Hello,
I have this strange feeling that there is something wrong with our "photons".
There seem to be too little of them :) The fidelity is not high enough.
Maybe I should go out more ! =D
But I think these photons might be a sign of simulation.
Further studieing photons might be usefull to try and see if these are a product of simulation.
Bye, Skybuck.
If we're in a simulation, then what we consider to be the laws of physics are actually be the rules in the simulation.
However, I can't see that it would ever be possible, even in principle, to tell the difference.
Sylvia.
I guess the difference is that with a sim there is stuff outside of it that doesn't follow the rules, and that has a habit of reaching the sim one way or another at some time.
He could have stopped there.
NT
Does it? Any evidence of that?
Sylvia.
It might be if the person programming the simulation has made a mistake somewhere or left a telling assumption about geometry that is true in their universe but not true in ours. eg. Periodic boundary conditions.
A lot of early Conway life simulators used periodic boundary conditions because it made life easier on the rather finite computers of the day.
The one I recall that amused me was a mistake in an early relativistic jet simulator that exploited cylindrical symmetry for speed of computation. You could get stuff jumping out of the hotspot at c/sqrt(2) due to an unfortunate choice of where to put the origin. There was an implicit impenetrable boundary at the coordinate system singularity.
Just the opposite. If I were living in a simulation, I would not be truly conscious. I would be part of the simulation and not have consciousness. I know I have consciousness, so I am not part of a simulation.
I can't speak for the rest of you. I can only judge my own consciousness.
How can you prove that your "consciousness" is not a simulation?
Or that your 'knowledge' (of your consciousness) is not simulated?
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afaik we don't yet really know what causes consciousness, and thus whether it could be generated in some sort of life sim.
NT
Whatever they'd done, whether by mistake or otherwise, it would form part of the physical law of our simulated universe. There wouldn't be any way one could conclude that it shouldn't.
Sylvia.
Until we know what consciousness is (I doubt we ever will), we cannot conclude that it cannot exist in a simulated environment.
Even if we prove that consciousness cannot exist in a purely deterministic world, all that would mean would be that the simulation, if simulation it is, is not deterministic.
Sylvia.
You mean the laws of the simulated universe would be that everything is Euclidean until you reach a point far, far off in space where it abruptly wraps around to a point the exact same distance in the other direction. Oh, and there is a point over here where it appears there is a hole in the fabric of space-time just like a divide by zero error! Then there is this one thing going on just over there that appears to be perfectly random while everything else is perfectly predictable. Amazing! God doesn't play dice with the universe, but he does play craps in the back room.
I don't have to prove it to anyone. I am experiencing it. I know what I feel.
If it were simulated there would be no consciousness.
Are you saying you don't know if you are conscious or not? It's the "I think, therefore I am" thing. I don't see anything other than people spouting that. But then maybe the rocks are forms of consciousness that have transcended trivial stuff like that.
Whatever it does, there no way of saying that a real universe doesn't behave that way.
Sylvia.
It seems to me that I'm conscious, but the argument "I'm conscious therefore not simulated" doesn't work.
Sylvia.
Really? How?
Ah, faith rather than evidence? Very scientific... Senses and thoughts betray the mind all the time, you only ever have your belief that they are accurate.
Why not?!?
Just because our technology is incapable (at the moment) of simulating consciousness doesn't mean it's impossible.
The brain is, after all, only a collection of chemical and electrical impulses.
It's not faith. Consciousness can't be proven externally. But I would know if I am conscious. I can't know if you are conscious or just a simulation.
Now you are extrapolating outside your knowledge. We don't know what consciousness consists of or even how to determine when it exists. More importantly, we know virtually nothing about how the mind works. Only a few hundred years ago we had no knowledge of electricity and no real understanding of chemistry. There is no reason to believe the mind is "just" a chemical reaction. We have no idea how chemistry as we know it can develop into something like the mind. Very likely we will have to discover an entirely new field of knowledge before we can understand the mind.
It requires that consciousness cannot exist in a simulation, which is not something that has been established.
Sylvia.
How would that be established?
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