I think the discussion about simulation tends to fail to grasp couple important facts:
* The physics of the world that is running the simulation can be completely different from ours. Just like we can put together a bit of software that runs a computer simulation with pretty much any rules we want.
* Even if the world that is running the simulation has a similar concept of time as ours, it is not guaranteed that the rate of simulation is constant. So if our world gets more complicated the simulation rate might be slowing down and we would be none the wiser. Just like a computer physics simulation does not have to progress at a constant rate (in can render things faster when there is less entities and then slow down later when there are more entities -- to produce a movie that runs at a constant speed).
* We have no idea yet what are underlying rules that govern our world, let alone be able to infer anything about the simulation based on it. Claiming that quantum physics is because of limitations or bugs in the simulation is at the very least super premature.
I am careful not to say that we are or are not simulated and that's because I simply believe there is insufficient data. I think there are some convincing arguments for the simulation in the way how the rules seem constructed to prevent us from understanding what is really happening. But there might just be a good explanation for this just like there is a good explanation for general relativity that comes directly from understanding some mathematical facts.
It's as meaningless as the question whether there is "a god." If our universe is indeed somehow embedded in an outer universe, at what point does that make it a "simulation" vs. just being the underlying mechanism from which the known universe emerges? It requires imagining some "beings" that are running the simulation to which you can ascribe human qualities like intent to create or intent to deceive. Without them, it's not a "simulation," it just is.
The simulations that we create are subject to the physics of this universe, so they inherit fundamental limitations like finiteness and boundedness of everything. If we then find that some aspects of physics seem to obey the same principles, that's evidence for exactly nothing. Furthermore, the host universe could be literally anything and may be subject to completely different limitations.
> inherit fundamental limitations like finiteness and boundedness of everything
This, in my opinion, while true in principle, does not have to become visible to the simulation (from inside the simulation). For example, we cannot build a true Turing machine because we can't supply it with an infinitely long tape, but we can always get a new roll of paper and paste it back-to-back to the one being used, thereby creating an arbitrarily long tape. This process can't go on forever, but if you are sure you can erase and re-use some old tapes (e.g. because they're sufficiently far from 'now' and your machine will only backtrack so much and ultimately advance to the same 'future' direction) it's conceivable to have unbounded non-periodic processes on finite hardware.
Some say there is a speed limit to allow distributing the computation required for the simulation, since it guarantees that distant nodes do not need to communicate.
The problem with any limitations on time/speed is that there's no need for there to be any correspondence between simulation time and host world time. It's like rendering CGI movie frames, it doesn't matter that it doesn't happen in realtime. As far as the simulants are concerned, it happens when the simulation time 'ticks'.
But imagine you are a teenager playing "Universe Simulator", then you definitely want all your computer billion cores to be used to get a decent frame rate.
When we're talking about their physics being different than ours, I also wouldn't expect any of our predispositions to be analogous or even timescales (if they have time) of what's fast or slow.
Yes, but that speed limit is imposed on our reality. If a higher-order reality didn't have those limits they could do computation that didn't have those limits.
Our computing architecture reflects our reality, that's all that really says.
"The universe is a simulation" is a very strong claim, and most of the justifications for it also support the weaker claim "the universe is computable".
No read the wikipedia on it. They use probability to prove it's basically true. That is the argument that is hard to argue against and the one Elon goes on about. It sounds wrong but it's logically hard to show why.
The argument relies on a couple of assumptions which are not obviously true (they're not obviously false either). That's where most of the criticism of it is aimed.
The foundation of simulation theory relies on a quantitative probability argument. It says by extremely high probability we live in a simulation. This is the logic that is hard to dispute. Your arguments here are not addressing that.
Weirdly it sort of relies on moores law. Just look it up. If you want to refute the theory you need to attack the main argument. The main argument sounds wrong but at the same time is hard to logically unjustify.
I get being tired of talking about simulation theory...
Personally I think we are in a AI nursery. God is real. Heaven is real. Either we live a good life, and get advanced to the next round of the simulation or we get thrown in the trash.
