Do We Live in a Simulation?

Back to the simulation idea, if we are in a simulation, which makes sense. Everything we do is controlled, maybe not controlled but calculated.

For instance, I'm currently listening to The Social Network by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Why did I choose this, it gets me in the mood, it makes me feel something, I'm controlled by it. Music is an extension of us. It like other inputs in life has a say in who we are. We feel it and need it, we are it. People create music to evoke a response, surely that's why the most powerful songs are love songs, the emotion we can't always quantify...

If we are in a simulation are we meant to understand everything? Surely not. Then the simulation would be over. We could surmise the end and then what would be the point.

If the universe we live in was created by a single explosion, then technically we are in a simulation, we are the effects of that bang. We are energy seekers and movers. We are a part in the cog turning to no end.

The point of life, there is no point. We exist and then we don't. I think that's fine. Should we expect more?

I mean, the definition of life is different to so many people. The western world is seeking status and a monk is seeking enlightenment. Who is right and who is wrong, it's in the eye of the beholder. Life is what we decide it to be or do we...

We are the sum of our pasts, we are the sum of our choices, we are the sum of the equation that is life.

Every step is adding to the formula we set out and was set out for us.

We are given the chance to exist and guided by those who have learned what "is best", or merely the sum of their learnings and opportunities.

I feel like my calling is to think and if this made you think then maybe that calling is correct. If you agree or disagree that calling is correct.

Ask geohot.

10 GOTO 10

Can't tell.

History repeats itself because: 1. People reproduce and die. The lessons learnt cannot be transmitted to the future generation in an error free way. Also, any such "lesson learnt" can be questioned. For example, how can be sure that event "A" really happened? Books, images, videos, all can be unreliable. If you cannot for sure say that an event happened in the past, then how can you learn anything from it?

2. I think this is more important than (1). We humans don't want to learn certain lessons due to inherent biases. We may live with these inconvenient "lessons" for short term gains, but given a chance, we want to forget these lessons and start over.

Because of 1 and 2, over generations, history repeats.

For what its worth, I don't think we're in a simulation as such, but in an uncontrolled experiment. Stuff happens here which is ultimately meaningless, but we assign it meaning in the short term.

I'm not but you are.

My uncle knows the answer to this question. Let me go ask him.

This question is as meaningless as a question could possibly be.

Because answer doesn’t change a single thing.

Not in the real world, nor in theoretical implications.

If the answer is no - whatever.

If yes - all relevant issues are just delegated “as is” to the next level (im simulated, mkay, but who is simulating me, i.e. who am i? Whats the meaning of his life? Etc.)

Typical Occam’s razor case.

Hello there Neo..

I've long thought that, in practical terms, we all pretty much are. The universe is, to all intents and purposes a figment of my [and your] imaginations.

We have no experience of its existence from before we were born. We can be told and shown things that supposedly happened back then. But with no 'cogito ergo sum' first hand experience of them, how do we know any of that is real?

When we die, our own personal universe will wink out of existence for us and, again, we're being asked to believe that it will somehow continue outside of our ability to experience it.

Which kind of segués into another of my philosophical mind-benders; how did the universe exist before there was even the most primitive form of life anywhere? Because, how can something 'be' when nothing exists to experience it?

does it matter ? Either answer will not conclude anything. Best answer probably is to enjoy your time here , be nice write well written and documented code !!

We do not learn from history, thus historys repeats.

In the first place history and the world is far to complex to learn everything and anything. Second, we all are constantly in the process of learning and everyone is at different stages in their process. And third: history often is the result of conditions, and these conditions often are unavoidable, leading to similar history unfolding.

It's a complex world with complex processes and complex problems. And we are just limited beings.

What would a simulation be simulating? Personally I think it is a dumb, anthropocentric argument.

I think it is far more likely that each moment is eternal.

I think simulation is a bad argument for a few reasons.

First and foremost, I find it a way to try to escape the idea of God. Those who take this stance are admitting the universe is fine-tuned to the point of appearing created, but rather than suggesting some sort of God designed it, attribute it to man. Thus we arrive at a neoCreationism, which results in the unfortunate side effect of complete, rigid, inescapable, deterministic nihilism. It is the only rational outcome of such a world; living with knowledge of its true nature would become torturous. Your existence would be a mockery, a farce with no meaning, and an ultimate condemnation to stochastic noise in the grand scheme of un-reality.

At least with a God you can attempt to justify the idea of free will, even with the idea of omniscience. With a simulation, everything is predetermined by various random seeds, so at any given time all that occurs is the whirring of vacuum tubes, or the flipping of bits, which marches onward until things in this false world reach some sort of termination criterion. At that point, there is no hope, the simulation WILL end, and you well before it, with nothing of you to survive the program.

