Aliens and imploding simulations.

It's not that loaded. If you accept that the simulation hypothesis is highly probable then you'd have to believe in God.

Otherwise, how would the entity that created and is conducting the simulation you're living in distinguishable from God?

Jasker said:

We might be thinking of two different things. Someone able to play god because they have power over a puppet, is not a real god.

Playing god because you have power over life is not being the one true god, because they themselves are subject to the same things the puppet is. Nested simulations.

Simulation doesn’t say god needs to exist.

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Regardless of whether they're living in a nested simulation themselves, how is the creator of this simulation distinguishable from God?

To the people in your session of The Sims or the orcs in your RTS, how is the creator of the game distinguishable from God?

To accept that the simulation hypothesis is the most probable likelihood among all the possibilities, you'd have to accept the hyposthesis in its entirety: that the simulations are CREATED by entities who are indistinguishable from a theistic God and that even if those simulations are nested, ultimately the final simulation that encompasses them all would be at the final millisecond of the universe and even THAT simulation was created by something.

It's enchanting because it sounds so deep. But if you take time to think it through, simulation theory is just meaningless at best and an abdication of moral responsibility at worst.

Even if the objective truth is that we have no agency, we must act as if we do. We must act that way because our lack of agency demands it. OUr subjective experience is one of agency.

There's a word for exactly this sort of argument. I can't remember it right this moment. It's not sophmoric, but it's close to that.

That's not a raw insult, you know. These sorts of questions do serve a purpose in the refinement of our questions.

I still can't remember the word. It's greek.

iannis said:

It's enchanting because it sounds so deep. But if you take time to think it through, simulation theory is just meaningless at best and an abdication of moral responsibility at worst.

Even if the objective truth is that we have no agency, we must act as if we do. We must act that way because our lack of agency demands it. OUr subjective experience is one of agency.

There's a word for exactly this sort of argument. I can't remember it right this moment. It's not sophmoric, but it's close to that.

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What? Take your time to think through what? There's no "reading through" what the hypothesis claims about morality or meaning since it doesn't mention either.

As written the simulation hypothesis sought neither to "provide meaning" nor to describe a determistic universe. It was a simple probabalistic argument about the set of possible circumstances that lead to the existence of the observable universe.

Among that set of circumstances, the likelihood that we're Boltzman Brains in a low-entropy universe violates thermodynamic law, living in a goldilocks Anthropic Universe is more likely but exceedingly low. More likely yet is that that we're living in what's describes by the Zoo Hypothesis, as in some entity created this universe with Anthropic constants as a zoo for us....but that's more or less an expression of the simulation hypothesis anyway.

All it states is that given what we know about matter formation and the universal constants that couldve gone a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WAY during the big bang, among all the possible sets of explanations, the case for living in a nested ancestor simulation is the likeliest.

As to why the simulation was created or what's expected of moral beings in it, it doesnt even bring that up.

There is no hypothesis when your assertion is untestable. It sounds like an argument but it's not. It's just a statement. Adding what if you're n front of it isn't objectionable, but it's still a statement.

This is not even testable as a thought experiment.

It's very silly philosophy masquerading as science. A bunch of young scientists watched the matrix and took it very seriously indeed. It's a religious argument and a very old one. There's an upanishad about this. Those are at least 3000 years old. They frame it in terms of reality awakening to its own existence, trying to reconcile their notions of predestination, but it's the same set of abstractions.

As you've noted yourself the assertion requires a prime cause and ultimately a lack of agency. we can't stop there. Well I guess we could but we shouldnt. This didn't start as a serious inquiry about the nature of reality. It started as a supposition about the nature of reality which accidentally wanders into moralism.

If this supposition is correct then how should we behave? We should behave as if it is not correct.

Or you can descend into raw solopism which would seem to contradict the initial supposition of determinism. But maybe it doesn't have to in some variants. people are clever, they could find caveats. Either way though it's way outside the bounds of rational inquiry about the nature of reality. It's philosophy but not natural philosophy.

If you're going to measure things it is helpful to believe in the authority of the concept of measurement.