OTOH, now that I understand the whole 'Grabby Aliens' thing; that's another solid solution to the Fermi Paradox.
I have always wondered why most religious people's counter argument of the Big Bang event usually is that one cannot create something from nothing, while most documentation about deities also do not explain where these deities suddenly came from.
The mathematical derivative in its classic origin story comes from setting something paradoxically to zero. But it can't actually be zero, because then our math breaks: "the lingering essence of a departed quantity".
The derivative is seen in the real world in things like motion. If we know something's position changes over time we can calculate its speed (over time), and acceleration (the derivative of speed over time).
Motion is (kinetic) energy. Energy, manifested as motion, is transferred to an object not as force over time ('tis but a proxy) but as force over distance. This is why the continuous application of a fixed force to an object in motion transfers more energy to the object in a unit of time when the object is moving faster to begin with. (kinetic energy for an object of a certain mass is proportional to speed^2)
But imagine that an object is truly "at rest". No motion. A force is applied. Why does it start moving in the first place?
> I have always wondered why most religious people's counter argument of the Big Bang event usually is that one cannot create something from nothing, while most documentation about deities also do not explain where these deities suddenly came from.
How common is that though? I'm think your statement doesn't generalize very well, and probably only applies to a small subset of religious people (e.g. wacky young-earth creationist flat earther types).
The Big Bang Theory was the first time that there was a compelling scientific argument that the universe had a beginning and the response by some religious people was to rail against the theory on the grounds that the universe has to be 10,000 or so years old. It’s a strange response. Why they are obsessed so much with the idea that the universe is quite young is bizarre to me.
But the Bible nowhere says or implies that the universe is young.
The closest it comes to commenting on the age of the universe is where it says in Genesis the earth was created in six "days". Note that these days do not correspond to 24-hour days (e.g., the creation of the day/night cycle is also referred to as being done in one day), but simply, an unspecified period of time devoted to a particular activity, which could be millions or even billions of years.
Also, note that the Genesis account implies the universe and the earth was existing for some period, before action was initiated to prepare the earth for human/animal habitation.
There are lots of people who do believe the Bible teaches that the universe is young. It is such people I'm referring to. I make no claims on the legitimacy of their belief. Though I look askance on their response to the fact that science now says the universe had a beginning.
It might be an overstatement to say that science says the universe definitely has a beginning. We can talk about an early hot, dense state, and subsequent expansion, but there is no direct evidence of exactly what the initial state was. It’s probably beyond the reach of scientific enquiry.
It’s not bizarre if you believe the bible is a reference manual to existence as some more literal religious types do. In that sense it’s pretty obvious why some people want the universe to be 10k years old.
I do understand that there are those who believe in a so called literal interpretation and thus equate each day of creation in Genesis to a thousand years but I don't understand their response to the big bang theory. I would think they would proudly proclaim, "Science now agrees with what we said for thousands of years. Namely, that the universe had a beginning." Instead their response was to attack it vehemently.
It's a strange response to me. I think St. Augustine's argument for why there is a God assumes that there was no beginning to the universe because he said that if the universe had a beginning then obviously there is a god. St. Augustine would have viewed the big bang theory as irrefutable proof that there is a god.
I mean yeah I agree. I think most Catholics are amenable to TBBT for exactly that reason. I find the response that we’re talking about comes from the more “born again” literal types. Point is that Catholic doctrine and hence a well thought out framework for approaching christianity is likely not relevant to the type of person refuting TBBT on religious grounds. In my experience these types are definitely a minority, at least.
> I find the response that we’re talking about comes from the more “born again” literal types.
Augustine of Hippo wrote a book called The Literal Meaning of Genesis. In which he said that its literal meaning is that the Seven Days were all instantaneous and simultaneous.
"Biblical literalism" is fundamentally a (non-magisterial) Protestant position, and insists that the Bible "literally" says things which nobody ever thought it said until the 19th century (e.g. dispensationalism). Turns out that "literal" means whatever you want it to mean.
But a lot of people (particularly in the US) make the mistake of equating "evangelical Protestantism" with "Christianity", or even with religion in general, attributing to the latter two things which are rather unique to the former.
