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

[82_28]

I read it as being administrator of the simulation.

[DrEvil]

^^Yup.

But more seriously, I've seen a few things lately that kinda, sorta fit with the simulation argument:

* That black physicist dude with the epic hair who found error correction code deep down in the math.

* This: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 103110.htm
Basically: reality doesn't exist until it's measured. Peter Watts has some interesting musings: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6799
It makes sense if we're in a simulation. Just like in a computer game there's no point in rendering what's behind the player until you turn around and look at it.
The big question is: What happens if you turn around really fast? Will reality have pop-in?

* Spooky action at a distance, aka quantum entanglement. Going with the gaming comparison again:
In a game world there's nothing to prevent something on one side of the map affecting something on the other side without any signal having to travel between them since distance is an illusion. The spooky action is performed in the overarching simulation (if x then y) and then fed back down to the simulation.

* The Planck scale: Pixels.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

So is this a gamer's iteration of Intelligent Design? Who coded the coder?


This is all old hat for the Religionists, in any event. YHWH had this all laid out eons ago... Y'all are late to the party.

[dada]

Yeah, we're living in a simulation alright. A Madden simulation.

"...Madden is kind of a paradigm for the whole industry: it's still fucking football. It's still eleven guys, they just look better. In some ways we're doing that. We're all, like any entertainment medium, telling stories, trying to make that same old story cool. The creative side of things hasn't really caught up. We're all still just making the same old fucking game." - Eugene Jarvis

[DrEvil]

So is this a gamer's iteration of Intelligent Design? Who coded the coder?

Assuming we are living in a simulation it doesn't have to be either intelligently designed, or designed at all. It could just be a random permutation among a huge/infinite set of random simulations (multiverse).
Still doesn't answer the question of where it all came from of course, it just pushes it one step up the ladder.
And where did the guy who coded the coder come from? You can go on like this forever, whether you're talking intelligent design or natural evolution.

[dada]

Let's say we have a holodeck, where we can immerse ourselves in simulated virtual realities that look and feel real. There is still the person who is entering the simulation.

Now, if reality itself is a simulation, is there the person, or something equivalent, entering the simulation? We don't know we're in the simulation. On the holodeck we are aware we're in a simulation.

Did we forget at birth that we were entering this simulated reality? Or is there some other way this works. Is this one of those simulations where we're tricked by the simulation into thinking we have memories, or something.

Or is consciousness itself simulated. So we're what, watching it all like a movie? But who's watching if consciousness is simulated. A simulated consciousness is living in a simulated reality. So basically nothing is happening, but it looks like something is happening. It's like a void with a simulated dream that no one is having layered on top.

See, this is why the simulation scenario kind of falls apart for me. It gets too silly if you think about the logistics of it.

[Belligerent Savant]

^^^^^ what dada says above.

So is this a gamer's iteration of Intelligent Design? Who coded the coder?

Assuming we are living in a simulation it doesn't have to be either intelligently designed, or designed at all. It could just be a random permutation among a huge/infinite set of random simulations (multiverse).

Kinda like the monkeys typing away into near infinity and eventually producing output along the lines of Shakespeare, ay?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Still doesn't answer the question of where it all came from of course, it just pushes it one step up the ladder.
And where did the guy who coded the coder come from? You can go on like this forever, whether you're talking intelligent design or natural evolution.

Indeed. That is the one question that has kept me up at night back in the day. Still no satisfying answer in sight.

[tazmic]

I found that other one
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37514&start=105

and sorry to recycle but this fits here even better:

This, like a lot of posthuman speculative work, is not so much philosophy as a search for a workable and stimulating religion that might satisfy techno-intellectual workers under a reductionist materialist neoliberalism. Call that last bit what you will: the next phase of capitalism, Rise of the Machines, etc. Under the systemic logic and given the trajectory of ongoing developments, the human is eventually to be extinguished or replaced or supplanted by its own creations (even if human bodies keep being reproduced). First engineered to a soulless utopian fit, then taken over by new species of our own invention: supermen, bio-mech hybrids made for space, or straight-up machines. Unless we decide we don't want that as a species, which is unlikely.

Ah, how did I miss that? Must have been distracted by the kind words...

And now, as we are (re)recycling:

CW, I think people were responding solely to the (rather obscure) data point of Herbert Krugman's experimental results.

