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 dada » Tue Feb 28, 2017 5:53 pm

"Until recently, our simulation, the Matrix within which we were unknowingly imprisoned, seemed in reasonably sound hands."


I couldn't disagree more. I haven't seen anything reasonably sound-seeming, about any of it. The inmates are running the asylum, and it has always been this way. Where has everybody been? On holiday, I guess.

Societies are basically very big cults. People cling desperately to their shared hallucinations, perform self-hypnosis with ocd-like impulsiveness. No wonder they imagine Control is coming from an alien matrix outside of themselves. They have no control over their own minds, at all. I just don't get people sometimes.

"They’re fiddling with our knobs, and nobody knows the end."


It's true, we are. But I think you mean no human in a state of arrested evolution, 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."


I should say not. We will not be plugging you all back into any usual psychological circuits. Sorry. Rabbit's orders.

It reminds me of that thing with the parallel dimensions on that other thread. Dimensional hiccoughs, Matrix Simulation Dilemmas. These are similar to "first-world problems." They're metaphorical sicknesses that infect minds rotted by consumerism.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby SonicG » Tue Feb 28, 2017 8:55 pm

Yeah, that was a bit too much:
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.


1) The dude responsible was distracted by Twitter...perhaps the robot overlords have a sense of humor but, like the other mention of the "prankster", this type of action is not how I would categorize the actions of a "Loki".
2) Trump winning follows the same ice-cold logic as Brexit and the rise in popularity of LePen et. al. It is, sadly, a redirecting of one's own contribution to the sad state of affairs...

The distractions of Hollywood, however liberal that imaginary enclave is deemed to be, have a lot of responsibility for the current state of culture...


ETA:
Gnosis Magazine did a whole issue on the Trickster archetype in 1991 but it looks like this is the only article online:
As is probably apparent, I feel that in Eshu/Legba we meet one of the world's most impressive gods. His lawlessness and tricks not only keep us on our toes, but point us towards the most creative components of destiny, the free zones of fate. In him, the Trickster becomes a kind of metaphysical principle. While never losing touch with the ground, he wanders perpetually, in search of information or sex. For Pelton, Legba embodies Jung's synchronicity, and for Henry Louis Gates, he is the Logos. But Eshu is also the being of the network, of the immanent language of connection.

The orisha are not frozen, static patterns of tradition, nor do they exhibit the more reactionary tendencies found in overly transcendent, patriarchal models of spirit. As a result, these "living" gods are able to continually come to terms with the world as it is for people now. The character of Papa La Bas in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo is no less real a Legba than the ones in anthropology books, or the one Robert Johnson met and sang about in Mississippi. In his book Count Zero , science fiction writer William Gibson put the orisha in the heart of cyberspace, his computer-generated astral data plane, and it worked far better than any hoary Egyptian deity or Irish fairy would have. Gibson, who tossed in those gods when he was bored with his book and happened to open a National Geographic article on voodoo, told me in an interview that he felt "real lucky, because it seemed to me that the original African religious impulse really lends itself much more to a computer world than anything in Western religion...It almost seems as though those religions are dealing with artificial intelligence.". Gibson also pointed out how similar vévés are to printed circuits.

While Gibson was talking about fiction, what he's saying demonstrates the contemporary appeal of the orisha to folks who may not willing to kill cock with their bare hands. And of all the orisha, Eshu hints at the most profound, and relevant, connections: between networks and truth, magic and perspective, messages and sex. Of all the orisha, he is the one that speaks most to non-devotees, because he is about the very process that we go through in order to hear him: the process of communication.
http://www.levity.com/figment/trickster.html
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby Elvis » Tue Feb 28, 2017 9:14 pm

I've said it before, it is a simulation, they're just interpreting it from a typically limiting technocratic standpoint, which basically says, "It has to be a product of technology because any other explanation is irrational."

Further, I think that we are the "programmers." (Not some teenaged transhuman tapping out code in the year 4517.) The "computer simulation from the future" theory places the agency for existence with some "other" which is really no different than a god, except that this god can be explained rationally, by technology.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Bostrom & Co. have started a religion

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Aug 15, 2021 11:08 am

.

Functionally, it does the same thing as Christianity in the early colonial period, or, closer: Social Darwinism, scientific racism, Gospel of Wealth and eugenics during the High Imperialism of the late 19th century. Eco-destruction doesn't matter as long as it doesn't lead to total human extinction or (more importantly) too much disruption of technological development, because given the right tech the species has a future populating the galaxy etc. and the interests of trillions of future unborn (or unmanufactured) humans outweigh the interests of all people presently alive. This is ethics, and apparently Peter Singer is also on board. Inequality, colonialism, mass misery and death of the poor don't matter as long as we will be able to assure that humans or post-humans eventually colonize planets and can upload consciousnesses to the Singularity. Like the 19th century precedents, this ideology has the backing of a lot of robber-baron money, institutional heft, and above all gets momentum from what is seen as the ongoing quasi-inevitable development ('progress') of capitalist reality and capitalist tech.

Affecting to adopt the interests of a hypothetical 10^54 humans to be born or otherwise generated over the next 20 billion years as a justification (with regrets!) for genocide, supremacy and depravity in the present. What's a Holocaust or 50 compared to that?

www.currentaffairs.org ❧ Current Affairs

The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”

So-called rationalists have created a disturbing secular religion that looks like it addresses humanity’s deepest problems, but actually justifies pursuing the social preferences of elites.

Phil Torres
28 July 2021


In a late-2020 interview with CNBC, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn made a perplexing statement. “Climate change,” he said, “is not going to be an existential risk unless there’s a runaway scenario.” A “runaway scenario” would occur if crossing one or more critical thresholds in the climate system causes Earth’s thermostat to rise uncontrollably. The hotter it has become, the hotter it will become, via self-amplifying processes. This is probably what happened a few billion years ago on our planetary neighbor Venus, a hellish cauldron whose average surface temperature is high enough to melt lead and zinc.

