20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

[pox americanus]

http://tinyurl.com/35jk52

[wintler2]

Oy. People. CONTEXT. I was going to alert Dreams End as soon as I saw this WP crap.
This is the upscale equivalent of 'those silly conspiracy theorists!'
...

Mmm, too distant a leap for me. I read all your proposed examples of KH & similar with interest, and slip some of them into conversation with friends to try and observe the confusion/exclusion effects. But i don't see sufficient commonality here.

[water]

[orz]

It's an interesting idea for sure. Bear in mind tho that it's an academic logical argument more than a serious theory about reality:

2. Do you really believe that we are in a computer simulation?

No. I believe that the Simulation argument is sound. The argument shows only that at least one of three possibilities obtains, but it does not tell us which one(s). One can thus accept the simulation argument and reject the simulation hypothesis (i.e. that we are in a simulation).

http://www.simulation-argument.com

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Deflecting attention away from deliberate manipulations (advertising, social engineering) by dressing them up as artsy High Concept goes back atleast to the 1930s when behavioral scientists were advising the FDR administration and the FBI was doing its own PR through 'friendly channels.'



There is currently a psy-ops campaign to counter our growing awareness of psy-ops history, theory, and tactics as deployed through 'entertainment.'

The movies 'The Truman Show' and 'The Matrix' are good examples of conveniently shooting past reality into metaphor.

This effort at obsuring the very existence of government psy-ops is directly linked to the new hyped up campaign to counter the onset of Vietnam Syndrome II with lots more 'strategic persuasion' as exemplified by recent papers by Karen Hughes and J. Michael Waller.

Waller is a USIA-class infowarrior who advises the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has declared that America's secret weapon to be deployed against 'terrorists' is...redicule!

Ah, redicule. We've recently seen this advocated as a weapon against the 9/11 Truth movement, haven't we? Because in this country telling the truth is an act of 'insurgency.'



The psy-ops industry is getting lots of money to deal with the infowar equivalent of Katrina. The levees have broken and truth is flooding the cities.

[theeKultleeder]

This wiki article appears to be okay. Some choice bits below:

America's Army (also known as AA or Army Game Project) is a tactical multiplayer first-person shooter owned by the United States Government and released as a global public relations initiative to help with U.S. Army recruitment...

The game features a kind of honor system making use of operant conditioning, which means that gamers who obey to the rules, dubbed "Rules of engagement" (ROE), are rewarded with experience points or else punished with a decrease of them...

A graduate of Utrecht University concluded the game "with its governmental background, is instead of an advergame, better to be described as a propagame."[15] Chris Chambers, the deputy director of development for America's Army, admits it is a recruitment tool,[16] and "the Army readily admits [America's Army] is a propaganda device," wrote Chris Morris, a CNN/Money columnist and director of content development.[17]

America's Army, considered by the U.S. Army to be a "cost-effective recruitment tool," aims to become part of youth culture's "consideration set," as Army Deputy Chief of Personnel, Timothy Maude, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee.[18]...

The Army Game and its official webpage, which must be visited to be able to play the game, contain links to the army recruitment website goarmy.com, another recruiting tool that, according to the Army Subcommittee Testimony from February 2000, has a higher chance of recruiting than "any other method of contact."[18] Leading American players to the website is a major goal of the game, and it was confirmed that twenty-eight percent of all visitors of America's Army's webpage click through to this recruitment site.[19]...

Gary Webb argued that the game's other purpose was aptitude testing of potential recruits and that this had never been noticed by the public. He concluded that this could be the only reason for spending taxes to track players and collect statistics.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America's_Army

[Seamus OBlimey]

Like 9/11 and 7/7 the training simulation is running in parralel to real world events.

We all have numbers and names so we are all tracked and thus increasingly predicted. 20% of us probably are living in a simulation or at least acting as predicted (ie the simulation is running 20% accurate). What the sim controllers need are a few more memorable dateshocks to boost that percentage until they reach their tipping point.

I'd say that bodes well for freedom if 80% are not conforming. IF a few of us can see through their strategies and tactics then we still have a lot more to play with than the sims do.

Let us play.