But not to his intriguing link at the end, from 2002:

A draft government report says we will alter human evolution within 20 years by combining what we know of nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT and cognitive sciences. The 405-page report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and Commerce Department, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, calls for a broad-based research program to improve human performance leading to telepathy, machine-to-human communication, amplified personal sensory devices and enhanced intellectual capacity.

People may download their consciousnesses into computers or other bodies even on the other side of the solar system, or participate in a giant "hive mind", a network of intelligences connected through ultra-fast communications networks. "With knowledge no longer encapsulated in individuals, the distinction between individuals and the entirety of humanity would blur," the report says. "Think Vulcan mind-meld. We would perhaps become more of a hive mind - an enormous, single, intelligent entity."

Armies may one day be fielded by machines that think for themselves while devices will respond to soldiers' commands before their thoughts are fully formed, it says. The report says the abilities are within our grasp but will require an intense public-relations effort to "prepare key organisations and societal activities for the changes made possible by converging technologies", and to counter concern over "ethical, legal and moral" issues. Education should be overhauled down to the primary-school level to bridge curriculum gaps between disparate subject areas.

Professional societies should be open to practitioners from other fields, it says. "The success of this convergent-technologies priority area is crucial to the future of humanity," the report says.

Looks like they've made their minds up. All of which reminds me of something Alan Watts wrote, in 1966:

All information will come in by superrealistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body—even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual—an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. There may be specialized types, just as there are specialized cells and organs in our bodies. For the tendency will be for all individuals to coalesce into a single bioelectronic body.

As resources dwindle, population must dwindle in proportion. If, by this time, the race feels itself to be a single mind-body, this superindividual will see itself getting smaller and smaller until the last mouth eats the last morsel. Yet it may also be that, long before that, people will be highly durable plastic replicas of people with no further need to eat. But won't this be the same thing as the death of the race, with nothing but empty plastic echoes of ourselves reverberating on through time? [...] In short, is the next step in evolution to be the transformation of man into nothing more than electronic patterns?

If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!

[mentalgongfu2]

Let's say we have a holodeck, where we can immerse ourselves in simulated virtual realities that look and feel real. There is still the person who is entering the simulation.

Now, if reality itself is a simulation, is there the person, or something equivalent, entering the simulation? We don't know we're in the simulation. On the holodeck we are aware we're in a simulation.

Did we forget at birth that we were entering this simulated reality? Or is there some other way this works. Is this one of those simulations where we're tricked by the simulation into thinking we have memories, or something.

Or is consciousness itself simulated. So we're what, watching it all like a movie? But who's watching if consciousness is simulated. A simulated consciousness is living in a simulated reality. So basically nothing is happening, but it looks like something is happening. It's like a void with a simulated dream that no one is having layered on top.

See, this is why the simulation scenario kind of falls apart for me. It gets too silly if you think about the logistics of it.

My own intuition, We're the person entering the holodeck, but we forget it's a simulation because we're in it so long and starting at level 1, and so does everybody else who enters. Like a dream within a dream... it all seems real until you wake up, but are you really awake or did you just wake up from the interior dream?perhaps our lives are only the dreams of our spirits taking a nap in the eternal consciousness. This idea resonates with me. But the downside of such theories is life as a simulation makes action in the material world irrelevant, which can be a form of escapism; if this reality is a dream there seems little point in fighting the Bakken pipeline and so forth. I tend to think it is a mix, and the reason dreams are so important in all our mythologies is because they are a bridge between the two worlds we inhabit.

[82_28]

Jeff linked this just now on fakebook:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... ebook-post

Bank of America of all things, apparently, has it up to a 50% chance.

Here is what I think. Yay! I think that the simulation is being created before our very eyes. If there is one indeed. One will not be able to tell the difference.

But what is this "difference"? The power to simulate everything at least visually and sonically is already here. By here I also mean there. Like in vast open world video games shit gets populated as you run along on your "quest". But depending on the CPU, it is humming right along with the process of the game outside of view. Places saved in which your character has been before and gets "grayed out" as it were. Been there done that. Move along to your next quest. You actually don't care about the morals or ethics. As a player, you just want to level up. There's a wistful feeling in playing games like this but I don't think it is an escape. It is a rapidly improving reality.

I have shared this link before (Jesus I wrote it over ten years ago!). I was asked to write something about why we may not exist. Don't worry it's short. Fuck it, I'll just copy and paste. I tried to be as deep but with enough brevity to make it quick.

http://www.huge-entity.com/2006/02/nine ... exist.html

Pushbutton Automation

by JK
DunneIV

[DunneIV] There is a mystical “I” awakening. It is being stirred by events unseen and of uncertain origin. When it wakes up what will it be?