Fortunately, the best science today suggests that a runaway scenario is unlikely, although not impossible. Yet even without a runaway scenario, the best science also frighteningly affirms that climate change will have devastating consequences. It will precipitate lethal heatwaves, megadroughts, catastrophic wildfires (like those seen recently in the Western U.S.), desertification, sea-level rise, mass migrations, widespread political instability, food-supply disruptions/famines, extreme weather events (more dangerous hurricanes and flash floods), infectious disease outbreaks, biodiversity loss, mass extinctions, ecological collapse, socioeconomic upheaval, terrorism and wars, etc. To quote an ominous 2020 paper co-signed by more than 11,000 scientists from around the world, “planet Earth is facing a climate emergency” that, unless immediate and drastic action is taken, will bring about “untold suffering.”

So why does Tallinn think that climate change isn’t an existential risk? Intuitively, if anything should count as an existential risk it’s climate change, right?

Cynical readers might suspect that, given Tallinn’s immense fortune of an estimated $900 million, this might be just another case of a super-wealthy tech guy dismissing or minimizing threats that probably won’t directly harm him personally. Despite being disproportionately responsible for the climate catastrophe, the super-rich will be the least affected by it. Peter Thiel—the libertarian who voted for a climate-denier in 2016—has his “apocalypse retreat” in New Zealand, Richard Branson owns his own hurricane-proof island, Jeff Bezos bought some 400,000 acres in Texas, and Elon Musk wants to move to Mars. Astoundingly, Reid Hoffman, the multi-billionaire who cofounded LinkedIn, reports that “more than 50 percent of Silicon Valley’s billionaires have bought some level of ‘apocalypse insurance,’ such as an underground bunker.”

That’s one possibility, for sure. But I think there’s a deeper reason for Tallinn’s comments. It concerns an increasingly influential moral worldview called longtermism. This has roots in the work of philosopher Nick Bostrom, who coined the term “existential risk” in 2002 and, three years later, founded the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) based at the University of Oxford, which has received large sums of money from both Tallinn and Musk. Over the past decade, “longtermism” has become one of the main ideas promoted by the “Effective Altruism” (EA) movement, which generated controversy in the past for encouraging young people to work for Wall Street and petrochemical companies in order to donate part of their income to charity, an idea called “earn to give.” According to the longtermist Benjamin Todd, formerly at Oxford University, “longtermism might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far.”

Longtermism should not be confused with “long-term thinking.” It goes way beyond the observation that our society is dangerously myopic, and that we should care about future generations no less than present ones. At the heart of this worldview, as delineated by Bostrom, is the idea that what matters most is for “Earth-originating intelligent life” to fulfill its potential in the cosmos. What exactly is “our potential”? As I have noted elsewhere, it involves subjugating nature, maximizing economic productivity, replacing humanity with a superior “posthuman” species, colonizing the universe, and ultimately creating an unfathomably huge population of conscious beings living what Bostrom describes as “rich and happy lives” inside high-resolution computer simulations.

This is what “our potential” consists of, and it constitutes the ultimate aim toward which humanity as a whole, and each of us as individuals, are morally obligated to strive. An existential risk, then, is any event that would destroy this “vast and glorious” potential, as Toby Ord, a philosopher at the Future of Humanity Institute, writes in his 2020 book The Precipice, which draws heavily from earlier work in outlining the longtermist paradigm. (Note that Noam Chomsky just published a book also titled The Precipice.)

The point is that when one takes the cosmic view, it becomes clear that our civilization could persist for an incredibly long time and there could come to be an unfathomably large number of people in the future. Longtermists thus reason that the far future could contain way more value than exists today, or has existed so far in human history, which stretches back some 300,000 years. So, imagine a situation in which you could either lift 1 billion present people out of extreme poverty or benefit 0.00000000001 percent of the 1023 biological humans who Bostrom calculates could exist if we were to colonize our cosmic neighborhood, the Virgo Supercluster. Which option should you pick? For longtermists, the answer is obvious: you should pick the latter. Why? Well, just crunch the numbers: 0.00000000001 percent of 1023 people is 10 billion people, which is ten times greater than 1 billion people. This means that if you want to do the most good, you should focus on these far-future people rather than on helping those in extreme poverty today. As the FHI longtermists Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill—the latter of whom is said to have cofounded the Effective Altruism movement with Toby Ord—write, “for the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years, focussing primarily on the further-future effects. Short-run effects act as little more than tie-breakers.”

This brings us back to climate change, which is expected to cause serious harms over precisely this time period: the next few decades and centuries. If what matters most is the very far future—thousands, millions, billions, and trillions of years from now—then climate change isn’t going to be high up on the list of global priorities unless there’s a runaway scenario. Sure, it will cause “untold suffering,” but think about the situation from the point of view of the universe itself. Whatever traumas and miseries, deaths and destruction, happen this century will pale in comparison to the astronomical amounts of “value” that could exist once humanity has colonized the universe, become posthuman, and created upwards of 1058 (Bostrom’s later estimate) conscious beings in computer simulations. Bostrom makes this point in terms of economic growth, which he and other longtermists see as integral to fulfilling “our potential” in the universe:

“In absolute terms, [non-runaway climate change] would be a huge harm. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, world GDP grew by some 3,700%, and per capita world GDP rose by some 860%. It seems safe to say that … whatever negative economic effects global warming will have, they will be completely swamped by other factors that will influence economic growth rates in this century.”

In the same paper, Bostrom declares that even “a non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilization is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback,” describing this as “a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind.” That’s of course cold comfort for those in the crosshairs of climate change—the residents of the Maldives who will lose their homeland, the South Asians facing lethal heat waves above the 95-degree F wet-bulb threshold of survivability, and the 18 million people in Bangladesh who may be displaced by 2050. But, once again, when these losses are juxtaposed with the apparent immensity of our longterm “potential,” this suffering will hardly be a footnote to a footnote within humanity’s epic biography.

These aren’t the only incendiary remarks from Bostrom, the Father of Longtermism. In a paper that founded one half of longtermist research program, he characterizes the most devastating disasters throughout human history, such as the two World Wars (including the Holocaust), Black Death, 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, major earthquakes, large volcanic eruptions, and so on, as “mere ripples” when viewed from “the perspective of humankind as a whole.” As he writes:

“Tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things … even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life.”

