GOOD NEWS! World won't end in 2012

[sgreger1]

I first mentions this theory and the citation for it because you said that "surely no one believes this or takes it seriously". I then showed you a source of someone who did put it on paper for a philosophy discussion. (The discussion being, how would you know?). It is like Plato's allegory of the cave. It's a thought experiment with the goal of getting you to realize that what you call reality may not be defined that way by others from a different point of view. I said it wasn't my belief, nor the belief of the writer most likely. Then you throw it out as "that's crazy, the world is too real, can't happen". So then I asked you why? Why couldn't it have happened? Humans will get to the point where we will be able to do this some day, and on that day we must assume that someone will try to create such a thing. The question was therefore, knowing that it is possible, could someone have already done it to us?

You see, it's less about the actual reality of whether or not computer programs created our reality, it's about Plato's cave, it's an allegory meant to illustrate that the world as has been presented to you is potentially not the correct (or only) version of the world, that what you have grown to see is not in fact representative of what is actually happening. I know you've read Plato's allegory of the cave, if not than go read it again and read my posts in that same context.


My plan was to lure you into a conversation about how we are/aren't currently in a computer program for the sake of discussion. But here I am on my side giving all the reasons why it could be happening, and all you are coming back with is "man that's impossible"!. Explain why it's impossible though, tear apart the paper, that is the purpose. It is also possible that the universe did not exist before the big bang and that it all happened by magic, we could debate that instead?

And you owe me a blowjob, I have shown you conceptual evidence of how it could be possible that we are living in a computer simulation. Just by illustrating the fact that such simulations will be possible in the near future, and that we assume someone will make one when that time comes. Now imagine we are there now, and we make this simulation, and the little simbiant versions of Roo and Sgreger1 are debating about whether they are in a computer simulation. Who is right in that scenario? What about in our scenario? If it's possible it will be done, and with that in mind you have to ask, has it already been done?

It's like the time traveler theory. If time travel is possible in the future, than where are all the time travelers? Except the difficult of the simulation argument is greater, because there would be no way for you to know. Hence, the point of the thought experiment, you don't frankly know. I can prove that it is more than possible, but you can't prove it is not possible. That's how thought exeperiments work.


Anyways, I am not trying to have some contest or anything of the sort. I was trying to discuss an abstract concept, using a completely fictional proposal as a thought experiment to illustrate it.

Back to our thread, we are saying that we all live in a world of our own making, a prison of our own design, one where the environment we create today is the environment the next generation is born into and who soon begins to see that environment as their reality. Over the years this has led to everyone thinking the world is 1 way, but it could in fact be any other way if we chose so.

[sgreger1]

Roo after reading this thread, after knowing that he saw flames at the door, but deciding to engage anyways:

[sgreger1]

Man Stu, Thought you was my homie. Damn must be the matrix I've been living in.....

Edit: Okay, I will discontinue the gif posts after tonight, but not until the night is through...

[Roo]

And you owe me a blowjob, I have shown you conceptual evidence of how it could be possible that we are living in a computer simulation. Just by illustrating the fact that such simulations will be possible in the near future, and that we assume someone will make one when that time comes. Now imagine we are there now, and we make this simulation, and the little simbiant versions of Roo and Sgreger1 are debating about whether they are in a computer simulation. Who is right in that scenario? What about in our scenario? If it's possible it will be done, and with that in mind you have to ask, has it already been done?

