Is the Universe a Computer Simulation?

[TeaPot&ChopSticks]

I hope this works if not here is the website link - via max keiser - could not get the video up on the site

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6l2YQCFE0N4

personally I would like to live long enough to find out the answer. reminds me of the movie the 13th floor - surprisingly it was before the matrix

 

[willrocks]

If it is, I hope they do regular backups!

 

[hawkeye]

Is this the simulation argument?

http://www.simulation-argument.com

 

[bordsilver]

On the face of it I call bollocks. Cool to think about in order to write a sci-fi book/movie but simply is a tautology.

The problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time.

The question that Beane and co ask is whether the lattice spacing imposes any kind of limitation on the physical processes we see in the universe. They examine, in particular, high energy processes, which probe smaller regions of space as they get more energetic

What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That's because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself.

So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles.

It turns out there is exactly this kind of cut off in the energy of cosmic ray particles, a limit known as the GreisenZatsepinKuzmin or GZK cut off.

These guys are no doubt very smart (probably way smarter than me). But for centuries there have been very strong fundamental arguments for indivisability/limit and these simulation guys are then trying to argue that indivisability/limit means a simulation occurring on a lattice. Even if we are a simulation the argument of indivisability simply means that the universe that is the computer will have the exact same lattice issue. So infinite regress. Essentially intellectual wankery I think. But I recognise that different ways of thinking/approaching a problem can yield unexpected fruit so happy for them to wank away thinking about experiments etc.

Remember: what I just wrote was already predetermined to occur by the programming. We are simply ghosts in the machine anyway. But my machine seems to find the ghost enjoyable and vice versa. Time for a beer

 

[willrocks]

It was already predetermined that you'd have a beer.

 

[hawkeye]

So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles.

It turns out there is exactly this kind of cut off in the energy of cosmic ray particles, a limit known as the GreisenZatsepinKuzmin or GZK cut off.

So they are saying it is possible it is a simulation?

Have you got a link to this because everything I've read say it is entirely possible we are in a simulation.

I agree it is intellectual wankery, but it is still fun to think about occasionally and try to figure out what the consequences would be. At the end of the day though all you can do is just assume it's real and proceed with your life accordingly.

Remember: what I just wrote was already predetermined to occur by the programming. We are simply ghosts in the machine anyway. But my machine seems to find the ghost enjoyable and vice versa. Time for a beer

Well, if you want to have a discussion about free will/determinism, I'm firmly in the determinist camp. I had no choice but to write this.

 

[hussman]

If you believe in god and an afterlife then I guess in a way this life is a simulation. In Paradise the laws of physics that apply here would not apply there.

 

[Emanance]

It's all a game & I want 'godmode'.

 

[bordsilver]

Yes they are saying it's possible and they think they have ideas about how to experimentally test it. The quote was from one of the articles linked in the comments section of the youtube clip.

http://www.technologyreview.com/vie...reveal-the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation/

Didn't we have some sort of free will/determinism discussion a few months ago? Anyway, I'm in the determinism camp as well. The illusion of free will is an extremely nice one (and I'll keep maintaining it) but fundamentally it's exactly that. Every neuron fires because it chemically has to in response to the stimuli provided to it (and so on and so forth). Knowing this will only have small (but potentially very, very important) influences on the way I live my life of course, since it is but one small thing in the billions of other stimuli competing for attention with absolutely no predictability.

Edit: Here it was (just a couple of posts back and forth) http://forums.silverstackers.com/message-406217.html#p406217

 

[hawkeye]

Oh right, I remember hearing something tangentially about that. Thanks for that.

Well, the universe is clearly a machine. Whether it is a physical machine or a simulated machine is essentially irrelevant to the question of free will.

I think of it similarly to you by the way. That consciousness is an effect of neurons interacting and not the other way around. We don't choose to fire neurons so how can we be determining our own fates? There's also the argument that everything is cause and effect in this universe.

Why is the illusion of free will so powerful? The same way that the illusion of the sun moving around the Earth is. Every day the sun appears to move around the Earth to me. I only know intellectually, from science, that it isn't the case. Even though I know I don't have free will, it still feels like I do.

 

[Holdfast]

Michio Kaku reckons it's dimensions

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI50HN0Kshg[/youtube]

 

[willrocks]

42

 

[bordsilver]

Michio Kaku reckons it's dimensions

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI50HN0Kshg[/youtube]

So "life the universe and everything" is really about cosmic, expanding, music-playing pea-brains?

Sounds like Black Francis from the Pixies

Edit: Sorry "P-branes".

 

[bordsilver]

Consciousness is an effect of neurons interacting and not the other way around. We don't choose to fire neurons so how can we be determining our own fates?

Re-reading. That's a nice simple one-liner (with the second technically superfluous but a good follow through).

 

[hawkeye]

Some thoughts I have on it for anyone interested.

The simulation argument is basically

at least one of the following propositions is true:
(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage;
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation

2 seems extremely unlikely to me. Though not impossible. Maybe we evolve beyond those kinds of needs...

If 3 is true, then the chances of us being at the bottom level, ie, the real physical universe are much smaller than 1% and therefore essentially negligible. After all, the vast majority of beings would be simulated and only a tiny minority not.

1 is really interesting. It seems likely at this point that we will reach a posthuman stage, but then why haven't any other civilizations done so before us? There is also the doomsday argument, which based on statitistical analysis basically says we are in the final days of the human race. That the vast majority of human history has already passed. Which kind of dovetails with the idea of a great filter which prevents civilizations from going much beyond their home planet.

The author has a lot of other thought-provoking stuff here

http://www.nickbostrom.com/

 

[EasyCollective]

All billionaires have downloaded the cheats for this game online.

 

[bordsilver]

Some thoughts I have on it for anyone interested.