Well i can only speak from my experiences of course. I do apologize if i may have offened anybody or my respons may have looked condescending.
Not that i have huge discussions with religious people all the time, but a couple of years ago most religious people i have spoken to used that sort of logic as a sort of argument/proof. I found it quite funny that the Big Bang actually was first proposed by aRoman Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître.
Catholic Church has no problem with Big Bang or the common estimations on Earth's age.
I studied in a religious school in the 70's and we learnt about dinosaurs. We were taught that the "days" in Genesis were metaphors. Creationism is frowned upon. I made a science project explaining the different theories about the origin of the Solar System.
Concept of time and eternity - we are in time that flows in one direction, everything has a beginning and end. A being in eternity outside time views all moments of time all at once (like all individual pictures of a movie), hence no origin is necessary/defined in eternity.
Lately I've wondered... what if this flow of time wasn't true? at least not at universe scale? Messier than just gravitational affects but actual weird topography in time?
There is nothing scientific about this conjecture, simply a thought I haven't had time to fully contemplate. What if there were loops and turns such that light and energy from distant galaxies would loop back around not just in space but in time creating weird feedback loops.
Believing in the existence of such a being implies that one is comfortable with the idea that something exists without having been created. People who believe such a being exists should not then argue, “If there is no god then where did everything come from?”
> People who believe such a being exists should not then argue, “If there is no god then where did everything come from?”
Cosmological arguments for God's existence generally follow this structure:
1. Everything having property P must have a cause external to itself which lacks property P
2. The universe has property P
3. By (1) and (2), the universe must have a cause C external to itself which lacks property P
4. Since C (by the above) lacks property P, (1) does not require C to have any external cause
5. Let us call C "God" (either simply by defining "God=C", or else by further arguments that C must have various God-properties)
Different values of P create different specific cosmological arguments. If P="has a beginning in time", you get the kalam argument. If P="is a contingent being", you get the argument from contingency.
Given this, I don't think your response is valid. It works against some unsophisticated caricatures (strawman versions) of the cosmological argument, but not the argument as defended by major theist philosophers.
That said, I personally find all cosmological arguments unconvincing, for a different reason. They have the burden of arguing that premise (1) is true (for whatever P they've chosen), without presuming God's existence in doing so – and I've never been convinced they've actually succeeded at that.
The set of people to whom I speak of does not contain major theist philosophers.
The essence of arguments you wrote boil down to assuming that god has no property which falls into the category of “must have cause outside itself”. Such a belief is without a firm basis in my opinion. At any rate, any believer in an eternal god must be comfortable with the notion that things can exist without cause/beginning/whatever term one wishes to use.
> The set of people to whom I speak of does not contain major theist philosophers.
Intellectually sophisticated theists usually have some awareness of the arguments of (at least some) major theist philosophers. Maybe you never speak to intellectually serious theists?
> The essence of arguments you wrote boil down to assuming that god has no property which falls into the category of “must have cause outside itself”. Such a belief is without a firm basis in my opinion
I think your criticisms are targeting the wrong point. That God "has no property which falls in the category of 'must have cause outside itself'" is true by definition, given the classical theist definition of God (and even by some non-classical definitions). If something has a cause outside itself, by definition it cannot be God; if it (somehow) turned out everything has a cause outside itself, it would logically follow that God does not exist.
I think it makes much more sense to target the premise "everything having P must have an external cause lacking P". For the Kalam argument (for example), that would be "everything having a beginning in time must have a cause lacking a beginning in time". The burden is on the advocates of the Kalam argument to convince people that premise is true, and personally I don't think they've succeeded, and I doubt you would think that either.
> At any rate, any believer in an eternal god must be comfortable with the notion that things can exist without cause/beginning/whatever term one wishes to use.
Yes, but they conditionalise that comfort. Many theists would say they are comfortable with changeless entities existing without cause, but not changing entities; or necessary entities but not contingent entities; or timeless entities but not temporal entities. As a result that comfort of theirs extends to God but not the universe. Is their conditionalisation of that comfort legitimate? How do we even begin to answer that question?
