If I say that below the surface of earth there are green goblins who suck down objects from the air and then an apple drops from a tree - that does not prove me right. It just does not prove me wrong.
Modern scientific authority derives from a inheritance of proofen right, which people who hang around in online communities usually do not know about. Add to that the "progressive" tendencies to smash the "old" - now taken over by the alt-right and you get a ahistoric bunch of fool, who would throw dirt at everyone no matter how right or wrong his hypothesis was.
There is a history of anti-history, as in revolutionary movements that tried to erase pre-existing culture. When napoleon conquered europe, the secularisation swept Europe and secularized monastrys, destroyed churches etc. Ironically like the catholic church, a thousand years prior.
Old books were thrown into fire or used to pave muddy roads.
And it was always for "progress" as in, the catholic church did it for progress, the protestant threw part of it out for "progress", the secularization threw the rest of it out for you guessed it. While it has its moments (the catholic church owned half of europe and its lands ripped away created a fresh start) those "Picture-storms" always created a wave of destruction too. When all the old is gone and nothing but the "horror" stories about the "before" times remain, you loose alot of knowledge too. Including the knowledge that all of this has been done a thousand times, for a thousand good and bad reasons and that even the "erasing" the past, has a long, bad history.
Since Einstein did not observe this extreme situation of a star around a black hole prior to formulating his theory, it does proof him right. It was a falsification observation, and it verified the theory.
Apples and goblins should produce predictions that differ from existing theory, and predict a new type of observation that could confirm its correctness versus existing work.
In a fundamental sort of way you're quite correct. Science can never _prove_ things correct in the same way mathematicians do. In fact, science constantly revises over time. It is not "done". And as a reminder, the way something is proved is when recognised scientific minds perform peer review and conclude it is proved. And they often get it "wrong" as most published science is later proven incorrect. This is science working.
However, this doesn't open the floodgates to any old theory because a simpler theory that explains the data is preferrable to a more complex one. Your green goblin theory might fit the data, but then leaves open questions like what do green goblins eat, why were they not detected previously, what else might they affect etc etc.
"In the case of stars orbiting close to a spinning, supermassive black hole, frame dragging should cause the star's orbital plane to precess about the black hole spin axis. This effect should be detectable within the next few years via astrometric monitoring of stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy."
And it's exactly this they are showing in the article.
The "artist's animation" show periapsis getting higher or lower (depending on how you interpret direction of motion of the star) which is not how orbits work.
These people (linked in the article) calculated the effect to be "12' per orbital period":
I'm starting to wonder if we will ever have a single unified theory or if QM and relativity will never be married. Maybe the universe works different at different scales etc?
Maybe relativity is the aproximate, fast calculation for calculating distant world cells. Meanwhile, QM is there for detailed local-world cell calculations.
The split is there because running the entire simulation completely in QM is overkill will bring the main CPU to its knees.
but even if you run our current QM (i.e. the standard model) simulation completely you would still not recover general relativity. Some sort of quantum gravity is still needed.
Reality isn't a simulation because QM is non-deterministic.
The non-determinism and measurement fidelity of QM also means reality is classically non-deterministic, as in chaotic systems which cannot be predicted beyond short horizons because measurement precision in initial conditions forbids it.
Algorithmic/computational models of reality are therefore false ("aproximations") rather than the converse. All computations are functions from N to N -- and randomness in the QM sense isn't a function.
Ie., a QM/Classical-Chaotic system is a "function" from state-space X to measurement space Y such that for some X there is no determinate Y. This isn't a function; and hence not computable.
> Reality isn't a simulation because QM is non-deterministic.
That doesn't necessarily follow. It's totally possible for us to observe non-determinism within a simulation. Reductio ad absurdum - the simulation could be of what we think we know, rather than actually what we observe.
> Reductio ad absurdum - the simulation could be of what we think we know, rather than actually what we observe.
Given we're talking about a universe-scale simulation, I don't think that's actually absurd. We wouldn't be able to do that, no, but we wouldn't be able to do any of this. It's obviously possible in principle.
No, reductio ad absurdum: The simulation could be of you. Just you. All other people are simulated only to whatever degree is needed when they interact with you; people who don't, are only simulated as trendlines.
> It's totally possible for us to observe non-determinism within a simulation
You can never really observe non-determinism. All you can say is that there is no observable determinism; you can never exclude the possibility of hidden patterns you aren’t smart enough to notice. Maybe our observations are totally deterministic but we will never be able to know because the determinism is computationally intractable, or depends on variables we cannot observe
Arguments from QM, such as Bell’s theorem, are sometimes presented as disproving hidden determinism: but, at best, only disprove local determinism, and leave the possibility of non-local determinism entirely intact; and when one considers the possibility of “superdeterminism” (that the observer’s choices of what observations to make are determined by the same determinism as the system being observed) maybe don’t even do that
If we're in a simulation, you have no basis for drawing conclusions about any of our observations, whether those observations have taken place, whether anything outside of this moment exists, or anything outside your mind, or both.
The notion that non-determinism can be proven, exists, and/or has a relevance to a simulation all make assumptions about reality that either won't or don't have to hold if you're in a simulation.
> If we're in a simulation, you have no basis for drawing conclusions about any of our observations, whether those observations have taken place, whether anything outside of this moment exists, or anything outside your mind, or both.
But then simulation is unfalsifiable. Whatever you observe, the simulation could have paused an arbitrary number of times, or modified you or the environment to an arbitrary degree, hence it's compatible with simulation. Which makes simulation "a difference that makes no difference".
Without wanting to speak on their behalf, I think that's exactly vidarh's point. That simulation is indeed unfalsifiable and therefore mjburgess' conjecture that it's false doesn't hold.
A theory known to be unfalsifiable cannot be conclusively ruled "false." It can only be deemed outside of the realm of science. To make such a strong claim puts one back in the realm of faith in pseudoscience.
I like the word "bullshit." Bullshit isn't necessarily true, isn't necessarily false, it's simply not worth my time to wade into it.
The simulation theory rests on a hypothesis that there are certain conditions outside of simulation, but if external conditions are certain, then the simulation has limited flexibility and is thus falsifiable. For it to be unfalsifiable external conditions must be at least unfathomable, which takes away the premise of the simulation theory that it correctly guessed external conditions.
Is sounds like you're discussing a specific simulation hypothesis. I'm assuming you're referring to Bostrom's Simulation Argument, but that is only one possible variant of simulation. Bostrom's Simulation Argument posits that one of three propositions are likely to be true, of which only one posits that we're likely in a simulation. The "simulation proposition" of the argument could be falsified by e.g. humanity going extinct (proving the first proposition of the argument true, but the 3rd - the simulation one - to be false).
But falsifying that proposition would not falsify the notion of simulation.
As macguillicuddy pointed out, the point was that the general concept of simulation is indeed unfalsifiable, and we can only ever hope to falsify very limited subsets. E.g. we can certainly say certain things about what features a simulation must have.
It does however not necessarily make a simulation a difference that makes no difference, because if we're in a simulation it is possible that we are in one where it is possible to falsify the theory that we're not in a simulation.
E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.
The problem of course being that you could well devote a lifetime to it and find nothing and it would tell you nothing about whether we're in a simulation or not, so unless you run into some anomaly that hints at it, it'd seem a rather wasteful pursuit.
In reality, of course, chances are none of us will ever see anything to give us reason to pursue that idea, but it's fun to think about. I write short stories about this subject, and I have a long document with headache-inducing scenarios to write up.
To avoid hypotheses that are unfalsifiable is good practice absent evidence because you can construct an infinite number of such hypotheses. That does not mean that a given unfalsifiable hypothesis can not be true, however, just that pursuing it is generally likely to be a waste of effort.
Asserting that simulation is definitely true absent evidence would be unjustified, but very few people would make that claim, so it's not very relevant.
