What's Real?

This fella, rather silly sometimes, says that Tech billionaires are "trying to break us out of the simulation" or some such thing.


Lets suppose for a moment that they have some method to accomplish this. Would it be a good thing? For instance lets say the little lectrons in the Civ game actually liked their simlives. They like watching the holobirds and the holobees and the simu rivers and techno trees. Then one of them figures out how to dump the simulation. The computer crashes and that's the end of everything. Is that a good idea?
 
Furthermore...I understand Civ VI still has AI issues. The only way to have a game -on my level- is to play vs other humans. Well, closer to my level anyway. So we can assume that whoever is running our simulated reality has licked the AI problem, as we exist*. This is hopeful, AI sucks.

*Kinda sorta in a funny 2D holographic simulated way. I think therefore I think I am is the extent of it apparently. :dunno:
 
The way we would create "Actual AI" for video games like Civ would be using relatively complex neural nets. At least in theory. Other than that all we can do is simple "if {x} then {y}" rules, which are incredibly limited, in that you end up having to give the computer opponent certain unfair advantages / human player handicaps.. because it's just not possible to train the computer how to behave using simple if/then/else logic unless you are dealing with a simple game, which Civ is not. So the only option for you if you want to make a computer player more powerful, is you give him more stuff, and you take stuff away from the human player.

Anyway, human beings are examples of neural nets. That's what our brains are and that's how we've learned how to do everything from baking cakes to making up claims about communism. So you are right, in a way we're the perfect AI for a game like Civ. After all, we are able to play this game and learn from each time we do, becoming better and better each time we play.

I mean, I doubt we were designed by anyone or anything to play video games. But that is one of the side-effects of our amazing brains, they are able to tackle all sorts of problems. They are essentially incredibly multi-purpose pattern recognition machines. If we ever figure out how to build something like the brain in a lab, it's going to have huge implications on our whole civilization. It's going to change a lot more in our civilization than just better video games with more interesting opponents.
 
If the physicists are right about this then we were put into this simulation for a reason. We either are involved solely with other, fellow, simulated neural nets, or not. If some among us are the programmers... Then we're being played. Alternately we could be the programmers, or associated with them somehow, and we're in a completely immersive simulation. Our conscious without our memories. Perhaps these can bleed through into the simulation however, with brain injuries and autism. Is autism a brain injury? Dunno. There are people who can tell the book and page from any line given to them from any book they've ever read. To me this infers access to 'the book of life' if you will, and not just facts taken from the goo in our brains. Some part of what they are capable of in another place is leaking in. While a clerk Einstein wrote 4 papers in a year that changed science. Somehow he got keyed into some thing that allowed him to think on another level, for a while anyway. There's a kid who is blind but uses echo location. Remote viewers can see things in places they've never been, or so its said.

Entanglement is the thing. Einstein was wrong when he said that nothing can move faster than light if entanglement actually exists, and its been proven, yes? Yet entangled pairs are the same distance from the processor which runs the simulation. I liked that line in one of the videos I put here. Of course there is no distance within a processor.

I think its fairly marvelous. I know you're not a believer warpus, but at a low point God gave me some pretty incredible love, pulled me out of it. Decades later scientists start debating a simulation. What's real? What is this creation? Anything goes that is meant to. Faith is the evidence of things unseen, but there is more evidence now. Entanglement, probability waves. Wild.
 
Nah, you just want to say God as many times as you can. You have Faith inside your heart, and want to multiply it. It makes you happy, and I am happy for you. But when it comes down to it, the truth will not matter to you, unless it is a truth that agrees with the light inside you, or a truth that is impossible to prove.

Tell me, assuming this is a simulation, how would any one of us be able to definitively prove it from inside the simulation?
 
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I mostly subscribe to some kind of Kantianism whereby our knowledge of reality is pretty limited to possible objects of experience. So at Warpus' neural net discussion: yeah, but surely different than the highly empirical means of learning weights via large training sets for approximating a target function. Though I'm always hesitant to compare humans to computers and data structures (say, matrices in the neural net case), species are an evolutionary store of information whereby individuals wind up with some of the Kantian a priori faculties that permit and restrict our experiences. I imagine if we're in a simulation and were created as part of a simulation, we'll have pretty limited knowledge of it.

