Vonte3000
Chance 3 :wow: :blessed:
So DNA is coding in a computer simulation but not a structure made by an intelligent God?
The gymnastics of beleiving we're in a computer over God creating us, the human ego is limitless
NDT finally coming around on simulation theory?
- Thread starter BelowTheMasonDixon
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The gymnastics of beleiving we're in a computer over God creating us, the human ego is limitless
BelowTheMasonDixon
Veteran
Another dope article on the subject
Why it matters that you realize you’re in a computer simulation
Why it matters that you realize you’re in a computer simulation
What if our universe is something like a computer simulation, or a virtual reality, or a video game? The proposition that the universe is actually a computer simulation was furthered in a big way during the 1970s, when John Conway famously proved that if you take a binary system, and subject that system to only a few rules (in the case of Conway’s experiment, four); then that system creates something rather peculiar.
What Conway’s rules produced were emergent complexities so sophisticated that they seemed to resemble the behaviors of life itself. He named his demonstration The Game of Life, and it helped lay the foundation for the Simulation Argument, its counterpart the Simulation Hypothesis, and Digital Mechanics. These fields have gone on to create a massive multi-decade long discourse in science, philosophy, and popular culture around the idea that it actually makes logical, mathematical sense that our universe is indeed a computer simulation. To crib a summary from Morpheus, “The Matrix is everywhere”. But amongst the murmurs on various forums and reddit threads pertaining to the subject, it isn’t uncommon to find a word or two devoted to caution: We, the complex intelligent lifeforms who are supposedly “inside” this simulated universe, would do well to play dumb that we are at all conscious of our circumstance.
The colloquial warning says we must not betray the knowledge that we have become aware of being mere bits in the bit kingdom. To have a tipping point population of players who realize that they are actually in something like a video game would have dire and catastrophic results. Deletion, reformatting, or some kind of biblical flushing of our entire universe (or maybe just our species), would unfold. Leave the Matrix alone! In fact, please pretend it isn’t even there.
The basic idea is that the intelligent lifeforms that have evolved inside a simulation are somehow made non-viable, or undesirable as samples, once they become aware of the simulation that they live in. Their own awareness of their plight (their environment) somehow excludes them from being valuable experimental samples. Samples that are aware of the truth of their simulated environment can, or will, compromise themselves, the simulation, or both.
So to avoid this possibly cataclysmic fate, some put forward a kind of survival strategy of “We better not know”, and if we do know, “We better play dumb”. It’s a position that comes with several interesting problems. The first of which should be obvious enough; having just read the last few paragraphs, you are now irrevocably in the know regarding the theory, whether you actually believe the universe to be a simulation or not. Reading this very article is potentially putting reality itself, or maybe just the continuation of our species, at extreme risk. That is supposedly how flimsy the cosmos is to the grandest secret of its truest nature—The universe can be unraveled with the simple transmission and comprehension of just a few sentences describing its features. Only a handful of axioms that explain the environment are apparently enough to destroy us all. Something about this theory feels unlikely, because it means that if you have a deep enough textbook on the nature of reality, the very act of reading it is enough to unmake reality. That sounds a lot like a literary device out of an H.P. Lovecraft short story; imagine an obscure occult science text so dangerous that to utter its very table of contents is enough to return the whole cosmos to total chaos.
Why it matters that you realize you’re in a computer simulation
Why it matters that you realize you’re in a computer simulation
What if our universe is something like a computer simulation, or a virtual reality, or a video game? The proposition that the universe is actually a computer simulation was furthered in a big way during the 1970s, when John Conway famously proved that if you take a binary system, and subject that system to only a few rules (in the case of Conway’s experiment, four); then that system creates something rather peculiar.
What Conway’s rules produced were emergent complexities so sophisticated that they seemed to resemble the behaviors of life itself. He named his demonstration The Game of Life, and it helped lay the foundation for the Simulation Argument, its counterpart the Simulation Hypothesis, and Digital Mechanics. These fields have gone on to create a massive multi-decade long discourse in science, philosophy, and popular culture around the idea that it actually makes logical, mathematical sense that our universe is indeed a computer simulation. To crib a summary from Morpheus, “The Matrix is everywhere”. But amongst the murmurs on various forums and reddit threads pertaining to the subject, it isn’t uncommon to find a word or two devoted to caution: We, the complex intelligent lifeforms who are supposedly “inside” this simulated universe, would do well to play dumb that we are at all conscious of our circumstance.
The colloquial warning says we must not betray the knowledge that we have become aware of being mere bits in the bit kingdom. To have a tipping point population of players who realize that they are actually in something like a video game would have dire and catastrophic results. Deletion, reformatting, or some kind of biblical flushing of our entire universe (or maybe just our species), would unfold. Leave the Matrix alone! In fact, please pretend it isn’t even there.