[Jeff]

An interesting relevant quote from Terence McKenna in Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness (1992):

"The modeling challenge for the future is human history. We will no longer be playing little games to demonstrate something to a group of students or colleagues, but we will actually be proposing models and methods powerful enough to begin to model the real world. These models will deal not only with the real world of biology, but with the real world of the felt experience of being embedded in human institutions."

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

I'd say that bodes well for freedom if 80% are not conforming. IF a few of us can see through their strategies and tactics then we still have a lot more to play with than the sims do.

Let us play.

[theeKultleeder]

Like 9/11 and 7/7 the training simulation is running in parralel to real world events.

We all have numbers and names so we are all tracked and thus increasingly predicted. 20% of us probably are living in a simulation or at least acting as predicted (ie the simulation is running 20% accurate).

Good angle on this. We are already living in a partial simulation - the simulation of desire is generated by marketeers as consumerism, the simulation of social justice is simulated by corporate PR, the simulation of democracy, by the ritual of voting...

I've been thinking lately that the economy is backed by violence in more ways than one. Basically, a person is forced to participate in a system that he or she finds morally repugnant because if one doesn't, one will starve to death or die of exposure to the elements. A person is forced by threat of death to not only participate in corporate culture or corrupt academia, but also to conform to the way of thinking and behaving embedded in them. If one doesn't conform, one is fired or marginalized and consigned to the limbo of non-participation.

Maybe that's the worst simulation: "play or die!"

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

My my my. Look at the NYTimes for Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2007, page D1.

Front page of the 'Science Times' section features "Slights of Mind: Science meets magic, playing on what we think we know."

All about magic shows and misdirection with help from Teller of Penn and Teller.

I'll repeat what I posted above:

There is currently a psy-ops campaign to counter our growing awareness of psy-ops history, theory, and tactics as deployed through 'entertainment.'

Quotes from the 8/21/07 NYTimes article:

"Secretive as the are about specifics, the magicians were as eager as the scientists when it came to the cognitive illusions that masquerade as magic: disguising one action as another, implying data that isn't there, taking advantage of how the brain fills in gaps - making assumptions, as the Amazing Randi put it, and mistaking them for facts."

"The left brain, as Dr. Gazzaniga put it, is the confabulator, constantly concocting stories."

"It's the Truman Show, said Robert Van Gulick, a philosopher at Syracuse University..."

"With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act, the subjective sense of I. "Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce 'magic,' " Dr. Dennett has written, "and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgiteer." "

" "Allow people to make assumptions and they will come away absolutely convinced that assumption was correct and that it represents fact," Mr. Randi said.
"It's not necessarily so." "

-end of quotes.

And take a look at the cover of this month's Scientific American Mind. Same kinda stuff.

Yes, there is a renewed attempt to redirect our interest in psy-ops into safe channels.

[orz]

I'd say that bodes well for freedom if 80% are not conforming.

Are you making a perceptive but unrelated analogy, or did you not actually read the article at all?

[theeKultleeder]

"With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act, the subjective sense of I. "Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce 'magic,' " Dr. Dennett has written, "and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgiteer." "

More pernicious here is the dogmatic materialist reductionist belief that there is no real person inside a body, no "subjective sense of I." Imagine what the black brothers could do if people believed there is no soul to torture, no "I" to imprison, and no moral agent to take responsibility!

Many people will be enlightened to know that the Buddha also taught the existence of self. The Middle Way is, after all, the path between the Absolutism of self, and the Nihilism of self.

I happen to have just written about such matters:

"Materialists would deny that an "I" really exists. They would say that it is only a byproduct of chemical processes... In this case, the self that people conceive when they think "I" is a negative mental agent. It is said to be negative because it cannot be found upon inspection, and it is a mental agent because it is able to willfully create and to think freely."

[brainpanhandler]

