Science Do we live inside a computer simulation?

[jedidia]

Actually, it sounds more like 13th floor. hich preceded matrix, by the way (at lest the movie. Don't know about the comics).

 

[statickid]

The site I mentioned before says that one of the following sentences must be true (it also explains why, just read it):

1 Almost all civilisations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.​

2 The fraction of technologically mature civilisations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.​

3 You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.​

Ok, let's go on. We can assume that 1 is false, because we have been on the brink of a nuclear war and we didn't destroy ourselves. We can also assume that 2 is false, because people always liked to play God. We have developed highly successful computer games like Spore or Sims. If the first two sentences are false, then the third must be true, meaning that we indeed do live inside a computer simulation.

And Ghostrider, where did you get your glow-in-the-dark frisbee? Just in case...

they MUST be true because they are wishy-washy. "almost all", "almost zero", "almost certainly"...

"we didn't destroy ourselves" - this does not prove the first one wrong, as there is no indication that we are technologically mature. Not to mention according to the thought flow, we are still babies, not even capable of extended or self reliant space travel. Perhaps there is a more lucrative technology we have yet to discover, or we can destroy ourselves by simply running an experiment we have yet to conjure.

"people like to play god" what certainty is there that all species are like people?

Perhaps the "simulation" is not a computer at all but our entire universe as a physical entity. If this were the case it is possible that it is impossible to turn it off. Maybe Our universe is occurring in a fraction of time comparable to a nanosecond which the simulators are measuring?

Hmmmmm:hmm:

 

[Quick_Nick]

I like the view of the universe based on the holographic principle. It may or may not be correct, but it's a nice way to see the universe as a computer.

 

[Pyromaniac605]

I think I've got some proof, when Jesus died he apparently came back, so he respawned.

Don't worry I'm just kidding, but the only way to really prove this would be to cause a glitch. (or enter a cheat code :lol

Darren

 

[Hielor]

I think I've got some proof, when Jesus died he apparently came back, so he respawned.

Don't worry I'm just kidding, but the only way to really prove this would be to cause a glitch. (or enter a cheat code :lol

Darren

Precisely why this isn't a particularly valid theory...scientific theories need to be disprovable.

This is just religion.

 

[Ghostrider]

This is just religion.

Yeah. Remember when the MCP was persecuting all those programs who believed in the Users?

 

[T.Neo]

Indeed, though I see no need to bash it... it is quite interesting, as religions go.

 

[Hielor]

Yeah. Remember when the MCP was persecuting all those programs who believed in the Users?

I don't understand your point. Religious persecution has been around forever.

 

[Ghostrider]

I don't understand your point. Religious persecution has been around forever.

Not quite forever. Some of us are old enough to remember when the MCP was just a chess program and anybody could go to a I/O Tower and talk to their Users without those darn security scripts harassing them.

Now, get off my allocated memory!

/gruff script.

 

[jedidia]

I don't understand your point. Religious persecution has been around forever.

He's refering to the movie Tron

 

[Hielor]

He's refering to the movie Tron

I know what he's referring to. As I see it, the conversation went like this:

Me: "This is just religion."
Him: "Remember that one fictional example of religious persecution?"
Me: "???"

 

[computerex]

Think of a computer simulation done even today. Ideas and concepts are represented as numerical data. Say you were writing a person simulator. The mood of the person would then be represented as perhaps 46% happiness, 20% sadness, etc.

But these simulations are just numbers, and at the deepest level they are just potentials of electricity. We are not numbers.

 

[Polaris]

Think of a computer simulation done even today. Ideas and concepts are represented as numerical data. Say you were writing a person simulator. The mood of the person would then be represented as perhaps 46% happiness, 20% sadness, etc.

But these simulations are just numbers, and at the deepest level they are just potentials of electricity. We are not numbers.

I agree.

 

[DarkEnergy]

Think of a computer simulation done even today. Ideas and concepts are represented as numerical data. Say you were writing a person simulator. The mood of the person would then be represented as perhaps 46% happiness, 20% sadness, etc.

But these simulations are just numbers, and at the deepest level they are just potentials of electricity. We are not numbers.

Are our brains not just electrical pulses among neurons at the deepest level as well? Yet, the brain can produce a consciousness. Why couldn't a sufficiently advanced computer achieve this as well?

 

[Quick_Nick]

I should think our brains are pretty good at what they do after millions of years of evolution. So I would expect simulations of people to be either emulations of brains or just growing/extracting a real brain and having input and output to a computer world. (brain in a vat)
We are just central nervous systems with a large support system and various sensors.
As stated before, the 'clock speed' of the 'processor' really doesn't affect simulation time. Theoretically: http://xkcd.com/505/

Also, the ethics are questionable. A truly emulated brain would be a person who basically feels pain just the same as anyone else. Yet you can erase or undo their pain. You can restore them to an earlier state. They may be just software but they may or may not be considered a person. (then you get into current ethics involving animals or possibly AI in general or even people )

(I'm ranting in my brain (or should I say mind?) sorry)

 

[Ghostrider]

We are not numbers.

This is debatable.

Be seeing you.

 

[computerex]

Are our brains not just electrical pulses among neurons at the deepest level as well? Yet, the brain can produce a consciousness. Why couldn't a sufficiently advanced computer achieve this as well?

The electrical impulses actually have a physical effect in our brains though. Binding of calcium ions (electricity) opens other channels, etc. A whole bunch of physical activity is taking place. Our brains do not produce consciousness, consciousness simply exists.