The basic idea is that the intelligent lifeforms that have evolved inside a simulation are somehow made non-viable, or undesirable as samples, once they become aware of the simulation that they live in. Their own awareness of their plight (their environment) somehow excludes them from being valuable experimental samples. Samples that are aware of the truth of their simulated environment can, or will, compromise themselves, the simulation, or both.
So to avoid this possibly cataclysmic fate, some put forward a kind of survival strategy of “We better not know”, and if we do know, “We better play dumb”. It’s a position that comes with several interesting problems. The first of which should be obvious enough; having just read the last few paragraphs, you are now irrevocably in the know regarding the theory, whether you actually believe the universe to be a simulation or not. Reading this very article is potentially putting reality itself, or maybe just the continuation of our species, at extreme risk. That is supposedly how flimsy the cosmos is to the grandest secret of its truest nature—The universe can be unraveled with the simple transmission and comprehension of just a few sentences describing its features. Only a handful of axioms that explain the environment are apparently enough to destroy us all. Something about this theory feels unlikely, because it means that if you have a deep enough textbook on the nature of reality, the very act of reading it is enough to unmake reality. That sounds a lot like a literary device out of an H.P. Lovecraft short story; imagine an obscure occult science text so dangerous that to utter its very table of contents is enough to return the whole cosmos to total chaos.
No DNA is coding period. If you can believe in a space man creating earth in seven days then you might as well believe in anything including a computer simulation. Or a flying spaghetti monster.
BelowTheMasonDixon
Veteran
I think your missing the point. After all what is "God" but not that which created us?
BelowTheMasonDixon
Veteran
(Cont)
Another issue to consider is in the conceivably deeper purposes for simulating a life-sustaining and life-evolving universe. Conceding the problem of anthropomorphizing the motives of our hypothetical simulation-designers, let’s nonetheless indulge and imagine ourselves in their position.
If your simulation includes evolving conscious entities that are allowed to develop an intellect (learning), and they have a recursive method to expand and explore that intellect (science), then it is likely that over time and after enough observations those entities will inevitably bump into the “writing on the wall”, as it were.
In the case of our own universe, physicist Tom Campbell of NASA has argued that the constant speed of light, the observer effect, and the Big Bang—all matter, energy, and physical laws arriving simultaneously out of nowhere—are tells of just such a situation. Brian Whitworth has published several papers on how the physics we experience could be easily explained with computable analogs. Martin Rees’s book Just Six Numbers could be argued as a whole set of tells. Max Tegmark summarizes the position in the PBS documentary The Great Math Mystery:
“If I were a character in a computer game that was so advanced that I were actually conscious, and I started exploring my video game world it would actually feel to me like it was made of real solid objects made of physical stuff. Yet if I started studying, as the curious physicist that I am, the properties of this stuff, the equations by which things move and the equations that gives the stuff its properties, I would discover eventually that all these properties were mathematical. The mathematical properties that the programmer had actually put into the software that describes everything.”
Via Tegmark’s thinking we can assume that if the physics and/or nature of any given universe that lends itself to be described through mathematics or exhibits mathematical constants, then it can be surmised to be analogous to, or a derivative of, a computer simulation—even by the entities within that simulation. In other words, if you can compute it, it’s likely the result of a computer itself.
In the case of our hypothetical evolving lifeforms, their science, if it is robust enough, should show that their universe is indeed logically the result of a computer simulation. Otherwise, what is the value of all their science?
We could call this the Simulated Intelligence Hypothesis. If you grow an evolving intelligence in a simulated environment it should, given enough time, be able to deduce, infer, or observe that its environment is indeed the result of a computed simulation. If this is true then it should lead to an interesting circumstance: an evolving intelligence within a simulated environment cannot be occluded from the fact that its environment is a simulation, given enough time and a robust enough science. This we could call The Sims Situation—You cannot evolve an intelligent sample inside a simulation whilst keeping that simulation hidden indefinitely. Eventually their science will reveal their circumstance, unless of course there is some kind of outside intervention—The same kind of intervention that we should supposedly play dumb in an effort to avoid provoking. Nevertheless, let’s return to imagining the evolution of our simulated lifeforms.
If we have a simulated universe that provides a platform for intelligent lifeforms to evolve, we could break these lifeforms up into at least 3 categories: (1) Simple, (2) Complex, (3) Savvy.
Another issue to consider is in the conceivably deeper purposes for simulating a life-sustaining and life-evolving universe. Conceding the problem of anthropomorphizing the motives of our hypothetical simulation-designers, let’s nonetheless indulge and imagine ourselves in their position.
