And here I was waiting to get unplugged, or maybe finding a Nokia phone that received a call.
we are a speck of excrement on the buttplug of reality during a gay porno film.
Buncha fee fees about to start rejecting reality
Oh those mathers. At least scientists are humble enough to recognize that theorums about the physical world can’t be proven.
The simulation idea doesn’t work only because people apply it incorrectly. Our brains do in fact create our experiences with no contact to the world outside our bodies, its our sensory organs that give data to the brain to create our perception of experiencing things.
We are all partly made of simulators, but knowing this changes nothing for each of us since we can start associating ourselves with a larger force of nature that happens when we group ourselves together for changes we want to see in the world.
Our brains do in fact create our experiences with no contact to the world outside our bodies, its our sensory organs that give data to the brain to create our perception of experiencing things.
Ehhh… The claim that there’s a clear delineation between the central and peripheral nervous system is generally just a byproduct of how we teach anatomy. The more we understand about cognitive science and anatomy in general, the further we get away from the old understanding of the cns when it was treated almost like a computer that runs a machine.
I think it kinda depends on how you define an experience, but you’re kinda edging into an old debate known as the mind body problem in cognitive science and philosophy.
None of that suggests this can’t be the case though.
What I’m saying is that for example, dreams are not real, and yet they can and often are indistinguishable from reality, many even have dreams where they are aware they are dreaming and can control them the same way we can control what we do while awake.
This is only possible because we have bodily systems for producing experiences.
What I’m saying is that for example, dreams are not real, and yet they can and often are indistinguishable from reality, many even have dreams where they are aware they are dreaming and can control them the same way we can control what we do while awake.
I think to adopt that argument you have to be operating on some preconceived assumptions.
Dreams are “real”, in the sense that they are propagated by measurable physical phenomena. Just because some people can experience an amount of choice in their dreams, does not mean they are interacting with “reality”.
This is only possible because we have bodily systems for producing experiences
Again… Experiences needs to be defined. There are a lot of theories about how we engage with the world around us in both a physical and metaphysical way.
Dreaming is perception unconstrained by sensory input
Reality is dreaming constrained by sensory input
Dreaming is perception unconstrained by sensory input
That’s not really true… Dreaming is a cognitive function that is still limited by how we engage with our surroundings normally. Congeniality Blind people do not see in their dreams, and deaf people do not hear.
Reality is dreaming constrained by sensory input
Imo that is a bit of a narcissistic way to view reality. Reality is shared, and not defined by an individual person’s sensory input. There are natural laws that persist even if there is no way for a person to perceive them.
People blind at birth dream of perceiving hearing unconstrained by sensory input so yes it is true still even for people blind from birth. I have a friend who is this case actually.
There is nothing narcissistic about it because it only proves that we are individuals with individual experience, something that everyone has been aware of for a long time, we still all operate on the substrate that is outside of our body with its brain and sensory organs.
People blind at birth dream of perceiving hearing unconstrained by sensory input so yes it is true still even for people blind from birth. I have a friend who is this case actually.
Right, but your original claim was that it was unconstrained by sensory input. The fact that they lack the ability to dream up sensory information they have no previous sensory input for is proof this claim is not true.
My point is that you are making an unfounded delineation between sensory input and the brain. That the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system should be viewed as a whole system reliant on each other, rather than a computer with sensory attachments.
There is nothing narcissistic about it because it only proves that we are individuals with individual experience, something that everyone has been aware of for a long time, we still all operate on the substrate that is outside of our body with its brain and sensory organs.
People having “individual experience” does not preclude people having shared experiences, and shared experiences do not preclude individuality. Your claim is only supported by an underdeveloped preconceived notion of perception and it’s effects on cognition.
What you are arguing is similar to Solipsism, which basically boils down to “I can only prove to myself that I process consciousness, and everyone else’s experiences are just subjective observations”. Which means if all observations are subjective in nature, then a person can only really prove that they themselves posses “real” consciousness.
Now that might not have been your original point, but it is the natural conclusion of the argument. And others have thought it out and argued against it for a long time. It’s known as the The Problem With Other Minds.
I will prove that we’re not in a simulation:
If we’re in a simulation then whoever is operating it would not want us to know if we’re in a simulation or not.
Anyone trying to check if we’re in a simulation or not would be stopped by the operator.
I wasn’t stopped by an operator hence there is no operator and we’re not in a simulation.
Q.E.D.
Um, why? As a general rule, the point of running a simulation is to find out what happens under some circumstances where you don’t know what happens. If you’re imposing conditions like that, then you aren’t so much running a simulation as you are running some kind of procedural generation.
deleted by creator
I’m kidding but since we’re just playing I would say:
Let’s imagine you want to know who will win the next election. You create detailed simulation of the entire population and run it until the voting day to see how they will vote. If the simulated population realized they are in a simulation the will obviously start behaving in a different way then the real population thus making your simulation useless.
So I would say unless the goal of the simulation is to see how fast will it realize it’s just a simulation you would try to avoid them finding out.