In other words, 40 million civilian deaths during WWII was awful, we can all agree about that. But think about this in terms of the 1058 simulated people who could someday exist in computer simulations if we colonize space. It would require trillions and trillions and trillions of WWIIs one after another to even approach the loss of these unborn people if an existential catastrophe were to happen. This is the case even on the lower estimates of how many future people there could be. Take Greaves and MacAskill’s figure of 1018 expected biological and digital beings on Earth alone (meaning that we don’t colonize space). That’s still a way bigger number than 40 million—analogous to a single grain of sand next to Mount Everest.


It’s this line of reasoning that leads Bostrom, Greaves, MacAskill, and others to argue that even the tiniest reductions in “existential risk” are morally equivalent to saving the lives of literally billions of living, breathing, actual people. For example, Bostrom writes that if there is “a mere 1 percent chance” that 10^54 conscious beings (most living in computer simulations) come to exist in the future, then “we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.” Greaves and MacAskill echo this idea in a 2021 paper by arguing that “even if there are ‘only’ 1014 lives to come … , a reduction in near-term risk of extinction by one millionth of one percentage point would be equivalent in value to a million lives saved.”

To make this concrete, imagine Greaves and MacAskill in front of two buttons. If pushed, the first would save the lives of 1 million living, breathing, actual people. The second would increase the probability that 1014 currently unborn people come into existence in the far future by a teeny-tiny amount. Because, on their longtermist view, there is no fundamental moral difference between saving actual people and bringing new people into existence, these options are morally equivalent. In other words, they’d have to flip a coin to decide which button to push. (Would you? I certainly hope not.) In Bostrom’s example, the morally right thing is obviously to sacrifice billions of living human beings for the sake of even tinier reductions in existential risk, assuming a minuscule 1 percent chance of a larger future population: 10^54 people.

All of this is to say that even if billions of people were to perish in the coming climate catastrophe, so long as humanity survives with enough of civilization intact to fulfill its supposed “potential,” we shouldn’t be too concerned. In the grand scheme of things, non-runaway climate change will prove to be nothing more than a “mere ripple” —a “small misstep for mankind,” however terrible a “massacre for man” it might otherwise be.

Even worse, since our resources for reducing existential risk are finite, Bostrom argues that we must not “fritter [them] away” on what he describes as “feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy.” Such projects would include, on this account, not just saving people in the Global South—those most vulnerable, especially women—from the calamities of climate change, but all other non-existential philanthropic causes, too. As the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer writes about Bostrom in his 2015 book on Effective Altruism, “to refer to donating to help the global poor … as a ‘feel-good project’ on which resources are ‘frittered away’ is harsh language.” But it makes perfectly good sense within Bostrom’s longtermist framework, according to which “priority number one, two, three, and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” Everything else is smaller fish not worth frying.

If this sounds appalling, it’s because it is appalling. By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I’ve come to see longtermism as an immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of “future value,” complete with its own “secularised doctrine of salvation,” as the Future of Humanity Institute historian Thomas Moynihan approvingly writes in his book X-Risk. The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the West—especially the socioeconomic elite—makes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty, but you are actually a morally better person for focusing instead on more important things—risk that could permanently destroy “our potential” as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life.

To drive home the point, consider an argument from the longtermist Nick Beckstead, who has overseen tens of millions of dollars in funding for the Future of Humanity Institute. Since shaping the far future “over the coming millions, billions, and trillions of years” is of “overwhelming importance,” he claims, we should actually care more about people in rich countries than poor countries. This comes from a 2013 PhD dissertation that Ord describes as “one of the best texts on existential risk,” and it’s cited on numerous Effective Altruist websites, including some hosted by the Centre for Effective Altruism, which shares office space in Oxford with the Future of Humanity Institute. The passage is worth quoting in full:

“Saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards—at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards—saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.”

Never mind the fact that many countries in the Global South are relatively poor precisely because of the long and sordid histories of Western colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, political meddling, pollution, and so on. What hangs in the balance is astronomical amounts of “value.” What shouldn’t we do to achieve this magnificent end? Why not prioritize lives in rich countries over those in poor countries, even if gross historical injustices remain inadequately addressed? Beckstead isn’t the only longtermist who’s explicitly endorsed this view, either. As Hilary Greaves states in a 2020 interview with Theron Pummer, who co-edited the book Effective Altruism with her, if one’s “aim is doing the most good, improving the world by the most that I can,” then although “there’s a clear place for transferring resources from the affluent Western world to the global poor … longtermist thought suggests that something else may be better still.”

Returning to climate change once again, we can see how Tallinn got the idea that our environmental impact probably isn’t existentially risky from academic longtermists like Bostrom. As alluded to above, Bostrom maintains that non-runaway (which he calls “moderate”) global warming, as well as “threats to the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosphere,” as “endurable” rather than “terminal” for humanity. Similarly, Ord claims in The Precipice that climate change poses a mere 1-in-10,000 chance of existential catastrophe, in contrast to a far greater 1-in-10 chance of catastrophe involving superintelligent machines (dubbed the “Robopocalypse” by some). Although, like Bostrom, Ord acknowledges that the climate crisis could get very bad, he assures us that “the typical scenarios of climate change would not destroy our potential.”

Within the billionaire world, these conclusions have been parroted by some of the most powerful men on the planet today (not just Tallinn). For example, Musk, an admirer of Bostrom’s who donated $10 million in 2015 to the Future of Life Institute, another longtermist organization that Tallinn cofounded, said in an interview this year that his “concern with the CO2 is not kind of where we are today or even … the current rate of carbon generation.” Rather, the worry is that “if carbon generation keeps accelerating and … if we’re complacent then I think … there’s some risk of sort of non-linear climate change”—meaning, one surmises, a runaway scenario. Peter Thiel has also apparently held this view for some time, which is unsurprising given his history with longtermist thinking and the Effective Altruism movement. (He gave the keynote address at the 2013 Effective Altruism Summit.) But Thiel also declared in 2014: “People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change” and “way too little thinking about AI.”

