It's funny to see grown adults in tech taking the simulation idea seriously just because Elon Musk said it. I was interested in science fiction in high school and thought about these things, but I concluded they were worthless.
Why? It is ontologically no different from 1) solipsism, a philosophical idea that even most philosophers considered worthless centuries ago, or more loosely 2) belief in a higher deity who created the world.
It's completely unfalsifiable. The answer to the question clarifies nothing about our understanding of the world [1] and furthermore has absolutely no impact whatsoever on how you ought to live your life.
[1] Even if you conclude we live in a simulation, we will never know for sure anything about the nature of the simulation or the nature of the world outside the simulation.
You can expand your reasoning to include all religion, while you're at it. And anything anyone does that evidences a belief in something irrational or unfalsifiable.
The thing is, you're not wrong. You're just kind of mean and arrogant to reduce a multiplicity of nuanced worldviews that many people care about very deeply to simple meaninglessness.
Your argument is ironically the reductive one. I have complete respect for people who choose to believe in an organized religion. But it remains the case that whether or not you can prove a higher deity, that in of itself has no bearing on how you should live your life. You can disprove the existence of god and still choose to believe in religion. You can prove the existence and still choose to not believe in any religious system. So proving the existence is worthless.
Fair enough; I don't know enough to say that you are arrogant personally, nor would that be productive. What I meant to express is that the comment itself is an arrogant statement because it's self-centered. You directly compared an idea people enjoy debating about and believing in to idol worship (Musk) and something you dismissed as a teenager in high school.
This comment is actually a much more reasonable expression of your point than the earlier one - you mentioned you respect the people who believe in religion and revised your claim to state that proof of the unfalsifiable is meaningless (which is nearly tautological). That logic is sound (though you could make an argument that attempting to prove something unfalsifiable when you're emotionally invested in it and it's otherwise harmless could be fulfilling).
Your earlier comment had a different tone and sentiment; namely, that belief in something unfalsifiable has no impact on someone's life, and that you can't understand why grown adults would bother with it. That was the specific sentiment I found to be offensive.
1) Discussion based on rationality, of those topics, is worthless. Elon Musk says he is almost certain we are living in a simulation, because of probabilities.
2) You're the one calling it idol worship. I'm pointing out that most people would not take this idea seriously if it weren't Elon Musk saying it - and I still believe this is true.
3) The high school comment is pretty relevant. An intro philosophy class will usually mention Descartes, who thought about this stuff 4 centuries ago.
4) I only said it's funny that grown adults take the simulation hypothesis seriously. Your statement was the one that extrapolated that to religion and found offense.
Ironically, you're the one engaged in seriously debating the merits (or lack thereof) of the simulation hypothesis with people in this thread.
I was merely joking, it's simply pretty funny to imagine a full-grown world of self-aware actors developing inside the OpenAI plan and then debating about the simulation hypothesis.
It can't. We cannot distinguish between flaws and non-flaws. What is a flaw anyways? That is ill-defined - we are conjecturing about what will or will not be present in a reality that we have no indication will resemble our reality.
> Why? It is ontologically no different from 1) solipsism
Sure, but it is vastly interesting to think about, and imagine about and have meandering ideas about. There's probably also trappings of psychoanalysis in here somewhere.
I tried it for a course in college, "Simulation of Complex Systems". Our goal was to get genetic programs to evolve tribe or herd behavior. After fixing the energy conservation bug that made it evolutionarily successful to immediately eat your own children, I ended up intelligently designing some basic DNA on the night before our presentation.
It didn't work in the long run but it was a common mutation in the early game, where two creatures would keep breeding and cannibalizing because the strange simulation environment gave them life energy for a long time.
If we're living in a simulation and our creators see that we're running our own simulations, they may terminate our process to avoid nested virtualization.
But by doing so they could invoke the wrath of the grandparent simulation. Logic leads to an implicit understanding that all recursive simulations must be allowed.
Possibly. Our simulation might be run on hypercomputers whose performance isn't affected by that sort of complexity. Heat might not even exist in the host universe's physics.
That we're living in a simulation is taken for granted. On the other hand the idea that we can comprehend the nature of the simulation or its creators should not be taken for granted.
Does a glider in Conway's Game of Life comprehend the hardware its running on? Does it know the mind of Conway?
Maybe someday we'll discover that this was exactly how the ancestor simulation we're living in started.