Living in a Simulated Universe
John D. Barrow
DAMTP
Centre for Mathematical Sciences
Cambridge University
Wilberforce Road
Cambridge CB3 0WA
UK
Abstract
We explain why, if we live in a simulated reality, we might expect to see occasional glitches and small drifts in the supposed constants and laws of Nature over time.
Of late, here has been much interest in multiverses. What sorts could there be? And how might their existence help us to understand those life-supporting features of our own universe, that would otherwise appear to be just very fortuitous coincidences1? At root, these questions are not ultimately matters of opinion or idle speculation. The underlying Theory of Everything, if it exists, may require many properties of our Universe to have been selected at random, by symmetry breaking, from a large collection of possibilities and the Universe’s vacuum state may be far from unique.
The favoured inflationary cosmological model that has been so impressively supported by the observations of the COBE and WMAP satellites contains many apparent 'coincidences' that allow the Universe to support complexity and life. If we were to consider a 'multiverse' of all possible universes then our observed universe appears special in many ways. Modern quantum physics even provides ways in which these possible universes that make up the multiverse of all possibilities can actually exist.
Once you take seriously that all possible universes can (or do) exist then a slippery slope opens up before you. It has long been recognised that technical civilisations, only a little more advanced than ourselves, will have the capability to simulate universes in which self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another2. They would have computer power that differed from ours by a vast factor. Instead of merely simulating their weather or the formation of galaxies, like we do, they would be able to go further and watch the appearance of stars and planetary systems. Then, having coupled the rules of biochemistry into their astronomical simulations they would be able to watch the evolution of life and consciousness (all speeded up to occur on whatever timescale was convenient for them). Just as we watch the life cycles of fruit flies they would be able to follow the evolution of life, watch civilisations grow and communicate with each other, argue about whether there existed a Great Programmer in the Sky who created their Universe and who could intervene at will in defiance of the laws of Nature they habitually observed.
2
Once this capability to simulate universe is achieved, fake universes will proliferate and will soon greatly outnumber the real ones. Thus, Nick Bostrom3 has argued that a thinking being here and now is more likely to be in a simulated reality than a real one.
Motivated by this alarming conclusion there have even been suggestions as how best to conduct ourselves if we have a high probability of being simulated beings in a simulated reality. Robin Hanson4 suggests that you should act so as to increase the chances of continuing to exist in the simulation or of being resimulated in the future ‘If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.’ In response, Paul Davies5 has argued that this high probability of living in a simulated reality is a reductio ad absurdum for the whole idea that multiverses of all possibilities exist. It would undermine our hopes of acquiring any sure knowledge about the Universe.
The multiverse scenario was suggested by some cosmologists as a way to avoid the conclusion that the Universe was specially designed for life by a Grand Designer. Others saw it as a way to avoid having to say anything more about the problem of fine tuning at all. We see that once conscious observers are allowed to intervene in the universe, rather than being merely lumped into the category of ‘observers’ who do nothing, that we end up with a scenario in which the gods reappear in unlimited numbers in the guise of the simulators who have power of life and death over the simulated realities that they bring into being. The simulators determine the laws, and can change the laws, that govern their worlds. They can engineer anthropic fine-tunings6. They can pull the plug on the simulation at any moment, intervene or distance themselves from their simulation; watch as the simulated creatures argue about whether there is a god who controls of intervenes; work miracles or impose their ethical principles upon the simulated reality. All the time they can avoid having even a twinge of conscience about hurting anyone because their toy reality isn't real, is it? They can even watch their simulated realities grow to a level of sophistication that allows them to simulate higher-order realities of their own.
Faced with these perplexities do we have any chance of winnowing fake realities from true? What we might expect to see if we made scientific observations from within a simulated reality?
Firstly, the simulators will have been tempted to avoid the complexity of using a consistent set of laws of Nature in their worlds when they can simply patch in “realistic” effects. When the Disney company makes a film that features the reflection of light from the surface of a lake, it does not use the laws of quantum electrodynamics and optics to compute the light scattering. That would require a stupendous amount of computing power and detail. Instead, the simulation of the light scattering is replaced by plausible rules of thumb that are much briefer than the real thing but give a realistic looking result -- as long as no one looks too closely. There would be an economic and practical imperative for simulated realities to stay that way if they were purely for entertainment. But such limitations to the complexity of the simulation’s programming would
3
presumably cause occasional tell-tale problems -- and perhaps they would even be visible from within.
