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Personally I find the peculiar implication of a simple question so appealing. Will we eventually be able to create simulations that one would be unable to diffe

Personally I find the peculiar implication of a simple question so appealing. Will we eventually be able to create simulations that one would be unable to differentiate from reality if that simulation is all they had ever known? The answer there is quite self evident, yet it simultaneously somehow implies it is highly likely that we are ourselves within a simulation. The reason is that we can safely assume that we are within one of n + 1 realities. The n simulated realities and the 1 real reality. Unless you attribute some sort of exceptionalism bordering on creationism to our existence, there's every reason to think that n is going to proportional to the number of advanced civilizations in existence and is presumably going to be very very large. And as you increase n the odds of us actually being in the 'real' reality, which are of course just 1/(n+1), approach 0. Like you mention it's something that doesn't necessarily go anywhere. Even if you "prove" it after death, that life you'd be experiencing at that point faces the same logical issue - at least unless the argument loses consistency at some point. Something most seem reluctant to admit is that it's also comforting as an atheist. I always expected the infinity of time after my existence to be very much akin to the infinity of time before my existence. That's just disappointing. The seemingly high probability that all is not as it seems is certainly emotionally appealing. But it's certainly not just the emotional appeal driving me there - I could obviously have chosen to invoke Pascal's Wager in the decades of time prior to considering this, but it seemed fake -- this, somehow, does not. It also answers, or at least compellingly kicks the can, of the question of existence. If I write a program to spit out a random number, I presume that there is no entity that suddenly whisks into existence under the false impression that it is choosing a random number - which it then decides upon, before then being whisked out of existence. So why am I, the 'thing' spectating the outcome of the series of chemical and electrical reactions carried out by this body, here? Descartes would have quite the time if the answer to our little question had been yes during his time. It changes the picture so much more than the dreams that drove his ponderances. --- From a scientific point of view, it's obviously not a great concept as it cannot be falsified. And like you mention, it also cannot really be physically proven without begging the question. On the other hand, it can be treated as a soft science and if a preponderance of evidence does lean towards supporting it then we can at least say, "Hmm.. well we can't really say anything for certain, but that's certainly interesting."

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Could you support the premise you can make an undetectable simulation? That's a key proposition and you don't support it at all. I find the idea highly questionable.
- danbruc 9y ago
  Do you think a NPC in a game could figure out that he is just a character controlled by the game logic? Current games are obviously far away from having conscious NPCs but I neither see any fundamental problem with having NPCs controlled by artificial brains nor any obvious way how such a NPC could figure out that he lives within a game. Or what if, while you are asleep, someone essentially detaches your brain from your body and uses the signals your brain sends to control a simulation of your body in a virtual environment and feeds back the simulation output into your brain as what you see, hear, feel, and smell? How would you detect that you are no longer really in the real world when you wake up?
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    Yes, lots of ways: For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system. A character in Minecraft could build a cosmic ray detector, for instance. So yes, absolutely -- my expectation is that any intelligent structure in a computational "bubble" will be able to detect that it's in a bubble managed by some outside system. Is your argument entirely from lack of imagination in how it could be done?
    - AgentME 9y ago
      >For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system. Only because minecraft does a lot of things to save from doing extra work, like unloading chunks or skipping frames if it's under load. If you remove those optimizations (and add some error-correcting ram or a redundant process to double-check calculations to protect from cosmic-ray-induced errors), then it's easy to make a minecraft-like game that's deterministic across platforms and doesn't reveal details about whatever platform it's on. Take something like Ethereum's blockchain: it's not possible for an executable turing-complete contract to know what type of computer it's executing on, because the VM is strictly specified, and if there were any flaws that accidentally revealed information from the environment, then every nearly every node in the Ethereum p2p swarm would get different results and the blockchain would fork ridiculously and practically halt as all nodes desynchronized from each other until people updated the software to fix that bug.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

Could you support the premise you can make an undetectable simulation? That's a key proposition and you don't support it at all. I find the idea highly questionable.

danbruc 9y ago
Do you think a NPC in a game could figure out that he is just a character controlled by the game logic? Current games are obviously far away from having conscious NPCs but I neither see any fundamental problem with having NPCs controlled by artificial brains nor any obvious way how such a NPC could figure out that he lives within a game. Or what if, while you are asleep, someone essentially detaches your brain from your body and uses the signals your brain sends to control a simulation of your body in a virtual environment and feeds back the simulation output into your brain as what you see, hear, feel, and smell? How would you detect that you are no longer really in the real world when you wake up?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Yes, lots of ways: For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system. A character in Minecraft could build a cosmic ray detector, for instance. So yes, absolutely -- my expectation is that any intelligent structure in a computational "bubble" will be able to detect that it's in a bubble managed by some outside system. Is your argument entirely from lack of imagination in how it could be done?
  - AgentME 9y ago
    >For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system. Only because minecraft does a lot of things to save from doing extra work, like unloading chunks or skipping frames if it's under load. If you remove those optimizations (and add some error-correcting ram or a redundant process to double-check calculations to protect from cosmic-ray-induced errors), then it's easy to make a minecraft-like game that's deterministic across platforms and doesn't reveal details about whatever platform it's on. Take something like Ethereum's blockchain: it's not possible for an executable turing-complete contract to know what type of computer it's executing on, because the VM is strictly specified, and if there were any flaws that accidentally revealed information from the environment, then every nearly every node in the Ethereum p2p swarm would get different results and the blockchain would fork ridiculously and practically halt as all nodes desynchronized from each other until people updated the software to fix that bug.