Then again, checking if people will realize they are in a simulation is a valid reason to simulate them so it’s possible we’re in a simulation that is supposed to find out it’s a simulation…
This is exactly the kind of disinformation the simulation would send out to trick us.
⬆️ ⬆️ ⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️BABA Start holy fucking shit I can see time. It’s the colour three.
You’re a single player I see.
Inside a turtle’s dream theory still not disproven
“Robot, parse this statement, ‘this sentence is false’.” The robot explodes because it cannot understand a logical contradiction.
I swear, that’s what this argument sounds like to me. Also, I’m genuinely confused why people don’t think that, if we can simulate randomness with computers in our world with pseudo random number generators, why a higher reality wouldn’t be able to simulate what we view as true randomness with a pseudo random number generator or some other device we cannot even begin to comprehend.
Either this paper is bullshit or they’re talking about some sort of very specific thing that all these articles are blowing out of proportion.
I don’t believe we are in a simulation but I don’t believe this paper disproves it. Just like I don’t believe in god but I don’t believe the question “can god make a rock so big he can’t pick it up?” disproves god.
When we dream we often believe it to be reality, despite that in retrospect we can identify clear contradictions with logic in those dreams.
A Matrix-like simulation doesn’t have to be perfect. We are a bunch of dumb-dumbs who will suspend disbelief quite easily and dismiss those who claim to see a different truth as crazy.
Damn
That’s just what they fucking want you to think.
About that title…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(mathematics)
Matrix theory is the branch of mathematics that focuses on the study of matrices.
In mathematics, a matrix is a rectangular array of numbers or other mathematical objects with elements or entries arranged in rows and columns
So really The Matrix should have taken place in a two dimensional world.
Alternatively, I would also accept renaming the trilogy to The Array, The Matrix, and The Tensor.
This paper is shit.
https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488_8e072972f66d1fb748b47244c4813c86.pdf
They proved absolutely nothing.
For instance, they treat physics as a formal axiomatic system, which is fine for a human model of the physical world, but not for the physical world itself.
You can’t say something is “unprovable” and make a logical leap to saying it is “physically undecidable.” Gödel-incompleteness produces unprovable sentences inside a formal system, it doesn’t imply that physical observables correspond to those sentences.
I could go on but the paper is 12 short pages of non-sequiturs and logical leaps, with references to invoke formality, it’s a joke that an article like this is being passed around and taken as reality.
I mean, simulation theory is kind of a joke itself. It’s a fun thought experiment, but ultimately it’s just solipsism repackaged.
In reality there’s no more evidence for it than there is for you being a butterfly dreaming it’s a man. And it seems to me that the only reason people take it at all seriously in the modern age is because Elon Musk said he believed it back when he had a good enough PR team that people thought he was worth listening to.
Simulation theory is actually an inevitability. Look up ancestor simulators for a brief on why.
Eventually when civilization reaches a certain computationally threshold it will be possible to simulate an entire planet. The inputs and outputs within the computational space will be known with some minor infinite unknowns that are trivial to compensate for given a higher infinite.
Either we are already in one or we will inevitably create one in the future.
There’s a few wild leaps in logic, here.
Firstly, we know of life evolving once. Just one planet. In the entire universe. We can postulate that with such a vast universe (and possibly multiverse) that it’s probable that other life exists elsewhere, but we don’t know that. It could be a unique event or an incredibly rare event. We can’t say, because 1 is way too small a sample size to extrapolate from.
But you’re not even extrapolating from 1 datapoint. You’re extrapolating from something that you think might be true at some point in the future.
I am skipping steps because this topic demands thought, research, and exploration, but ultimately the conclusion is, in my view, inevitable.
We are already building advanced simulators. Video games grow in realism and complexity. With realtime generative AI, these games will become increasingly indistinguishable to a mind. There are already countless humans simultaneously building the thing.
And actually, the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial life is support of the idea. Once a civilization grows large enough, they may simply build Dyson sphere scale computation devices, Matrioshka brains. Made efficient, they would emit little to no EM radiation and appear as dark gravitational anomalies. With that device, what reason would beings have to endanger themselves in the universe?
But I agree, the hard evidence isn’t there. So I propose human society band together and build interstellar ships to search for the evidence.
None of what you’ve said ameliorates the faulty logic I highlighted. You have instead just added more assumptions.
The logic is not faulty, it is predicated upon conditional statements. It is actually a synthesis of Bostrom’s trilemma, Zuse/Fredkin digital ontology, Dyson/Fermi cosmological reasoning, and extrapolation from current computational capabilities.
The “holes” are epistemic, not logical.
Okay, if you prefer to frame the flaws in your reasoning like that, then I’m happy to do so. That doesn’t make the conclusion less flawed. The conversation isn’t about the hows and whyfores of formal logic, it’s about whether the conclusion is likely to be true.
The DMT I took yesterday says otherwise
Have you bothered looking for evidence?
What makes you so sure that there’s no evidence for it?
For example, a common trope we see in the simulated worlds we create are Easter eggs. Are you sure nothing like that exists in our own universe?