However the inverse - the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation - is falsifiable by proving that we are in a simulation. And any number of variations over the idea that we might be in a simulation can also be testable and falsifiable in various ways.
The original point of contention was that QM and non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation, however, and that is not a viable way to falsify the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation. The hypothesis that non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation is falsifiable by coming up with a way wherein non-determinism can be accommodated.
If the world the simulator runs in has access to non-determinism this is trivially done by simply forwarding non-determinism into the simulation (many other approaches to attack that hypothesis are possible, e.g. using a additional simulations as oracles to determine if supposedly non-deterministic events would be revealed as such, and use that to pick values that ensures a failure to simulate non-determinism never gets detected, so access to a source of non-determinism is not necessary to falsify that hypothesis either, though it would complicate matters). As such the hypothesis that non-determinism alone proves we're not in a simulation is false.
I have no idea what you're trying to say. Why would it be bad? It makes no sense. All it means is insisting it is true without evidence makes no sense. But nobody here is making that claim.
Unjustifiability means unfathomability; unfathomability suggests impossibility. And if simulation theory is impossible, its unfalsifiability is of no help.
This makes no sense to me whatsoever. You're using these words to means things entirely different from how I use them. Going by your use of them, simulation theory can not be proven unjustifiable, because that would make it falsifiable.
I don't have a rigorous proof that unfathomability implies impossibility, it's just a strong suggestion and demonstration that you incur a high risk of assuming an impossible thing into existence.
I think Bostrom’s core argument is likely valid - the more ancestor simulations you run, the greater the odds you are actually in one yourself. Now, right now that number is zero, and we don’t know if it will ever rise above zero, and even if one day it does, that day is likely many centuries away. But maybe in 500 or 5000 years time, ancestor simulations will be very numerous, and Bostrom’s argument may convince many people in such a scenario
Unfalsifiable propositions can be true, and it is even possible to have good reason-whether direct or indirect evidence-for believing one
“Somewhere and somewhen in this universe there exists an extremely controversial and very famous politician named Donald Trump” is an example of a proposition which is true, and we have very good reason to believe is true, but which is strictly speaking unfalsifiable, indeed almost inherently so. Even if we suppose our Donald Trump had never been born, we could not rule out the possibility of some very famous and controversial politician having that name (let’s say named by a very similar sequence of sounds) existing on a planet in a distant galaxy. If one accepts a B theory view of time, that proposition has always been true, and was just as true in 5000 BCE as it is today, but nobody back then could have possibly known it was true.
But it is worth also remembering that Bostroms Simulation Argument is an argument for simulation, not the only one possible.
To me the original point I made was simply that non-determinism can't falsify simulation.
More broadly I believe simulation is unfalsifiable, because the impossibility of proving we have existence in time (our consciousness could exist for only a moment, and we can't tell, because we have access to the past only as memories which could be fake), or that a world outside ourselves exists (our sensory inputs could be fake) means we can say hardly anything about the scale or complexity of a theoretical simulation. Said another way: we don't know even how much of ourselves exists.
That opens the door to a vast set of possible simulation arguments, but also raises the question of whether there is a clear line between simulation and what reality is. E.g. you can imagine a similar set of possible conceptions of a physical reality. If physical reality is that our existence is mere fragmentary moments of parts of a mind, then that would mean any experience we might think we have one day of building simulations would themselves be illusory.
So it's not a given that we can meaningfully tell whether or not a simulation exists even if we one day believe we successfully build one, because the experience of building the simulation might well be the totality of the experience. There's no certainty said simulation ever exists.
Trying to nail down what we can actually infer about this is something we'll struggle with for a very long time.
Even defining in concrete terms what is simulation vs. simply an arrangement of physical reality is unclear (think Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where Earth was a computer)
> because the impossibility of proving we have existence in time (our consciousness could exist for only a moment, and we can't tell, because we have access to the past only as memories which could be fake), or that a world outside ourselves exists (our sensory inputs could be fake) means we can say hardly anything about the scale or complexity of a theoretical simulation. Said another way: we don't know even how much of ourselves exists.
Consider the following argument:
1] If P being true is a necessary precondition for rational thought to exist, we are rationally justified in believing that P is true
2] The general reliability of our memories is a necessary precondition for rational thought to exist
3] Therefore, we are rationally justified in believing that our memories are generally reliable
4] Therefore, our memories are generally reliable
From the general reliability of our memories, the substantial existence of the past trivially follows; does that count as "proving we have existence in time"? And replace the "general reliability of our memories" with "the existence of other minds" to turn the above argument into a proof of the later.
> but also raises the question of whether there is a clear line between simulation and what reality is.
I actually think the simulation hypothesis is a pretty good argument for idealism: if the simulation hypothesis is true, then either materialism is simply false (if one interprets "matter" to mean only the apparent physical matter of this universe), or else its truth is unknowable (if one interprets "matter" to mean the unknowable matter of the substrate universe.) If we cannot know whether the simulation hypothesis is true, how can we know that materialism is true? By contrast, if idealism is true, then minds and their experiences are the most fundamental constituents of reality; whether this universe is a simulation is simply a question about whether there exists another universe containing minds who have the experience of operating a computer simulation which appears to contain minds having particular experiences, where those particular experiences happen to be identical to the set of all experiences had by all minds in this universe. Idealism could be equally true no matter what the answer to that question may be. The ontological status of this universe is completely independent of whether that separate simulating universe happens to exist; in principle, our universe could even be simultaneously simulated by multiple distinct simulating universes.
>It does however not necessarily make a simulation a difference that makes no difference, because if we're in a simulation it is possible that we are in one where it is possible to falsify the theory that we're not in a simulation.
Since, as you said, there are infinite possible unfalsifiable theories, it's a good idea to avoid them. It's better to deal with them when evidence does appear; otherwise you have an infinite number of them to go through.
> E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.
I'm not sure that's even decidable. Is, say, relativity a glitch in the Matrix or just the way the universe works? Or, to flip the question on its head: do simulations we can construct behave like the real world because the real world is simulated, or just because what we can construct is limited by the world we live in?
I think these outright flaws would have to be very obvious to unambiguously point to simulation. And I can't escape the feeling that the simulation idea is a modern version of Newton's clockwork universe: trying to explain the universe by the metaphors we have available today.
I'm taking "being a simulation" to mean something like "implementable by a universal Turing machine".
If "simulation" is just an alleged property everything is meant to have (ie., sim = "seeming-as-if real but actually being a... dream, ...").
Then the argument against it is simply pragmatic: rather than add "seeming-as-if" to everything we say, drop it.
Adding it can make no difference, which is stipulated by this definition of "simulation".
You could also make a kind of rationality argument: consider the family of all such seeming-as-if properties, say S; and the family of all real properties R.
Given conditioning on S essentially makes all claims false, eg., P(I am a human awake on earth | S) = 0
Ditching the S properties is equivalent, essentially, to reasoning being possible.
So if we are in a simulation essentially every judgement we make is false. So to beleieve we're in a simulation, ie., to condition on being in one, prevents any thought/reasoning/etc.
To actually believe we're in a simulation, in this sense, you'd be completely incapable of essentially any thought wahtsoever.
Well this is basically the philosophical argument between George Berkeley's subjective idealism[1] vs. philosophical materialism (though Berkeley as far as I remember - it's been a couple of decades - at least thought minds were real, and if in a simulation that is also not a given), so it's a well trodden area of philosophy going back to the 18th century, with parts of the ideas dating back much further.
You're right that since we can't falsify the general idea of simulation, it makes sense to simply discount it in most discourse, because we just have to act as if the world is real.
(EDIT: I'll add that "implementable by a universal Turing machine" or not does not change any of this in either direction)
This is the most straightforward rejection of Berkeley's idealism as well.
But that is different from discounting the possibility.