As an aside, no one should get gushy over the possibility that the universe fundamentally resembles a bunch of 20th/21st century computing and AI topics that happen to be in vogue rn
 
Honor said:
Nah, you just want to say God as many times as you can. You have Faith inside your heart, and want to multiply it. It makes you happy, and I am happy for you. But when it comes down to it, the truth will not matter to you, unless it is a truth that agrees with the light inside you, or a truth that is impossible to prove.

Tell me, assuming this is a simulation, how would any one of us be able to definitively prove it from inside the simulation?
Click to expand...

I suggest you look at some of Leonard Suskind's lectures, available on youtube, for a better answer than I can give. Think I posted one earlier.

I mentioned God a total of once, when I related my experience.
 
CavLancer said:
I suggest you look at some of Leonard Suskind's lectures, available on youtube, for a better answer than I can give. Think I posted one earlier.

I mentioned God a total of once, when I related my experience.
Click to expand...
Yes, you did, and I should not have mentioned it. I am sorry about that.

However, I do find the simulation hypothesis a little dangerous, because anything that seems to be out of the norm can be interpreted as a glitch in the simulation.
 
And what happens if there is a CTD? Would we be reseted to the big bang or there is autosave?
 
I'd assume there's an autosave, and this might explain deja vu.

Consider the big bang for a moment. In the beginning there was nothing, and it exploded. Folks seem to have an easier time believing nothing can explode and create the universe than accepting what Susskind and others are saying about this being a simulation. I think the reason may be an unwillingness to accept a creator. If you've got a program, there's likely a programmer. With big bang of course there might be a being in charge of getting nothing to explode... The multiverse was envisioned to explain the cosmological constant and other improbable aspects of the universe that have to be spot on and tend to point at a creator. With multiverse, its all inevitable. ...as long as you are willing to accept endless universes where things were a bit off and are totally dead and desolate. Of course the existence of other universes cannot be proven from within this one at all. There is much better proof of the simulation. There is no entanglement or double slit experiment evidence to prove the multiverse, yet for some reason its accepted. Many people don't want there to be a God so they'll accept anything, no matter how absurd, to deny God.

There, I said God twice, no thrice, more. Just what the hell is wrong with me??!? :D God God God.

Bit of fun Honor, apology accepted.
 
Some here think God is still stuck in the past of some primitive mind.

God is outside of reality, while for the most part God's "programming" is both in the human mind, and also the rest of creation.

The Biggest Issue is timing. But when it comes to an eternal being, what is time any way, but only part of the reality of the "programming".
 
Well I haven't been given any such details, and I figure God knows his business. Timing, eh... I doubt time passes where the big honkin computer is sitting in the way we experience it.
 
Derrick CB said:
I imagine if we're in a simulation and were created as part of a simulation, we'll have pretty limited knowledge of it.

As an aside, no one should get gushy over the possibility that the universe fundamentally resembles a bunch of 20th/21st century computing and AI topics that happen to be in vogue rn
Click to expand...

There is some evidence however, as discussed earlier. Generally people like Susskind don't pull such stuff out of their posteriors.

Been thinking on whether the 'computer' that's doing the math for the simulation "fundamentally resembles" your average Dell, but a billion years advanced. The conclusion I've come up with is I doubt it very much. I was posting earlier about the autistic guy that can remember every book he's ever read in detail, providing page #s for quotes and quotes for particular page #s. If he can do that, why can't God run this problem in his mind? We could be thoughts. Who knows however, we could be in a Dell. No way to know really. Once we discern the simulation it gets even trickier to figure out what's running it. A physicist found computer code "written into the fabric of the universe" or some such. A code from the 60s or something. I'll see if I can find that vid.

 
It depends on the acceptance of time being a dimension in reality. Without that dimension reality would not exist, but it moves things away from the physical and towards the mental. I doubt we can use reality to even begin to construct what is past the dimensions of this reality.
 
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