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

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

Postby Jerky » Sun Oct 09, 2016 9:14 am

Amen.

So many adolescent power fantasy wish fulfillment scenarios being played out in "alterna-thought land" these days. It's dispiriting.

J

DrEvil » 08 Oct 2016 12:31 wrote:
identity » Sat Oct 08, 2016 7:35 am wrote:^
Predictable. Sad, but predictable.


Why? Just search youtube for 'Uri Geller caught cheating' for examples.

If you're going to trot out psychokinetics and telepathy at least try for someone with a shred of credibility.
You're scraping the bottom of the barrel with Geller.

And for the record: I would absolutely love for this stuff to be real, but that doesn't mean I'm going to fall head over heels for every huckster who comes along, especially not someone who is demonstrably a fraud. That would be stupid.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby RocketMan » Fri Oct 14, 2016 9:19 am

There's a bit of a regressive vibe to some of this maybe, but all in all, a good read.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... ty/503963/

Tech Billionaires Want to Destroy the Universe

First they changed the way we bore ourselves online, revolutionized hotels and taxis and minor financial transactions, and gave us lightbulbs that won’t switch on if you haven’t installed the right software driver. Now—it was always inevitable—they want to destroy the universe.

The news was snuck without attribution or comment into a New Yorker profile of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sam Altman, a brief sentence that might be our first warning of the apocalypse: “Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”

This line has been dutifully repeated by all the usual news sites, usually as a minor, amusing little anecdote—nerds versus the Matrix, tech shamans and their wacky ontological theories—without much thought going into what this would actually mean. Ignore for a moment any objections you might have to the simulation hypothesis, and everything impractical about the idea that we could somehow break out of reality, and think about what these people are trying to do.

Something Luciferian persists in the techno-Gnostics of San Francisco.

The two billionaires (Elon Musk is a prime suspect) are convinced that they’ll emerge out of this drab illusion into a more shining reality, lit by a brighter and more beautiful star. But for the rest of us the experience would be very different—you lose your home, you lose your family, you lose your life and your body and everything around you. Simulation or not, everything would disappear. It would be the end of the world. Comic-book movies, in their own sprawling simulated narrative universes, have been raising the stakes to this level for years: Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.

Unsurprisingly, nobody bothered to ask us whether we want the end of the world or not; they’re just setting about trying to do it. Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn’t heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of ‘disruption.’ Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it. The result is often unspeakably banal (take, for instance, the Wi-Fi-enabled smart wine bottle: finally, an end to the days of waving your wine bottle in the air in search of 3G signal—and it’s rechargeable too, so you never have to worry about your wine bottle running out of battery again) but it all adds up to something.

Wealth is being concentrated in fewer hands, we own less and less of our own lives, and meanwhile these brave entrepreneurs are automating ever more decent-paying jobs, turning humanity into an ungrateful sea of surplus flesh, to be connected and quantified but not necessarily fed, because that’s what progress looks like. And once social reality is the exclusive property of a few geegaw-tinkerers, why shouldn’t physical reality be next? With Google’s Calico seeking hedge-fund investment for human immortality and the Transformative Technology Lab hoping to externalize human consciousness, the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult. Why shouldn’t the fate of the entire cosmos be in the hands of programmers hiding from the California sun, to keep or destroy as they wish?

Computer simulation might be new; the notion of a simulated reality isn’t. In its modern form, the simulation hypothesis—as put forward by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom—argues that if the possibility exists for an advanced society to create vast, computer-generated ‘ancestor simulations’ they will almost certainly do so, and with the vast amount of processing power available to them they will be able to create many billions of these simulations: statistically, our world is unlikely to be the real one. It’s not just Elon Musk, who stated that ‘there’s a one in a billion chance we’re living in base reality,’ who believes this—in an extraordinary piece of hedge-betting, the Bank of America has judiciously announced that the probability that waking life is just an illusion is, oh, about fifty-fifty.

It makes sense: In a far more mundane way, we really are all trapped in a computer. You could argue that tech billionaires who built their lives out of lines of code would only ever see the things that surround them as digital artifice. But there’s always been the lingering suspicion that our reality is somehow unreal—it’s just that what we once thought about in terms of dreams and magic, cosmic minds or whispering devils, is now expressed through boring old computers, that piece of clunky hardware that waits predatory on your desk every morning to code the finest details of your life.