Because while we can't falsify the hypothesis that we're in a simulation, as I've expanded on in another comment too, if we are in one there's at least a possibility that we are in one where the hypothesis that we are not in one can be falsified (e.g. a doorway could open in front of me to let me "exit" the simulation; as wildly unlikely as it is; or we could travel into space and hit a literal wall, or an infinite number of other things)
Going further, it's in particular different from discounting the possibility because of details of the world, because all of what we think we know is a product of processes that if we are in a simulation could have been manipulated or outright manufactured.
So you're right that in our day to day lives it makes sense to just not worry about whether we are in a simulation or not and act as if we're not.
I don't agree that a belief in one would affect our ability to reason, though, as we are good at compartmentalising and saying exactly what we're saying here: As long as / until we can tell we're in a simulation, you just go on acting as if you're not. Whether you believe you're in one or not doesn't really make a difference as long as you have no evidence either way.
The only way we could "continue to reason" is if there were a systematic way of taking claims about the environment, say C and translating them into some "neutral language", C'.
This was Husserl's project. But it's a failure.
Consider the case where realism is true: the environment causes us to enter a brain state which is ambiguious, so we cannot recover perfect information about the enviroment. Eg., light hits our eyes from a 3D room in a largely 2D way so we get depth perception wrong. A common occurance.
This means that there is a metaphysics, say R, where if R is true then all descriptions derivative/about anything metal may be systematically false.
In this sense realism is a scepticism about the "netural language" idealism presumes.
Since this scepticism is at least coherent/possible, there is no neutral language.
ie., the global sceptic says P(I am human|Scepticism) = 0 for a particualr Scepticism, eg., "youre in a dream" etc.
The idealist says: let's translate to a neutral language. P(Perceptions seem as if human|Scepticism) = 1
The realist says this is not 1, and may be zero, eg., when
So realism offers a scepticism that idealism cannot overcome. There is no neutral language. And so reasoning does become impossible.
Eg., consider the claim "the object is 1m away" has to be translated to "perceptions seem as-if objects are 1m away" but in the case of an ambgious perception there is no fact about what "seems as-if" -- so you loose the ability to even talk about objects being at any distnace.
And since perceptions are bascially always ambigous there is no means by which you can translate objective claims into neutral subjective ones.
The choice to reason becomes the choice of a domain (of concepts) with which to interpret claims. A priori there is no neutral choices (eg., Idealism is NOT neutral!) -- so any sceptical choice becomes a decline to reasoning as such or a positive claim about the way the world is.
> The only way we could "continue to reason" is if there were a systematic way of taking claims about the environment, say C and translating them into some "neutral language", C'.
By this argument, we can't continue to reason, as we can't falsify the hypothesis that we might be in a simulation.
We clearly can continue to reason, on the basis of working within a set of assumptions / axioms that presume that what appears to be physical reality is physical reality.
That we can't disprove that it isn't physical reality is irrelevant.
Conditioning on any global scepticism disables reasoning.
Any any alternative is "positivistic" in the sense that it positsts against scepticism.
Idealism, ie., the false belief that there is a neutral language of "experience alone" is a posit against scepticism and presumes quite a radical metaphysics.
My point is that one alwayas has to condition on some positive account of the objectiuve content of our concepts in order to reason.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here or how it is meant to relate to the hypothesis of to possibility that our reality is a simulation.
The way you describe idealism also makes no sense to me. The way I understand what you wrote does not match Berkeley's subjective idealism at all. You call it false, but it's an unfalsifiable philosophical view, so while we can reject it as meaningless, you have no basis for saying it is false.
The idealists claim is a genetic fallacy: that since the product of the objective, the subjective, has a property P so must its origin. ie., the objective is Ideal because the subjective is Ideal.
In later idealism this became formalised as the claim that there is a "language of the subjective" -- but it is clear that Berkeley thinks this also. ie., that you can "describe your experiences as such".
This claim is false, and is basically just a restatement of the same genetic fallacy. Language describes the objective (eg., "I am in a room"), not the subjective. It is just asserted that since the objective = subjective, then this language is "ontologically neutral" -- ie., it "avoids metaphysics".
It does not! (1) the claim about the objective is metaphysical; (2) the language is still about the objective.
The idealists need there to be a "neutral language of the subjective" to avoid the challenge of scepticism -- ie., that all our claims are false.
But there is no neutral language. You cannot just "describe the subjective" to substitue for "describng the objetive".
To see this, suppose realism is true (ie., that you really are in a 3d space, with light hitting your eyes, etc.). In this situation you have an ambigious perception: it neither seems as-if you are 1m from the tv nor 2m (eg., consider the duck-rabbit illusion).
In this situation there is the objective claim "i am 1m from the tv" but no possible subjective reference for that claim. The subjective is ambiguous with respect to the objective. So idealism fails in its reply to scepticism: the subjective is ambiguous.
So what? Well then there is no reply to scepticism. If you believe all our claims are false then there is no "neutral language" to translate them into for the sake of "practical reasoning". To be sincere in this belief, you cannot reason.
Any sceptic (including idealists) who engages in conversation and claims to hold a global sceptical belief are just acting incoherently. They are, in fact, doing metaphysics.
Whatever "neutral language" they translate "ordinary claims" into entails a non-neutral set of metaphysical commitments. So to "reason at all" is to choose a metaphysics.
To connect this with the simulation point: to believe we are actually in a total simulation you are either (1)incapable of reasoning; or (2) asserting a contrary metaphysics without any justification whatsoever.
> The idealists claim is a genetic fallacy: that since the product of the objective, the subjective, has a property P so must its origin. ie., the objective is Ideal because the subjective is Ideal.
No, the idealists claim there is no objective, and that we only know the world subjectively via our senses. This is an unfalsifiable claim, because any attack on it can be written off by arguing that any experience of investigating the claim is coloured by the subjectivity of the senses.
The only viable "attack" on idealism is to accept that while it is possible, unless there is direct evidence - e.g. you observe things that would not be possible in a physical world - it is pointless to consider the idea because it is unfalsifiable.
This is much the same with simulation arguments - they're nothing but "digital versions" of idealism. What simulation arguments (any varianet, not just Bostrom's) gives us is a constraint that gives us something that could become worth investigating if we specific things. E.g. if we were to observe telltale signs of possible compression in physical reality
> This claim is false, and is basically just a restatement of the same genetic fallacy. Language describes the objective (eg., "I am in a room"), not the subjective. It is just asserted that since the objective = subjective, then this language is "ontologically neutral" -- ie., it "avoids metaphysics".
That languages seeks to make claims about the objective does not mean the claims are true.
A simple description of idealism in "physical terms" is to imagine three rooms connected in a series with a data feed A <-> B <-> C, where rooms A and C are minds, and B is physical reality, and where none of the rooms have any other ability to obtain information about what is outside the room. Idealism states that only A and C exists, and that B is an illusion produced by A and C or by as a product of their connection. Any statement you make "about the objective" is meaningless because you have no way of talking about an objective outside your room that is not based on the information obtained from the data feed.
If you are A you don't know if B exists or if C exists for that matter, because you have no source of information about them that you can prove is objective. Your data feed might be purely fake, it may come from you yourself, or it may be manipulated in all kinds of ways, or it may come from outside the rooms entirely. But there's a further problem: You only observe A as well through a stream of data that you believe to be internal to A, but you have no way of verifying that either. You can't prove A exists, have existed, or will exist. You can at most assert that in the given moment, something has an experience that gives an experience of time and space and consciousness. There is no way for you to independently verify the existence of time even.
You may not have existed before you read this and you may cease to exist after having read this, and I might not exist at all.
Now, if I were to assert that this is definitely true, that would be unjustified and idiotic. I can't even say if it is possible. I can say, however, that we have no means of falsifying it, and so any assertion - like the one that started this discussion - that anything we observe falsifies simulation, is unjustified.
> The idealists need there to be a "neutral language of the subjective" to avoid the challenge of scepticism -- ie., that all our claims are false.