Inexistence is a nice concept. It works in that soporific marketing kind of way because inexistence is more user friendly than its more anal sister named Existence – given a choice, people dig the bliss and carelessness of inexistence more. Existence asks of its multitudinous rapt egos that they be engaged and aware. But anymore, engagement and awareness are “tasks” to be doled onto tiny gadgets running algorithms and automated signals sent by servers via radio and rapidly focused light. Thus I submit, that at an ever quickening pace, the Ego is now and will be forever more, an automated AI, adding layer upon complexifying layer everyday, hectoring the skin of life and callousing Existence's ability to recognize her brother: Inexistence, hidden, mired behind a cloud of tough, translucent flesh. We are becoming supernatural through the silent seduction of the nascent I's cries.

It is for our inexistence that I write these randomized, pontificating thoughts in order to contribute something, anything to this “World Wide Web” we came of age in continual contact with. We are striking out into it because, at our cores, we do not exist fully, but seek communion with something as equally empty nonetheless. We are not noticed, yet are, only when we take the time to notice the other for ourselves. And we, ourselves, do not notice when we do not take the time out of our “existences” to care about the general act of “noticing” the fact that ultimately, innumerable unknowable others do as well. Thus many do not care about their necessary existence because they seek to not be noticed in and of this perceived chaos that lurks in the darknesses everywhere. For, we find, that there is nothing for us “supernaturals” to warrant being noticed for! So we hide. To exist fully in the open, devoid of inhibition and perpetually brimming with energy, is to knock yourself out of existence so to speak.

I am at a club in the cobblestoned past of a cellar that now houses Drum and Bass DJs on Saturday nights. It is dark and the marijuana and beer I have consumed, the people I have seen grimace and pose, the telltale mode of police state security through a billion lenses and miniature glowing personal screens has made the place a node for the virtualscape underworld. There are lapping tails and braying claws on the periphery. In the center there are automatons with occasional facial illumination as they check. They check they check they check. I see them check as they bob to the ever enveloping cadence. So I, like a pupil of a professor who yawns in front of class, check mine too – bobbing in time. I proceed to fire up a conversation with someone in Chicago then text a joke to someone's cellphone 5 miles away. And yet the immediate darkness persists.

The glows of various human faces lit up by uniform devicery becomes more clear and lucid as more people pile into the venue made of brick and deep blue neon. Like an ooze of a swimming luminescent jellyfish, the humans communicate into and out of networks, networking their brainwaves with the dude who stands in front of two record players – texting their thoughts elsewhere as their voices and senses have been muted. Images of flatly illuminated faces come and go, some bearing teeth like a warbuilt chimp–potential brutality, like the sounds of the launching bullets embedded within the music the body involuntarily sways to. Others still illuminated here and there by a virtualworldly LED blue, only to flash out of existence once again – with an unheard soundfile as its been swallowed by vibrations of the bigger and more powerful speakers in its vicinity. Indeed, inexistence. For $1.99 a sound and ten bucks to get in.

You cannot talk but you can text. You also need your personal and paid-up artifact to make you glow when you're amidst a noise, a net, you cannot network, let alone swim your way out of if you wanted. You are ensnared. Is this the user-friendly universe built upon the notions of packaging and traveling and refueling our coffeecards that we've been waylaid into accepting as a default limitless future? Is this the world of pushbutton automation where out dreams are but a click away? Is the universe a place now that it is represented by variously themed menu schemes? Or does it, like ourselves, not exist either, its conventional understanding of which having been “automated” out of any high soaring human relevance whatsoever?

[Luther Blissett]

…
* This: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 103110.htm
Basically: reality doesn't exist until it's measured. Peter Watts has some interesting musings: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6799
It makes sense if we're in a simulation. Just like in a computer game there's no point in rendering what's behind the player until you turn around and look at it.
The big question is: What happens if you turn around really fast? Will reality have pop-in?
…

Okay, so, this happened to me a while back. Not exactly huge, but I'm inclined to share.
So, it was a lazy Sunday morning. I slept late the previous night and my flatmate got off early ( can't for the life of me, remember why!) So I get up late, around 11-ish, make an omelette, eat it while reading the newspaper. Now as I get up, I get this very weird feeling that I saw someone sitting in the exact same spot as in was just a second ago. You've to visualize it like me just spotting someone out of the corner of my eye, just as I'm turning. I slow down just a little, and the next thing I remember is getting the lightest nudge on my back, like wind hitting me on my back from very small range. And then I saw it. I saw myself. Me taking the plate to the kitchen. Clear as day. Wearing the same clothes. Even limping a little bit from last night's sore leg. This was for about five seconds. And, then I'm in the kitchen, where I was headed five seconds ago.
Weirded me out a little bit. And, I don't have any history of hallucination or sleep walking. No headache afterwards. Was just a little spooked out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/3uyxmc/saw_myself_from_behind/

[tazmic]

Basically: reality doesn't exist until it's measured.