Secondly, I think it's a bad argument because of how messy the world is. Typically in a simulation you need to make simplifying assumptions, and those tend not to include infinitely irrational numbers, constantly rendering high-poly 3D objects, and all the colors, smells, and other sensory input we deal with constantly. "Just make pi=3.14159 and call it a day, it's enough precision for our needs". Instead, all the messiness we know and have access to would point to this actually being reality, especially if you consider the whole "the map becomes the territory" issue. If some people a layer up in the simulation were capable of producing all this detail, they would need an insane amount of resources to do so, which is unlikely if they're also trying to simulate their own reality accurately. Consequently, if they were in a simulation, the production of another computer in their own simulation to run a new simulation would likely take up all the processing power/memory of the layer above them, thus causing a cascade of Out Of Memory exceptions until we're left with the original reality. Such simulations would be doomed from the start.

Thirdly, about the whole history repeating itself thing, I believe it occurs due to a few things. I posit it's the combination of the limits of human consciousness to perceive a threat horizon past a few decades, combined with the consequences of disrupting homeostatic systems that have little-to-no error correction for large scale instability.

The threat horizon issue is blatantly apparent if you consider modern society: many people are in bad health due to poor decision making (drug addiction, obesity, etc). While the consequences of their actions are not immediate, the rewards are; therefore, the self-harmful behavior continues. This also replicates itself at larger scales of governments due to our inability to effectively regulate behaviors that produce immediate benefit with only a risk of long term damage (see climate change, and lobbying). The long term damage WILL come with enough rolls of the dice, but it's easy to justify the behavior when getting a hit of dopamine. That's how heart disease, addiction, corruption, and societal collapse happen. One metaphorical cheeseburger at a time.

Finally, once these homeostatic systems do collapse, the people placed into these new uncomfortable situations desire to build something better for their families. Thus the slow, Sisyphean march toward a comfortable utopia will repeat itself. To break the cycle, we must either find a way to think rationally about our decisions without considering pleasurable rewards as primary motivators, or stop caring about rewards altogether. Its the desire for them that both drives progress from moral actors seeking the betterment of others, and drives regress from unsc...

The universe is not a simulation.

Our perception of our own lives IS a simulation. Our brain sits in the dark, with no actual contact to the outside world, receiving input through our evolutionary derived senses. Our senses are optimized for survival, as is our consciousness. We can never perceive things as they truly are, instead our brain builds a story that matches the observed "facts". This is why optical illusions work, for example.

History is similarly a projection of the past made by gathering imperfect data, that tries to tell a coherent story that is compact enough to use as a teaching aid. History does NOT repeat, it rhymes.

  Long, long ago, folks got tired of having to re-implement compilers every time they got a new computer with an incompatible new instruction set, so they eventually invented the UCSD P-code system. This allowed far more portability of code, and helped popularize the Pascal language.

  UCSD Pascal had a problem though, all code ran at the same privilege level, so it was easy to crash the environment, and debugging became a problem. Plus, it ran slower than native code, so it was passed over in the end.

  Eventually, people at SUN got tired of having to re-implement their compilers on incompatible processors, and having seen P-code, wrote their own virtual system called Java. But everything ran at the same privilege level, so it was prone to breaking, plus it ran slower than native code.

  So eventually, the folks at Microsoft got tired of having to port everything to new incompatible instruction sets, and having seen pCode and Java, decided to implement .NET so the could run one set of code everywhere. But it was slower, and had all the same issues, and never ran as fast as native win32 calls.

You see the theme I wove, the imperfection of the facts, all designed to show you how the same things keeps happening, over and over. But let me through one more at you

  The customers of IBM were spending a lot of time re-implementing things on each new incompatible machine. IBM decided to implement a hardware virtual machine, which made it possible to run the old software on the new machine, with no loss of performance (thanks to faster new machines). However, at that time people expected to have to re-write their applications on new incompatible machines, so they optimized for the present day, and didn't have to worry about timelines exceeding a decade or so, as they would be re-writing things to take advantage of the new hardware.

  When backwards compatibility came along, it had the effect of freezing many systems as they were in the late 1950s and 1960s, and giving those programs an artificially long life. This was the root cause for the Y2K problem.

So, now a counter-example shows that history isn't quite as repetitive as I first showed. I'm also certain that I've got a few errors in my history, as others will be happy to point out.

Lastly, <--- this (Hacker News) ---> is a community of people who have found enough coherence between our views of the world that it is worth it for us to all visit here and share our time and attention. It is mediated through a stack of code written in a variant of Lisp. I have no idea how it is actually funded. Dang moderates it and keeps us all in check, providing stewardship of this whole crazy thing. The fact that it's all bits at the bottom end doesn't mean it is simulated, just that it is quantifiable, as are the particles in our universe.