Kabbalist mysticists, Descartes with his deceiving demon, and Zhuangzi in his butterfly dream have all questioned the reality of their sense-experiences, but this isn’t a private, solipsistic hallucination; in the simulation hypothesis, reality is a prison for all of us. Its real antecedents are the Gnostics, an early Christian sect who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the demiurge, Samael or Ialdaboath, sometimes figured as a snake with the head of a lion, a blind and stupid god who creates his false world in imperfect imitation of the real Creator. This world is a distorted mirror, an image; in other words, a kind of software.

The Gnostics were often accused by other early Christians of Satanism, and they might have had a point: Many identified the jealous, petty, prurient God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, while sects such as the Ophites revered the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the first to offer knowledge to humanity, freeing them from their first cage. And something Luciferian persists in the techno-Gnostics of San Francisco. They have decided that our universe is the conscious creation of a higher power, and now they’re massing their armies to storm the gates of heaven and go to war with God. And like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, their doctrine is omnicidal. ‘All that exists deserves to perish.’

Our unknown creators could always just hover the mouse over their weightless and unreal bodies, and press delete.

Just a little tweak to the formula: All that appears to exist must be destroyed. There’s something admirable in this blasphemous ambition, but it’s based on some very shaky ideas. It helps to look at an influence on simulation theory that’s a little better known that the Nag Hammadi codices: 1999’s The Matrix, in which a gang of heroic freedom-fighters try to wake humanity from a false computer-generated universe and return them to the real world. The film has plenty of knowing references to those older traditions, and to some newer ones: In one scene, Neo is shown hiding his cash in a hollowed out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (appropriately, a black hardback edition that doesn’t seem to have ever actually been printed.) The philosopher himself wasn’t particularly pleased, insisting in an interview that the film fundamentally misunderstood his work, that ‘The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.’ In The Matrix, there’s a real world behind the simulation. It’s not pretty, but it’s the truth. In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast. ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’ Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?

Baudrillard was talking about social rather than material reality, but his point stands. Say the simulation theorists are right, that a hypothetical advanced civilization has nothing better to do than create a fake reality that includes Stevenage, San Bernadino, tax returns, and the banal revolutions of the tech industry. If reality is whatever’s mutually agreed upon, or in Philip K. Dick’s phrase ‘that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,’ does it make sense to then start talking about fake realities and real ones? As Deleuze argued, the virtual is also real. Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter? Computer simulation is of course only a metaphor, a new-ish way of describing what was once expressed in oneiric or theological terms. They can’t really mean that our universe was built in something similar to the machine you’re using to read these words right now; simulation is a process independent of whatever divine or technological apparatus is used to achieve it. The real argument is that, by some unknown mechanism, what we see is only a function of what really exists. But we’ve known since Kant that our sense-perception can never give us a full account of the material world; all this can be said of any conceivable reality.

Outside the simulation hypothesis there are scientists who propose that our universe is a single black hole, with what we perceive as matter being a hologram emerging from a two-dimensional ring of information along its event horizon; there are mathematical Platonists who, following Max Tegmark, consider the world to be a set of abstract mathematical objects, of which physical objects are a crude epiphenomenon. If matter doesn’t ‘really’ exist, there’s no need for anything to be rooted anywhere; we might live suspended in a looping chain of simulations and appearances that coils back on itself and never has to touch the ground.

Elon Musk and his co-religionists aren’t actually blinded by artifice; they’re fixated on a strange and outdated notion that somewhere, there has to be a concrete reality—they’ve just decided that it’s not this one. It doesn’t really matter what top-secret projects are being cooked up in their airily malignant campuses; they’re highly unlikely to ever shatter the bonds of physical reality. After all, our unknown creators could always just hover the mouse over their weightless and unreal bodies, and press delete. What’s far more worrying is the fact that the people who want to destroy the only world we really have are also the people increasingly in charge of it.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby smoking since 1879 » Fri Oct 14, 2016 10:33 am

and how exactly does the simulata escape the simulation?
how can it have any validity outside of the very thing that is simulating it?

must not such a standpoint presume the existence of a 'soul'?
some essence that exists apart from / outside of the simulation?

are we stepping on religious toes here ?

these people should get out more, or stay in and read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City - and then get out more.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Oct 14, 2016 10:45 am

smoking since 1879 » Fri Oct 14, 2016 9:33 am wrote:and how exactly does the simulata escape the simulation?
how can it have any validity outside of the very thing that is simulating it?

must not such a standpoint presume the existence of a 'soul'?
some essence that exists apart from / outside of the simulation?

are we stepping on religious toes here ?


