Comment by arcticfox
10 years ago
> 4. A complex simulation with many long-lived agents.
Maybe someday we'll discover that this was exactly how the ancestor simulation we're living in started.
10 years ago
> 4. A complex simulation with many long-lived agents.
Maybe someday we'll discover that this was exactly how the ancestor simulation we're living in started.
It's funny to see grown adults in tech taking the simulation idea seriously just because Elon Musk said it. I was interested in science fiction in high school and thought about these things, but I concluded they were worthless.
Why? It is ontologically no different from 1) solipsism, a philosophical idea that even most philosophers considered worthless centuries ago, or more loosely 2) belief in a higher deity who created the world.
It's completely unfalsifiable. The answer to the question clarifies nothing about our understanding of the world [1] and furthermore has absolutely no impact whatsoever on how you ought to live your life.
[1] Even if you conclude we live in a simulation, we will never know for sure anything about the nature of the simulation or the nature of the world outside the simulation.
You can expand your reasoning to include all religion, while you're at it. And anything anyone does that evidences a belief in something irrational or unfalsifiable.
The thing is, you're not wrong. You're just kind of mean and arrogant to reduce a multiplicity of nuanced worldviews that many people care about very deeply to simple meaninglessness.
Let's not resort to calling people names.
Your argument is ironically the reductive one. I have complete respect for people who choose to believe in an organized religion. But it remains the case that whether or not you can prove a higher deity, that in of itself has no bearing on how you should live your life. You can disprove the existence of god and still choose to believe in religion. You can prove the existence and still choose to not believe in any religious system. So proving the existence is worthless.
3 replies →
The negative ("we are not in a simulation") is the falsifiable version. It could be falsified by discovering a flaw in the simulator.
Bostrom's formulation has a properly constructed hypothesis: see http://simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf
It can't. We cannot distinguish between flaws and non-flaws. What is a flaw anyways? That is ill-defined - we are conjecturing about what will or will not be present in a reality that we have no indication will resemble our reality.
> Why? It is ontologically no different from 1) solipsism
Sure, but it is vastly interesting to think about, and imagine about and have meandering ideas about. There's probably also trappings of psychoanalysis in here somewhere.
"clarifies nothing about our understanding of the world" ... LOL
I tried it for a course in college, "Simulation of Complex Systems". Our goal was to get genetic programs to evolve tribe or herd behavior. After fixing the energy conservation bug that made it evolutionarily successful to immediately eat your own children, I ended up intelligently designing some basic DNA on the night before our presentation.
This particular subject interests me to no end.
Here are a few resources that might be helpful to anyone interested
https://www.complexityexplorer.org/
http://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/Xcomplexit.html
http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~simon/page6/page6.html
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarscape
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life
https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bi...
Evolutionarily beneficial to eat your own children? Could you explain how?
It didn't work in the long run but it was a common mutation in the early game, where two creatures would keep breeding and cannibalizing because the strange simulation environment gave them life energy for a long time.
I played a similar game on the Tandy computer in the 80s.
If we're living in a simulation and our creators see that we're running our own simulations, they may terminate our process to avoid nested virtualization.
But by doing so they could invoke the wrath of the grandparent simulation. Logic leads to an implicit understanding that all recursive simulations must be allowed.
Why would our creators want to avoid nested simulation?
The singularity would probably overheat the host computer.
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They probably already figured it out if they can build a simulation this huge.
That we're living in a simulation is taken for granted. On the other hand the idea that we can comprehend the nature of the simulation or its creators should not be taken for granted.
Does a glider in Conway's Game of Life comprehend the hardware its running on? Does it know the mind of Conway?