But do such entomologists actually exist, or are they part of the simulation as well?
Thanks for that… uh… contribution that totally shows you understood the article. Or something.
I never got to do it, but it seems dissecting owl droppings is quite the thing.
And could any simulation model a thread drift from simulation to GAI to bird poop?
Fair enough - but occasionally going to “high accuracy mode” when a meticulous guy is around is still easier than being in “high accuracy mode” all the time. Until microscopes come along you don’t need to put much effort into your simulations of bacteria, etc., etc.
That’s why the black death was so deadly. No one was watching to make sure it wasn’t cheating.
Heh.
One programmer to another: “They’re not looking. Just kill one in five and be done with it. In a few centuries, they’ll be able to see bacteria, and we’ll have to trace every contact, but until then, go wild.”
Humans were trivializing endgame content after they reached the industrial era, so the devs had to introduce global warming mechanics in an emergency patch to nerf them.
The problem is generating the retroactive history. We’ve figured out where the meteor that killed the dinosaurs hit by analyzing data drawn from studying the ground of multiple continents. Where did the data in the ground come from, if not being calculated at the time the meteor hit?
Here’s the thing about faking things in simulation: I believe a simulation can reasonably described as when the reality is represented by data, and interactions between things within the data are simulated by adjusting the data based on the interactions. That’s what simulation is. And entities within the simulation don’t recognize that it (and they) are just data because interacting with the rest of their simulated reality does indeed really effect them (since they are just data, and the data is really changed by the simulated interactions).
That all being the case, when you simplify the data, such as reducing the moon to a textured ideal sphere, you are literally simplifying the reality - the moon really is a textured ideal sphere to them. And, contrariwise, it’s not really meaningful to claim you’ll put off rendering the other side of the tree until somebody looks - if you are storing the data needed to consistently render the back of the tree when you need it, the actual back of the tree exists in your data, which means it too exists.
The long and short of that is, however you are simulating their reality, that is their reality, and they’re going to notice. If atoms are generated at random when you look through a microscope, they’ll conclude the atoms are random. And if they’re not random, they’re data, and already exist in the simulated world. You can’t avoid it, and you can’t avoid storing it. If you try to avoid storing it, they’ll notice, because that’s the whole point of science: observing and understanding the world you are experiencing.
And so it is theoretically entirely consistent with our observations of the mechanics of subatomic parties to conclude that we are a simulated reality running on hardware in a universe where subatomic particles go a few more levels down before they get into quantum weirdness; but to simply the simulation they reduced the detail in our reality by a few levels, and that’s why quarks seem so weird here.
The only “solar system” that needs to be simulated for your benefit is your immediate surrounding area, some low to mid LOD models of the surrounding landscape/buildings and a convincing skybox over your head. All you actually know about our solar system is what you’ve seen in books, documentaries and what you’ve observed in the night sky. That could all be fabricated by the simulation. AFAYK, the entire solar system, including the Earth, could be a fictional construct that never existed.
I think simulation theory is one of those “nothing is real” or “you don’t know anything” pieces of fluff that make the lay person think philosophy is just a bunch of horse hockey. Philosophy is supposed to be useful for things like figuring out what is good or the difference between right and wrong. What does simulation theory do for anyone?
While I don’t believe the simulation hypothesis, I do enjoy talking about it.
When playing “20 Questions” the audience answering “Yes” or “No” normally has an answer in mind in advance - but that’s not strictly necessary. The first person who answers “Yes” to “Is is an animal?” may have “Nixon’s dog Checkers” in mind, but the second person who answers “No” to “Does it weigh more than 300 pounds?” could be thinking of Minnie Moo, the famous cow with spots that look like Mickey. As long as each answerer makes his next answers consistent with all past answers, the questioner has no way of telling that there was no “real” answer at the start of the game.
I think reality is quite obviously functionally equivalent to a simulation - it’s emergent properties and behaviors all the way down. The only thing in question is whether it was made deliberately by an outside agent or not.
This analogy doesn’t really follow - everywhere we look there are the fingerprints of a consistent reality. The notion that the first time somebody looked through a microscope God shrugged and said, “let’s have that be carbon, whatever,” and the next time “I guess this thing’ll have some oxygen in it” and then later he said, “Huh, maybe I’ll make this new oxygen stuff necessary for breathing, whereas before I didn’t have a plan for why I was making people choke” is absurd.
Well firstly, whether it leads to conclusions like “nothing is real” is something arrived at by thinking about it.
Secondly there are people that believe the logic of this hypothesis is sound, and true, and that it should therefore impact how we interpret reality and live our lives. I disagree with them, and this is the reason why we should have this discussion.
Finally, just as with mathematics say, sometimes the most useful areas of study are ones that looked the least useful initially.