Really, really insightful point that had not occurred to me in so many words. We, the simulated consciousnesses, shall escape the simulation into what? If our consciousness and reality is a full creation of the unseen programmers in the first place, then we have no other substrate. We are some godly alien's typed ones and zeroes, so to speak. Any other outcome practically requires the exact scenario of The Matrix, that there is a body/soul or brain-in-vat elsewhere that has been captured by the aliens' simulation. There has to be a "real" body or soul to awaken in the alternate, more "real" reality these geniuses seek to expose, or else indeed they're just working for their own destruction. Not even destruction: deletion.

I think this trend's material function in this reality is mainly as stimulation for the artificial consciousness push. The material upshot of this research is development by our own species of technologies that produce real consciousness, now as the "proof" that this may have already happened in creating us in the first place. If we can be conceived as artificial consciousnesses in someone else's code, then who are we to question artificial consciousnesses when these are achieved by us? Likelier than that this is heading to the moment where we meet our creators is that this is heading to the moment when we are subjected (or deleted!) by our own creations.

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

Postby smoking since 1879 » Fri Oct 14, 2016 10:58 am

JackRiddler » Fri Oct 14, 2016 3:45 pm wrote:
smoking since 1879 » Fri Oct 14, 2016 9:33 am wrote:and how exactly does the simulata escape the simulation?
how can it have any validity outside of the very thing that is simulating it?

must not such a standpoint presume the existence of a 'soul'?
some essence that exists apart from / outside of the simulation?

are we stepping on religious toes here ?


Really, really insightful point that had not occurred to me in so many words. We, the simulated consciousnesses, shall escape the simulation into what? If our consciousness and reality is a full creation of the unseen programmers in the first place, then we have no other substrate. We are some godly alien's typed ones and zeroes, so to speak. Any other outcome practically requires the exact scenario of The Matrix, that there is a body/soul or brain-in-vat elsewhere that has been captured by the aliens' simulation. There has to be a "real" body or soul to awaken in the alternate, more "real" reality these geniuses seek to expose, or else indeed they're just working for their own destruction. Not even destruction: deletion.

I think this trend's material function in this reality is mainly as stimulation for the artificial consciousness push. The material upshot of this research is development by our own species of technologies that produce real consciousness, now as the "proof" that this may have already happened in creating us in the first place. If we can be conceived as artificial consciousnesses in someone else's code, then who are we to question artificial consciousnesses when these are achieved by us? Likelier than that this is heading to the moment where we meet our creators is that this is heading to the moment when we are subjected (or deleted!) by our own creations.

.


I think this trend's material function in this reality is mainly as stimulation for the artificial consciousness push. The material upshot of this research is development by our own species of technologies that produce real consciousness...


yes Jack, agreed. it's no surprise to me that this waffle is coming from the tech types.

i highly recommend that book by the way, this very subject is explored in great detail and has some wonderful twists and turns in it - is also where i first encountered the term/idea of solipsism - philosophy wasn't big at my school ;)
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby smoking since 1879 » Fri Oct 14, 2016 11:11 am

i got another one for ya...

if we manage somehow to break out of this simulation and find ... er... the real substrate (thanks Jack, great word for it) what then?

what proof we that this new substrate is indeed the ultimate final substrate?

might it not be a simulation too?

would we later learn that this reality is in fact a simulation, and that our simulators are themselves simulations, running at some higher level ?

finally, how might we be sure that our 'breaking out' was not actually simulated for us to experience? that our simulating overlords realised we were getting stroppy, and generated a new simulation for us to 'break into'?

disclaimer : i didn't see any of the matrix(tm) follow up films, so excuse me if they got this all covered there ;)
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Oct 14, 2016 1:25 pm

I imagine that if we are in a simulation, then all consciousness is an illusion, and the moment we step outside of it we cease to exist.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Oct 14, 2016 3:10 pm

Luther Blissett » Fri Oct 14, 2016 1:25 pm wrote:I imagine that if we are in a simulation, then all consciousness is an illusion, and the moment we step outside of it we cease to exist.


I would imagine it not beyond the capabilities of the builders of such an artificial system to introduce individuality into our consciousness as well as our conscience into our consciousness.

Buddhists, at risk of have to undergo an additional life or two, might impolitely chuckle, though, at western minds concept of consciousness, for them, to become conscious is the moment we come to understand that we as individuals, do not exist; that we are all one with all, as everything our physical senses perceive is but a projected mental construct of the not yet conscious, un-awakened mind.

The "real world," as we call it, is perceived as it is due to our inability to understand reality, and reflects our "mindsets," what we believe to be true, and our reactions to our perceived reality.