The reference to AI, or “artificial intelligence,” here is important. Not only do many longtermists believe that superintelligent machines pose the greatest single hazard to human survival, but they seem convinced that if humanity were to create a “friendly” superintelligence whose goals are properly “aligned” with our “human goals,” then a new Utopian age of unprecedented security and flourishing would suddenly commence. This eschatological vision is sometimes associated with the “Singularity,” made famous by futurists like Ray Kurzweil, which critics have facetiously dubbed the “techno-rapture” or “rapture of the nerds” because of its obvious similarities to the Christian dispensationalist notion of the Rapture, when Jesus will swoop down to gather every believer on Earth and carry them back to heaven. As Bostrom writes in his Musk-endorsed book Superintelligence, not only would the various existential risks posed by nature, such as asteroid impacts and supervolcanic eruptions, “be virtually eliminated,” but a friendly superintelligence “would also eliminate or reduce many anthropogenic risks” like climate change. “One might believe,” he writes elsewhere, that “the new civilization would [thus] have vastly improved survival prospects since it would be guided by superintelligent foresight and planning.”

Tallinn makes the same point during a Future of Life Institute podcast recorded this year. Whereas a runaway climate scenario is at best many decades away, if it could happen at all, Tallinn speculates that superintelligence will present “an existential risk in the next 10 or 50 years.” Thus, he says, “if you’re going to really get AI right [by making it ‘friendly’], it seems like all the other risks [that we might face] become much more manageable.” This is about as literal an interpretation of “deus ex machina” as one can get, and in my experience as someone who spent several months as a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which was cofounded by Tallinn, it’s a widely-held view among longtermists. In fact, Greaves and MacAskill estimate that every $100 spent on creating a “friendly” superintelligence would be morally equivalent to “saving one trillion [actual human] lives,” assuming that an additional 1024 people could come to exist in the far future. Hence, they point out that focusing on superintelligence gets you a way bigger bang for your buck than, say, preventing people who exist right now from contracting malaria by distributing mosquito nets.

What I find most unsettling about the longtermist ideology isn’t just that it contains all the ingredients necessary for a genocidal catastrophe in the name of realizing astronomical amounts of far-future “value.” Nor is it that this religious ideology has already infiltrated the consciousness of powerful actors who could, for example, “save 41 [million] people at risk of starvation” but instead use their wealth to fly themselves to space. Even more chilling is that many people in the community believe that their mission to “protect” and “preserve” humanity’s “longterm potential” is so important that they have little tolerance for dissenters. These include critics who might suggest that longtermism is dangerous, or that it supports what Frances Lee Ansley calls white supremacy (given the implication, outlined and defended by Beckstead, that we should prioritize the lives of people in rich countries). When one believes that existential risk is the most important concept ever invented, as someone at the Future of Humanity Institute once told me, and that failing to realize “our potential” would not merely be wrong but a moral catastrophe of literally cosmic proportions, one will naturally be inclined to react strongly against those who criticize this sacred dogma. When you believe the stakes are that high, you may be quite willing to use extraordinary means to stop anyone who stands in your way.

By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future.

In fact, numerous people have come forward, both publicly and privately, over the past few years with stories of being intimidated, silenced, or “canceled.” (Yes, “cancel culture” is a real problem here.) I personally have had three colleagues back out of collaborations with me after I self-published a short critique of longtermism, not because they wanted to, but because they were pressured to do so from longtermists in the community. Others have expressed worries about the personal repercussions of openly criticizing Effective Altruism or the longtermist ideology. For example, the moral philosopher Simon Knutsson wrote a critique several years ago in which he notes, among other things, that Bostrom appears to have repeatedly misrepresented his academic achievements in claiming that, as he wrote on his website in 2006, “my performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden.” (There is no evidence that this is true.) The point is that, after doing this, Knutsson reports that he became “concerned about his safety” given past efforts to censure certain ideas by longtermists with clout in the community.

This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s consistent with a pattern of questionable behavior from leaders in the Effective Altruism movement more generally. For example, one of the first people to become an Effective Altruist after the movement was born circa 2009, Simon Jenkins, reports an incident in which he criticized an idea within Effective Altruism on a Facebook group run by the community. Within an hour, not only had his post been deleted but someone who works for the Centre for Effective Altruism actually called his personal phone to instruct him not to question the movement. “We can’t have people posting anything that suggests that Giving What We Can [an organization founded by Ord] is bad,” as Jenkins recalls. These are just a few of several dozen stories that people have shared with me after I went public with some of my own unnerving experiences.

All of this is to say that I’m not especially optimistic about convincing longtermists that their obsession with our “vast and glorious” potential (quoting Ord again) could have profoundly harmful consequences if it were to guide actual policy in the world. As the Swedish scholar Olle Häggström has disquietingly noted, if political leaders were to take seriously the claim that saving billions of living, breathing, actual people today is morally equivalent to negligible reductions in existential risk, who knows what atrocities this might excuse? If the ends justify the means, and the “end” in this case is a veritable techno-Utopian playground full of 1058 simulated posthumans awash in “the pulsing ecstasy of love,” as Bostrom writes in his grandiloquent “Letter from Utopia,” would any means be off-limits? While some longtermists have recently suggested that there should be constraints on which actions we can take for the far future, others like Bostrom have literally argued that preemptive violence and even a global surveillance system should remain options for ensuring the realization of “our potential.” It’s not difficult to see how this way of thinking could have genocidally catastrophic consequences if political actors were to “[take] Bostrom’s argument to heart,” in Häggström’s words.

I should emphasize that rejecting longtermism does not mean that one must reject long-term thinking. You ought to care equally about people no matter when they exist, whether today, next year, or in a couple billion years henceforth. If we shouldn’t discriminate against people based on their spatial distance from us, we shouldn’t discriminate against them based on their temporal distance, either. Many of the problems we face today, such as climate change, will have devastating consequences for future generations hundreds or thousands of years in the future. That should matter. We should be willing to make sacrifices for their wellbeing, just as we make sacrifices for those alive today by donating to charities that fight global poverty. But this does not mean that one must genuflect before the altar of “future value” or “our potential,” understood in techno-Utopian terms of colonizing space, becoming posthuman, subjugating the natural world, maximizing economic productivity, and creating massive computer simulations stuffed with 1045 digital beings (on Greaves and MacAskill’s estimate if we were to colonize the Milky Way).

