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Are We Living in a Simulation?

Almantas

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MJ DeMarco

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Hi guys!

What's your opinion of Elon Musk's opinion that we're most likely living in a computer simulation?

See Elon Musk's arguments here: Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Elon Musk Thinks So.

Possible. When one looks at how mathematical rules govern the world around us, one might conclude so. The concept of fractals blow my mind.
 
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Almantas

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Most people interpret God as a bearded guy sitting on a cloud that decides who goes up or down.

What if... our God is the master coder who has created the computer simulation of our existence?

That's deep. Lol.
 

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Yes, I believe something like that.

But not exactly a computer simulation.

Our imagination loves to ties things to which we are familiar. Therefore a "computer simulation" is the closest analogy we can come up with. If its true then how can we use our senses to "see" another dimension if your senses are limited to this "dimension"? Therefore it very difficult to picture how that would look like. Remember how descartes said your sense cannot be trusted?

Physics strongly suggests the possibility of other dimensions. There's no proof, but the evidence "strongly suggests" or "more likely than not" that our dimension is kinda of like a "projection" from another reality. Kind of like how a movie is played at a cinema; a machine with a tape unknown to the audience projects a movie. And we are fixated to that movie but are completely oblivious to the causes.
 
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lowtek

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If it turns out to be true, my money is on an ancestor simulation. It's actually trillions of years into the future, and the "real humanity" is huddled around a dwindling number of black holes. They are black hole farming to simulate the glory days of the universe, when nuclear fuel was abundant and the universe was bathed in energy.

buttttttt....

there are (at least) two very significant problems with the simulation hypothesis:

1) The unspoken assumption in all of these arguments is that you even CAN simulate a mind.

I don't necessarily see a reason why you can't, but they tend to hand wave this away and say "moore's law!". It doesn't stand to reason that simply increasing computational power means you can simulate the mind of a human - let alone billions of them. We can't even define what it is to be sentient - so the certainty of being able to replicate it in a digital format seems very, very misplaced to me.

2) There's simply no evidence for it. One would expect to see, as we do with all computer simulations, digitization artifacts (i.e. aliasing in video games). As we probe deeper into the universe, we simply don't see this. That doesn't mean it isn't there, but the lack of it does call the idea into question.
 

MJ DeMarco

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If it turns out to be true, my money is on an ancestor simulation. It's actually trillions of years into the future, and the "real humanity" is huddled around a dwindling number of black holes. They are black hole farming to simulate the glory days of the universe, when nuclear fuel was abundant and the universe was bathed in energy.

Ya mean, the real humans are massively advanced and we're trying to relive our glory days? And since we're sitting around a black hole, does that mean time here on Earth is moving super-fast, relative to our blackhole brethren?

The movie Interstellar kinda goes down this route...
 
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socaldude

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And its actually funny because non of these ideas are new.

Plato was on the first to theorize about this.

He called them "forms". The objects in this physical dimension are actually projections of "essences" from another dimension.

Freaking brilliant.:rofl:
 

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If we lived in a simulation, could we have the immense amount of free will that we have today? Do we have any free will?
 

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lowtek

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Ya mean, the real humans are massively advanced and we're trying to relive our glory days? And since we're sitting around a black hole, does that mean time here on Earth is moving super-fast, relative to our blackhole brethren?

The movie Interstellar kinda goes down this route...

The time dilating effects only matter for observes in different regions of space time. So if you're a billion miles from the black hole, watching someone fall in as they flash a light at you.. the flashes get farther and farther apart - from your perspective. They eventually take hours, days, and months, and then years to reach you. The last flash before they fall in never reaches you.

From their perspective, they're still flashing at once per second.

If we're all simulated intelligences in a civilization orbiting a black hole, then our absolute (i.e. time in the real universe, not our simulated time) would proceed at whatever rate is going on for our advanced descendants.

When you're talking about such advanced computation, it's difficult to say how much real time would be elapsing for our simulated time. In principle, it could only be seconds in the real universe - from the start of our simulation 13 billion years ago to now. Or it could be millions of real years to simulate one second of ours - who knows.

Indeed it's not really that important, since the limiting factor is going to be the amount of energy needed to run the simulations. In such a future, energy is dwindling and will eventually run out. Time will extend infinitely far into the future, so even if a second of our simulation takes a million "real" years, it doesn't matter.

Such a simulation would be the next best case to finding a way out of our universe into a younger one. If you can't actually get away, you can at least simulate a time when life was better.
 

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If we lived in a simulation, could we have the immense amount of free will that we have today? Do we have any free will?

I argue that free will is an illusion. You think you have it because when presented with a choice, you can imagine picking either option.

You can also imagine unicorns riding down a rainbow and bringing you the pot of gold they stole from the leprechaun.

