It's time to revisit the simulation theory.

D

Days like these...

Have a Blessed Day
All the threads were old so decided to post a new thread. Mods lock if simulated or whatever. This comes from a newly published paper. This is gist of the article but what do I know I do drywalling for a living.

Vopson built on his own "second law of information dynamics" proposition, which holds that the "entropy of any system remains constant or increases over time," to argue that gravity is pulling together matter and objects in space to keep entropy at a minimum, much like a computer tidying and compressing data.

futurism.com

Physicist Says He's Identified a Clue That We're Living in a Computer Simulation

Physicist Melvin Vopson offered a new interpretation of gravity, arguing that it could be evidence that reality is a computer simulation.
futurism.com futurism.com
 
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Can consciousness fit in the simulation theory?
Will an AI ever have true imagination, moral dilemmas and original philosophical thinking?
 
Simulation theory is a hell of a lot more plausible than religion for me but my head hurts thinking about it.
 
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clarky said:
Simulation theory is a hell of a lot more plausible than religion for me buty head hurts thinking about it.
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Not for me. It has the same problems with religion.

If this is a simulation, then who built it? Who's running it and why? Without a plausible answer to "who are the simulators and what is their motivation?", the idea feels very abstract and untethered from reality. It's like religion with 'who created God' etc.

Then there is the other version suggesting that perhaps "reality" itself is a form of computation without a specific "runner" in the traditional sense, which really just raises more questions.

Honestly, the idea of there being a higher power who created everything is more believable than a simulation.
protonion said:
Will an AI ever have true imagination, moral dilemmas and original philosophical thinking?
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Nope. Those are all traits of humans which are results of our evolution and complex neurochemistry.
 
IDKFA said:
Not for me. It has the same problems with religion.

If this is a simulation, then who built it? Who's running it and why? Without a plausible answer to "who are the simulators and what is their motivation?", the idea feels very abstract and untethered from reality. It's like religion with 'who created God' etc.

Then there is the other version suggesting that perhaps "reality" itself is a form of computation without a specific "runner" in the traditional sense, which really just raises more questions.

Honestly, the idea of there being a higher power who created everything is more believable than a simulation.
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I don't think its that much of a stretch that humans might evolve to a point that they can download consciousness to a mainframe/construct or whatever to essentially "live" forever.

Certainly more plausible that an omnipotent being in my eyes.
 
that's a really cool theory I can get behind, I love this stuff so thanks for sharing!

Entropy is clearly a rule that needs to exist for some reason, when you think about life in general, it literally IS entropy, the act of something going from low chaos to high chaos is the birth of life itself, what's more chaotic (and chaos making!) than life, we throw rocks in the calm pool of the universe.

I've been pondering reality so long, I'll doubt I'll live long enough to get a confident answer but being from a game dev background you start to notice over time how some of the quirks found in our current games/simulations can be applied to real life phenomena, memory management, concurrency, lazy-loading, level of detail systems etc, if I'm seeing things in our world that somewhat resemble our current attempts to simulate worlds, does that mean we're potentially living in a man-made simulation, maybe even a recursive fractal of simulations within simulations, is our future self our current selfs god?

My current theory is

We co-exist in one simulation, but that simulation is split up into smaller parallel realities, so you can almost think of each reality as a new dimension spanning a thin slice of the other axis, so like our own little reality bubble that follows us around everywhere across time and space. So whilst you and I may be in the same place at the same time, we're both in our own little bubble realities, and our observations may differ.

These bubble realities have a higher fidelity of simulation, and things that "occur" or "exist" outside of them, do not truly occur but are simulated in a fuzzier low fidelity method as and when they are actually needed. So if I miss a live sports game, it's fine, the result isn't really decided until I check it anyway.

The creepy thing is when you start thinking you can see where your bubble ends, all those nameless buildings you pass everyday but pay no interest to, ones you have no reason to interact with, speak about, or even hear about.

One fun little trick is go for a walk but do not decide where you going, just head in a direction, and every time you have to make any sort of decision, do I turn here, do I try looking into that building etc, try to do something as random as possible. The results are usually pretty chaotic, like the simulation is trying to retroactively correct itself.

I went on a random walk (quite literally) and ended up at a pub I've never heard of, despite living here for 10 years, nobody ever mentioned it, never saw it mentioned online, it literally didn't exist, then the day I discover it and get a drink, the next day someone at work asks me about it, the day after that I see a news article about it online dated 2 weeks ago.

Have fun in your little bubble!
 
IDKFA said:
Not for me. It has the same problems with religion.

If this is a simulation, then who built it? Who's running it and why? Without a plausible answer to "who are the simulators and what is their motivation?", the idea feels very abstract and untethered from reality. It's like religion with 'who created God' etc.