Simulation theory is confusion eating it's own ass. It's kinda fun though.

It's a really sneaky way for an atheist to make a non theological argument for an afterlife.

Which is fine with me. It really is. They might be right. I can't prove they arent. It just doesn't matter, is all.

It's when they start claiming to be able to see the other side, that's when you need to slowly back away.

Seems testable to me. Do you skip past text in game? Do you skip text in "real life"?

Checkmate.

iannis said:

It's a really sneaky way for an atheist to make a non theological argument for an afterlife.

Which is fine with me. It really is. They might be right. I can't prove they arent. It just doesn't matter, is all.

It's when they start claiming to be able to see the other side, that's when you need to slowly back away.

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It's never purported to be a theological argument. You've obviously been triggered by something someone wrote about the Simulation Hypothesis stepping on theological or moral toes...it doesn't, it never has. It was published in 2003 and has been challenged from all sides since and it's fared well. Although the original Oxford paper was a philosophical argument, it had at its core a physical trilemma:



Its best defense is in the simplicity of its rigor. For one, neither the hypothesis itself nor its proponents have ever suggested a moralistic or theistic conclusion from it. The fact that anyone who would bootstrap such a simulation would be indistinguishable from God is just an logical observation but at no point was it ever concerned with it. For another, although the ideas behind it preceded the Oxford paper for years, the math for the actual hypothesis is actually even simpler than the Drake Equation.

Also dismissing the author and the proponents of the hypothesis for something it does NOT purport is what's silly. These weren't goofy scientists who watched too much Matrix, though it may comfort some folks to think that way. Nick Bostrom was also the author behind the Vulnerable World Hypothesis and one of the leading lights in the safety engineering for superintelligent AGI. He worked with Stephen Hawking, which almost certainly influenced him more than too many viewings of the Matrix.

pharmakos said:

It's important to remember one of the other possibilities that Bostrom proposed -- that truly universe-size simulations are simply impossible to create.

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And it's inefficient to simulate the entire Universe when you need only simulate a solar system. Or a planet. Or a room. And so you wouldn't.

There was a quantum-lattice experiment that proved that simulating the entire universe would be computationally impossible, and that's true. But you wouldn't need to. You need only simulate the context that each individual perceives.

Lightning Lord Rule said:

Wouldn't that mean that reality isn't a simulation, but that it appears to be a simulation to each individual because their brains are incapable of perceiving actual reality and so construct a near approximation of reality in real time?

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That's close to the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis, which could be true. Once again the simulation hypothesis doesn't attempt to address how the simulation is actually implemented... it's a bayesian probabilistic argument that simply takes observations about the ratios of power/computation over the last century of computing, the likelihood that advanced civilizations would create ancestor simulations and from that it draws the likelihood that anyone alive today is living in a nested ancestor simulation---and that value is closer to 1 than all the others.

Insofar as how that likelihood or our acceptance or understanding of it should affect our behavior or our policies, it suggests nothing. All it does is attempt to explain some of the prevailing paradoxes in the Anthropic Universe, which is also what the Boltzmann Brain attempted to do when thermodynamic laws very clearly suggested that 99.99999% of all time unto infinity should be spent in the absolute darkness of total entropy---then why is the universe full of stars, light and life.

Yeah basically there's no way around the first and second laws of thermodynamics. If the universe started differently, some constants like the speed of light could be different....but the first and second laws would still be the same. The law of the conservation of energy would still be the same. Entropy would still be the same.

What Boltzmann surmised was that given the set of the entirety of all time, virtually all of it would be spent in absolute darkness where entropy triumphs. The extreme unlikelihood of finding the moment where that galaxies and light and stars in that set of time is so remote that the only reason we exist to observe all the things we observe is because we exist that that tiny miniscule slice of spacetime where it's possible for atoms to randomly assemble themselves into self-aware entities. Like finding the script of Hamlet in pi...it's in there somewhere, it must be.

Anyways, it says that we know two things: that the laws of existence are so stacked against the probability of our existence, and that we exist anyway---so the Universe as we observe it at this moment is as ANTHROPIC as it can be because for the rest of eternity it isn't.