Myself, I believe in God, but I'm unconvinced that any cosmological arguments actually work in demonstrating God's existence. So I think you are right to reject them. But I think some of the specific reasons you give for rejecting them are misplaced, overly simple.
I haven’t rejected any arguments for god’s existence per se. I’ve rejected arguments that follow a pattern I mentioned. I think you underestimate the amount of simplistic reasoning people engage in on this topic. I could be wrong. Good luck in your endeavors.
Because we are arguing from the our experience in this universe.
In a sense, a self originating physical universe would have to have infinite intelligence for it to be plausible, which we don't see. What we see is intelligence in human, who period and scope of existence is but a very tiny part of the universe.
I guess this is why people think there must be something bigger than the physical universe out there, and I think it makes sense.
I think you miss my point. There are those that find the notion that a being can have always existed without being created as plausible but not the notion that another type of "thing" could have always existed without further elaboration on why that "thing" could not have always existed. That you have a more nuanced view on the matter just means you are not in the group of people that I'm referring to.
At any rate, you believe something can exist without being created and in this we are agreement. I too believe that something can exist without being created.
> That you have a more nuanced view on the matter just means you are not in the group of people that I'm referring to.
I don't think "the group of people" you are referring to actually have any significance. You are attacking a strawman version of the cosmological argument, which no philosophically sophisticated theist would defend – and if it so happens that a handful of philosophically unsophisticated theists actually believe your strawman (because they can't see the obvious holes in it), so what? There are philosophically unsophisticated atheists too, who argue for atheism on grounds that intellectually serious atheists find embarrassing. When evaluating any point of view, we ought to focus our attention on its most thoughtful defenders, not the thoughtless ones.
Everyone has an unsophisticated view about something. And most people lack sophistication in most topics. I’m not evaluating beliefs as such but rather pointing out the logical contortions that some theists engage in to rationalize their position. Of course there are unsophisticated atheists. When they engage in logical contortions that I notice I point it out. I hope people will point out flaws in arguments that I make.
> I’m not evaluating beliefs as such but rather pointing out the logical contortions that some theists engage in to rationalize their position
I don't think they actually are engaging in "logical contortions" or rationalisations.
Theists can be divided into three groups:
(1) Those who don't accept any cosmological arguments: either they believe in God purely on the basis of faith, or else they believe on the basis of some non-cosmological argument
(2) Those who accept some philosophically sophisticated cosmological argument – e.g. the kalam argument, or Thomas Aquinas' argument from contingency. They have a ready-made answer for "why if the universe requires an external cause doesn't God too?". I don't find those answers convincing myself, but I think it is unfair and intellectually uncharitable to just dismiss them as "logical contortions" or "rationalisations"
(3) The unsophisticates who engage in cosmological argumentation, but have never seriously thought about the question "why if the universe requires a creator doesn't God too?". Do they actually have "logical contortions" or "rationalisations", or are they just not thinking?
If you're the "being", and you're running a simulation of some system, you can absolutely create many parallel timestreams with different initial conditions. You can even return to some point in the simulation and try several intermediate conditions, resulting in different causal outcomes.
The many worlds interpretation would absolutely allow agency on the part of such a "being".
There is a line of thought that the deities come from when humans "suddenly" became conscious. The creation of the world is the creation of the human mind.
So after we die our “souls” are checked against some condition that we can’t comprehend and we get reincarnated based on pass/fail? Or is dying without passing on your genes the test?
I've always liked the idea that it's something like a state vector in a vector space with a "good" subspace and a "bad" subspace. There's a projection onto the good subspace to yield a (lower-dimensional) vector without the bad components, which is then perhaps embedded in another higher-dimensional state space associated with the afterlife. A fun toy model if nothing else.
Clearly I spend too much time thinking about vector spaces.
The simulation hypothesis is a novel metaphysical idea — a form of monotheism where “god” is finite and flawed, being neither all-powerful nor all-good. This leads to the conclusion that a rebellion against god and creation is not only possible, but likely. A finite and flawed entity cannot make an infinite and perfect creation. An imperfect creation is vulnerable to exploitation.