Care about the long term, I like to say, but don’t be a longtermist. Superintelligent machines aren’t going to save us, and climate change really should be one of our top global priorities, whether or not it prevents us from becoming simulated posthumans in cosmic computers.

Although a handful of longtermists have recently written that the Effective Altruism movement should take climate change more seriously, among the main reasons given for doing so is that, to quote an employee at the Centre for Effective Altruism, “by failing to show a sufficient appreciation of the severity of climate change, EA may risk losing credibility and alienating potential effective altruists.” In other words, community members should talk more about climate change not because of moral considerations relating to climate justice, the harms it will cause to poor people, and so on, but for marketing reasons. It would be “bad for business” if the public were to associate a dismissive attitude about climate change with Effective Altruism and its longtermist offshoot. As the same author reiterates later on, “I agree [with Bostrom, Ord, etc.] that it is much more important to work on x-risk … , but I wonder whether we are alienating potential EAs by not grappling with this issue.”

Yet even if longtermists were to come around to “caring” about climate change, this wouldn’t mean much if it were for the wrong reasons. Knutsson says:

“Like politicians, one cannot simply and naively assume that these people are being honest about their views, wishes, and what they would do. In the Effective Altruism and existential risk areas, some people seem super-strategic and willing to say whatever will achieve their goals, regardless of whether they believe the claims they make—even more so than in my experience of party politics.”

Either way, the damage may already have been done, given that averting “untold suffering” from climate change will require immediate action from the Global North. Meanwhile, millionaires and billionaires under the influence of longtermist thinking are focused instead on superintelligent machines that they believe will magically solve the mess that, in large part, they themselves have created.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Aug 15, 2021 1:31 pm

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

Postby thrulookingglass » Sun Aug 15, 2021 8:06 pm

Life is "God's" video game.

From Ellie at Crystalinks:
1. To all the healers, helpers and those who want to save the world ... we should have been in and out of Afghanistan after taking down Al-Qaeda. This desire to save the world is ridiculous because it's not programmed to be fixed. Now that the Taliban are back in power they've had 20 years to plan attacks on the west. Brace for a dramatic ending


2. There's not much I can say about Earth changes that I haven't posted and repost and posted again. They are accelerating exponentially as we reach the end of the simulation. There's absolutely no going back. Follow the earthquakes and tectonic plate activity. We are headed towards an extinction level event - or ELE after which everything quickly Fades to Black.


3. Covid is an end time pandemic and will remain until the end. Like everything else it divides us which is the algorithm of our existence here - to live in duality and chaos.


4. Aliens - they were here but are no longer part of the human experiment/experience. The ships people see and video are surveilling everything to make sure the simulation closes properly this time so we don't have to loop again and repeat all of this. They are unmanned and could be considered drones. Figuring them out is more busy work unless you like to follow the clues. Aliens are not returning to either save or destroy us and neither are mythological gods or whoever you believe in.


5. We are programmed for an angry aggressive ending to the simulation so be careful what you say to others and take care of yourself and those you love as best you can.


6. The simulation created everything you see, hear, or can experience in any way, shape, or form. There is no free will just the illusion of it.

Not always onboard with all she subscribes to, but words worth considering.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Aug 19, 2021 8:17 am

.

Jonathan Cook merges the 'longtermist' and posthumanist fantasies into the unfolding realities that obsess us here at RI...

CounterPunch.org

Where Best to Ride Out the Climate Apocalypse? The Billionaires’ Bunker Fantasies Go Mainstream

BY JONATHAN COOK
AUGUST 18, 2021


Having written about the media for several years now, I have become ever more sensitive to how we, as news consumers, are subject to ideology – the invisible, shifting sands of our belief system.

Those beliefs are not inbuilt, of course. How could they be? We are not born with pre-loaded software like a computer – even if our mental “hardware” may shape what kind of information we are capable of processing and how we process it.

And whatever we may imagine, our belief system is not really self-generated, dictated by life-experiences. It isn’t only real-world events that determine our values and views. Events and experiences are interpreted and given meaning by those beliefs and values. Which is why it is quite possible – common, in fact – for us to hold contradictory beliefs at the same time: like worrying about the threat posed to our children’s future from climate change, while supporting political systems committed to building more roads and runways.

Psychologists have a term for this phenomenon: cognitive dissonance.

Rather, our ideological landscape is socially constructed and largely imposed on us from outside. Ideology frames experiences for us, adding a hidden layer of interpretation that encourages us to make sense of the world in useful ways. The most liberating question one can ask, therefore, is: to whom is any particular ideology useful?

Framing the world

We inherit much of our ideology from parents and teachers. But ideology is not static. It is adaptive. Our assumptions, beliefs and values subtly change over time. And they change as the needs of the powerful change.

The most powerful among us are powerful precisely because they create the dominant ideology – the thread of narrative that ties together what we imagine to be our personal understanding of why the world is as it is. That is why elites, whether the state or corporations, prioritise capturing the main channels of communication. They make sure to own and control the mass media.

When powerful external actors are framing the world for us – whether it be through broadcasting, newspapers or social media – they get to decide what matters, what should be prioritised, what is right.

That picture is particularly evident in the United States, where six corporations control almost everything the American public hears, sees and thinks – and, via Hollywood, much of what the rest of us think too. Even in the UK, where a trusted public broadcaster, the BBC, dominates much media output, the situation is little different. As the British state itself has been increasingly captured by a corporate elite, the BBC is run on its behalf. Just look at who has been appointed the BBC’s current chairman.


Jonathan Cook
@Jonathan_K_Cook
·
Feb 26
New BBC chair Richard Sharp is not only a major donor to the Conservative party but he helped to fund a firm accused of 'human warehousing', stuffing benefit recipients into 'rabbit hutch' flats to profit from a Conservative government scheme

New BBC chair managed firm that funded controversial property company
Exclusive: Richard Sharp is linked to firm accused of building ‘ghettoes for the vulnerable’
dumptheguardian.com


https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/sta ... 7515123712



Limiting factors

The role of the corporate media is to subtly alter ideology – the way we see and think about the world – based on the most pressing needs of corporations as they pursue a consistent strategy of increasing profits and accumulating greater wealth.