If your simulation includes evolving conscious entities that are allowed to develop an intellect (learning), and they have a recursive method to expand and explore that intellect (science), then it is likely that over time and after enough observations those entities will inevitably bump into the “writing on the wall”, as it were.
In the case of our own universe, physicist Tom Campbell of NASA has argued that the constant speed of light, the observer effect, and the Big Bang—all matter, energy, and physical laws arriving simultaneously out of nowhere—are tells of just such a situation. Brian Whitworth has published several papers on how the physics we experience could be easily explained with computable analogs. Martin Rees’s book Just Six Numbers could be argued as a whole set of tells. Max Tegmark summarizes the position in the PBS documentary The Great Math Mystery:
“If I were a character in a computer game that was so advanced that I were actually conscious, and I started exploring my video game world it would actually feel to me like it was made of real solid objects made of physical stuff. Yet if I started studying, as the curious physicist that I am, the properties of this stuff, the equations by which things move and the equations that gives the stuff its properties, I would discover eventually that all these properties were mathematical. The mathematical properties that the programmer had actually put into the software that describes everything.”
Via Tegmark’s thinking we can assume that if the physics and/or nature of any given universe that lends itself to be described through mathematics or exhibits mathematical constants, then it can be surmised to be analogous to, or a derivative of, a computer simulation—even by the entities within that simulation. In other words, if you can compute it, it’s likely the result of a computer itself.
In the case of our hypothetical evolving lifeforms, their science, if it is robust enough, should show that their universe is indeed logically the result of a computer simulation. Otherwise, what is the value of all their science?
We could call this the Simulated Intelligence Hypothesis. If you grow an evolving intelligence in a simulated environment it should, given enough time, be able to deduce, infer, or observe that its environment is indeed the result of a computed simulation. If this is true then it should lead to an interesting circumstance: an evolving intelligence within a simulated environment cannot be occluded from the fact that its environment is a simulation, given enough time and a robust enough science. This we could call The Sims Situation—You cannot evolve an intelligent sample inside a simulation whilst keeping that simulation hidden indefinitely. Eventually their science will reveal their circumstance, unless of course there is some kind of outside intervention—The same kind of intervention that we should supposedly play dumb in an effort to avoid provoking. Nevertheless, let’s return to imagining the evolution of our simulated lifeforms.
If we have a simulated universe that provides a platform for intelligent lifeforms to evolve, we could break these lifeforms up into at least 3 categories: (1) Simple, (2) Complex, (3) Savvy.
- Simple, they can make decisions and engage meaningfully with their environment.
- Complex, they record history as well as develop sciences, cultures, artifacts, and arts.
- Savvy, they are conscious of the fact that they are in a simulated universe.
BelowTheMasonDixon
Veteran
@Nelomaxwell you should really check out the entire article. I think you'll dig it.
Vonte3000
Chance 3 :wow: :blessed:
If that's the case why don't you quit playing and believe in what's already there for you? Why are you sp ready to believe we're in a computer
Vodoun was left for me by my ancestors so that is what I believe. But you talk like only one thing can exist which is completely narrow minded. Only difference is that I don't dismiss new information, without analyzing and considering it. That's just ignorant.If that's the case why don't you quit playing and believe in what's already there for you? Why are you sp ready to believe we're in a computer
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BelowTheMasonDixon
Veteran
If that's the case why don't you quit playing and believe in what's already there for you? Why are you sp ready to believe we're in a computer
At one time humans sacrificed others to God, and burned witches at the stake. Theories evolve and times change. One shouldn't simply believe something because its "what's already there for you" to believe.
Vonte3000
Chance 3 :wow: :blessed:
Vodoun was left for me by my ancestors so that is what I believe. But you talk like only one thing can exist which is completely narrow minded. Only difference is that I don't dismiss new information, without analyzing and considering it. That's just ignorant.
I believe what resonates with me and no matter how many theories I looked at or new age religions I looked into or attempted I was always lead back tot The Bible, that is the only place where you can be sure of why things are the way they are. Does the simulation explain evil? If we're programs why are we dying? Why can't we be updated and improved? This theory is a result of False Evidence Appearing Real.
That’s good for you. I'm not led in that direction. I was going to write a post explaining what everything could be but, I don't think you want to entertain other view points. Also I'm not sure if you were confusing vodoun with a new age religion because it's origins trace back to kemet.
Vonte3000
Chance 3 :wow: :blessed:
Voo doo vodoun I know they trace back to Africa and honestly I don't thin there is any religion you can mention I haven't looked into. I've spent a lot of time looking at theories and religions so I'm not entertained by them, you can make your post I won't say anything I've spoken my piece
If you'ver spoken your piece then I'm not sure there's any point in making my post. It won't convince you so what's the point. We can just agree to disagree .