OK sgreger, this is where we differ. You are proposing that someday, computer programs will be able to simulate life on Earth in its totality, and to such a degree that the subjects of this grandiose virtual reality will be unaware that none of it is actually real. Computers will simulate every single one of the 196,940,400 square miles on this planet and every single tangible object contained within each of these 196,940,400 square miles, every molecule and each and every atom that comprises each and every molecule, all of your senses, sensations, emotions, every pine needle on all the trees on all the continents - however remote and uninhabited the location may be. Each and every one of the approximately 700,000 hours you spend in this computer "matrix", and all of your thoughts, feelings; everything you smell, eat, and touch; every complex organism you encounter, including your wife and child, right down to each and every nucleotide contained in every strand of their DNA; those woodpeckers mating in a tree in Kamtchatka, the unknown-to-science and never-before-seen bottom-dwelling creatures on the ocean floor in the Bearing Sea's Aleutian Trench, every gnat, fly, and mosquito in the heart of the Congo, every frozen snowflake on each Glacier from the Altai range to the Himalyas, from the North Cascades to Mt. Shasta, from the Urals to the Caucasus; all of these things will be figments of a grand, flawless, computer program, with nary a glitch in a thousand years (measured of course using our sense of time, but really this all probably takes 10 minutes in the dimension from which this computer operates)....

And I m telling you this is possibly the dumbest idea I have ever heard. So no, I do not owe you a blowjob. I do not consider this within the realm of possibility if humans were to live until the Gregorian year 200,012. And you are telling me it will be possible in the near future, and since it will be possible, we must consider the possibility that it has already been done.

Dude, no.

[Premium Parrots]

sorry guays.... if you are trading blowjobs that needs to be posted on the exchange thread or contact each other thru PMs.

carry on

[Roo]

Trading BJ's? I prefer the expediency of a 69.

[charmando]

Playing devils advocate here. Hypothetically, if we were in a complex computer generated world than our understanding of reality would be greatly limited to what we've been allowed to see in our "lifetimes". If all the land, dna, molecules were in fact a creation rather than the "real world"; a computer program creating our perceived world would be more complex than we could ever imagine. For example, imagine you are the mario of supernintendo living in a continuous 2-dimensional world where you can only move left to right, up and down. All though this world may seem incredibly in depth to you, you have been limited by your senses and what you have seen in your lifetime. You would have never believed a three dimensional world possible or even be able to fathom it until you were placed in that world. So what we perceive to be incredibly complex in microbiology may actually be very simple compared to the "reality" of the world we have never been allowed to sense. Bottom line we have no way of knowing what is actually going on. If our senses our fallible and we are limited by them, there may be infinite amount of things buzzing around us that we cannot perceive because we have not evolved these organs or have not been granted them.

[Roo]

If our senses our fallible and we are limited by them, there may be infinite amount of things buzzing around us that we cannot perceive

That I agree with. The entire universe and everything we experience and perceive is filtered through our human brains. I couldn't agree more. My problem is with the computer component of this discussion.

[sgreger1]

OK sgreger, this is where we differ. You are proposing that someday, computer programs will be able to simulate life on Earth in its totality, and to such a degree that the subjects of this grandiose virtual reality will be unaware that none of it is actually real. Computers will simulate every single one of the 196,940,400 square miles on this planet and every single tangible object contained within each of these 196,940,400 square miles, every molecule and each and every atom that comprises each and every molecule, all of your senses, sensations, emotions, every pine needle on all the trees on all the continents - however remote and uninhabited the location may be. Each and every one of the approximately 700,000 hours you spend in this computer "matrix", and all of your thoughts, feelings; everything you smell, eat, and touch; every complex organism you encounter, including your wife and child, right down to each and every nucleotide contained in every strand of their DNA; those woodpeckers mating in a tree in Kamtchatka, the unknown-to-science and never-before-seen bottom-dwelling creatures on the ocean floor in the Bearing Sea's Aleutian Trench, every gnat, fly, and mosquito in the heart of the Congo, every frozen snowflake on each Glacier from the Altai range to the Himalyas, from the North Cascades to Mt. Shasta, from the Urals to the Caucasus; all of these things will be figments of a grand, flawless, computer program, with nary a glitch in a thousand years (measured of course using our sense of time, but really this all probably takes 10 minutes in the dimension from which this computer operates)....

And I m telling you this is possibly the dumbest idea I have ever heard. So no, I do not owe you a blowjob. I do not consider this within the realm of possibility if humans were to live until the Gregorian year 200,012. And you are telling me it will be possible in the near future, and since it will be possible, we must consider the possibility that it has already been done.