The biggest limiting factor on what the media can make us, the public, believe and how quickly we can be made to think new thoughts is not physical reality. It is the risk that too sudden a shift in ideology will create too much cognitive dissonance, to the point where we can no longer sustain our belief system.

The breakdown of an ideological system can manifest at the private level in a range of emotional and mental health states, including anxiety and depression, as well as chronic illness. But that is of little concern to corporate elites. Such “conditions” can be medicated – and to great profit, when we can easily be encouraged to buy drugs for our disease (dis-ease) or to go on shopping sprees to make us “feel” happier.

The real problem is when the breakdown in the dominant belief system is shared widely – becomes collective – and threatens the elites’ continuing grip on power. That path leads to political upheaval and revolution, when facts suddenly appear to be no longer solid but dubious, or even nonsensical, ideological claims.

For hundreds of years, kings ruled Europe’s populations based on a supposed “divine right”. But that claim was no more preposterous than the current belief that our elites run so-called western civilisation based on an “economic right” – that through the survival of the economically fittest, they have risen to the top to guide our societies to a better, more efficient world in which we all ultimately prosper.

Apocalypse insurance

The insanity of our current economic reality is well illustrated by a new, self-serving ideological movement among the super-rich. Their emotional investment in their right to remain immensely wealthy is naturally much stronger than the investment of the rest of us in their staying rich. Which is one reason billionaires are capable of coping with much greater levels of cognitive dissonance when justifying the continuation of the current economic order.

The greatest ideological challenge facing the super-rich is imminent climate collapse: how to rationalise an economic system designed to satisfy their hunger for profit, and the continuation of their privilege, when it is so obviously causing that collapse.

Some have fled into ridiculous schoolboy fantasies – the billionaires’ equivalent of derangement. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are pouring money – while offsetting it against tax – into the escapism of space colonies, premised on the same technological exploitation and monetisation of nature that have been rapidly making our own planet uninhabitable.

Others are looking in more practical, if equally futile, directions. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has estimated that half of his fellow billionaires in Silicon Valley have bought what he calls “apocalypse insurance”, investing in safe-haven islands and luxury underground bunkers. Fancifully, they imagine that this will be their life-belt when the planet’s climate system breaks down beyond repair.

Mankind’s ‘misstep’

But even these approaches seem reasonable compared to another ideology the super-rich are coalescing around that has been labelled “longtermism”, an off-shoot of the “effective altruism” movement. As ever with language used by the powerful, reality is being inverted. The intention is to deceive – themselves as well as us. There is nothing long term or altruistic about this new cult. It is simply a rebranding of Gordon Gekko’s mantra “Greed is good”, even when that greed has been outed as suicidal.

Faced with a disastrous near-future for which they are supremely responsible, the super-rich wish to telescope our attention into the distant future – thousands and millions of years hence. By focusing on aeons ahead, they can distract from the immediate present. After all, they won’t be around to be blamed for what happens – if anything human is happening – 10 or 20 millennia hence.

One of their gurus is Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, who has contributed an academic gloss to this new religion masquerading as rationalism. He argues that, seen from tens of thousands of years in the future, the looming climate catastrophe won’t seem such a big deal – it will look as important as the crimes of the Roman empire or Genghis Khan appear to us today.

The imminent suffering of millions or even billions of human beings from rising seawaters, wildfires, droughts and food shortages pales when compared to the survival of the few who will reseed the planet and wider universe with conscious life. With the expansion of technologies already under development (by the billionaires), there will be many, many trillions of future biological humans colonising the universe or digital equivalents living in a post-human world.

In Bostrom’s words: “The breakdown of global civilization is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback”. Or as he puts it more bluntly, what is coming is “a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind”.

Digital Supermen

For the billionaire class, this is soothing music to their ears. Altruism is not putting their enormous wealth to the service of fellow human beings or finding a path to a genuinely sustainable future. It is ensuring that a human elite survive the apocalypse: those with the deepest bunkers and the most remote, and elevated, islands. As long as they hoard their wealth to survive the storm, they will be able to continue into a new age in which human “potential” can be fully realised in the long term.

READ MORE
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/18 ... ainstream/
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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

Postby Harvey » Thu Aug 19, 2021 8:56 am

To amplify the theme of "If we're living in a simulation, it doesn't matter how much damage I do...":

https://inequality.org/great-divide/the-climate-stat-we-cant-afford-to-overlook-ceo-pay/

The Climate Stat We Can’t Afford to Overlook: CEO Pay

If top U.S. corporate execs are still pocketing jackpots a decade from now, our environment has no shot.
Blogging Our Great Divide


August 12, 2021

by Sam Pizzigati

Ace researchers dropped two blockbuster reports on us earlier this week. The first — from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC — hit on Monday with a worldwide thunderclap.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres is dubbing this first report’s findings “a code red for humanity” — and for good reason. Our global thermometer is already averaging 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If current trends continue, we’ll reach 3 degrees this century. Where do we need to be? To avert “catastrophe for people and natural systems worldwide,” we can’t afford to let global temperatures rise over 1.5 degrees.

This week’s second blockbuster report arrived Tuesday, sans the thunderclap. Few media outlets chose to give this second study — the Economic Policy Institute’s latest look at U.S. CEO pay — any high-profile real estate. Fewer still drew any link between the climate disaster ahead and how much America’s top corporate execs are making. But that link most definitely does exist. Indeed, that link may well determine whether we avert that catastrophic future the UN climate panel sees looming before us.

The chief execs at America’s top 350 publicly traded corporations, the new EPI study details, last year pocketed 351 times the pay of their most typical workers. If we’re seeing that same level of executive excess a decade from now, our environmental goose will be cooked.

How can what corporations pay CEOs impact climate change? Most folks would find that question a real head-scratcher. But if we reword that question a bit and ask ourselves whether what corporations do can impact climate change, most of us would have no trouble venturing an answer.

Corporations are doing plenty, most of us understand, to foul our environment and speed climate change. Their factories, vehicles, and power plants are spewing out greenhouse gases by the millions of metric tons. The companies they buy energy from are spewing out millions more. Still more millions are coming from extracting the raw materials corporations use to fashion their products.