When does the measurement exist?

[dada]

"If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!"


Yet we are not 'merely' a system of electronic patterns. We are a system of electronic patterns that can grow. It can become aware of itself. It has sensory experience, imagination, it dreams. It can love, laugh, make love, even have compassion. It's a system of electronic patterns that can do all these things.

The same goes for if we're living in a simulation, or a dream, or whatever. Saying 'it could be that life is a simulation,' is one thing. Saying 'It could be a simulation that has all these qualities of life' has a very different meaning.

How about, 'compassion is an illusion.' Compare that to, 'There is an illusion that has all the qualities of compassion.' They end up in two entirely different places. One is empty, the other is this incredible thing. An illusion that has compassion? Sounds like some alien life form the Enterprise bumped into on an old episode of star trek.

Looked at this way, it would still make sense to fight the Bakken pipeline and so forth. If life is a dream, it's a dream with all the qualities of life. This incredible dream that can do all these crazy things, even love.

Of course it's a fun exercise to try to peer into the nature of reality. We know how a lot of things work, but why do they work is a whole other matter. So we build our meta-contextual frameworks, or whatever. It's another cool thing this system of electronic patterns likes to do.


"My own intuition, We're the person entering the holodeck, but we forget it's a simulation because we're in it so long and starting at level 1, and so does everybody else who enters. Like a dream within a dream... it all seems real until you wake up, but are you really awake or did you just wake up from the interior dream?perhaps our lives are only the dreams of our spirits taking a nap in the eternal consciousness."

Like the Hindu's say, 'Vishnu is sleeping, and the multi-verse is his dream.' Or Chuang-tzu, dreaming he was a butterfly, waking up and not being sure if now he was a butterfly dreaming he was chuang-tzu.

I find saying 'life could be like a simulation' to be a more interesting thought experiment than saying 'life could be a simulation.' Treating the frameworks like metaphors allows many to exist simultaneously without contradiction. Life can be like a simulation, like Vishnu's dream, and like many other things, all at once.

You know, like there's three top gods in Hinduism. Brahma would be the closest thing to a benevolent father/creator type. But he and Shiva are both just part of Vishnu's dream. But Shiva is infinite, even Brahma and Vishnu can't see his beginning or ending. Which is supreme, then? It's a silly question. They're Hindu gods. It's like asking, 'which metaphor of life is true?.'

Best part about the 'life could be like this or that,' thought experiment, in my opinion, is then you can take the metaphors and apply them in other ways. When Vishnu wakes from his dream, the multi-verse he's dreaming disappears. That can be looked at cosmically, or it could be a metaphor for a person 'waking up from their illusions.' It could be 'waking up from a waking dream.'

If life is like a simulation, this simulation isn't something we're trapped inside of. It becomes a concept that can be used creatively. You can metaphorically break the simulation, load a different simulation. It could be applied to some aspects of life and not others. You can do whatever you want with it. It's your simulation, then.

All this talk of videogames and dreams makes me think about Link's Awakening. Link falls off a ship in a storm, wakes up on an island. Over the course of his adventure, he learns that the island and all of its inhabitants are a dream. He's not having this dream though, it's the Windfish, which is a flying whale that is sleeping on a mountaintop. If he wants to get off of the dream island, he has to wake the Windfish. He meets a girl on the island named Marin who helps him out, even though she knows that if the Windfish wakes up, she'll disappear. It's kind of a bittersweet story.

You know that finishing the game means that Marin and the others on the island will disappear. But you go wake the Windfish anyway. It's a videogame, that's what you do.

[DrEvil]

Basically: reality doesn't exist until it's measured.

When does the measurement exist?

At the time of measurement? Not sure what you're getting at.

Edit: Ooohh! Now I do.
The person doing the measurement already exists, so all they do is expand existence a bit by measuring something.

[tron]

we are division, divided from the source.