The only viable attack on idealism is that it is unfalisifiable, and so not worth spending time on the unconstrained form of idealism.
That does not mean all forms of idealism are necessarily unfalsifiable; one can imagine constrained forms that set out further propositions that would make it detectable; e.g. in the subset of idealist philosophies of simulation theories, a simulation theory that posits ...
It isn’t really known whether QM is deterministic or not. In the 90s (before my time), I think the majority view was that it’s not, but more recently there are signs that all “interpretations” aren’t really equivalent after all, and some deterministic ones (Many Worlds…) have been gaining support.
Not exactly! This just applies to "local" hidden variables. See Bohmian mechanics for one which uses non-local hidden variables (i.e, not values at each spatial voxel but values per wavefunction, spread out over it) (from that description you can also imagine the problems this theory has in integrating with relativity).
The issue with the many-worlds interpretation is that it only provides for a local absence of randomness.
The process of splitting into many words, as well as necessary limitations on measurement, i think both leave you in non-computable territory.
You'd model this by generating an infinite number of Turing machines for each quantum event, but you'd also need to do something about the time horizon on prediction.
Ie., chaotic systems aren't long-run deterministic because of measurement limitations. So there's something like many uncountable infinities of Turing machines out there. As for each digit in X there is an infinity of many-worlds in Y (the nature of chaos).
I dont see this many-worlds vision giving you anything you can simulation. Rather its a useful conceptual heuristic when interpreting QM probabilities.
> The process of splitting into many words, as well as necessary limitations on measurement, i think both leave you in non-computable territory.
You don’t actually have to compute umpteen branches. You just have to simulate sufficient evidence to convince an observer in the simulation that many-worlds is true. Surely it is far easier to delude simulated people into believing some theory of physics is true, than to actually accurately simulate a universe in which it is true.
But, even that wholly accurate simulation - if we are living in a simulation, it is possible the physical laws of the “real” universe are very different from those of our own. If our simulators are living under very different laws of physics, they may have access to computational resources which would be “unphysical” in ours. They may even be capable of hypercomputation. Maybe their laws of physics contain an oracle for the halting problem. Maybe they can execute supertasks. Even proof that simulating our universe would be uncomputable does not exclude the possibility that we are simulated on a hypercomputer
We don’t even know that hypercomputation is physically impossible in this universe. We know of no way of achieving it given known physics, but we cannot exclude the possibility of unknown physical laws or processes which permit it, or even that it might be some bizarre mathematical consequence of existing theories which nobody has yet discovered. Maybe the hypercomputer will be the defining technological advance of the 57th century.
Why do you imply non-determinism when you very well no that’s not provable. I dislike people that mislead others online by deliberately writing false statements.
The universe works differently at different scales the same way water looks different at -5 oC and 120 oC. However there is an underlying theory that can explain both.
Finding that theory is hard to find for our current knowledge and capabilities. But extrapolating that this will remain so will not age well.
Do you think we will be able to grow capabilities indefinitely ? For example, let's imagine we know how to build a detector for some phenomenon. For some reason we need to go to another star (for example, to mine all of its planet for some unobtainiun). Then we would be stuck in our progress...
I'm not in physics but is there lot of room to improve our capabilities left ?
I'm not convinced that comparing two different states of matter is a useful comparison. The universe doesn't necessarily work differently, we're just observing different phenomena, aren't we? The behaviour of an atom or subatomic particles in isolation is not necessarily the behaviour of the same particles when part of a much larger system.
Could one could also argue that quantum indeterminacy makes it difficult make predictions the more interactions you add to a system? That is, interactions at the atomic and subatomic levels are manageable enough to observe, but as we add actors, the interactions grow exponentially, and each actor's state is influenced not just by itself but by other actors in the system, ad infinitum.
> I'm not convinced that comparing two different states of matter is a useful comparison.
Actually, it is probably a terrific comparison. What is a state change? It is a drastic change in the properties of a material once some threshold condition (usually temperature and/or pressure) is crossed. And in fact QM and GR describe the same system under different lenses - maybe not pressure or temperature but certainly different conditions.
Don't forget that the universe itself has undergone a phase transition, after (or during, depending on who's lecturing) the inflation period (very shortly after the big bang).
> Don't forget that the universe itself has undergone a phase transition, after (or during, depending on who's lecturing) the inflation period (very shortly after the big bang).
I prefer calling it a vacuum collapse, 'cause that's what it was. "Phase transition" sounds too clinical.
Always wondered if there's any chance there may have been some form of life existing prior to reheating. It's not as though we have any way to find out, unfortunately.
The problem is we're not sure that's what caused reheating. There's been other suggestions, some of them quite exotic -- a collision with a neighbouring brane, for instance. Still, my bet's on false vacuum decay.
I was mainly thinking in the difference between an atom in laboratory conditions being observed in a very controlled way, vs an atom at the core of a protostar, for instance, but that's an interesting point, thanks!
> Finding that theory is hard to find for our current knowledge and capabilities. But extrapolating that this will remain so will not age well.
On the other hand, have you ever tried to explain even the most elementary concepts of basic special relativity to a crow? Crows are intelligent and can reason about problems, but special relativity is just beyond them no matter how long you try to teach them, and it seems likely that this is something crows will never be able to understand. At best some distant descendant of crows that has evolved so much from present day crows to be a completely new species might get it.
I see no reason to assume that the capabilities required to completely understand physics fall somewhere between the limits of crow intelligence and the limits of human intelligence.
Einstein seems to really deserve his iconic status in popular culture as the most brilliant mind ever. I’m not sure that he was, but that seems to be the popular image of him.
One thing that does amaze me though, is his unbelievable capacity for intuition.
Some people indeed have that image. But quite a lot of other people consider Newton to be the most impactful scientist and mathematician ever. I count myself in that camp. Gauss was obviously a more brilliant mathematician than Newton, and maybe even Terry Tao, or Grothendieck, or a few others, but none of them change the the world the way Newton did. There is simply math after Newton, and math before, and they are like spacecraft vs stone tools.
as evidenced by Leibniz, it seems like most of it would have happened without him. his work on series was probably not going to happen for a bit without him.
> as evidenced by Leibniz, it seems like most of it would have happened without him. his work on series was probably not going to happen for a bit without him.
I think that part of what was marvellous about Newton (Einstein, too) was how many things he did. As you say, it seems plausible any individual thing Newton did would have been done by someone else—probably the same is true of anyone—but it seems unlikely that any one person could have done everything Newton did.
I always wondered who he had in mind when he said that. My guess would be Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. But while both Kepler and Brahe qualify as giants without question, there's still a world of difference between them and Newton.
Einstein is the only modern physicist many people can name easily (some will also get Hawkins or Feynman), and his name has become synonymous with "smart". In a poll of the general public for "who's the smartest person?" he'd win due to name recognition. Even ten-year-olds know "Einstein = smart".
I suspect that if you asked the HN crowd for their guess at the smartest person, Mozart (thanks to Hofstadter) and von Neumann would come out on top (though I might just be biased towards whom I'd answer). Tao is a likely candidate for living person.
In terms of impact, Newton is truly stand-out, though I think when it comes to math, his most significant contribution was calculus, and Leibniz came up with that independently at the same time, and we now use his version instead of Newton.
Amused that your apocryphal "easily name"d scientist "Hawkins" appears to be a confused jumbling of popular science writers Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.
My answer within the last few decades would be Alexander Grothendieck and I’d place him higher than Tao, Scholze and any other living (or dead) mathematician within that time frame.
Few in the HN crowd understand the mathematics Grothendieck worked in and therefore cannot properly assess his contributions and intellect due to their unfamiliarity with his work.
von Neumann had savant like intelligence, but Grothendieck was in an unmatched league of his own in terms of abstractions.
It's a tough call. Newton connected third dimension (up/down) to the other two; Einstein connected the fourth (time) to the other three. They both were impactful, even creators, of multiple fields of physics (sorry about the pun).