The power to imagine something does not equate to its potential reality.
 

socaldude

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If we lived in a simulation, could we have the immense amount of free will that we have today? Do we have any free will?

The evidence strongly suggests that we don't. Even our very mental construct is determined by our genes not just our body.

So does a serial killer have free will? No. Rather they are wired wrong.

Albert Einstein talked about this, he said they should still be punished and locked away but don't have free will.

If reality is in fact a projection then it doesn't leave room for free will because everything has to be determined kind of like how a play is determined by a script.
 
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G

GuestUser450

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Imagine the sheer amount of power it would take to run it though...

Damning evidence against it: everything in the world has changed in our history except human nature. No firmware upgrade, we're still apes cognitively and emotionally.

Theory: Omniscience will be found in the future when our technology lets us stop chasing technology - knowledge through subtraction, not addition. Upside: we already know everything. Downside: Dirty hippy surfers were right all along.
 

millerad

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The evidence strongly suggests that we don't. Even our very mental construct is determined by our genes not just our body.

So does a serial killer have free will? No. Rather they are wired wrong.

Albert Einstein talked about this, he said they should still be punished and locked away but don't have free will.

If reality is in fact a projection then it doesn't leave room for free will because everything has to be determined kind of like how a play is determined by a script.

Sounds like a good cop out to be irresponsible with your life imo. Also a reason why I cant "Give it Up" to Jesus. I'm a control freak. I make my decisions and no one else will ever get to take that from me.
 

socaldude

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Sounds like a good cop out to be irresponsible with your life imo

It does not rule out personal responsibility because determinism moves us into questioning and being AWARE of ourselves. Inquiring into the causes of our thoughts and desires.

Believing in free will is worse because you just stay ignorant and lack self-awareness.

Sounds worse to me.
 
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millerad

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It does not rule out personal responsibility because determinism moves us into questioning and being AWARE of ourselves. Inquiring into the causes of our thoughts and desires.

Believing in free will is worse because you just stay ignorant and lack self-awareness.

Sounds worse to me.
Man you have way too much time on your hands. You should spend all the time you spend thinking about determinism, on a business system. You will be the next Elon Musk. Then people might care about your opinion.
 

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You ever play a game where your processor can't handle the simulation...because there's too many objects on screen?

Black holes, and matter in general, warp and slow down time when you get near it. The more matter there is, the slower the time is....COINCIDENCE?

@MJ DeMarco Where are the thinking emojis maaann??? :shit:
 
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socaldude

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Man you have way too much time on your hands.

I can spend my time on this forum because I can. I take that as a compliment. While most people are at work right now I can take 30 minutes to see whats going on here at this forum while I am at home(not at my mom's house).
 

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This video got me into all this:

View: https://youtu.be/GZKmyMaG40o


Basically, they've found that when you break down the world to it's simplest form, it's the same as computer code.

Whether that means that we are in some 9 year old kid's The Sims 25 game on his PS18 is a different matter.

But in all seriousness, it is a real possibility that somebody has beaten us to it.
 

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playin devils advocate
it's not possible to simulate the level of information that exists in our reality.
 

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playin devils advocate
it's not possible to simulate the level of information that exists in our reality.

It's not possible to simulate that in OUR reality. We don't know what other realities are capable of doing.

It's akin to telling Julius Caesar that in the future there would be computers that allow us to have face to face conversations with people on the other side of the world, satellites orbiting the earth, cables that connect the world at the bottom of the the ocean, etc.

Julius Caesar would look at you like: "wtf?"

There isn't any method to disprove that we're living in a simulation.

The better question would be:

If we can say with 100% certainty that we're living in a simulation, does it change our reality?
 
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luniac

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It's not possible to simulate that in OUR reality. We don't know what other realities are capable of doing.

It's akin to telling Julius Caesar that in the future there would be computers that allow us to have face to face conversations with people on the other side of the world, satellites orbiting the earth, cables that connect the world at the bottom of the the ocean, etc.

Julius Caesar would look at you like: "wtf?"

There isn't any method to disprove that we're living in a simulation.

The better question would be:

If we can say with 100% certainty that we're living in a simulation, does it change our reality?

Say that to Caesar's face, I dare you.
 

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Maybe yes, maybe not, but it just shifts the focus and if it's true, it still doesn't really answer any big questions: who created the "programmer"/simulation/that super advanced civilization that runs us, what is the universe, is there a God and if there is, does God have any consciousness or is it just a big clockwork-like quantum mechanism, who/what created God etc. And the most important question of them all: what is love? And why can't MJ just take us by the hand and give us all these proven step-by-step strategies on how to effortlessly become a millionaire in less than 365 days?
 
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