Stranger than fiction?

[boogabooga]

Interesting talk, but ...

I may be wrong, but given the total lack of evidence, I have the feeling I am looking at a group of scientists discussing theology (after inventing a new language to make it more palatable).

I don't think that you are wrong.

 

[jedidia]

I may be wrong, but given the total lack of evidence, I have the feeling I am looking at a group of scientists discussing theology

As someone that has discussed a lot of theology in his life, I can confirm that it's in fact very familiar. All they need to make the impression complete is a common reference work to build their discussion on.

 

[Ravenous]

Incidentally, is anybody working on a self-aware Orbiter plugin?

Somebody tried, but he's still floating around outside as he couldn't get the pod bay doors to open for some reason...

 

[Donamy]

Maybe there is a simulation of people living on Mars, who believe they are a remnant, of people who escaped from a doomed Earth.

 

[Thorsten]

Once you entertain the idea of a simulation and that it doesn't include rocks over at planets in Andromeda to save computing power, we might as well dispense with all of you. To save computing power, it'd be cheaper to simulate just one conscious entity and fake the rest - no need to simulate in excruciating detail what that one entity doesn't see.

Then we're at a philosophical position called 'solipsism' (which says we can't know anything except that our mind experiences stuff, but not whether that is real, imagined, simulated,...)

Which is a boring concept, because it has no consequences - and even the philosophy professors who advocate it still get pretty angry if their paycheck doesn't arrive (in spite of the fact that it actually doesn't exist according to them...)

More interesting - what measurement is it we could possibly do? The actual laws of nature are already so strange and partially absurd as to stretch credibility to the utmost extremes (time is just another aspect of space, we don't have a definite history, everything is connected with everything else,...) - just what absurdity would it take to convince us that what we see is a bug in a simulation?

Take it as a challenge - propose a result of an experiment that would convince you that we're in a matrix!

 

[Artlav]

To save computing power, it'd be cheaper to simulate just one conscious entity and fake the rest - no need to simulate in excruciating detail what that one entity doesn't see.

I don't see how that is meaningful in any sense - there are billions of people, which one is the "player"?

Optimization-wise, the thing that makes sense is to have many levels of conceptual details. That would actually produce entropy as a byproduct - the finer details are only simulated when they have meaningful consequences, and no power is wasted on tracing every path of every atom, thus making it just heat.

You try to get at these details by going down to quantum level, and find unsolvable equations and untraceable interactions, just like what you would expect from a procedurally augmented algorithm.

just what absurdity would it take to convince us that what we see is a bug in a simulation?

Nothing definite. The theory is unfalsifiable - any finding can be refuted by assuming it was programmed like that intentionally.

However, we can look for artifacts common to the computers as we understand them...


Imagine you are the PC, and the head NPCs called you into a non-conspicuous meeting. As you come towards the table with the Head on the other side, the lamp on it gradually dimmed and turned itself off. That was strange, since the Head wasn't really into special effects.

"Well, sir, as you know your records before joining the Order were perfect and your services very valuable, so it is very sad for us to call you here. Let's start with a little preamble. Not so long ago our scientists noticed that the interactions of quarks have certain anisotropy to them - on certain directions the energy required is a little less than on the others, as if the world was computed on a grid algorithm. The exiting part of it is that we can make free energy devices out of it. The weird part is that once made, their output was fluctuating."

"Further research suggested that the fluctuations were gradual, and increased with distance from certain focal points, of which two were found. One is somewhere in the other side of the planet, but the other is much, much closer."

"In fact, this light here is powered from such a device, and you saw what happened to it as you got close. So, how do you plead?"

You get up and run to try to jump out of the window, only to hit the head hard on the unbreakable glass, while the suddenly appearing guards rapidly moved in.

"Bullet proof glass, sir. There is no escape."

You crack the cyanide capsule in your tooth, everything goes blank.

GAME OVER
RESET OR LOAD LAST SAVE?

"Stupid NPCs, can't they just get out of the way."

-RESET INITIATED
-LOD SET TO MINIMUM
-Ivan666 JOINED THE GAME
-ThunderSmith JOINED THE GAME
-INITIALIZING WORLD...

...anyone want to continue the story?

 

[Donamy]

Deja vu ?

 

[MikeB]

there are billions of people

. . . in YOUR simulation!

 

[Artlav]

Deja vu ?

Hm?

. . . in YOUR simulation!

So? They are still people, needing the same amount of resources to simulate.

 

[Donamy]

Hm?

Something that would convince someone, there was a matrix.

 

[Andy44]

Hm?

In the movie "The Matrix", deja vu was explained as a glitch in the Matrix, indicating the presence of an Agent.

Like me, for instance.

 

[Thorsten]

Not so long ago our scientists noticed that the interactions of quarks have certain anisotropy to them - on certain directions the energy required is a little less than on the others, as if the world was computed on a grid algorithm.

Which would be more compelling if spacetime wouldn't actually be anisotropic ('gravity'), and if people hadn't been looking for such anisotropies a century ago, though for a different reason ('ether hypothesis', 'Michelson-Morley experiment').

Next suggestion please.

I don't see how that is meaningful in any sense - there are billions of people, which one is the "player"?

