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>If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level fo

>If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, These are both somewhat my logic for even believing we live in a simulation. Obviously humans seem to be the largest factor on Earth given how we are rapidly changing the planet and directly, and indirectly, affecting all life on the planet. We already have things like folding@home, weather modelling, climate modelling, asteroids@home, cosmology simulations from universe sandbox to supercomputer level, etc etc so on and so forth. People love to immediately dismiss a simulation hypothesis "stuff is too detailed!" "why would someone use such specificity!". Well, why would anyone watch the Kardashians or eat hair (Trichophagia) or smoke cigarettes because none of these things are rational... however having a highly detailed simulation has all sorts of potential applications from seeing how ancestors may have evolved to seeing how a designer organism might potentially play out on a sterile world you plan to seed to being someone's incredible version of the Sims. I mean, WE have the desire to do this sort of stuff. The above mentioned distributed computing and supercomputer applications shows some level of desire for this sort of thing but then you have games like SimLife from 1992 that allowed players to simulate an ecosystem and to modify the genetics of the plants and animals in the game. 'Junk' DNA, prions, viruses, erm consciousness, burning fossil fuels to the tune of roughly 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions this year, living in coastal cities at or below sea level even AFTER disasters do considerable damage, the rapid adoption of social media and reality television, all of these things seriously make me wonder if we in fact are some sort of simulation just to see how a species can deal with both environmental and self-caused disasters. Throw in many other things like the fact we've not detected life off-world, we've yet to detect any signs of another intelligent species (mind you we're just starting to really look), the rapid advances we've made in technology just in the 33 years of my life, technology allowing for us to fake audio and video of people that enough reference data exists for and things like this Chinese virtual news anchor, etc and it becomes really easy to go "huh, maybe we DO live in a simulation".

Dylan16807 8y ago
Are you saying that the more complicated things are, the more it hints at a simulation? Here, let me ask the most important question: What evidence about how things work on earth would make you less likely to believe the world is a simulation? Because it's always possible to come up with a justification after seeing evidence. (Other planets are a different issue entirely.)
- jerf 8y ago
  Speaking for myself, I can not imagine what evidence would disprove the Simulation hypothesis. At the moment, reality is indistinguishable from being "real", for appropriate values of "real". There are things that would increase the likelihood of us being in a simulation, like us finding a QM effect of some sort where we can prove that what's actually happening is a computationally tractable simplification of what the theory presents. Instead, in the real world, every torture case we put QM to, QM keeps on QM'in just fine, regardless of what our intuitions think. So I would say that for me, the simulation hypothesis is more-or-less as improbable as it can get. However, that isn't zero, and I can't see how it would ever be zero, and I have to admit that the "not zero" in question is not merely a pro forma "not zero, but 10^-huge number", but some sort of non-trivial "not zero". No idea how to put a precise number on it, though. (As Scott Aaronson has said, one interesting reason to pursue quantum computers is that they are the things that will allow us to run experiments to see if reality does perhaps give up after a certain amount of entanglement and turn the system classical again despite there being no QM reason to do so. It's probably not the best reason to do it, but it is a reason to do it. If quantum computers turn out to be truly impossible, and not just an extremely hard engineering challenge, the reasons why can't help but teach us something profound about the universe.)
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    > Speaking for myself, I can not imagine what evidence would disprove the Simulation hypothesis. I'm not talking about absolute proof. I'm saying that for a claim that evidence makes it "more likely", you can't just come up with a plausible reason. You have to weigh plausible reasons for and against it. For every "more likely", there has to be a corresponding "less likely". I can come up with plausible reasons that "less complex world" implies simulation, and I can come up with plausible reasons that "more complex world" implies simulation. But unless I'm using conspiracy theorist logic, I have to weigh those against each other, and say that one of those pieces of evidence would overall make me less likely to believe in a simulation.
jerf 8y ago
"Throw in many other things like the fact we've not detected life off-world," I do consider the simulation hypothesis to be one of the answers to the Fermi paradox, because "not deeply simulating the observable universe" is definitely another one of those obvious ways of cutting the load exponentially. Again, lots of attention to detail; if the external universe is something other than a full QM-level (or true ToE-level) simulation, it's obviously running on one heck of a detailed model... but it could still be exponentially less detailed than it superficially seems to be. Of course, even if we are an island of advanced simulation, there could be others out there, surrounded by much-lower-detail areas.

Dylan16807 8y ago

Are you saying that the more complicated things are, the more it hints at a simulation? Here, let me ask the most important question: What evidence about how things work on earth would make you less likely to believe the world is a simulation? Because it's always possible to come up with a justification after seeing evidence. (Other planets are a different issue entirely.)

jerf 8y ago
Speaking for myself, I can not imagine what evidence would disprove the Simulation hypothesis. At the moment, reality is indistinguishable from being "real", for appropriate values of "real". There are things that would increase the likelihood of us being in a simulation, like us finding a QM effect of some sort where we can prove that what's actually happening is a computationally tractable simplification of what the theory presents. Instead, in the real world, every torture case we put QM to, QM keeps on QM'in just fine, regardless of what our intuitions think. So I would say that for me, the simulation hypothesis is more-or-less as improbable as it can get. However, that isn't zero, and I can't see how it would ever be zero, and I have to admit that the "not zero" in question is not merely a pro forma "not zero, but 10^-huge number", but some sort of non-trivial "not zero". No idea how to put a precise number on it, though. (As Scott Aaronson has said, one interesting reason to pursue quantum computers is that they are the things that will allow us to run experiments to see if reality does perhaps give up after a certain amount of entanglement and turn the system classical again despite there being no QM reason to do so. It's probably not the best reason to do it, but it is a reason to do it. If quantum computers turn out to be truly impossible, and not just an extremely hard engineering challenge, the reasons why can't help but teach us something profound about the universe.)
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  > Speaking for myself, I can not imagine what evidence would disprove the Simulation hypothesis. I'm not talking about absolute proof. I'm saying that for a claim that evidence makes it "more likely", you can't just come up with a plausible reason. You have to weigh plausible reasons for and against it. For every "more likely", there has to be a corresponding "less likely". I can come up with plausible reasons that "less complex world" implies simulation, and I can come up with plausible reasons that "more complex world" implies simulation. But unless I'm using conspiracy theorist logic, I have to weigh those against each other, and say that one of those pieces of evidence would overall make me less likely to believe in a simulation.

jerf 8y ago

"Throw in many other things like the fact we've not detected life off-world," I do consider the simulation hypothesis to be one of the answers to the Fermi paradox, because "not deeply simulating the observable universe" is definitely another one of those obvious ways of cutting the load exponentially. Again, lots of attention to detail; if the external universe is something other than a full QM-level (or true ToE-level) simulation, it's obviously running on one heck of a detailed model... but it could still be exponentially less detailed than it superficially seems to be. Of course, even if we are an island of advanced simulation, there could be others out there, surrounded by much-lower-detail areas.