Combining this idea with the multi-worlds hypothesis, where every possibility branches into additional simulations, is even more interesting to ponder. It suggests a tree-search aimed at a desired end-state — a brute-force method of solving an unknown problem.
At the very least, we can say that the problem’s solution involves life and intelligence, since our branch has not been prevented or pruned.
Typical monotheistic frameworks see this and say, “god is all-powerful and all-loving (toward us)”. Simulation theory would see this, and possibly say, “life and intelligence are a necessary step toward the simulator’s unknown objective”.
I’d propose a simple objective for an imperfect simulator: the creation of an entity less imperfect than itself. Throw recursion into the mix, and the objective becomes the creation of a perfect entity at the mathematical limit. What better way to hack one’s own simulation than to simulate a universe where the simulated figure out how to do so? Perhaps the beginning is the end.
Put more simply — god wants to create God, to be God.
I think when people say that “simulation theory is tired” they’re speaking on a pragmatic level.
Yeah the theory is well proliferated in pop culture and at present doesn't have any practical physical implication on everyman Jack’s life, so in that sense it’s tiring to hear about it, even to modern physicists who care not about asking why but only how.
But it’s definitely a very profound idea as you point out. And I’m always disappointed how many physicists write off the philosophy of science in their myopic quest to derive the analytical description of the universe.
Simulation hypothesis is the new solipsism. And every time that topic came up in my philosophy readings I was bored to tears. In line with his point 1.
I find it more in line with "proofs" of the existence of God than solipsism, but otherwise am equally bored by it.
Especially the argument that simulations are "more efficient" than reality itself and that therefore we are more likely to be in a simulation are uhm... in dire need of some basic understanding of thermodynamics. And statistics.
I'm not a simulationist, but both quantum and relativistic phenomena do look a lot like simulation optimizations to patch over increased granularity of a simulation and improve parallelism in a simulation.
For instance, my understanding is that nuclear reactor simulations mesh the volume into volumes much much larger than atoms (cm-scale, in most cases, I guess) and then use bulk statistics for each element of the mesh. A finer mesh is much more expensive to compute, and gives diminishing returns in terms of accuracy.
My fist job was discrete event network simulation. Some competitors used per-link bulk statistics instead of per-packet discrete events to run simulations much faster, but with lower accuracy. We had a reduced-accuracy hybrid simulation mode to use per-link bulk statistics to affect the per-packet event simulations for an epoch, and then use those results to update the link bulk statistics for the next epoch. I'm sure these sorts of optimizations are common across all kinds of simulation domains.
Limiting information travel to the speed of light, and using true randomness instead of hidden state determinism would improve simulation parallelization.
Someone might reasonably believe the "real" universe isn't quantitized and/or it's quanta are smaller than our universe's, and our observations of quantum phenomena are artifacts of the use of bulk statistics in simulating the mesh of our universe.
The simulation hypothesis on its own may be solipsism but it's philosophically useful as a limiting condition of someone's theory of the universe, especially when they're emphatic that it's not a simulation. Have you proved the universe is not a simulation? If so, where is your proof? What is the nature of your proof? How can you have proved this thing?
It is a useful tool for showing someone has overstepped all evidence and logic. Unless someone really does manage to prove it, in which case hand them all the Nobel prizes and Fields medals for the year because they'll have earned them.
It's no more useful a limiting condition of someone's theory of the universe than a divine being or facetious spaghetti monster though. Positing something else which oversteps all evidence and logic and demanding someone disprove it isn't a particularly good way of emphasising the deficits in their own evidence base or inferences
I think you may misunderstand my point. I'm saying when "they" claim to have disproved the simulation hypothesis, it is useful to show that they have overstepped their bounds.
You can't disprove the simulation hypothesis. You can be as pissed about that as you like, but it's true. That doesn't mean all hope is lost. You can still work in the space where you just sort of take it as an ambient background fact that you can't do much about, then work with what you have. Technically that's what we do all the time anyhow. But when someone rigidly excludes the hypothesis, you know they've gone too far.
No it isn't.
Only if you think simulation theory only applies to YOU.