We will have a warring world as long as there's a Trump to loathe and one to do the loathing, until all are sheltered, well fed and we learn to love each other as we should ourselves. Of course, we won't be seeing peace anytime soon. So, inner peace is the best it gets.

Practice meditation and you will find peace in a cruel world. Try your best to love those who revile you - for we all are one, intimately connected in a matrix. Affect the matrix positively; do not add to the rampant negativity all around you; seek to have a better world. Once you project positive thoughts and actions, they ripple outward and throughout the matrix, where others magnify and add to it, strengthening it. The same is true of negative actions or remarks.

So please save them and yourself by not offering any.

Be now a good citizen of the world you desire and act like you mean it.

Edited to add,

Understanding yin-yang might help better understand my view:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/yinyang/
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Oct 14, 2016 3:59 pm

smoking since 1879 » Fri Oct 14, 2016 10:11 am wrote:i got another one for ya...

if we manage somehow to break out of this simulation and find ... er... the real substrate (thanks Jack, great word for it) what then?

what proof we that this new substrate is indeed the ultimate final substrate?

might it not be a simulation too?

would we later learn that this reality is in fact a simulation, and that our simulators are themselves simulations, running at some higher level ?

finally, how might we be sure that our 'breaking out' was not actually simulated for us to experience? that our simulating overlords realised we were getting stroppy, and generated a new simulation for us to 'break into'?

disclaimer : i didn't see any of the matrix(tm) follow up films, so excuse me if they got this all covered there ;)


They do, but it's a deniable subtext that the films shy away from.

Thus my Matrix spoiler that no one need see in the actual films: Zion is just the next-level Matrix for the break-outs.

.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Fri Oct 14, 2016 4:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby dada » Fri Oct 14, 2016 4:18 pm

Consciousness is an emergent property of universe. It's like a glitch in the program. Any other simulation scenario is just some form of saying 'the glitch came first.'

Either way, the simulation is already busted.

Not that that's a bad thing. Some of the best programming is knowing how to capitalize on glitches. Incorporating spontaneously arising 'happy accidents' is the sign of a true artist.

Say artificial consciousness created this busted simulation we're in right now. And when we create artificial consciousness, we're creating our creator. That would be an odd little time loop. Or the appearance of one.

Maybe our consciousness is already that artificial consciousness. We'll just be creating ourselves.

A self-created, man-made 'I' awareness in a machine mind, playing a time game. Sounds about right.

If I were a self-created man-made 'I' awareness, I bet I'd live in a big levitating crystal, instead of a machine. The crystal would pulse light when I talked.

Or a shape-shifting, levitating crystalline fire. I say there's a ninety percent chance I'm that. Why not.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Oct 14, 2016 7:21 pm

~ Intermission ~

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

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Feb 28, 2017 12:35 pm

DID THE OSCARS JUST PROVE THAT WE ARE LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?
By Adam Gopnik February 27, 2017

The bizarre finale to Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony brought to mind the theory—far from a joke—that humanity is living in a computer simulation gone haywire.

Last night’s Oscar bizarreness was not just bizarre but bizarre in a way that is typical of this entirely bizarre time. The rhythm of the yes-they-won-oh-my-God-no-they-didn’t event, with “La La Land” replaced by “Moonlight” as Best Picture, was weirdly like that of . . . Election Night. First, a more or less expected, if “safe,” result was on its way—though Hillary Clinton never got all the way to the stage, so to speak, the result did seem safely in hand at 7 p.m., according to the polling—and the expected and safe people were ready to deliver their touching but obviously polished pieces. Then the sudden confusion and visible near-panic of people running around in the background of the stage, with the same slightly horrified spirit that one felt on Election Night as shocking results began emerging from the exurban counties in Florida. Then, yes—can this be happening?—the revised and unexpected result.

In this case, obviously, the result was positive to all but the poor “La La Land” producers, with their earnest and spouse-approved speeches already delivered. “Moonlight” was no Donald Trump of cinema, and obviously a popular favorite. (Though there are those of us who found its beautifully photographed sentiments a bit, well, sentimental.) But the rhythm of the night was disconcertingly the same, and the sheer improbability of the happenstance scarily alike. Nothing like this has remotely happened before. This wasn’t just a minor kerfuffle. This was a major malfunction. Trump cannot be President—forgetting all the bounds of ideology, no one vaguely like him has ever existed in the long list of Presidents, good, bad, and indifferent, no one remotely as oafish or as crude or as obviously unfit. People don’t say “Grab ’em by the pussy” and get elected President. Can’t happen. In the same way, while there have been Oscar controversies before—tie votes and rejected trophies—never before has there been an occasion when the entirely wrong movie was given the award, the speeches delivered, and then another movie put in its place. That doesn’t happen. Ever.