I'd put Euler up there. And Laplace, Fourier, Heaviside, Lagrange, Poisson, Gauss, Jacobi, Green, and all the other guys you cover in an undergrad classical engineering degree. Our current world is literally built on their work.
> One thing that does amaze me though, is his unbelievable capacity for intuition.
If you partially submerge a stick into water, it appears as if the stick is broken. When a physicist first sees this phenomenon, their reaction is: space must be warped/contracted/broken! It's a strange kind of intuition.
His intuitive approach has always felt like “my” kind of smart. Just ramped up to 1000. Contrasted with someone like von-Neumann whose mind and abilities I can’t even comprehend at some basic level.
Einstein had such a characteristic style that his proof of the Pythagorean theorem, as a kid, is unmistakably his. That's remarkable because you might think there's just no room for anything so simple to bear a personal stamp.
I think Einstein had some wrong ideas in the area of quantum mechanics. While I don't think we have a perfect understanding of entanglement, it has been demonstrated in many experiments. Einstein didn't like this "spooky action at a distance". He was also quoted as saying "god does not play dice with the universe" in regards to the fundamental randomness that seems to underlie QM.
I subscribe to the view of the world in the show DEVS. Basically, given enough processing power to simulate every particle in the Universe, there is no randomness.
I have a pretty crazy opinion about all of this, where I think creationism and science do not contradict each other. The book of Genesis and science describe the same exact thing, but in different languages.
And it explains how, in the Bible, this God "person" was able to predict the future without fail, with unlimited horizon. It's like a video tape - fast forwarding and going back to the original point does not change the plot.
Hmm. To an observer, an apple falling from a tree is random. How would you know when it happens? But all random events have precursors. To me, the idea that something happens out of nowhere, on its own, is pretty farfetched.
I doubt anything in the Universe is truly random. What if you have all of the information? And I mean, ALL of the information?
That's what most physicists thought, in the early 20th century, until they became aware of the implications of quantum mechanics... Are you familiar with the Uncertainty Principle?
In short, it's fundamentally impossible to completely and precisely describe the current state (position & velocity) of any particle. The more precisely you measure one of those values, the more uncertain the other becomes, in proportion.
This is a fundamental physical reality of the universe... It's not just an imperfection of how we take measurements. At a quantum level, the universe is actually random in it's behavior. You can make statistical predictions, which in larger & larger quantity can asymptotically approach certainty, under the right conditions... But at a macroscopic level, outcomes will always reflect some amount of randomness.
By implication, you cannot fully predict the future behavior of a system by knowledge of its current state. This was a tremendous shock to the worldview of many scientists, including Albert Einstein. But over the last century, every attempt to disprove the reality of this fundamental randomness has failed.
It is possible to predict the future state of a system in QM from the initial state. QM equations are parabolic/hyperbolic and so from a global initial state one can deduce both future and past. What one cannot do is to deduce the future or past of a local patch based on the state of that local patch at a particular moment in time. The QM state is global and there is no way to isolate the local patch from influence of arbitrary far away points.
Yes! When we talk about "simulating the Universe", you cannot just simulate the Earth. A tiny event taking place somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy will have some sort of an effect. You have to take into account the whole system, in its entirety.
Superdeterminism (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism) isn't really a falsifiable theory, per se... It doesn't actually have testable predictions that can ever differentiate between a universe wherein Bell's Theorem is true, vs a universe governed by Superdeterminism.
It's kind of like saying "All our experiments appear to come up with consistent results, only because God intervenes in all our experiments to create those results." That statement can never be made falsifiable, so it's not a scientifically interesting statement to consider, because by definition it can never yield testable predictions.
That does not mean Superdeterminism is uninteresting... Just that it's a matter of theology or literature, not science.
There are no probabilities in the equations of quantum mechanics. The probabilities appear in Copenhagen interpretation of QM but there are alternative interpretations that avoids probability and use global hidden variables.
He pointed out his own mistakes or shortcomings a bit. Like his addition of a cosmological constant which I think he said was regrettable - he probably hoped for a more elegant solution he couldn’t grasp. And I think he wanted quantum mechanics to work differently than it did / didn’t believe the theories would hold.
Einstein spent alot of time trying to modify his theory so that there would be a fixed sized universe. He really hated the idea of an expanding universe for some reason.
An even better one would be "Einstein's General Relativity model supported by (another) observation". We've had many similar observations already (e.g. Mercury's procession around the Sun) that provide similar confirmation.
That's why there is such consternation about it, versus the Standard Model born of quantum physics: both models have tons of confirming evidence supporting them, and yet they are at some level incompatible/incomplete. There's a gap in our knowledge, understanding, and intuition.
There is a difference between "proving," vs "supporting" or "confirming." This observation still leaves the possibility that Einstein's prediction is wrong but within the margin of experimental error, or that the model will fail to accurately predict motion near a different rotating supermassive object due to variables which aren't present for this one.
Any analytical formula describing a physical property will have dropped higher order terms (implicit or explicitly) the entire way through the derivation. This experiment proves Einstein’s equations are predictive within the precision implied by order of terms within the equation. That is implied by the form of the equation itself. You are trying to logic yourself to a witty conclusion but lack the context to understand the words that are being used.
The experiment confirms the specific prediction made by the equation for this particular set of circumstances. That's good, that's useful, but it doesn't prove that the predictions made by the equations under other circumstances will be confirmed, nor does it prove the equations that made the prediction, nor does it prove the model that generated the equations. Those are generalizations that require additional assumptions not tested by the experiment. That's just a limitation of empirical methods.
People (including myself) get in a bugabear about the use of the word "prove" because it implies a finality of knowledge which is not true of the experiment, and in fact counter to the spirit of the scientific method. The equations are supported by the experiment, but that support still admits the possibility of better equations later ("better" having many possibilities). The ideas confirmed by this experiment as still subject to revision and review and modification and improvement, hence the disagreement with calling them "proven."
You are correct, but using this argument, pretty much all of our understanding of Physics is "unproven". All we do is look at what happens in nature and form theories. Sure, we reason a lot and that to cut down the state space but at the end of the day, we have no way to be sure if what we know of Physics today is how our universe actually works. So validations like this are almost as good as it gets. The only thing that would be better is experimental observation refuting relativity or some other accepted theory.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadIf I say that below the surface of earth there are green goblins who suck down objects from the air and then an apple drops from a tree - that does not prove me right. It just does not prove me wrong.
Modern scientific authority derives from a inheritance of proofen right, which people who hang around in online communities usually do not know about. Add to that the "progressive" tendencies to smash the "old" - now taken over by the alt-right and you get a ahistoric bunch of fool, who would throw dirt at everyone no matter how right or wrong his hypothesis was.
Apples and goblins should produce predictions that differ from existing theory, and predict a new type of observation that could confirm its correctness versus existing work.
It provides evidence that his theory is correct, it does not prove it because they still could find evidence that does not fit general relativity.
The posters example made it sound crazy, but "proof" is the wrong word to use. I much prefer the paper's opener of
>The theory of General Relativity (GR) continues to pass all experimental tests with flying colours
However, this doesn't open the floodgates to any old theory because a simpler theory that explains the data is preferrable to a more complex one. Your green goblin theory might fit the data, but then leaves open questions like what do green goblins eat, why were they not detected previously, what else might they affect etc etc.
"In the case of stars orbiting close to a spinning, supermassive black hole, frame dragging should cause the star's orbital plane to precess about the black hole spin axis. This effect should be detectable within the next few years via astrometric monitoring of stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy."
And it's exactly this they are showing in the article.
These people (linked in the article) calculated the effect to be "12' per orbital period":
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2020/04/aa37813-...
So no, not even close to being as dramatic as on "artist's animation".
The split is there because running the entire simulation completely in QM is overkill will bring the main CPU to its knees.
