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> But that's not the kind of world we find ourselves in. Our minds appear to be constructed of the same stuff as the rest of the world. If we're to accept the s
by jamesaguilar 13y ago
> But that's not the kind of world we find ourselves in. Our minds appear to be constructed of the same stuff as the rest of the world. If we're to accept the simulation argument, then our definition of "simulated reality" must imply a physics implementation that is high enough fidelity to support minds as high level structures - you have to actually be able to build compact working brains in the simulation.
Devils advocate, but there could simply be level-of-detail heuristics, where the mind is explainable in terms of physics, but not implemented that way (unless you look). Similarly, for people who take damage to their brains, the model for that person's new brain could simply be derived during that simulation step and substituted.
That's just a high level view of how a lazy simulation could still produce minds that appear to by implemented using physics.
- mistercow 13y agoThat's what I was saying in the "Alternatively, ..." part. But this does suggest an avenue of testing the simulation hypothesis that might be more useful than looking at purely physical anomalies. The physics engine might be simplified, but edge cases will likely be subtle and difficult to distinguish from gaps in our theories of physics. But if the simulation is using heuristics to gauge whether a brain is being observed, and making it correlate to the mind primitive backing it as needed, then we should eventually be able to construct scenarios where those heuristics are wildly inaccurate. If we could, for example, trick the simulation into presenting a completely inactive brain while its was conscious, that would be informative.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoAgreed although presumably our hypothetical simulators have sysadmins and could simply ratchet up the fidelity around anyone who is looking.
- mistercow 13y agoYeah, there are a number of ways that it could be thwarted. Any civilization that can achieve this kind of universe simulation would probably also have solved general AI, so the "heuristics" we're trying to fool may in fact be an intelligence far more clever than ourselves. But evidence is never perfect.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoActually in a universe where time doesn't necessarily flow forward, evidence could be perfect. They could just delete branches where the simulation is discovered and revert back to the point where the bit leading to the discovery was made. But I see what you are trying to say.
- pixl97 13y agoWho says we haven't tricked the simulation, and who says we can be tricked? If we do exist in a simulation, not understanding the motivations and nature of the perpetrators of said simulation leave us with no means to tell if our results are unadulterated. Lets say you find incontrovertible proof that we are being simulated. You are so exited you pull through a red light on the way home and are killed by a bus. In the mean time the hard drive with your data on it crashes and the data is lost. Another researcher attempts to follow your work, performs the same experiment and gets a negative result, we are not being simulated (little does he know he's running on Universe.exe patch level 4.0.2113). A universal virtual machine could operate just like virtual machines we use now. If the occupants of said simulation screw stuff up we can always be rolled back to a checkpoint with no knowledge of such an occurrence. Slight changes could be made to the problematic actors in the simulation and chaos theory would likely make the simulation diverge.