Then there is the other version suggesting that perhaps "reality" itself is a form of computation without a specific "runner" in the traditional sense, which really just raises more questions.

Honestly, the idea of there being a higher power who created everything is more believable than a simulation.


Nope. Those are all traits of humans which are results of our evolution and complex neurochemistry.
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There is already the philosophical model of the Evil Genius...
 
Hookshot said:
There is too much unnecessary bullshit for it to be a simulation.
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The way I understand it, the primary reason to run the simulations that we could be in is for research purposes. So having the unnecessary bullshit is a necessity to have usable data.

So if you're going to run simulations to see how many times an intelligent civilization resorts to authoritarianism, or destroys itself with nuclear weapons, or runaway climate change, then you need all the extraneous details.
 
Simulation theory is probably the only "conspiracy" theory (if you can call it that) that I could legitimately see as plausible. The more I study physics, especially anything quantum, the more I'm convinced that everything in our universe can eventually be broken down into math, and specifically waveforms/strings.

And if such a thing as near-infinite processing power can exist (presumably in a different/higher type of reality), then it's a "mathematical probability" that we're currently in a simulation.

Granted, I'm at the wrong end of the dunning-kruger scale, but it's really fun to think about.
 
Ecotic said:
The way I understand it, the primary reason to run the simulations that we could be in is for research purposes. So having the unnecessary bullshit is a necessity to have usable data.

So if you're going to run simulations to see how many times an intelligent civilization resorts to authoritarianism, or destroys itself with nuclear weapons, or runaway climate change, then you need all the extraneous details.
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Right but there is zero reason to render dust on top of everyone's wardrobes, or a universe of billions of time years and billions of light years to see if humans will nuke themselves.
 
clarky said:
I don't think its that much of a stretch that humans might evolve to a point that they can download consciousness to a mainframe/construct or whatever to essentially "live" forever.

Certainly more plausible that an omnipotent being in my eyes.
Click to expand...

I don't think that'll be possible in our lifetimes. Far too many problems to address. For example, lets say we could copy the information in a brain, would the resulting digital entity be the same person? Would there be a continuous sense of self, or would it be a copy with its own separate existence? It's possible that consciousness cannot exist outside of a biological system and an emergent property of the brain. Simply replicating neurons like the film Ex Machina might not also make a copy of human consciousness.

Although all of this is different to creating a simulation of the universe.

Durien said:
There is already the philosophical model of the Evil Genius...
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Good call.

"I think, therefore I am"

If I can think, is this a simulation? Does consciousness prove there is no simulation? Am I going to now spend hours thinking about this?
 
Imagine you are being simulated and you spend your simulation trying to figure out if you are indeed a simulation.

Who cares? Just enjoy life fellas, there's no way out of samsara.
 
Days like these... said:
proposition, which holds that the "entropy of any system remains constant or increases over time,"
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A proposition that proposes something does 2 out of 3 total possible options ?

Seems a bit "woolly"

Also how is that in alignment with the theory that says the universe will eventually suffer from heat death where there is nothing
 
With regards to the paper, I find that if something starts with a question the answer is simply "No." It's reminiscent of obscure videogame lore theories on Reddit and provides a similiar amount of evidence. Lots of "If we just pretend this is true for a minute (even though you have no reason to) and you squint then it maybe sort of kinda looks like this if you've taken enough LSD."

I have no respect for the concept. It exists in the same category as the supernatural and other things that only have any sort of following on the internet: nonsense until absolutely and irrefutably proven otherwise. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Being in a simulation would fundamentally change nothing about your existence - cogito ergo sum still applies. Unless you're hoping to achieve a CHIM x Neo state it only serves to either encourage nihilism and/or be a basic prime mover explanation for anyone who isn't on the receiving end of any attention this stuff gets. It actually has less implications for humanity than, say, the Christian God appearing and setting the record straight. At least that has heaven and hell.

Let me know when someone gets access to console commands and spawns a reason for me to give a shit about this utter bollocks.
 
Hookshot said:
Right but there is zero reason to render dust on top of everyone's wardrobes, or a universe of billions of time years and billions of light years to see if humans will nuke themselves.
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I guess if an advanced civilization has processing power that's near limitless and costless by our standards, then having as accurate a simulation as possible to the 'base reality' would provide the best results. Plus if you run a simulation with 2 trillion galaxies then you could potentially get results on millions to billions of intelligent civilizations. So instead of having to run millions of simulations, you could just run one simulation with millions of individual data points.