The non-determinism and measurement fidelity of QM also means reality is classically non-deterministic, as in chaotic systems which cannot be predicted beyond short horizons because measurement precision in initial conditions forbids it.
Algorithmic/computational models of reality are therefore false ("aproximations") rather than the converse. All computations are functions from N to N -- and randomness in the QM sense isn't a function.
Ie., a QM/Classical-Chaotic system is a "function" from state-space X to measurement space Y such that for some X there is no determinate Y. This isn't a function; and hence not computable.
That doesn't necessarily follow. It's totally possible for us to observe non-determinism within a simulation. Reductio ad absurdum - the simulation could be of what we think we know, rather than actually what we observe.
Given we're talking about a universe-scale simulation, I don't think that's actually absurd. We wouldn't be able to do that, no, but we wouldn't be able to do any of this. It's obviously possible in principle.
No, reductio ad absurdum: The simulation could be of you. Just you. All other people are simulated only to whatever degree is needed when they interact with you; people who don't, are only simulated as trendlines.
You can never really observe non-determinism. All you can say is that there is no observable determinism; you can never exclude the possibility of hidden patterns you aren’t smart enough to notice. Maybe our observations are totally deterministic but we will never be able to know because the determinism is computationally intractable, or depends on variables we cannot observe
Arguments from QM, such as Bell’s theorem, are sometimes presented as disproving hidden determinism: but, at best, only disprove local determinism, and leave the possibility of non-local determinism entirely intact; and when one considers the possibility of “superdeterminism” (that the observer’s choices of what observations to make are determined by the same determinism as the system being observed) maybe don’t even do that
The notion that non-determinism can be proven, exists, and/or has a relevance to a simulation all make assumptions about reality that either won't or don't have to hold if you're in a simulation.
But then simulation is unfalsifiable. Whatever you observe, the simulation could have paused an arbitrary number of times, or modified you or the environment to an arbitrary degree, hence it's compatible with simulation. Which makes simulation "a difference that makes no difference".
I like the word "bullshit." Bullshit isn't necessarily true, isn't necessarily false, it's simply not worth my time to wade into it.
But falsifying that proposition would not falsify the notion of simulation.
It does however not necessarily make a simulation a difference that makes no difference, because if we're in a simulation it is possible that we are in one where it is possible to falsify the theory that we're not in a simulation.
E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.
The problem of course being that you could well devote a lifetime to it and find nothing and it would tell you nothing about whether we're in a simulation or not, so unless you run into some anomaly that hints at it, it'd seem a rather wasteful pursuit.
In reality, of course, chances are none of us will ever see anything to give us reason to pursue that idea, but it's fun to think about. I write short stories about this subject, and I have a long document with headache-inducing scenarios to write up.
To avoid hypotheses that are unfalsifiable is good practice absent evidence because you can construct an infinite number of such hypotheses. That does not mean that a given unfalsifiable hypothesis can not be true, however, just that pursuing it is generally likely to be a waste of effort.
Asserting that simulation is definitely true absent evidence would be unjustified, but very few people would make that claim, so it's not very relevant.
However the inverse - the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation - is falsifiable by proving that we are in a simulation. And any number of variations over the idea that we might be in a simulation can also be testable and falsifiable in various ways.
The original point of contention was that QM and non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation, however, and that is not a viable way to falsify the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation. The hypothesis that non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation is falsifiable by coming up with a way wherein non-determinism can be accommodated.
If the world the simulator runs in has access to non-determinism this is trivially done by simply forwarding non-determinism into the simulation (many other approaches to attack that hypothesis are possible, e.g. using a additional simulations as oracles to determine if supposedly non-deterministic events would be revealed as such, and use that to pick values that ensures a failure to simulate non-determinism never gets detected, so access to a source of non-determinism is not necessary to falsify that hypothesis either, though it would complicate matters). As such the hypothesis that non-determinism alone proves we're not in a simulation is false.
Unfalsifiable propositions can be true, and it is even possible to have good reason-whether direct or indirect evidence-for believing one
“Somewhere and somewhen in this universe there exists an extremely controversial and very famous politician named Donald Trump” is an example of a proposition which is true, and we have very good reason to believe is true, but which is strictly speaking unfalsifiable, indeed almost inherently so. Even if we suppose our Donald Trump had never been born, we could not rule out the possibility of some very famous and controversial politician having that name (let’s say named by a very similar sequence of sounds) existing on a planet in a distant galaxy. If one accepts a B theory view of time, that proposition has always been true, and was just as true in 5000 BCE as it is today, but nobody back then could have possibly known it was true.
But it is worth also remembering that Bostroms Simulation Argument is an argument for simulation, not the only one possible.
To me the original point I made was simply that non-determinism can't falsify simulation.
More broadly I believe simulation is unfalsifiable, because the impossibility of proving we have existence in time (our consciousness could exist for only a moment, and we can't tell, because we have access to the past only as memories which could be fake), or that a world outside ourselves exists (our sensory inputs could be fake) means we can say hardly anything about the scale or complexity of a theoretical simulation. Said another way: we don't know even how much of ourselves exists.
That opens the door to a vast set of possible simulation arguments, but also raises the question of whether there is a clear line between simulation and what reality is. E.g. you can imagine a similar set of possible conceptions of a physical reality. If physical reality is that our existence is mere fragmentary moments of parts of a mind, then that would mean any experience we might think we have one day of building simulations would themselves be illusory.
So it's not a given that we can meaningfully tell whether or not a simulation exists even if we one day believe we successfully build one, because the experience of building the simulation might well be the totality of the experience. There's no certainty said simulation ever exists.
Trying to nail down what we can actually infer about this is something we'll struggle with for a very long time.
Even defining in concrete terms what is simulation vs. simply an arrangement of physical reality is unclear (think Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where Earth was a computer)
Consider the following argument:
1] If P being true is a necessary precondition for rational thought to exist, we are rationally justified in believing that P is true
2] The general reliability of our memories is a necessary precondition for rational thought to exist
3] Therefore, we are rationally justified in believing that our memories are generally reliable
4] Therefore, our memories are generally reliable
From the general reliability of our memories, the substantial existence of the past trivially follows; does that count as "proving we have existence in time"? And replace the "general reliability of our memories" with "the existence of other minds" to turn the above argument into a proof of the later.
> but also raises the question of whether there is a clear line between simulation and what reality is.
I actually think the simulation hypothesis is a pretty good argument for idealism: if the simulation hypothesis is true, then either materialism is simply false (if one interprets "matter" to mean only the apparent physical matter of this universe), or else its truth is unknowable (if one interprets "matter" to mean the unknowable matter of the substrate universe.) If we cannot know whether the simulation hypothesis is true, how can we know that materialism is true? By contrast, if idealism is true, then minds and their experiences are the most fundamental constituents of reality; whether this universe is a simulation is simply a question about whether there exists another universe containing minds who have the experience of operating a computer simulation which appears to contain minds having particular experiences, where those particular experiences happen to be identical to the set of all experiences had by all minds in this universe. Idealism could be equally true no matter what the answer to that question may be. The ontological status of this universe is completely independent of whether that separate simulating universe happens to exist; in principle, our universe could even be simultaneously simulated by multiple distinct simulating universes.
Since, as you said, there are infinite possible unfalsifiable theories, it's a good idea to avoid them. It's better to deal with them when evidence does appear; otherwise you have an infinite number of them to go through.
> E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.
I'm not sure that's even decidable. Is, say, relativity a glitch in the Matrix or just the way the universe works? Or, to flip the question on its head: do simulations we can construct behave like the real world because the real world is simulated, or just because what we can construct is limited by the world we live in?
I think these outright flaws would have to be very obvious to unambiguously point to simulation. And I can't escape the feeling that the simulation idea is a modern version of Newton's clockwork universe: trying to explain the universe by the metaphors we have available today.