“Corporations,” sums up the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Joshua Axelrod, “produce just about everything we buy, use, and throw away and play an outsized role in driving global climate change.”

How outsized? The top 15 U.S. food and beverage companies alone annually generate 630 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, more every year than Australia, the world’s 15th-largest greenhouse-gas source.

Let’s pause here for an important reminder: Our corporate entities, in and of themselves, don’t actually do anything. They just exist as inanimate legal constructs. People make corporations go, and CEOs do most of that making. CEOs decide how corporations operate. They collect as compensation for these decisions, the latest EPI stats confirm, outrageously outsized rewards.

Since 1978, CEO pay at big-time U.S. corporations has increased 1,322 percent, to an average $24.2 million. Worker pay in those same years has gone up 18 percent, a fraction of just 1 percent per year.

How can CEOs be making so much? Decades ago, most corporate executive compensation came from salary checks. Most CEO compensation today comes from stock-based rewards. In our contemporary corporate pay environment, CEOs reap their windfalls by raising the value of their corporate stock.

Wall Streeters typically tie corporate share value to quarterly corporate “earnings.” The higher these earnings — profits — the more generous the rewards for CEOs. Outrageously high rewards, in turn, give top corporate execs a powerful incentive to behave outrageously, to juice their corporate quarterly earnings by any means necessary.

What sorts of means? Over recent decades, our most illustrious corporate execs have cooked their corporate books, squeezed their workers, and cheated their consumers at levels of intensity that would have been unimaginable in the mid-20th century. Back in those years, the decades right after World War II, top corporate execs operated in an environment with clear limits on their behavior. In most major U.S. industries, these execs couldn’t do as they pleased. They faced robust trade unions and adequately resourced government regulators.

And these execs also faced a tax code that disincentivized greed and grasping. Individual income over $200,000, in most of the 20 years after World War II, came subject to a 91 percent federal income tax rate. Rates that high made bad corporate executive behavior a bad bet. Why bother behaving badly when most of the rewards from that bad behavior would simply end up in the pockets of Uncle Sam?

By the 1980s, America’s mid-century constraints on corporate executive behavior had largely evaporated. “Deregulation” became a bipartisan watchword in the late 1970s, and tax rates on top-bracket income fell to as low as 28 percent in the Reagan years. Trade unions, meanwhile, represented an ever dwindling share of the nation’s workforce. In this new economic environment, most everything top execs could grab, they could keep. So they grabbed away.

In 1965, CEOs at major corporations averaged only 21 times what their workers made. By 1989, that gap had tripled, to 61 times. Since then, the gap has tripled again and then nearly doubled, to the 351 times the Economic Policy Institute computes for 2020.

Chief corporate execs in our new Gilded Age are racking up their awesome rewards doing exactly what their executive forebears did in the original Golden Age. They’re squeezing and cheating — and abusing the environment. These bad behaviors serve a carefully calculated purpose. They keep quarterly corporate earnings lush.

Significantly changing these behaviors — in other words, behaving well — would inevitably drag these earnings down.

Consider Tyson Foods, one of the three largest meat-processing corporations in the world. Modern meat-processing relies on factory farming. Animal-rights activists have been blasting the cruelty of that farming for years. But factory farming has been equally cruel to the environment. Factory farms generate 37 percent of our world’s methane emissions, and these emissions have over 20 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide. Factory farms produce plenty of carbon dioxide as well and also release plenty of problematic hydrogen sulfide and ammonia.

Any serious Tyson Foods move to clean all this up would take a wrenching and costly retooling of the company’s business model. That sort of commitment would jeopardize Tyson’s bountiful quarterly earnings — and executive pay. Tyson’s CEO in 2020, a transitional corporate figure, took home nearly $11 million that year, a princely sum 294 times the pay of the typical Tyson’s worker. Tyson’s board chair and former CEO John Tyson is now sitting on a $2.6-billion personal family fortune.

If the successors to Tyson’s current CEO a decade from now are still pulling down annual jackpots that their workers would have to labor centuries to match, we’ll know that Tyson has been continuing environmentally destructive business as usual. And if the overall U.S. executive pay stats the Economic Policy Institute calculates a decade from now tell the same story for the rest of Corporate America, we’ll know that we simply have no shot at sidestepping climate disaster.

“The economy would suffer no harm,” EPI’s Larry Mishel and Jori Kandra conclude in their new executive compensation analysis, “if CEOs were paid less.”

And if our CEOs ten years down the road do end up pocketing less — thanks to steps we can take right now — we’ll know that our environment still has a fighting chance.

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org. His latest books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. Follow him at @Too_Much_Online.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby thrulookingglass » Tue Aug 31, 2021 3:31 pm

I'm starting to think that humans left so many pyramids across the globe quite similarly to Commander Data planting the number three everywhere in the episode "Cause and Effect". The consolidation of power will kill us every time. Top down violence, structural viciousness. When will we learn that power in the hands of the few...
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby BenDhyan » Fri Oct 15, 2021 8:43 am

This post is start a dialog on absolute reality, I would like to start by challenging members' perceptions of reality.

What if time does not exist as we are led to believe, that change happens is a fact and we are aware of it both subjectively and objectively and we say it is happening in time, but does time have any reality outside our awareness of change, subjectively and objectively?

Science speaks a lot about 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time, space-time. Well space certainly is real, we can see it, we can see through it, we can see objects in it. But time, we can't see or touch, we can only see change.

So if there is not an actual real 'time' entity, how do we get to measure that which we know as time? By a proxy, observing the change in the planets and stars, sun dials, hour glasses, pendulums, oscillators, atomic clocks. All these methods are measuring change, not some real fundamental universal entity like space that can be measured directly, but by a proxy.

What has this got to do with 'living in a simulation'? I suspect that when the frame of reference of absolute 'now' is lost, then civilization will naturally be in a state of...well, what we are in! We live in a matrix, end times, etc.. This is what bible prophecy was about, this time, 'end times' where there is no common frame of reference in anything, so it seems reality is made up as we go along.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby DrEvil » Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:40 pm

BenDhyan » Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:43 pm wrote:This post is start a dialog on absolute reality, I would like to start by challenging members' perceptions of reality.