Even if the simulators were scrupulous about simulating the laws of Nature, there would be limits to what they could do. Assuming the simulators, or at least the early generations of them, have a very advanced knowledge of the laws of Nature, it’s likely they would still have incomplete knowledge of them (some philosophers of science would argue this must always be the case). They may know a lot about the physics and programming needed to simulate a universe but there will be gaps or, worse still, errors in their knowledge of the laws of Nature. They would of course be subtle and far from obvious, otherwise our “advanced” civilisation wouldn’t be advanced. These lacunae do not prevent simulations being created and running smoothly for long periods of time. But gradually the little flaws will begin to build up.
Eventually, their effects would snowball and these realities would cease to compute. The only escape is if their creators intervene to patch up the problems one by one as they arise. This is a solution that will be very familiar to the owner of any home computer who receives regular updates in order to protect it against new forms of invasion or repair gaps that its original creators had not foreseen. The creators of a simulation could offer this type of temporary protection, updating the working laws of Nature to include extra things they had learnt since the simulation was initiated.
In this kind of situation, logical contradictions will inevitably arise and the laws in the simulations will appear to break down now and again. The inhabitants of the simulation - especially the simulated scientists - will occasionally be puzzled by the experimental results they obtain. The simulated astronomers might, for instance, make observations that show that their so-called constants of Nature are very slowly changing7.
It’s likely there could even be sudden glitches in the laws that govern these simulated realities. This is because the simulators would most likely use a technique that has been found effective in all other simulations of complex systems: the use of error-correcting codes to put things back on track.
Take our genetic code, for example. If it were left to its own devices we would not last very long. Errors would accumulate and death and mutation would quickly follow. We are protected from this by the existence of a mechanism for error correction that identifies and corrects mistakes in genetic coding. Many of our complex computer systems possess the same type of internal ‘spell-checker’ to guard against error accumulation.
If the simulators used error-correcting computer codes to guard against the fallibility of their simulations as a whole (as well as simulating them on a smaller scale in our genetic code) then every so often a correction would take place to the state or the laws governing the simulation. Mysterious sudden changes would occur that would appear to contravene the very laws of Nature that the simulated scientists were in the habit of observing and predicting.
4
We might also expect that simulated realities would possess a similar level of maximum computational complexity across the board. The simulated creatures should have a similar complexity to the most complex simulated non-living structures—something that Stephen Wolfram8 (for quite different reasons, nothing to do with simulated realities) has coined the Principle of Computational Equivalence.
So we conclude that if we live in a simulated reality we should expect occasional sudden glitches, small drifts in the supposed constants and laws of Nature over time9, and a dawning realisation that the flaws of Nature are as important as the laws of Nature for our understanding of true reality.
1 M. Tegmark, Sci. American May (2003), pp. 41-51; M.J. Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat, Princeton UP, (2001).
2 JD Barrow, Pi in the Sky: counting, thinking and being, Oxford UP, Oxford, (1992), chap. 6.
3 N. Bostrom, Are you living in a computer simulation?, Philosophical Quarterly 57(211): 243-255 (2003), http://www.simulation-argument.com
4 R. Hanson, How to Live in a Simulation, Journal of Evolution and Technology 7 (2001), http://www.transhumanist.com
5 P.C.W. Davies, A Brief History of the Multiverse, New York Times April 12, 2003; see also the paper delivered at Stanford University workshop "Universe or Multiverse?", March 28-9, 2003, Proceedings to be published by Cambridge UP, (2004), ed B.J. Carr.
6 E.R.Harrison, The Natural Selection of Universes containing Intelligent Life, Quart. Jl. Roy. Astron. Soc. 36, 193 (1995)
7 J. K. Webb, M. Murphy, V. Flambaum, V. Dzuba, J.D. Barrow, C. Churchill, J. Prochaska, & A. Wolfe Further Evidence for Cosmological Evolution of the Fine Structure Constant, Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 091301 (2001).
8 S. Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Inc., Ill., (2002).
9 J.D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: from alpha to omega, Jonathan Cape, London, (2002)

http://www.simulation-argument.com/barrowsim.pdf

[justdrew]

no, gotta disagree with that. If they're running a simulation of such detail that it tracks the quantum waveform function of every little bit, and it sure seems to be the case, if this is a simulation, the capabilities of their runtime environment are great enough that there would be no need to add the complexity of 'short-cuts' like the example of the light reflecting off a lake, if the simulation is good enough to 'work' there would be no need to tamper with it to achieve certain effects.

In what way would such a 'simulated' universe be "fake" ? It would be as real as any 'real' universe to everyone inside, and I would expect the simulators to treat it as such.

but I would think the easiest way to make such a simulation would be to simply make a 'real' universe, storing all the info required would require a machine of the same complexity as a 'real' universe.