Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?
Mar. 2nd, 2005 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anhinga_anhingaCema pointed my attention to the fact that one of the smartest modern philosophers, Nick Bostrom, now has a separate Web site dedicated to the Simulation argument.
anhinga_anhinga
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Date: 2005-03-03 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 04:21 am (UTC)Are you saying that Lem explained/tried to explain why it is likely that we live in a simulation?
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Date: 2005-04-02 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 07:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 10:56 pm (UTC)Have you read "The Web" ("Паутина")? I am looking for an English translation of this one...
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Date: 2005-04-03 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 02:41 am (UTC)Мне понравилось...
>Это ведь Лёха Андреев, да?
Говорят, что да... Только мне это ничего не говорит - что ты про него знаешь ?
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Date: 2005-04-03 04:49 am (UTC)Reposting
Date: 2005-04-02 11:54 pm (UTC)Have you read "The Web" ("Паутина")? I am looking for an English translation of this one...
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It seems that LJ ate this comment (not quite, it shows in the list of my
recent comments as,
http://www.livejournal.com/users/anhinga_anhinga/8017.html?thread=56657#t56657
but not in the entry itself, and the thread seems to be lost.) This looks like a race condition: it did not appear for a while after "Posted Successfully", then appeared, then disappeared again...
Re: Reposting
Date: 2005-04-02 11:55 pm (UTC)Weird...
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Date: 2005-03-03 06:35 am (UTC)And this "tower" of embedded simulations can be quite tall... It's difficult to figure out whether it's finite...
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Date: 2005-03-03 06:16 pm (UTC)In some sense, this continues the trend of moving the Earth from the center, then the Sun, then the Galaxy, now the very Universe, and even our creators are being moved from the "center"...
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Date: 2005-04-02 07:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 07:52 am (UTC)Basically, we usually refer to something described by the Big Bang model (or by some alternative models) as the Universe; this is what is being moved from the center.
The correct procedure is, of course, to stop calling this object "the Universe", and call it something like "the Astrophysical Space" :-) Given that the Astrophysical Space might be not very universal, we probably should not call it the Universe any longer :-)
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Date: 2005-04-02 08:59 pm (UTC)The "simulation argument" as presented has holes in some important places. One of them is that the author glosses over the way the simulator decides how many details to simulate (and how to simulate them). This point is all handwaving and little substance, imho.
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Date: 2005-04-02 09:14 pm (UTC):-) Would not this be too radical ? :-)
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Date: 2005-04-03 02:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 08:26 am (UTC)One of my favorites is that we are created by our post-human descendants ;-)
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Date: 2005-04-02 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 09:25 pm (UTC)There is an informal notion of an AI-complete problem. Having the correct theory of the world is probably at least AI-complete. And having decent specs here is unlikely without a much better theory of the world, than we have now...
We should pick a somewhat less radical project for making specs...
(BTW, how would you describe the difference between specs and implementation?)
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Date: 2005-04-03 02:35 am (UTC)I do not see, however, why in order to implement the simulation one would need to come through the singularity. Furthermore, I do not see why coming through the singularity would necessarily lead to the simulation becoming possible.
Finally, a "correct theory of the world" is, strictly speaking, impossible, as follows from the trivial observation that, in order to simulate a universe, one would have to create its copy (another universe), which would be futile anyway, because no measurement would be possible (it would destroy the similarity between the universes). So, instead of a correct theory, we need something more flexible: a plausible theory. Now this is interesting, but I did not think sufficiently hard about this to post anything, even in a comment. (Maybe we will have time to discuss this tomorrow?)
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Date: 2005-04-03 03:01 am (UTC)Mostly, because the simulation of this kind is AI.
>correct theory
I mean, a theory based on "correct" principles. Of course, we can only talk about "more correct" and "less correct", like in "general relativity is more correct than the preceding theory of gravity".
Basically, I don't think the existing understanding of the world is "correct enough" to tell us what is required to create an experience of a human-like life by running a computer program.
>a plausible theory [...] Maybe we will have time to discuss this tomorrow?
Indeed.