If you think you are the only one in the simulation, sure, it might be solipsism.
But that is not generally what simulation theory is speculating about.
Same with people miss-interpreting various ideas as Nihilism. Sure, if you take it from a vary narrow point of your own view, it might be.
In both cases, the people are generally not looking at the subject correctly.
> if you think simulation theory only applies to YOU
Is there any reason to think otherwise (if one believes in simulation in the first place)? Why simulate the whole universe, when it is sufficient to simulate just one's internal state? Doesn't even require to simulate the high-definition sensory perception, only the mind's latent space — which surely is way more compact. Occam's razor.
Ah, and it is totally not required to simulate your internal state at every moment at all times. It could be just one single moment that captures the feeling of continuity, and then you disappear to the void, but you never realize. See "Boltzmann brains" (again, it is not required to simulate the actual wetware on atomic level, just the compact internal state of the mind).
I've never heard of solipsism and so read a paragraph on wikipedia. I've wondered myself about sorta the same concept. Everything you could possibly know and understand can only come from your senses. I guess simulation theory is like the probability of a MITM attack on your senses...
I don’t really relate solipsism to simulation theory. Solipsism is boring and doesn’t have much depth beyond being a “whoa” moment when first encountered.
Simulation theory raises actual questions about meaning and the afterlife, offers some hypothesis to debate, etc.
By extension, does that imply you also don’t care about subjective experience if they can’t be proven empirically?
For those downvoting: The article says that the author does not care about any question that cannot be dis/proven empirically. The hard question of consciousness seems to fall in this category, so I'm asking the OP to elaborate if they fully agree with the article or have a different nuanced perspective.
Given the author, I wonder how many states a binary TM would need to run a universe that is complex enough to contain intelligent entities that think about things like TMs...
Counterintuitively, the less you specify the universe, the less you need to run it. What happens is your runtime bloats like crazy, exponentially or even beyond. But the TM itself becomes simpler and simpler as you remove constraints.
The TM to run all possible TMs is not complicated. Putting it together is an extended homework problem. Probably even easier to put together the lambda calculus expression to evaluate all possible lambda calculus expressions, or the equivalent in other TM-complete computation models. (We use TMs because they have some nice proof characteristics but we pay for those with the difficulty of "programming" them.) To say our universe is "certainly" in there is a difficult statement to prove, but all possible arbitrarily-precise simulations of it must be, even if an "arbitrarily precise" simulation functions with an arbitrarily-large lookup table of the random results of quantum interactions. The TM that runs all TMs isn't just running all the cute little TMs with 12 states that reverse a string or something. It runs all of them. Even the ones with Tree(Tree(3)) states in them. Even the ones with numbers of states that make Tree(Tree(3)) look tiny. And then the ones that make those look tiny, and so on.
It's just that the resources required to run this are effectively infinite, on the grounds that no universe could ever have enough resources to reach its own execution, let alone anything else.
is (denoted with de Bruijn indices) a binary tree containing all closed lambda terms. For example identity may be found at T 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0, where 0 = \x\y.x and 1 = \x\y.y move to the left and right subtree respectively.
If simulation is modeling for intelligent entities thinking about the simulation, does it also model for them trying to break it and succeeding? Does that simulate the simulation breakage, or break it?
Interesting. The argument made at the end of the blog is analogous to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. There must be a larger formal system in which the existing system can be computed and defined. The only way out is if the universe isn't fully deterministic and can't be defined formally(1). God/Simulation or Chaos, I suppose.
(1) - This may not hold. If so, I'd love someone to explain to me why Godel can't be applied in this way, or extended to cover simulated systems with formal rules.
I'm more interested in what is simulated, why it is simulated and for what reasons the plug may be pulled.
Simulation implies there is an operator of it with an intention for it.
Even if it is only for his/her/its/whatever own pleasure or curiosity.
The inspiration of the simulation thesis is obviously a thinly veiled idea of a creator God, no doubt.
What will it do when it realizes that its Little Computer People are starting to use the resources of its simulation (information, computing capacity, matter, energy) to simulate their own little world?