The simulation argument is basically

at least one of the following propositions is true:
(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage;
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation

2 seems extremely unlikely to me. Though not impossible. Maybe we evolve beyond those kinds of needs...

If 3 is true, then the chances of us being at the bottom level, ie, the real physical universe are much smaller than 1% and therefore essentially negligible. After all, the vast majority of beings would be simulated and only a tiny minority not.

1 is really interesting. It seems likely at this point that we will reach a posthuman stage, but then why haven't any other civilizations done so before us? There is also the doomsday argument, which based on statitistical analysis basically says we are in the final days of the human race. That the vast majority of human history has already passed. Which kind of dovetails with the idea of a great filter which prevents civilizations from going much beyond their home planet.

The author has a lot of other thought-provoking stuff here

http://www.nickbostrom.com/

I'm not a big fan of the doomsday argument except in the sense of man-made life displacing humans as we currently know them. I think it is a weak, dead-end thought experiment.

The question of why we seem to be alone is a very interesting one, however. It's clear that replicating "life" is positively "eager" to occur and complex nervous systems (brains) highly probable due to their intrinsic worth in seeking resources and avoid being a resource (but most likely only beneficial after millions of generations of "blobs" blobbing about). Couple this with the frickin ginormous number of stars and the simple calculation that if even only one in a million stars has planets and only one in a million of those are "habitable" and only one in a million of those has the right starting chemistry, then the existence of alien life somewhere is a certainty.

Stacking the deck even further against success and only one in a million of those evolve sentient life with consciousness then it is still a "certainty".

Personally, I have a strong suspicion that it is the next step of evolving inter-galactic colonising sentient life that really has the cards stacked against it and this can easily explain why we haven't knowingly seen sentient life in the half century that we have been looking. The physiological and cultural changes that would be required to actually enable colonisation a nearby solar system (let alone even solar systems on the other side of the galaxy or in another galaxy) in any meaningful way would be so massively significant as to essentially eradicate the very essence of the sentient life that evolved.

In the absence of "star gates" (referencing the movie) the depths of time required to create any single piece of important infrastructure are so massive that the society, culture and life forms that tried to do so will be gone before it succeeds. At best you'll see a line or a cobweb of new lights being turned on but that are only fitfully keeping ahead of the death of older lights only to die in the depths of time.

 

[AngloSaxon]

In the absence of "star gates" (referencing the movie) the depths of time required to create any single piece of important infrastructure are so massive that the society, culture and life forms that tried to do so will be gone before it succeeds. At best you'll see a line or a cobweb of new lights being turned on but that are only fitfully keeping ahead of the death of older lights only to die in the depths of time.

Did you miss the TV series and its' 2 spinoffs? They were awesome, with a great starting premise.

 

[bordsilver]

^ Yep. Probably one of my favourite sci-fi series.

 

[hawkeye]

I'm not a big fan of the doomsday argument except in the sense of man-made life displacing humans as we currently know them. I think it is a weak, dead-end thought experiment.

The question of why we seem to be alone is a very interesting one, however. It's clear that replicating "life" is positively "eager" to occur and complex nervous systems (brains) highly probable due to their intrinsic worth in seeking resources and avoid being a resource (but most likely only beneficial after millions of generations of "blobs" blobbing about). Couple this with the frickin ginormous number of stars and the simple calculation that if even only one in a million stars has planets and only one in a million of those are "habitable" and only one in a million of those has the right starting chemistry, then the existence of alien life somewhere is a certainty.

Stacking the deck even further against success and only one in a million of those evolve sentient life with consciousness then it is still a "certainty".

Personally, I have a strong suspicion that it is the next step of evolving inter-galactic colonising sentient life that really has the cards stacked against it and this can easily explain why we haven't knowingly seen sentient life in the half century that we have been looking. The physiological and cultural changes that would be required to actually enable colonisation a nearby solar system (let alone even solar systems on the other side of the galaxy or in another galaxy) in any meaningful way would be so massively significant as to essentially eradicate the very essence of the sentient life that evolved.

In the absence of "star gates" (referencing the movie) the depths of time required to create any single piece of important infrastructure are so massive that the society, culture and life forms that tried to do so will be gone before it succeeds. At best you'll see a line or a cobweb of new lights being turned on but that are only fitfully keeping ahead of the death of older lights only to die in the depths of time.

I think the doomsday argument may be misnamed. Who truly knows what a posthuman, post-singularity (if you believe in that) society will look like. Will we even still be humans under the classical definition? Will procreation be important to us anymore, especially if we have created ways which presumably will eventually allow us to live forever. In that sense, it could be the end of the human race as we know it. I don't pretend to know the statistical analysis behind doomsday, only that it hasn't been refuted.

As to why we seem to be alone, I've seen many theses. One is that we are basically the first species to get going. When you think about the universe and what is required for life, as far as we know, it literally takes billions of years from the beginning of the universe before there can be any complex life, higher elements have to form from the first stars, then stars themselves have to form and once life gets going it is slow going for hundreds of millions of years. Plus, on this planet dinosaurs ruled for millions of years and if it hadn't been for that lucky asteroid hit...

I swing back and forth about where the difficulty arises. I tend to think that humans will never explore space to any great extent. Our weak fleshy bodies are not meant for space travel. That it will basically be done by machines (already is really, Voyager, etc). And as the machines exceed our intelligence, as I think it is inevitable they will, then basically they will be the pre-dominant lifeform. So maybe it's already happened somewhere else in the universe. Maybe a machine race is in charge with technology so far advanced from us that we can't detect them and they don't contact us because, frankly, it would be like me or you trying to make contact with an ant colony. We would be so far beneath them why would they bother?

And then again maybe we're just in a computer simulation and that explains it. It's all been done already and now simulations of the past are being run and we are just in one of them.