Yeah, it’s pretty much a statistical argument. There can be only one “real” world, but that world could spawn an untold number of simulations. And if those simulations become sophisticated enough, they could each spawn their own vast array of simulations.
At that point, it’s turtles all the way down.
So if you were going to bet, the smart money would be on us being a simulation, with odds of kazillions-to-1.
Assuming you could ever figure out who wins the bet, of course.
Simulated magnetic fields won’t turn a motor. My point is. You have to have this biological thing do its electrical/chemical process to create consciousness just like you need an actual moving electron to create a magnetic field.
Why do I have this feeling the NDT means ‘Meh, either we are or we aren’t, it’s 50-50!’ and reading anything more into it isn’t very smart?
I’m not sure I quite follow her argument. To me it seems to boil down to it would be really hard to simulate fundamental laws of physics to the level of precision that we can measure them to. And we would have trouble doing it with our current computing power.
But that seems to me like Mario arguing that the glowing light pixels that make up his universe are fundamental building blocks and he doesn’t know how to create them so he must not be living in a simulation. This is because he doesn’t and can’t know about electrons hitting phosphor screens.
Mario can’t argue because he doesn’t exist.
Of course Mario exists, in millions of simulations all over the world. Do you mean he doesn’t have consciousness?
You have to scale up the analogy until Mario has consciousness. Dr. Hossenfelder didn’t seem to have a problem with that part of the simulation hypothesis.
On the other hand, most simulated worlds are going to be much less extensive than the real world. If there are a billion simulated worlds, but each is one trillionth the size of the real one, then you’re probably in the real one.
Of course they will, if the motor itself also exists at the same level of simulation.
But we’re already getting past “a trillionth”, and we’ve only been doing computer simulations for a few decades. Give us a million years, and the sky’s the limit, baby.
I mentioned Grand Theft Auto earlier. Well, GTA V is a good enough simulation of Los Angles that when I see movies set in LA, I recognize a lot of the locations from playing GTA V. Give us a million years, and look out!
As was said above… At that point, it’s turtles all the way down.
grammed my way out of the simulation
From the article:
" For example, a team of theoretical physicists from Oxford University asserts there aren’t enough atoms in the universe to create sufficient computing memory for storing a realistic simulation of consciousness."
So how come there are enough atoms in a human head to “create sufficient computing memory for storing a realistic simulation of consciousness”?
I love it when people start arguing about “consciousness”, because both sides of the debate claim the other side is the one that believes in “the soul” or some shit. It’s hilarious!
There aren’t, not using Monte Carlo methods. Human heads don’t simulate consciousness using Monte Carlo methods.
Although with China cracking down on Macau…
~Max
With regard to this topic, it always seemed to be rather self contradictory to argue whether or not we could be part of a simulation based on the ability of computers (even advanced ones) to simulate this or that. If we were in a simulation than any discussion about what we can and can’t simulate is not relevant since there is no reason that the technology in our universe is the one that is being used to run the simulation in the “real” universe. Once you posit that our view of reality is false, you basically have to give up on any form of argument except the pure mathematical.
On the other hand certain aspects of our universe do seem to be reminiscent of heuristic programming to cut down on memory and computation time. Quantum physics in particular would seem to make a great deal of sense if viewed in terms of as needed computation, where you don’t bother computing the value of a variable until its needed in another process. Also the holographic universe also seems like a memory saving method.
Next on my list of novels I’d try to publish if didn’t hate writing so much, is one where scientists have cracked the code of the simulation universe, and the ultimate doomsday device is one the causes an unrecoverable runtime error.
I’d say that any computer capable of simulating an entire universe is, from our point of view, indistinguishable from God. Therefore, saying “we’re all in a simulation” is exactly the same as saying “we all exist in God’s mind”.
A very dubious, scientifically unsupportable position stated without evidence. As Sabine Hossenfelder stated in the video linked upthread, simulating consciousness is not the problematic part of the simulation hypothesis. It’s far more likely, and consistent with everything we know about biology and computational intelligence, that (in Hossenfelder’s words) “… consciousness is simply a property of certain systems that process large amounts of information. It doesn’t really matter what physical basis this information processing is based on.” It’s exactly the same idea I’ve argued a number of times before, that it’s very likely that consciousness is just an emergent property of a sufficiently intelligent system, regardless of the physical substrate that system is implemented on.
My professor at the time had some issues with my argument too. But I got a decent grade on the paper (A or B).
We don’t need to prove computing power has insurmountable limits to state that it’s a fallacy to assume a perfect world simulation is inevitable. It’s sophistry all the way down, SF fan-wank technology projection.
While the “simulation hypothesis” can be an interesting thought-exercise, and some serious people have speculated about it, the core problem with it is that it’s entirely unfalsifiable and entirely untestable. That means it cannot be analyzed using our scientific method. That doesn’t intrinsically mean it is false, it just means we cannot even approach it scientifically, so it’s pseudoscientific.
I will note with some interest a lot of the sort of writers who like to write about the simulation hypothesis are also atheists, and yet in virtually any form of simulation theory they’ve come up with, the simulator would have to be considered akin to a god, any entity that could simulate the universe as we know it has powers that are godlike regardless of their origin.