I think I was heading the wrong direction thinking “No, we’re at the top” or whatever it was from Futurama. Anyways - yes, this guy seems completely off base. I love that his “gut instinct” is newsworthy. The crap that gets published…
Brendon Small
Yep. Sunlight and everything.
Is this like the argument I heard once?:
If it is possible to simulate any universe, then our universe is probably simulated.
It is possible to simulate a universe.
Therefore our universe is probably simulated.
I can not remember how the first premise was supposed to be justified.
-FrL-
Does anyone else suddenly want Funyons and Mountain Dew? That article’s like, deep, man… 
Kind of. IIRC Bostrom’s simulation argument doesn’t say that we MUST be living inside a simulation, it only argues for a trichotomy. Either
- Sentient races can’t simulate reality convincingly (either cos it just can’t be done, or they blow themselves up first, or whatever)
OR
- They invariably choose not to,
OR
- We are almost certainly inside a simulation.
I guess the idea is that if it is at all possible and desirable, then any such simulator-species is unlikely to stop with just one sim - they’ll run meeelyons. After all, with our crude Populous, Civilization etc games, we’re already running meeelyons. So if it’s at all possible, the simulated universes vastly outnumber the real universe, so ours is likely to be simulated just from a probabilistic viewpoint.
But this isn’t new. And I don’t just mean that people have thought about brains-in-vats before, I mean that Nick Bostrom’s paper is already quite old. So I’m not sure why the NYT’s reporting it. Slow news day I suppose.
ETA: huh, turns out it was only printed in 2003, not as old as I thought then. But still…
I’m confident that if anyone figured out the truth we’d all disappear immediately.
Everybody send me ten dollars to stop me figuring it out or the universe gets it. :mad:
Dr. Bostrom’s theory is explored in some detail in Marcus Chown’s very interesting book “The Never-ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Science”. I can’t comment on the accuracy/relevancy of the scientific theories discussed in the book, but it is a thought-provoking read.
I’m going from memory here, but as I recall the simulation argument posits a future where there is **infinite **processing power to run an **infinite **number of simulations and in that context, it seems plausible. And as I recall the theory holds for either an expanding or collapsing universe, because from the perspective of the simulators they can experience a subjective infinity of time. The relevant section of the book is in the chapter (paraphrasing) “Are we all to be resurrected in a computer program at the end of time?” Also discussed is the potential to determine if we are in a simulation. Since an infinite number of simulations would result in occasional errors, we could perhaps detect them if we knew where to look (e.g., the ten trillionth digit of pi, or somesuch).
Please don’t press me for details, I am not a physicist. But it’s all in the book, which unfortunately I don’t have with me at the moment. And I’m sure I’ve munged Chown’s lucid writing with my recall. But my main reason for posting was to plug the book – if you are at all interested in the fringes of physics, I recommend it highly.
Dude, my hands are HUGE!!
And they can touch anything except themselves! :eek:
[sup]Oh… wait…[/sup]
I’m convinced that I am the one living in the simulation and that the rest of you are simply created and destroyed depending on whether I am paying attention in your direction or not. My proof is that whenever I approach a traffic intersection in my car, there are no cars seen crossing my field of view. But as soon as I get to the intersection and look both ways, there are thousands of cars coming from both directions. This happens too often to be mere coincedence.
Why do you think he’s an idiot? He’s posited a plausible picture of the human experience, one that cannot be disproven and makes as much sense as any religious cosmology.
Not exactly a new idea, of course. The philosophical idea that what we perceive as reality is an illusion does predate The Matrix by just a tiny bit. Few thousand years.
If true, it follows that the simulator’s universe is probably a simulation, and so on. As a wise man once said, it’s turtles all the way down.
Is it me, or do the stars appear to be goi
Indeed. I don’t think it can be turtles all the way down, surely it’s got to bottom out somewhere. But there’s certainly room for multiple levels.
Cool name by the way. Gosh, how long it’s been since I read Asimov. Must start again!
Moved to Great Debates; or did I? 
Gfactor, General Questions Moderator
Couldn’t you test this theory by looking for glitches? The pseudo-physics of a simulation should be different from the physics of a real world.
The version in my universe is that this was a retort from a woman whose turtle-beliefs were being questioned by Bertrand Russell, though it may be apocryphal.
Dr. Bostrom was somewhat slipshod with his mathematics. To avoid wasting prescious time, I’ll merely repost my point from a prior thread about this subject.
That would explain the dark matter that physicists and astronomers are always going on about. Dark matter is really the OS and other background processes that we can infer, but never observe.
So are we running in a protected memory space?
No, that’s just my point, it doesn’t make any sense at all and is completely idiotic. Taken by itself, in its most simplistic form… I suppose it’s plausible. But it is utter stupidity not to take into consideration all of your personal life experiences; love, art, pride, selflessness, heroism, and all the things that make us human - think about the last time you experienced these things for yourself, do you remember how amazing it felt? How can a reasonable person believe that those feelings were created by a computer? You want to tell me that when I listen to my favorite albums, or when I look at the art that hangs on my walls, a computer made that? No. I don’t care if you have infinite computing power (which I think is dumb to assume in the first place, but whatever), it is sheer supidity. No computer can make love. No computer can create. Too few of the things I have seen and felt, frankly, could be created by a computer, and I think it’s complete idiocy to believe otherwise.