If we’re in a simulation then we’d have no idea what’s outside that simulation, so we’d have no idea what an easter egg would look like.
But it’s not my job to find evidence to prove other people’s claims. It’s their job to provide evidence for those claims. That’s true regardless of whether the claim is that we live in a simulation, that we’re ruled over by a benevolent omnipotent god, or whether there’s a teapot orbiting between Mars and the sun.
You don’t even need to reject the applicability of Gödel, because there’s no proof that our universe doesn’t include a bunch of undecidable things tucked away in the margins. Jupiter could be filled with complete nonsense for all we know.
I highly suggest to listen to this podcast with Damien P. Williams and Paris Marx:
“No, we don’t live in a f—ing simulation”
https://ouropinionsarecorrect.libsyn.com/no-were-not-living-in-a-f-ing-simulation
“If we assume X theorem is true, Y theorem is true, and lemma Z is true, then …”
This is actually about our models and seeing their incompleteness in a new light, right? I don’t think starting from arbitrary axioms and then trying to build reality was about proving qualities about reality. Or am I wrong? Just seems like they’re using “simulated reality” as a way to talk about our models for reality. By constructing a “silly” argument about how we can’t possibly be in a matrix, they’re revealing just how much we’re still missing.
It’s possible that the universe could be simulated by an advanced people with vastly superior technology.
Hard solipsism has no answer and no bearing on our lives, so it’s best to not give it another thought.
It’s possible yes, but the nice thing is that we know we are not merely talking about “advanced people with vastly superior technology” here. The proof implies that technology within our own universe would never be able to simulate our own universe, no matter how advanced or superior.
So if our universe is a “simulation” at least it wouldn’t be an algorithmic one that fits our understanding. Indeed we still cannot rule out that our universe exists within another, but such a universe would need a higher order reality with truths that are fundamentally beyond our understanding. Sure, you could call it a “simulation” still, but if it doesn’t fit our understanding of a simulation it might as well be called “God” or “spirituality”, because the truth is, we wouldn’t understand a thing of it, and we might as well acknowledge that.
But that sounds like disproving a scenario no one claimed to be the case: that everything we perceive is as substantial as we think it is and can be simulated at full scale in real time by our own universe.
Part of the whole reason people think of simulation theory as worth bothering to contemplate is because they find quantum physics and relativity to be unsatisyingly “weird”. They like to think of how things break down at relativistic velocities and quantum scale as the sorts of ways a simulation would be limited if we tried, so they like to imagine a higher order universe that doesn’t have those pesky “weird” behaviors and we are only stuck with those due to simulation limits within this hypothetical higher order universe.
Nothing about it is practical, but a lot of these science themed “why” exercises aren’t themselves practical or sciency.
Just blaming god again for all the unexplainable stuff. Only instead if god it’s a simulation.
I’m not sure I agree with the “no one claimed” part, because I think the proof is specifically targeting the claim that it is more likely than not that we are living in a simulation due to the “ease of scaling” if simulated realities are a thing. Which I think is one of the core premises of simulation theory.
In any case, I don’t think the reasoning only applied to “full scale” simulations. After all, let’s follow the thought experiment indeed and presume that quantum mechanics is indeed the result of some kind of “lazy evaluation” optimisation within a simulation. Unless you want to argue solipsism in addition to simulation theory, the simulation is still generating perceptions for every single conscious actor within the simulation, and the simulation therefore still needs to implement some kind of “theory of everything” to ensure all perceptions across actors are being generated consistently.
And ultimately, we still end up with the requirement that there is some kind of “higher order” universe whose existence is fundamentally unknowable and beyond our understanding. Presuming that such a universe exists and manages our universe seems to me to be a masked belief in creationism and therefore God, while trying very hard to avoid such words.
The irony is that the thought experiment started with “pesky weird behaviours” that we can’t explain. Making the assumption that our “parent universe” is somehow easier to explain is really just wishful thinking that’s as rational as wishing a God to be responsible for it all.
I’ll be straight here: I’m a deist, I do think that given sufficient thought on these matters, we must ultimately admit there is a deity, a higher power that we cannot understand. We may as well call it God, because even though it’s not a religious idea of God, it is fundamentally beyond our capacity to understand. I just think simulation theory is a bit of a roundabout way to get there as there are easier ways to reach the same conclusion :)
Broadly speaking, I’d say simulation theory is pretty much more akin to religion than science, since it’s not really testable. We can draw analogies based on what we see in our own works, but ultimately it’s not really evidence based, just ‘hey, it’s funny that things look like simulation artifacts…’
There’s a couple of ways one may consider it distinct from a typical theology:
- Generally theology fixates on a “divine” being or beings as superior entities that we may appeal to or somehow guess what they want of us and be rewarded for guessing correctly. Simulation theory would have the higher order beings likely being less elevated in status.
- One could consider the possibility as shaping our behavior to the extent we come anywhere close to making a lower order universe. Theology doesn’t generally present the possibility that we could serve that role relative to another.
Does it feel very solipsistic around here or am I the only one?