Depends on whom you ask - since you asked me, I am the player, you are just simulated. Given that the sim doesn't even provide you in audio or video to me and just needs to come up with text responses in this forum, you're actually computationally cheap to do :lol:

Which, incidentially, brings me to the other point I was going to make - computing power. Contrary to singularity talk in SciFi literature, it doesn't increase exponentially in time - nothing actually does. Usually technological developments go like a generalized logistic function - exponential initially, then saturating.

Take specific impulse of rocket engines, plot them over time. The SSME is a lot better than the V2 - but now you can make them just a bit better, and every improvement gets harder.

When I started to go to university, I had a 1 GHz processor in my computer. Given Moore's law, where's the 10 GHz processor and faster? Processor power has reached the saturation branch, they can't build them any faster because of cooling problems. Integrated circuits can't be arbitrarily small because of quantum problems.

You can of course have more processors, but parallelizing problems is not easy and sometimes just impossible when you have to synchronize states too often. So cramming 10 1 GHz processors into a laptop isn't the same thing as the 10 GHz processor- it's much worse for many problems.

So just as I consider it very unlikely that an advanced civilization will bild liquid rocket engines with an ISP three times that of the Shuttle, I think it may be foolish to believe that they'll have infinite computing resources, or even much larger ones than we do. That's just based on extrapolating the beginning part of a generalized logistic function with an exponential.

 

[Ravenous]

At one point in the early '90s, I spent a month or two playing solid Doom, and I had a few dreams that I was in the halls of Level 1. No monsters or fighting, just exploring the place (it looked like a real room) and generally admiring the stuff on the walls and ceiling.

Interesting and sad in equal measure!

 

[jedidia]

In the movie "The Matrix", deja vu was explained as a glitch in the Matrix, indicating the presence of an Agent.

Like me, for instance.

Now that you mention it, I do have the vague feeling of having seen that picture before...

 

[Enjo]

Interesting talk, but ...

I may be wrong, but given the total lack of evidence, I have the feeling I am looking at a group of scientists discussing theology (after inventing a new language to make it more palatable).

There must be a reason for Dawkins not joining the discussion.

 

[Ravenous]

You mean Richard Dawkins? He actually suffered a stroke earlier in the year (he's since made a very good recovery apparently) so wouldn't have been available

By the way he has some interesting comments on "Debating societies" in one of his books. He expressed disquiet about people taking on the side of an argument they actually do not believe in, for the sake of getting experience in debate. (I kind of agreed, evidence should win the day rather than people skilled in making counter-arguments.)

 

[Enjo]

Yes, I meant Richard.

By the way he has some interesting comments on "Debating societies" in one of his books. He expressed disquiet about people taking on the side of an argument they actually do not believe in, for the sake of getting experience in debate talking down.

FIFY

 

[Artlav]

Next suggestion please.

You do realize i wasn't trying to be literal, but rather was just telling a story?

Given that the sim doesn't even provide you in audio or video to me and just needs to come up with text responses in this forum, you're actually computationally cheap to do

Ah, but you would still need to calculate everything which would result in that text appearing, which includes most of the world and it's people.

Otherwise people would be indistinguishable from chatbots and the world would appear very inconsistent.

When I started to go to university, I had a 1 GHz processor in my computer. Given Moore's law, where's the 10 GHz processor and faster?

Not exactly, the law only states that the amount of transistors per square area would increase exponentially.
By that metric we haven't quite reached saturation yet, although we are almost up to it on the silicon front by now.

Most of that increase didn't go into GHz, but into parallelism - you now have thousands of computational nodes (GPU) per the same chip area that used to contain one CPU, so the actual GFLOPS/$ keeps increasing.

For a lot of tasks that is just as good as one 10GHz CPU, and even better.

 

[Thorsten]

For a lot of tasks that is just as good as one 10GHz CPU, and even better.

I remember arguing just the opposite - that parallelizing tasks works only for rather particular problems and is usually worse than having the n times the computation speed serially.

I do a lot of coding for real-time 3d rendering, and I'm well aware how amazing devices modern graphics cards are - and equally well how much the need to compute everything in parallel makes real-time techniques suck in comparison with what a simple raytracing code can do in terms of graphics output.

Ah, but you would still need to calculate everything which would result in that text appearing, which includes most of the world and it's people.

Otherwise people would be indistinguishable from chatbots and the world would appear very inconsistent.

From flight simulation, coding an abstract representation of what AI airline traffic across the whole world is doing is significantly cheaper than the one AI plane you see taking off on the screen near you.

Yes, the simulation would include an abstract representation of your interaction with some other people, but it wouldn't need much detail and to do this for 7 billion people would still be cheaper than the hires version of the dozen or so people I really interact with on a daily basis.

 

[jedidia]

Yes, the simulation would include an abstract representation of your interaction with some other people, but it wouldn't need much detail and to do this for 7 billion people would still be cheaper than the hires version of the dozen or so people I really interact with on a daily basis.

The question would essentially be, what is the purpose of the simulation?

If it's a trueman show, then that approach makes sense. If it's an attempt at socio-historical modeling, then you pretty much have to let the system interact with itself. If you start abstracting that, you're already limiting the result.