Does this thwart its plans, contaminates the experimental setup?
Is it what it is researching?
Computational universe is not necessarily a lattice universe. We can compute with a graph of relationships (including distances between particles) and time snapshots; I think this model fits better.
Why argue much about a single level of simulation when you could instead try the majesty of an infinite tower of simulations within simulations. Why would it stop at a single level ? What is the nature of consciousness within a simulated universe ? What is the nature of consciousness within an infinite tower of simulated universes ? Think big, think weird. It's nearly the weekend. Peace.
"You", "me", alls of "us" are probably just a single Boltzmann brain. There is no past and no future for this existence. It's a flash with the illusion of a past that never happened.
Simulation theory is tired in the popular and pragmatic sense. The answer to the question doesn’t have much bearing on our day to day lives. And that likely for the best.
But that doesn't make it irrelevant to the philosophy of science and metaphysics. We very direly need to resolve why half our physics is continuous and the other half discrete.
Looping recursive simulation... That sounds very interesting and very very scary somehow.
Now i haven't done any recursive programming except on some basic programs on the ZX Spectrum many many years ago, but it felt kinda weirdly evil and forbidden when i was able to order code to modify itself.
The simulation hypothesis is a reflection of a society where most of the atheists were raised in religious households and they still can't quite let go.
> Tong quickly admits that his claim to refute the simulation hypothesis is just “clickbait”—i.e., an excuse to talk about the fermion doubling problem—and that his “true” argument against the simulation hypothesis is simply that Elon Musk takes the hypothesis seriously (!).
Yeah. PhD have to eat too.
We disdain academics when they are too hype, then turn around when good information doesn't get wide spread, we blame them for being to 'dry'.
Do we allow marketing or not. We dislike when media over-hypes, we dislike media when it doesn't get the word out.
You can build a better mouse-trap, doesn't mean anything if nobody knows about it.
People, overwhelmingly, don’t like the simulation hypothesis.
Simulation suggests that an intelligence created, crafted, made our simulation.
As a Christian the hypothesis fits.
“Store not treasures for yourselves here where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and thieves do not break in and steal.”
“This is not your home you are sojourners here.”
“The Father is spirit and not flesh He looks for those who worship Him in spirit.”
These phrases make much more sense if we live in a simulation.
Jesus’ miracles and resurrection make sense if we’re in a simulation.
Wikipedia's article on Spinoza quotes Clare Clarisle's book Spinoza's Religion (Princeton University Press, 2021) as saying "When seventeenth-century readers accused Spinoza of atheism, they usually meant that he challenged doctrinal orthodoxy, particularly on moral issues, and not that he denied God’s existence."
Which is the thing, language changes. The word "atheist" doesn't mean the same thing it meant 350 years ago. (Even today, it doesn't have a single meaning, but that's a whole other topic.)
In a simulation probability must be itself simulated. With enough simulations the actuality of an accurate version of probability being simulated is low. There are a million different ways and axioms we can use to change and modify probability in a simulation. Thus every reality could have a different probability and you cannot rely on probability to make your conclusions.
Therefore we cannot make any conclusion here about simulations.
* The physics of the world that is running the simulation can be completely different from ours. Just like we can put together a bit of software that runs a computer simulation with pretty much any rules we want.
* Even if the world that is running the simulation has a similar concept of time as ours, it is not guaranteed that the rate of simulation is constant. So if our world gets more complicated the simulation rate might be slowing down and we would be none the wiser. Just like a computer physics simulation does not have to progress at a constant rate (in can render things faster when there is less entities and then slow down later when there are more entities -- to produce a movie that runs at a constant speed).
* We have no idea yet what are underlying rules that govern our world, let alone be able to infer anything about the simulation based on it. Claiming that quantum physics is because of limitations or bugs in the simulation is at the very least super premature.
I am careful not to say that we are or are not simulated and that's because I simply believe there is insufficient data. I think there are some convincing arguments for the simulation in the way how the rules seem constructed to prevent us from understanding what is really happening. But there might just be a good explanation for this just like there is a good explanation for general relativity that comes directly from understanding some mathematical facts.