Dude, no.

I did not say this would happen in the near future, I am saying that if AT ANY POINT IN HUMAN HISTORY this kind of processing power becomes available, than it will be used.

And you again completely miss the point Roo. We have no idea how acurate the simulation is to their real world. It could be missing pieces, it could be comprised only of things they know to exist etc, similar to how we model the weather today (we just plug in all the data we have available and draw what conclusions we can from it). To them, the simulation we live in may not be complete, but to us we would never know because it is all we know to exist. Do you see what i'm saying?

If you think that humans will never be able to run computer models that mimic natural processes at ANY point in the future than I guess we just have to agree to disagree. I think you are being a bit shortsighted though, considering how we went from no computers to already working quantum computers in like 50 years, yet you think that given another 10k years we will not have the computing power to simulate earth? The law of accelerating returns, Moore's Law, and nearly every computer scientist on earth would likely disagree with your assessment but if that's what you believe than that is fine. I bet in the 70's you were one of the guys saying computers would never be in every house too right?

with nary a glitch in a thousand years

The participants wouldn't notice any glitches that did happen, just like my character in Skyrim doesn't notice when i turn the power off, things like that are rendered invisible to the characters of the simulation. I can't believe you don't think we will ever be able to model things like the human brain with a computer, do you not watch the news or something I am confused.

[sgreger1]

Playing devils advocate here. Hypothetically, if we were in a complex computer generated world than our understanding of reality would be greatly limited to what we've been allowed to see in our "lifetimes". If all the land, dna, molecules were in fact a creation rather than the "real world"; a computer program creating our perceived world would be more complex than we could ever imagine. For example, imagine you are the mario of supernintendo living in a continuous 2-dimensional world where you can only move left to right, up and down. All though this world may seem incredibly in depth to you, you have been limited by your senses and what you have seen in your lifetime. You would have never believed a three dimensional world possible or even be able to fathom it until you were placed in that world. So what we perceive to be incredibly complex in microbiology may actually be very simple compared to the "reality" of the world we have never been allowed to sense. Bottom line we have no way of knowing what is actually going on. If our senses our fallible and we are limited by them, there may be infinite amount of things buzzing around us that we cannot perceive because we have not evolved these organs or have not been granted them.

Exactly. Has anyone ever played The Game of Life on their computer? With the little squares? If I create a pattern that reproduces itself, than we can call that my universe that i've created. I've created a closed simulation with a set of rules, and if I do it right two blocks will mate and make a third one. Now imagine that on a larger scale, and like you said, what we see as reality may not be representative of the "real" reality, we could be some cheap 8bit mario version of a universe compared to the one their computer is built. We would never know, because our bodies were built to only perceive things that we needed to see here in the 3 dimensions.

Again, none of this is proveable or anthing, it is just designed to make you think about the fact that any number of things could be possible. Roo arguing that it can't ever be possible because computing power will never be fast enough to make a simulation of earth is incorrect in my opinion given the facts we know about Moore's Law.

[truthwolf1]

http://subspacecommunique.com/node/989

[sgreger1]

That I agree with. The entire universe and everything we experience and perceive is filtered through our human brains. I couldn't agree more. My problem is with the computer component of this discussion.

So your only argument is that you don't think computers will be fast enough to model natural processes, at any point in all of human history? Now take how big our universe is and consider how much life likely lives out there somewhere in a far away galaxy that we will never meet. Do you think they will never have this kind of processing power either? You are making a bet against something that is almost 100% certain to happen at some point, unless all of life goes extinct for some reason. Computer power will proceed to increase exponentially each decade for the rest of infinity.