Excellent point, I hadn’t realized this.
So it seems this requirement of “lazy evaluation” within the simulation hypothesis, is the loose thread that can pull the whole thing apart. Because at this point, I can think of several reasons why it leads to questioning some of the premises of the simulation argument, or makes the implications so messy that we can’t come close to a simple conclusion like “Therefore, we’re probably in a simulation”.
True, but that would yield a far less convincing simulation than the one that we (perhaps) occupy.
But we don’t know how much detail the “real” universe has, if we are not the real universe. What if quarks behave probabilistically because in the “top” universe subatomic particles go a few levels lower, but in the simulation they said “just set some probabilities for how given quark should behave and call it a day, we don’t have time to model subquark particles”
Personally I think that people who arrive at conclusions like “nothing is real” or “we’re just simulations so nothing matters” don’t understand the theory being discussed. If you are a simulated entity, then by definition the simulated world is 100% real as far as you’re concerned. There is nothing intangible about it and consequences do matter - if you trigger a flag that gets you’re deleted, you’re dead, which sucks for you as much as it would suck if you’re real. And if there would be anything that gives your life meaning if the world was real, then those things would still work if you and those things are simulated.
About the only difference between a simulation and ‘reality’ is that at any time the simulation could get turned off by a capricious, disinterested, or angry creator. Which would probably be a better experience than what Christians expect to happen when the world is ended. Though honestly Christians already believe we’re living in a simulation, whether they’re aware of it or not.
Is seems evident that if we are a deliberately created simulation then universe that contains us must necessarily be a great deal larger and/or more information-dense than ours, or our creators wouldn’t be wasting so much real estate on us. (Which also is the death knell for the ‘we are statistically certain to be in a simulation’ argument in the op, since each successive level’s simulations must necessarily be simpler, until there’s a level where a subsimulation isn’t possible.)
Of course there’s also a possibility that our simulation isn’t quite as complex as we think it is - there’s a chance that some of the things we observe aren’t actually part of the simulation. As a simulated world uses science to suss out the limits of their world, they will inevitably start doing science on the architecture their world runs on, to the degree that it effects the simulation that’s running. So when it comes to things about our universe that we infer the existence of, perhaps things like subatomic particles and quarks aren’t deliberately rendered. Perhaps what we observe about them is just how the natural behavior of the physical computer our simulation is running on looks from the inside. So our atoms are simulated, but our quarks might be real!
I get you, but I think you may have misunderstood my point (or I should have restated the context under which I was saying that).
I don’t believe that the simulation hypothesis, in itself, suggests “nothing is real”. Indeed, as I’ve argued on the Dope before, I think it’s a misapprehension that “real” and “illusion” are labels that can or should be applied to some object or entity like our universe.
What they really allude to is interpretations of our experiences.
Anyway, what I was referring to in my previous post was the requirement that simulations feature “lazy evaluation” – that parts of the simulation are only filled in as necessary to fool us.
(One) problem with this idea is we have now been given additional reason to believe in “Last Thursdayism”.
Because, while we can always doubt our environment and memories, this proposition is giving us additional reason to do so. If we’re positing A, B and C don’t exist while I am not looking, then why draw the line there? Why assume X, Y and Z have object permanence?
Last Thursdayism as it’s usually posited isn’t really plausible, because it’s claiming that some creator designed our entire universe, in full detail, including everyone’s memories of everything, by hand. Which wouldn’t be so bad if our universe had the complexity and size of, say, a Wolfenstein level, and (presuming the creator is a team of people) it is even feasible to make a world like a big box game like Skyrim. But for reality to be handcrafted? Have you seen how many atoms we have lying around, that would have to have been hand-placed? Have you? Go ahead, count them. I’ll wait.
Everything everywhere (in a simulation or reality) came to be by a combination of these three processes:
- It happened randomly.
- It was deliberately made that way by a conscious entity.
- It happened as a result of automatic (or “natural”) processes. (And everything made this way started off as something made by processes 1 or 2.)
You could convince me that the big bang was set off intentionally, inside a simulation - I’d believe that easily. You could also argue that the simulation ran naturally since then with occasional interventions by the creator - but I’d be highly doubtful, since if there was evidence of that I wouldn’t be an atheist. But creating the entire universe as it was last thursday manually? In the detail we see? Ha ha ha no.
There is one thing I would accept, that I briefly thought was equivalent to Last Thursdayism: saved states. One way a creator could have started time “Last Thursday” would be to have then run a simulation naturally up until the present, letting it get as complicated as it is via automatic processes, but then she noticed that it looked like Trump was winning so she got mad, deleted the simulation, and restored it to a previous state to see if she could get a better outcome this time. But then I realized that that’s not Last Thursdayism - that’s multiverse theory.