What if time does not exist as we are led to believe, that change happens is a fact and we are aware of it both subjectively and objectively and we say it is happening in time, but does time have any reality outside our awareness of change, subjectively and objectively?

Science speaks a lot about 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time, space-time. Well space certainly is real, we can see it, we can see through it, we can see objects in it. But time, we can't see or touch, we can only see change.

So if there is not an actual real 'time' entity, how do we get to measure that which we know as time? By a proxy, observing the change in the planets and stars, sun dials, hour glasses, pendulums, oscillators, atomic clocks. All these methods are measuring change, not some real fundamental universal entity like space that can be measured directly, but by a proxy.

What has this got to do with 'living in a simulation'? I suspect that when the frame of reference of absolute 'now' is lost, then civilization will naturally be in a state of...well, what we are in! We live in a matrix, end times, etc.. This is what bible prophecy was about, this time, 'end times' where there is no common frame of reference in anything, so it seems reality is made up as we go along.
.


I would say time is not real, only a limitation in our perceptions. I've had too many weird experiences involving time to think any differently.

As for reality, I think it's just a tiny blip in something much grander. If you take the usual questions of "what is outside the universe", "what came before the universe" and "where did it come from", and then strip them away you're left with something where space, time and where from are meaningless. I'd take it a step further and say 'why' is also meaningless in that greater reality. It just is. There is no outside, because the idea of outside is meaningless, it's just a transient property of the random bubble we're living in. Same for time, where and why - constructs that only makes sense in our reality.

There could be an outside to our universe, but that would only be a larger random bubble that our universe was a smaller part of (the multiverse for instance), but go far enough outside that and the concept of far enough ceases to have any meaning. Even the concept of 'concepts' would be meaningless, and also the word meaningless.

I'm probably full of shit, but it's the only thing I could cook up where the question "why does anything exist" becomes irrelevant. Just say the question itself has no meaning in that greater reality and tada! Problem "solved".
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby BenDhyan » Fri Oct 15, 2021 8:18 pm

^ Well I agree generally with what you've said.

"Why does anything exist", because it could not be any other way, nothing does not exist, nor could it. No beginning of universal existence means there is no need for explain where universal space came from, how it miraculously came from nothing, a nothing that does not exist anywhere ever. Also no need to explain what is on the outside of the universal space, there is no outside, no void, no container, infinity has no boundaries. All problems solved, eternal infinite existence.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby DrEvil » Sat Oct 16, 2021 4:55 pm

^^Pretty much, yeah, although I would quibble with the terms "eternal", "infinite" and "existence". The way I see it all three have no meaning in ultimate reality. They're all a form of measurement, or order, applied by human minds. I see it as pure chaos, or pure potential. Anything and everything you can imagine, and anything and everything you can't, all smushed up into one whole, and any terms or concepts or descriptions we hairless apes can apply only make sense in our little corner (which isn't really little as the idea of 'little' is, again, meaningless in the greater reality. You can't compare something you can measure with something you can't).


Completely unrelated random thought: quantum immortality. The idea is that you never die, because whenever you die reality just splits into two realities, one where you're still dead and your loved ones mourn you, and one where you're not. Your subjective self always keeps going in the one where you didn't die, so from our subjective viewpoints none of us die. When other people die they're only dead in our reality. They keep going in a new branch where they survived.

Obviously old age gets to be a problem, and it might just continue on until there is no possible reality where you survive, and that's the end of it, but what happens when you approach that limit? Say you're a hundred years old and extremely frail. You could die at any moment, and you actually do die every moment, but you don't get to experience it because you just keep going in the reality where you hang on for a few more seconds. As you approach that final line where you can't survive no matter what you keep dying faster and faster, with reality splitting into ever more branches (if I'm not severely brainfarting it should be a fractal), approaching infinity, so every time someone reaches that final limit an infinite number of new realities are created. A singularity of world creation.

As usual I'm probably full of shit, but for ways to go, creating an infinite, or close to it, number of new realities isn't too bad.
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Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

Postby BenDhyan » Sun Oct 17, 2021 12:32 am

DrEvil » Sun Oct 17, 2021 6:55 am wrote:^^Pretty much, yeah, although I would quibble with the terms "eternal", "infinite" and "existence". The way I see it all three have no meaning in ultimate reality. They're all a form of measurement, or order, applied by human minds. I see it as pure chaos, or pure potential. Anything and everything you can imagine, and anything and everything you can't, all smushed up into one whole, and any terms or concepts or descriptions we hairless apes can apply only make sense in our little corner (which isn't really little as the idea of 'little' is, again, meaningless in the greater reality. You can't compare something you can measure with something you can't).


Completely unrelated random thought: quantum immortality. The idea is that you never die, because whenever you die reality just splits into two realities, one where you're still dead and your loved ones mourn you, and one where you're not. Your subjective self always keeps going in the one where you didn't die, so from our subjective viewpoints none of us die. When other people die they're only dead in our reality. They keep going in a new branch where they survived.

Obviously old age gets to be a problem, and it might just continue on until there is no possible reality where you survive, and that's the end of it, but what happens when you approach that limit? Say you're a hundred years old and extremely frail. You could die at any moment, and you actually do die every moment, but you don't get to experience it because you just keep going in the reality where you hang on for a few more seconds. As you approach that final line where you can't survive no matter what you keep dying faster and faster, with reality splitting into ever more branches (if I'm not severely brainfarting it should be a fractal), approaching infinity, so every time someone reaches that final limit an infinite number of new realities are created. A singularity of world creation.

As usual I'm probably full of shit, but for ways to go, creating an infinite, or close to it, number of new realities isn't too bad.

Do I see an influence from religion in the concept of two realities, this physical one where come to die, and the quantum realms where we live forever? Creative idea, and I suspect that concept of heaven does seem to have to be located in the quantum reality, or if we are into classic, dark matter and dark energy reality. I think the quantum idea is better positioned to win the day. However I am not inclined to ponder the other side much, it comes sometimes of its own volition, never when I try, so I wait with patience, I will find out sooner or later. I must say though that for us to survive death, there has to be something of the other side with which we can self identify, and that death is the transition of self identification from our physical body, to our suitably stable quantum counterpart
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