In rebuttle to your argument about how we would have to model every species, every woodpecker etc, that is not true:

Now imagine that our universe, big bang and everything else are all based off a certain repeating pattern, that the universe is, at it's very core, just an algorhythem, a fractal that plays itself out endlessly over million upon million of iterances. In other words, there may be a simple set of rules, and these rules (given enough time) lead to increased entropy and more complex structures. Just like how somethign as simple as the algorhythm contained in DNA leads from single celled life to complex intelligent life if you give it enough time, the same may be true of the universe. Do you see what i'm saying? You don't have to model everything in the universe by hand, scientists would be mroe likely to throw this algorhythm into their supercomputer and let it run for a few trillion instances to see what happens.

It's just like if I were a graphics designer, and wanted to model a 3d tree, I wouldn't sit there and craft it by hand or assemble virtual molecules together to make it look real, I would just figure out the algorythm to make the tree with math and then use that to generate a tree. This is what CGI professionals do, you just enter a simple piece of math and it makes the tree which looks very realistic with little to no effort from you, because the tree is basically just a simple fractal pattern that repeats itself, and given enough interances it forms the shape of a tree. Do you see my point, we don't need to model everything manually, we just have to find the algorhythm that constitutes it's structure and then it becomes easy to recreate everything in a realistic way. In 10k years I am sure we will have figured out more about the universe than we know today, and may better understand the underlying basis ofhow the universe is calculated.

Wouldn't scientists want to plug this math equation into a supercomputer and let it run in a simulation? And if they were correct, wouldn't the pattern just keep going on until eventually simple cellular life is formed, then more complex things form from that, then eventually intelligence? The point is that they may not need to know every species on earth or know the exact parameters for every calculation, they may just be using an initial algorhythm to create things and letting it run for an infinite number of iterances until eventually the simulated universe creates it's own life and species.


I don't see why the world being a computer simulation is any less likely than any other possible scenario.

[sgreger1]

Can some of our more tech-savvy users chime in on this? My opinion is that once we reach the proverbial "Second half of the chessboard" as it were, computing power will grow exponentially and make things like the holodeck or realistic simulations of natural processes a reality. This isn't even considering the very real possibility of the singularity occuring, in which we eventually invent AI which is capable of improving upon it's own design and creating a slightly better version of itself with each generation. After enough iterations of this refinement process the computers will have made themselves infinitely faster and more capable than even the human mind is able to achieve in it's current form. Such computers would undoubtably be able to run a simulation of earth. But even that aside, computing power doubles every few years, in less than 100 years from now we will see computers that are exponentially more capable than todays computers (especially if quantum computing becomes practical and takes off commercially).

So in 10k years is there literally any logical reason to believe we won't have the level of computing power I am referring to here? I don't see any indication that this won't be the case, all signs point to yes and unless there is some major extinction event or something I don't see that there is any way to avoid the fact that someday we will have computers that can process enough items in paralell to where we could achieve a realistic simulation of the human brain or of other natural processes. If someone more knowledgeable on this would like to state otherwise than I would love to hear it.

[Roo]

I did not say this would happen in the near future, I am saying that if AT ANY POINT IN HUMAN HISTORY this kind of processing power becomes available, than it will be used.

And you again completely miss the point Roo. We have no idea how acurate the simulation is to their real world. It could be missing pieces, it could be comprised only of things they know to exist etc, similar to how we model the weather today (we just plug in all the data we have available and draw what conclusions we can from it). To them, the simulation we live in may not be complete, but to us we would never know because it is all we know to exist. Do you see what i'm saying?

If you think that humans will never be able to run computer models that mimic natural processes at ANY point in the future than I guess we just have to agree to disagree. I think you are being a bit shortsighted though, considering how we went from no computers to already working quantum computers in like 50 years, yet you think that given another 10k years we will not have the computing power to simulate earth? The law of accelerating returns, Moore's Law, and nearly every computer scientist on earth would likely disagree with your assessment but if that's what you believe than that is fine. I bet in the 70's you were one of the guys saying computers would never be in every house too right?




The participants wouldn't notice any glitches that did happen, just like my character in Skyrim doesn't notice when i turn the power off, things like that are rendered invisible to the characters of the simulation. I can't believe you don't think we will ever be able to model things like the human brain with a computer, do you not watch the news or something I am confused.