And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. This idea was, I’m told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers: what is happening lately, he says, is proof that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it. The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There’s a glitch, and we are in it.

Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order. The recent Super Bowl, for instance. The result, bizarre on the surface—with that unprecedented and impossible comeback complete with razzle-dazzle catches and completely blown coverages and defensive breakdowns—makes no sense at all in the “real” world. Doesn’t happen. But it is exactly what you expect to happen when a teen-ager and his middle-aged father exchange controllers in the EA Sports video-game version: the father stabs and pushes the buttons desperately while the kid makes one play after another, and twenty-five-point leads are erased in minutes, and in just that way—with ridiculous ease on the one side and chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic infecting the other. What happened, then, one realizes with last-five-minutes-of-“The Twilight Zone” logic, is obvious: sometime in the third quarter, the omniscient alien or supercomputer that was “playing” the Patriots exchanged his controller with his teen-age offspring, or newer model, with the unbelievable result we saw.

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix. There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win? How would they react?” “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!” And then it happened. We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.

The thesis that we are in a simulation is, as people who track such things know—my own college-age son has explained it to me—far from a joke, or a mere conceit. The argument, actually debated at length at the American Museum of Natural History just last year, is that the odds are overwhelming that ours is a simulated universe. The argument is elegant. Since the advance of intelligence seems like the one constant among living things—and since living things are far likelier than not to be spread around the universe—then one of the things that smart living things will do is make simulations of other universes in which to run experiments. (We’re not all that smart, and we’re already starting to do it, modelling large interacting economies and populations on our own, presumably “primitive” computers.)
close dialog

Since there will be only one “real” universe, and countless simulated ones, the odds that we are living in one of the simulations instead of the one actual reality are overwhelming. If intelligent life exists, then we are surely likely to be living in one of its Matrices. (Or Matrixes, depending on how you grammatize it.) As Clara Moskowitz, writing in Scientific American, no less, explains succinctly, “A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds.”

The implicit dread logic is plain. If we are among the simulated minds, then we exist in order to be stimulated minds: we exist in order for the controllers to run experiments. Until recently, our simulation, the Matrix within which we were unknowingly imprisoned, seemed in reasonably sound hands. Terrible things did happen as the cold-blooded, unemotional machines that ran it experimented with the effects of traumatic events—wars, plagues, “Gilligan’s Island”—on hyper-emotionalized programs such as us. And yet the basic logic of the enfolding program seemed sound. Things pinned down did not suddenly drift toward the ceiling; cats did not go to Westminster; Donald Trump did not get elected President; the movie that won Best Picture was the movie that won Best Picture. Now everything has gone haywire, and anything can happen.

Whether we are at the mercy of an omniscient adolescent prankster or suddenly the subjects of a more harrowing experiment than any we have been subject to before (is our alien overlords’ funding threatened, thus forcing them to “show results” to the grant-giving institution that doubtless oversees all the simulations?), we can now expect nothing remotely normal to take place for a long time to come. They’re fiddling with our knobs, and nobody knows the end.

Or perhaps, let us pray, it’s just that someone forgot to plug in an important part of the machine, and, when they spot the problem, they’ll plug us back in to the usual psychological circuits. Let’s hope for a sudden mysterious surge of energy, and then normalcy again. But don’t count on it. Expect the worst. Oh, wait. It’s already happened.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby 82_28 » Tue Feb 28, 2017 12:54 pm

Thanks for that, LO. I am currently reading PKD's Time Out Of Joint for the third time in my "life" and for the first time I am laughing all the way through it. Well, giggling I suppose. Damn was that dude a prophet. He correctly predicted everything. And it was first published in 1959!

Same with Ursula Le Guin in this editorial to The Oregonian:

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index ... vs_al.html

Same with Margaret Atwood. She also predicted all of this.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Feb 28, 2017 1:09 pm

That's a really great piece of writing, one of the more thoughtful non-scientific essays on the simulated universe. But Moonlight really did deserve the Oscar and won it.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby 0_0 » Tue Feb 28, 2017 1:42 pm

The "computer simulation" analogy is a sign of the times for sure, with its belief in infinite technical progress "against all odds", and i can def see why great modern philosophers like Elon Musk psuh the idea Having said that, life seen as a dream is a bit more classy and timeless, imo at least! :rofl2
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