There can't be any consciousness in a computer program. Computer programs are just a bunch of instructions executed mechanically by a processor. The state of something is altered based on those instructions. There is nothing else to it.

Imagine: In the far future, imagine a robot that can paint pictures very very quickly with life like detail. If the robot paints a person running in quick succession, showing the person to be running in animation, is this sufficient to say that this is a person running? All we did is create an image of something alive by manipulating the physical world. Is that image alive itself simply because it looks very life like?

If you think about it, the whole "Are we in a simulation" argument is absurd.

 

[jedidia]

Are our brains not just electrical pulses among neurons at the deepest level as well? Yet, the brain can produce a consciousness. Why couldn't a sufficiently advanced computer achieve this as well?

To get an answer to that question, you'll best read "the emperors new mind" by Roger Penrose (yes, THE Roger Penrose. The one famous from research on black holes and quantum mechanics). It's a fascinating and quite enlightening read on the subject.

The bottom of it all is that he suggests that quantum effects are a vital part of the brains workings, and that they are a natural occuring hardware feature. I.E. you'd have to emulate the WHOLE Hardware (i.e. brain) to get similiar results. When even so small things as quantum effects figure into the workings, "sufficiently advanced" in this case means capable of complete subatomic simulation, which is something savely out of our grasp currently, and it is rather hard to imagine that any numerical processor will ever have the neccessary capabilities. There's just no way to emulate such complex hardware by software, at least not in real time, and even for calculating a simple thought process not real time, the programm that has to be written for it puts up a new definition for "staggering complexity".

Currently, someone just managed to emulate a two decades old operating system (the DOS-Box). It was quite a difficult task, because most stuff written for DOS relied more on using the hardware directly than the actual OS. So in orther to write the DOS-Box, its authors had to emulate the whole hardware with it (a hardware that isn't even so much different from what we use today), with the result that even on a current computer, you have trouble running some high-end games of the time with the same speed as they ran on a computer built two decades ago. Just for comparison of the trouble involved in emulating hardware by software. What we are talking about here would be emulating hardware working on completely different principles than the one we want to emulate it on, which makes the matter a lot worse.


Where pure logical argument comes in to claim the day: Why would anyone go through the trouble of this all? One brain simulation for the sake of neurological research might be imaginable in a couple of hundred years or so, but a whole MMORPGer filled with billions of them? I couldn't see any practical purpose in such a thing.

Plus, the author of said code would most probably have something akin to a brain, so we have to assume that something like natural inteligence exists. If so, it might as well be us.

I also have a theological oppinion on the matter, in a nutshell:

"God created man in his own image." This means that God made something akin to himself. We can savely assume that god isn't a physical being, so we have to assume that his thought processes and feelings work on a non-physical basis, a "truer" basis if you want.

So in order to create something akin to himself, he had to create a hardware on which to emulate processes he observes in himself. Thus he created physics and the universe, as framework, and the created the human body as a "machine" that could emulate his mental and emotional functionality using biochemistry, bioelectricity and whatever else effects that are needed to make our bodies (including our brains) tick.

So, in a way, I think we are a "simulation", although I don't think that we are located on a server. The Universe is Gods computer, which makes it no less real. (No, I have not copied this over from Clarke, I actually had these thoughts a long time before reading "Rama revealed", and I don't believe that the universe is merely a testrun to check the conditions. This is the real thing, just that something went wrong. Read the first chapters of Genesis for further explanation on the topic... :lol

 

[Artlav]

It may not be as hard as simulating every single atom of a human brain with quantum physics.

Consider this. Imagine that you need to find a volume of an intricately curved vessel.
The shape can be described mathematically, allowing it be inputted into a computer.
The computer then starts grinding numbers, analysing which parts are inside, and which are outside, dividing the shape into small grid and estimating the volume of each cell, etc. On and on and on.

While it's at it, pour some water into the vessel. It will quickly settle, filling the whole. If you then pour it into a measuring tank, you'll get the volume. And the computer is still grinding.
The water does not need to compute it's equilibrium state, it just flows into it.

How important is this?

Consider folding of proteins. The predictions of how a specific protein will fold are calculated in a worldwide grid of thousands of volunteer-provided computers.


Consider one microsecond. Each computer read two numbers from memory, multiplied them, stored. One of many operations of the equation is done.
But the protein in the tube have already folded.
The atoms don't need to compute their states of minimal energies, they just go to them, driven by the underlying laws of physics.
At the same time, computers would be grinding numbers for months doing the thing atoms did in a microsecond.

Make no mistake about speed improving with time - you can't have a set of processes working faster than one of these processes. A simple digital computer won't outpace the atoms.


So, what does this say about human brains?
It's quite likely that the brain uses both the digital effects of a classic neural net along with the analog effects of the currents going around said net. We need to simulate both, but only first is simulate-able by a digital computer with any meaningful performance. We would need a special hardware to simulate the analog part of it, not necessarily a quantum computer or anything as complex.

Quite likely, just loops of transistors arranged as neurons.

 

[jedidia]

We would need a special hardware to simulate the analog part of it, not necessarily a quantum computer or anything as complex.

Quite likely, just loops of transistors arranged as neurons.

If you manage to rebuild the brains structure using transistor loops, it might be arguable if you can still call it a computer. It would probably better fit the rather old term of an "electron brain".

Plus, You'll need a way to also simulate the chemistry. electrical transfer from neuron to neuron depends on biochemical reactions, which themselfes have a part in modifying the signal (Therefore you can go depressive of lack of Serotonine, which is nothing more or less than one of the substances managing the electrical transfer from neuron to neuron).