If "simulation" is just an alleged property everything is meant to have (ie., sim = "seeming-as-if real but actually being a... dream, ...").
Then the argument against it is simply pragmatic: rather than add "seeming-as-if" to everything we say, drop it.
Adding it can make no difference, which is stipulated by this definition of "simulation".
You could also make a kind of rationality argument: consider the family of all such seeming-as-if properties, say S; and the family of all real properties R.
Given conditioning on S essentially makes all claims false, eg., P(I am a human awake on earth | S) = 0
Ditching the S properties is equivalent, essentially, to reasoning being possible.
So if we are in a simulation essentially every judgement we make is false. So to beleieve we're in a simulation, ie., to condition on being in one, prevents any thought/reasoning/etc.
To actually believe we're in a simulation, in this sense, you'd be completely incapable of essentially any thought wahtsoever.
You're right that since we can't falsify the general idea of simulation, it makes sense to simply discount it in most discourse, because we just have to act as if the world is real.
(EDIT: I'll add that "implementable by a universal Turing machine" or not does not change any of this in either direction)
This is the most straightforward rejection of Berkeley's idealism as well.
But that is different from discounting the possibility.
Because while we can't falsify the hypothesis that we're in a simulation, as I've expanded on in another comment too, if we are in one there's at least a possibility that we are in one where the hypothesis that we are not in one can be falsified (e.g. a doorway could open in front of me to let me "exit" the simulation; as wildly unlikely as it is; or we could travel into space and hit a literal wall, or an infinite number of other things)
Going further, it's in particular different from discounting the possibility because of details of the world, because all of what we think we know is a product of processes that if we are in a simulation could have been manipulated or outright manufactured.
So you're right that in our day to day lives it makes sense to just not worry about whether we are in a simulation or not and act as if we're not.
I don't agree that a belief in one would affect our ability to reason, though, as we are good at compartmentalising and saying exactly what we're saying here: As long as / until we can tell we're in a simulation, you just go on acting as if you're not. Whether you believe you're in one or not doesn't really make a difference as long as you have no evidence either way.
[1] https://philosophybreak.com/articles/george-berkeley-subject...
This was Husserl's project. But it's a failure.
Consider the case where realism is true: the environment causes us to enter a brain state which is ambiguious, so we cannot recover perfect information about the enviroment. Eg., light hits our eyes from a 3D room in a largely 2D way so we get depth perception wrong. A common occurance.
This means that there is a metaphysics, say R, where if R is true then all descriptions derivative/about anything metal may be systematically false.
In this sense realism is a scepticism about the "netural language" idealism presumes.
Since this scepticism is at least coherent/possible, there is no neutral language.
ie., the global sceptic says P(I am human|Scepticism) = 0 for a particualr Scepticism, eg., "youre in a dream" etc.
The idealist says: let's translate to a neutral language. P(Perceptions seem as if human|Scepticism) = 1
The realist says this is not 1, and may be zero, eg., when
P(Perceptions seem as-if human|AmbiguousBrainState) = 0
So realism offers a scepticism that idealism cannot overcome. There is no neutral language. And so reasoning does become impossible.
Eg., consider the claim "the object is 1m away" has to be translated to "perceptions seem as-if objects are 1m away" but in the case of an ambgious perception there is no fact about what "seems as-if" -- so you loose the ability to even talk about objects being at any distnace.
And since perceptions are bascially always ambigous there is no means by which you can translate objective claims into neutral subjective ones.
The choice to reason becomes the choice of a domain (of concepts) with which to interpret claims. A priori there is no neutral choices (eg., Idealism is NOT neutral!) -- so any sceptical choice becomes a decline to reasoning as such or a positive claim about the way the world is.
By this argument, we can't continue to reason, as we can't falsify the hypothesis that we might be in a simulation.
We clearly can continue to reason, on the basis of working within a set of assumptions / axioms that presume that what appears to be physical reality is physical reality.
That we can't disprove that it isn't physical reality is irrelevant.
Conditioning on any global scepticism disables reasoning.
Any any alternative is "positivistic" in the sense that it positsts against scepticism.
Idealism, ie., the false belief that there is a neutral language of "experience alone" is a posit against scepticism and presumes quite a radical metaphysics.
My point is that one alwayas has to condition on some positive account of the objectiuve content of our concepts in order to reason.
The way you describe idealism also makes no sense to me. The way I understand what you wrote does not match Berkeley's subjective idealism at all. You call it false, but it's an unfalsifiable philosophical view, so while we can reject it as meaningless, you have no basis for saying it is false.
In later idealism this became formalised as the claim that there is a "language of the subjective" -- but it is clear that Berkeley thinks this also. ie., that you can "describe your experiences as such".
This claim is false, and is basically just a restatement of the same genetic fallacy. Language describes the objective (eg., "I am in a room"), not the subjective. It is just asserted that since the objective = subjective, then this language is "ontologically neutral" -- ie., it "avoids metaphysics".
It does not! (1) the claim about the objective is metaphysical; (2) the language is still about the objective.
The idealists need there to be a "neutral language of the subjective" to avoid the challenge of scepticism -- ie., that all our claims are false.
But there is no neutral language. You cannot just "describe the subjective" to substitue for "describng the objetive".
To see this, suppose realism is true (ie., that you really are in a 3d space, with light hitting your eyes, etc.). In this situation you have an ambigious perception: it neither seems as-if you are 1m from the tv nor 2m (eg., consider the duck-rabbit illusion).
In this situation there is the objective claim "i am 1m from the tv" but no possible subjective reference for that claim. The subjective is ambiguous with respect to the objective. So idealism fails in its reply to scepticism: the subjective is ambiguous.
So what? Well then there is no reply to scepticism. If you believe all our claims are false then there is no "neutral language" to translate them into for the sake of "practical reasoning". To be sincere in this belief, you cannot reason.
Any sceptic (including idealists) who engages in conversation and claims to hold a global sceptical belief are just acting incoherently. They are, in fact, doing metaphysics.
Whatever "neutral language" they translate "ordinary claims" into entails a non-neutral set of metaphysical commitments. So to "reason at all" is to choose a metaphysics.
To connect this with the simulation point: to believe we are actually in a total simulation you are either (1)incapable of reasoning; or (2) asserting a contrary metaphysics without any justification whatsoever.
No, the idealists claim there is no objective, and that we only know the world subjectively via our senses. This is an unfalsifiable claim, because any attack on it can be written off by arguing that any experience of investigating the claim is coloured by the subjectivity of the senses.
The only viable "attack" on idealism is to accept that while it is possible, unless there is direct evidence - e.g. you observe things that would not be possible in a physical world - it is pointless to consider the idea because it is unfalsifiable.
This is much the same with simulation arguments - they're nothing but "digital versions" of idealism. What simulation arguments (any varianet, not just Bostrom's) gives us is a constraint that gives us something that could become worth investigating if we specific things. E.g. if we were to observe telltale signs of possible compression in physical reality
> This claim is false, and is basically just a restatement of the same genetic fallacy. Language describes the objective (eg., "I am in a room"), not the subjective. It is just asserted that since the objective = subjective, then this language is "ontologically neutral" -- ie., it "avoids metaphysics".
That languages seeks to make claims about the objective does not mean the claims are true.
A simple description of idealism in "physical terms" is to imagine three rooms connected in a series with a data feed A <-> B <-> C, where rooms A and C are minds, and B is physical reality, and where none of the rooms have any other ability to obtain information about what is outside the room. Idealism states that only A and C exists, and that B is an illusion produced by A and C or by as a product of their connection. Any statement you make "about the objective" is meaningless because you have no way of talking about an objective outside your room that is not based on the information obtained from the data feed.