Plus, I'd argue that knowing that we exist in a tiny speck of a larger universe that has existed (and will exist) for an exceptionally long time is a pretty big part of how we view ourselves and influences our behavior. And having the potential for space colonization would be a key part of any simulation to see if a civilization drives itself to extinction. I'm imagining a one solar system simulation that would be easier to render, but I don't think you'd get accurate results at all for a lot of experiments. And don't forget a lot of scientific advancement is derived from studying the universe, so if you subtracted that from a simulation, then an intelligent civilizaiton might not be able to advance as greatly to get usable data from the simulation.
 
clarky said:
I don't think its that much of a stretch that humans might evolve to a point that they can download consciousness to a mainframe/construct or whatever to essentially "live" forever.

Certainly more plausible that an omnipotent being in my eyes.
Click to expand...
my issue with this theory, is that a lot of our consciousness is dictated by the health of our brain and chemical make up. Simple chemical updates can change us dramatically, that I feel like once inside computer, we will lose the "humanity" of our consciousness.
 
Dr_Ifto said:
my issue with this theory, is that a lot of our consciousness is dictated by the health of our brain and chemical make up. Simple chemical updates can change us dramatically, that I feel like once inside computer, we will lose the "humanity" of our consciousness.
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The brain is the transmitter consciousness is the signal
 
If it´s a simulation, why can humans only see up to 200fps? :messenger_angry:
The raytracing of this reality is nice, though.
 
So yet another fringe article that postulates something with zero evidence. The simulation theory is neat and all, but it has the same amount of hard evidence in its favour as most religions.
 
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If the world is created by a designer it would make sense that there are aspects of simulation in its existence. The complexity in the system seems to indicate the existence of a Designer. In that sense there are realities outside our own implying that our reality is a simulation.
 
protonion said:
Can consciousness fit in the simulation theory?
Will an AI ever have true imagination, moral dilemmas and original philosophical thinking?
Click to expand...
Current AI might not. But our braind are jist electrical machines. The moment we build an AI by just straight up copying a brain then i dont see why not. Unless counsciousness is magic
 
Ecotic said:
So if you're going to run simulations to see how many times an intelligent civilization resorts to authoritarianism, or destroys itself with nuclear weapons, or runaway climate change, then you need all the extraneous details.
Click to expand...
We're sprinting full-speed toward all 3 outcomes, so we're the best simulation ever!
 
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It's funny, I just crested 50yo and only have started considering this simulation business with any sense of seriousness in the past couple of years. Up until then, I guess I was thinking more on the macro-microverse scale - that is, "what if our entire massive Known Universe exists on the spore atop an imperceivably huge pimple on the butt of an even more inconceivably huge guy on what is essentially a subway in an impossibly unimaginably huge New York subway system?" Or something to such an effect.

But then I watched some youtube things about aliens (I've never believed) and a bit more about "are we in a simulation" as the concept is at least fascinating, and someone put a thought into my brain that was never there before, and it made some sense to ponder. WHAT IF.. not only are we in a simulation, but what if we are not even the actual point of the simulation at all, like this was all made to measure or observe or experiment something completely unrelated (and, again, completely outside of the boundaries of our tiny, tiny perception) and we are just the tiniest of (potentially countless) byproducts? Like we were never even the main point, or even a side point, we just developed because the conditions were there and the possibility deemed it so. As to it being "real" or not, or even what "real" is, essentially is irrelevant. Again, "real" might be so profoundly different to what we can relate to: no light or dark, no life or death, maybe not even consciousness in a relatable manner at all (getting back to all the usual "very alien" discussion at this point). So what is the point then?

The point is there is no discernable point, none that we can ever know, or at least not for a very long time and in consideration that we've not even scratched any of the surface. To think that the universe doesn't work in the solipsistic way that we "are programmed to expect" does seem jarring, and I still get a little fuzzy when I try to conceive of that, but it does make sense to me (as much as anything else possibly can). Anyway, there's only so far one can go with these discussions before it all goes into the wall rather quickly. As a species we are still very fresh to the idea that there is a planet, and a galaxy holding it and other planets, and that there are other creatures here (human and otherwise) that we are trying to coexist with and how to make sense of all of that. Just live your life, try to have some good times, don't be a dick yadda yadda yadda.
 
I don;t want to think of the "we're living in a simulation' theory that much, because I don't want it to dictate my mental state. But I will say this... I was watching some ones hot take theory on this and they made a claim that we have all been trapped in a simulation since 1999... And you know what... I am willing to consider that possibility.
 
On a cosmic level he is probably right, we have no idea what the fuck can be out there and we might as well be microbes for cosmic beings. That being said on a earth related level, it doesnt mean shit, so just carry on watching your hentai my dudes. No one cares.
 
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