Come on dude!!! I am in no way saying that computer models will never be able to mimic natural processes, or never be able model the human brain... I mean if that is what you're taking from my posts we really need to just stop. I am saying computers will never be able to simulate all reality as we know it, your life, my life, the whole entire ****ing world, in such a way that the artificial reality would be seamlessly indistinguishable from our reality. Is that really hard to understand? Our life as we know it, our planet as we experience it, will never be perfectly recreated or represented by a computer. Sure, computers may be able to simulate planet earth, or the human body. but not to the degree that your life now and everything you experience could ever be simulated so true to nature and the human experience that the future you would not even know it.

I can't even believe you are trying to compare this scenario with ****ing weather models, or digital models of the human brain... I think you are just trying to aggravate me lol. LIFE will never be simulated by computers with such accuracy and complexity so as to render the simulation indistinguishable from REALITY. This is a very simple opinion. If you don't understand my stance on it now, and you think I am so shortsighted that I don't think we will be able to mimic natural processes with computers, then **** it. There is no more I can say.

And when the 70's turned into the 80's, I was 14 months old.

[Roo]

So your only argument is that you don't think computers will be fast enough to model natural processes, at any point in all of human history? Now take how big our universe is and consider how much life likely lives out there somewhere in a far away galaxy that we will never meet. Do you think they will never have this kind of processing power either? You are making a bet against something that is almost 100% certain to happen at some point, unless all of life goes extinct for some reason. Computer power will proceed to increase exponentially each decade for the rest of infinity.

In rebuttle to your argument about how we would have to model every species, every woodpecker etc, that is not true:

Now imagine that our universe, big bang and everything else are all based off a certain repeating pattern, that the universe is, at it's very core, just an algorhythem, a fractal that plays itself out endlessly over million upon million of iterances. In other words, there may be a simple set of rules, and these rules (given enough time) lead to increased entropy and more complex structures. Just like how somethign as simple as the algorhythm contained in DNA leads from single celled life to complex intelligent life if you give it enough time, the same may be true of the universe. Do you see what i'm saying? You don't have to model everything in the universe by hand, scientists would be mroe likely to throw this algorhythm into their supercomputer and let it run for a few trillion instances to see what happens.

It's just like if I were a graphics designer, and wanted to model a 3d tree, I wouldn't sit there and craft it by hand or assemble virtual molecules together to make it look real, I would just figure out the algorythm to make the tree with math and then use that to generate a tree. This is what CGI professionals do, you just enter a simple piece of math and it makes the tree which looks very realistic with little to no effort from you, because the tree is basically just a simple fractal pattern that repeats itself, and given enough interances it forms the shape of a tree. Do you see my point, we don't need to model everything manually, we just have to find the algorhythm that constitutes it's structure and then it becomes easy to recreate everything in a realistic way. In 10k years I am sure we will have figured out more about the universe than we know today, and may better understand the underlying basis ofhow the universe is calculated.

Wouldn't scientists want to plug this math equation into a supercomputer and let it run in a simulation? And if they were correct, wouldn't the pattern just keep going on until eventually simple cellular life is formed, then more complex things form from that, then eventually intelligence? The point is that they may not need to know every species on earth or know the exact parameters for every calculation, they may just be using an initial algorhythm to create things and letting it run for an infinite number of iterances until eventually the simulated universe creates it's own life and species.


I don't see why the world being a computer simulation is any less likely than any other possible scenario.

You are vastly underestimating the complexity of our world, or a tree for that matter, and disregarding the most important factor at play in our universe: RANDOM. CHANCE. As much as you would like to believe otherwise, woodpeckers and other organisms and natural phenomena (avalanches, storms, earthquakes, cell division, etc ad nauseum) do not behave according to algorythms. Computer simulations do, and that is precisely why they cannot accurately replicate the natural world. Back to work compadre!