If you are A you don't know if B exists or if C exists for that matter, because you have no source of information about them that you can prove is objective. Your data feed might be purely fake, it may come from you yourself, or it may be manipulated in all kinds of ways, or it may come from outside the rooms entirely. But there's a further problem: You only observe A as well through a stream of data that you believe to be internal to A, but you have no way of verifying that either. You can't prove A exists, have existed, or will exist. You can at most assert that in the given moment, something has an experience that gives an experience of time and space and consciousness. There is no way for you to independently verify the existence of time even.
You may not have existed before you read this and you may cease to exist after having read this, and I might not exist at all.
Now, if I were to assert that this is definitely true, that would be unjustified and idiotic. I can't even say if it is possible. I can say, however, that we have no means of falsifying it, and so any assertion - like the one that started this discussion - that anything we observe falsifies simulation, is unjustified.
> The idealists need there to be a "neutral language of the subjective" to avoid the challenge of scepticism -- ie., that all our claims are false.
The only viable attack on idealism is that it is unfalisifiable, and so not worth spending time on the unconstrained form of idealism.
That does not mean all forms of idealism are necessarily unfalsifiable; one can imagine constrained forms that set out further propositions that would make it detectable; e.g. in the subset of idealist philosophies of simulation theories, a simulation theory that posits ...
Sorry for brevity, am typing on a potato.
But we do know that there are no hidden variables - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
The process of splitting into many words, as well as necessary limitations on measurement, i think both leave you in non-computable territory.
You'd model this by generating an infinite number of Turing machines for each quantum event, but you'd also need to do something about the time horizon on prediction.
Ie., chaotic systems aren't long-run deterministic because of measurement limitations. So there's something like many uncountable infinities of Turing machines out there. As for each digit in X there is an infinity of many-worlds in Y (the nature of chaos).
I dont see this many-worlds vision giving you anything you can simulation. Rather its a useful conceptual heuristic when interpreting QM probabilities.
You don’t actually have to compute umpteen branches. You just have to simulate sufficient evidence to convince an observer in the simulation that many-worlds is true. Surely it is far easier to delude simulated people into believing some theory of physics is true, than to actually accurately simulate a universe in which it is true.
But, even that wholly accurate simulation - if we are living in a simulation, it is possible the physical laws of the “real” universe are very different from those of our own. If our simulators are living under very different laws of physics, they may have access to computational resources which would be “unphysical” in ours. They may even be capable of hypercomputation. Maybe their laws of physics contain an oracle for the halting problem. Maybe they can execute supertasks. Even proof that simulating our universe would be uncomputable does not exclude the possibility that we are simulated on a hypercomputer
We don’t even know that hypercomputation is physically impossible in this universe. We know of no way of achieving it given known physics, but we cannot exclude the possibility of unknown physical laws or processes which permit it, or even that it might be some bizarre mathematical consequence of existing theories which nobody has yet discovered. Maybe the hypercomputer will be the defining technological advance of the 57th century.
Finding that theory is hard to find for our current knowledge and capabilities. But extrapolating that this will remain so will not age well.
Do you think we will be able to grow capabilities indefinitely ? For example, let's imagine we know how to build a detector for some phenomenon. For some reason we need to go to another star (for example, to mine all of its planet for some unobtainiun). Then we would be stuck in our progress...
I'm not in physics but is there lot of room to improve our capabilities left ?
Could one could also argue that quantum indeterminacy makes it difficult make predictions the more interactions you add to a system? That is, interactions at the atomic and subatomic levels are manageable enough to observe, but as we add actors, the interactions grow exponentially, and each actor's state is influenced not just by itself but by other actors in the system, ad infinitum.
Don't forget that the universe itself has undergone a phase transition, after (or during, depending on who's lecturing) the inflation period (very shortly after the big bang).
I prefer calling it a vacuum collapse, 'cause that's what it was. "Phase transition" sounds too clinical.
Always wondered if there's any chance there may have been some form of life existing prior to reheating. It's not as though we have any way to find out, unfortunately.
What does "vacuum collapse" mean? No matter how I try to interpret it, I cannot come up with anything that resembles the cosmic inflation.
The problem is we're not sure that's what caused reheating. There's been other suggestions, some of them quite exotic -- a collision with a neighbouring brane, for instance. Still, my bet's on false vacuum decay.
On the other hand, have you ever tried to explain even the most elementary concepts of basic special relativity to a crow? Crows are intelligent and can reason about problems, but special relativity is just beyond them no matter how long you try to teach them, and it seems likely that this is something crows will never be able to understand. At best some distant descendant of crows that has evolved so much from present day crows to be a completely new species might get it.
I see no reason to assume that the capabilities required to completely understand physics fall somewhere between the limits of crow intelligence and the limits of human intelligence.
One thing that does amaze me though, is his unbelievable capacity for intuition.
I think that part of what was marvellous about Newton (Einstein, too) was how many things he did. As you say, it seems plausible any individual thing Newton did would have been done by someone else—probably the same is true of anyone—but it seems unlikely that any one person could have done everything Newton did.
I suspect that if you asked the HN crowd for their guess at the smartest person, Mozart (thanks to Hofstadter) and von Neumann would come out on top (though I might just be biased towards whom I'd answer). Tao is a likely candidate for living person.
In terms of impact, Newton is truly stand-out, though I think when it comes to math, his most significant contribution was calculus, and Leibniz came up with that independently at the same time, and we now use his version instead of Newton.
I was specifically thinking about physicists in that case, though I guess Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan fall under that umbrella.
I also don't know a ton about him, but as someone in the math scene, he's the only modern-day mathematician I hear about with any regularity.
Few in the HN crowd understand the mathematics Grothendieck worked in and therefore cannot properly assess his contributions and intellect due to their unfamiliarity with his work.
von Neumann had savant like intelligence, but Grothendieck was in an unmatched league of his own in terms of abstractions.
If you partially submerge a stick into water, it appears as if the stick is broken. When a physicist first sees this phenomenon, their reaction is: space must be warped/contracted/broken! It's a strange kind of intuition.
I have a pretty crazy opinion about all of this, where I think creationism and science do not contradict each other. The book of Genesis and science describe the same exact thing, but in different languages.
And it explains how, in the Bible, this God "person" was able to predict the future without fail, with unlimited horizon. It's like a video tape - fast forwarding and going back to the original point does not change the plot.
See? I figured it out. Next question.
I doubt anything in the Universe is truly random. What if you have all of the information? And I mean, ALL of the information?
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
In short, it's fundamentally impossible to completely and precisely describe the current state (position & velocity) of any particle. The more precisely you measure one of those values, the more uncertain the other becomes, in proportion.
This is a fundamental physical reality of the universe... It's not just an imperfection of how we take measurements. At a quantum level, the universe is actually random in it's behavior. You can make statistical predictions, which in larger & larger quantity can asymptotically approach certainty, under the right conditions... But at a macroscopic level, outcomes will always reflect some amount of randomness.
By implication, you cannot fully predict the future behavior of a system by knowledge of its current state. This was a tremendous shock to the worldview of many scientists, including Albert Einstein. But over the last century, every attempt to disprove the reality of this fundamental randomness has failed.
It's kind of like saying "All our experiments appear to come up with consistent results, only because God intervenes in all our experiments to create those results." That statement can never be made falsifiable, so it's not a scientifically interesting statement to consider, because by definition it can never yield testable predictions.
That does not mean Superdeterminism is uninteresting... Just that it's a matter of theology or literature, not science.
That's not how proofs work.
That's why there is such consternation about it, versus the Standard Model born of quantum physics: both models have tons of confirming evidence supporting them, and yet they are at some level incompatible/incomplete. There's a gap in our knowledge, understanding, and intuition.
People (including myself) get in a bugabear about the use of the word "prove" because it implies a finality of knowledge which is not true of the experiment, and in fact counter to the spirit of the scientific method. The equations are supported by the experiment, but that support still admits the possibility of better equations later ("better" having many possibilities). The ideas confirmed by this experiment as still subject to revision and review and modification and improvement, hence the disagreement with calling them "proven."