Bull

Are you suggesting the Mongols stole something from the Chinese?

 

its a start....

Consider this. We are made in God's image. We are God. 100,000 years ago humans were witnessing the earth decay. These humans new it was only a matter of time before the earth was uninhabitable. The ancient humans built a device that could retain the thoughts and knowledge of a seed population. The device used this data to start a simulation of human life. The ancient humans launched the device in space, sending it to a habitable planet. The device is programmed to run the simulation with ever increasing complexity. With each new generation of stimulants, the stimulant get closers to the level of knowledge the ancients possessed. The stimulants should reach a technological level capable of creating organic humans and be capable of downloading the simulated minds into the bodies. These new biological will rebuild civilization.

The device is also programed to make the stimulants believe they have developed some Technology that is not possible. Light speed travel or extended cryogenic hibernation for example. This leads the stimulants to believe they are exploring, colonizing the universe of their own volition.

I could go on but I think I might turn this into a short story.

Copywrite 6/2/16

At least one Vortigaunt has it figured out.




 

That's how I mow my emails every morning.

He needs metaphysics. But the problem for most techy types is that honest inquiry into reality leads toward God. So they tend to take an exit off the logic highway and try and explain it a different way. And then you end up with tranny porn.

Am I just ignorant or is Musk overrated?

The media (and my Uber liberal colleagues) portray him as a living legend.


What am I missing?

A thread about reality involves theology, so I don't think I'm derailing... but I'll just do one reply just in case:

God doesn't send you to Hell. You choose Hell. There are mountains of philosophical and theological works by some of the smartest men in all of history that logically and reasonably prove, in as much as it is provable, that God exists. Yet I'll wager you've read none of them, nor anything on physics, and you say both claims are nonsensical? Swallow your pride, excise the arrogance, and undergo some honest inquiry. Not on Arfcom, but from Protestant and catholic scholars and apologists.

Tesla motors, tesla energy, space x, PayPal. He has the potential to become the next Rockefeller.

He's right, but the similation is exactly what we see, which is made up of matter and the laws of physics that govern it. Nothing magical or weird about it, it is what it is. Particle physicists have spent years disecting it.

Theres no super computers running our simulation. We would be the ones to make super computers because thats OUR limitation of creation. The one who built this simulation would have to be greater in capacity/ability, above it, outside it as we would be to super computers.

He's a guy with a hard-on for getting us off our dependency for fossil fuels and onto mars, who started as a poor immigrant with absolutely nothing.

It currently appears like he might accomplish both, if not make more significant contributions towards doing so than any other person alive.

If nothing else, he's the CEO of not one but 3 successful multi-billion dollar companies, one of which that lands 10+-story tall rockets vertically on barges in the ocean (let that sink in) and another that makes what is arguably the finest 4-wheeled automobile ever produced.

Much easier still to simply dream or imagine all of it. No coders, server space, or power transmission needed. Would that make it, thus, tremendously more likely than even the simulation theory?

Dead on. It peaked with X-Com...

That's a much steeper intellectual hill to try and climb.  I don't think Occam cuts the way you want it to with that argument.

His premise has one major flaw....

Say 'God' or aliens have us living in this giant Matrix style computer program, then why would us squirrels be alowed the advance to the technolgical point of even fathoming such a concept?   The construct is used to deceive us squirrels.  Advances would be cleared from the program ahead of us being able to put two and two together.

Who knows?  That's neither his problem to solve nor a flaw in his theory though.

Things like the behavior of subatomic particles make more sense this way.

Fuckin A.  Boggles the noodle.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Gen 1:1 KJV

Totally agree.

I was merely trying to demonstrate that Occam's doesn't quite work as intended when one theory is supported by evidence, while the other exists purely of insight (and is perhaps even unprovable).

My goal, and I hope the goal of the majority of devs, is certainly to supersede our current capabilities.

 

Being a very good PM doesn't make you a philosopher.

People get bored playing games that can't be beaten.

Even in theoretical physics this idea is considered to be far fetched.

It is considered as theory, but it's bullshit.

"We made Pong, therefore.."

Who cares if people get bored or not.  As long as pain and suffering are there youre going to stay on the treadmill or else. Your options are play the game, or end your life.  Coincidence? Nope. You will be a good little Sim or you will be terminated. Thats it. And honestly if they could have taken the option of suicide away without the whole simulation falling apart then I bet they would have.

But like what about all of the math stuff thats makes up the uni and everything or whatever?

What if the point of the simulation is to overcome its conditions, i.e. see through the mirage?  Plato suggested this very thing, that what we consider reality is just shadows dancing on the wall of the cave, but that through supreme effort we can turn and see the light behind.  

 

In the beginning, pain is a motivator. But once a society moves past the survival phase people stop playing when they get bored. See: millennials

I'd read it, and would hope it was a novel, that's a great start to a sci-fi epic.

Speculatively, if we are in a simulation, you could look at the universe as a "program" that is populated by various recursive/evolutionary ai learning algorithms as a method to surmount some particular problem. Through history, "life" has exhibited local maximums on the path of evolution and then later, some flavor of impetus has kicked the process out of the slump and back onto the path of continuing evolution. Its an issue that has been discussed in ai development and can be applied as a example from a top down look on the course of humanity through the ages.

As an example, Stargate Atlantis S03EP15: The Game, was an episode that had John and Rodney playing what they though was a game, but was in fact, an Ancient experiment into the study of evolution of culture and civilization. It basically turned into a pissing contest between the two over who could supply more knowledge and progress "their" civilization further. A direct example related to our "reality" would be the invention of calculus by Netwon(I know he just got the credit blah blah). Based on the local maximum, the simulation owner could have just simply said, "The program seems to be stuck in a local maximum, lets have this particular entity "discover" calculus and see what that does."

Yes, this would be nigh impossible to prove and is largely circular. Given what we currently know and our current state of ai development, the questions we are asking about what an ai would, can certainly be applied to our own existence.

The world, and everything in it, actually IS in fact a simulation.

It's all in your head. The world you know, everything you see and experience. It's all just a model that you built in your head.

If you see a car crash a hundred yards away, you see the crash, then you hear the sound. However, if it happens 110 feet away, you see and hear it at the same time. There is a measurable lag between the sight and the sound of it, but you don't perceive this. Why?

If someone says, "The mouse on the desk is broken," then you get a different picture in your head than if they'd said, "The mouse on the desk is eating cheese." It's the same word, yet you get a different image in your head. Why?

In both cases, it's because your brain holds on to information until it gets the context, then it puts together a model of what's happening in the world, and the model is what you understand. Your brain will hold on to visual input for up to 100 ms, waiting for the audio, then it syncs them together.

The brain's processing power is pretty low. Something like 50 Hz of conscious thought processing. What it's really good at, though, is categorization. As you sit there, in your chair, close your eyes and think about what's around you. Floor, walls, a lamp, another chair, a coffee table... All those things can be summed up by just a couple bits of information. "Chair" is a category of objects. If you concentrate, you can imagine the details of the chair. You bring up more categories. What kind of chair is it? Color? Position? Orientation? Comfort? Size? But when you do, you're not thinking about that lamp any more. That's why people can't multi-task, even when they think they can.

A person talking conveys about 30 bits of data per second. Same for speaking. Which is why you can't listen to two people talk at once. Everything you know is stored in your brain, and can be called up in an instant, starting with its category. But everything is just a model in your head, that is built by the information you gather with your senses.

I'm a physics professor. In basic physics, I toss a baseball up into the air, let it fall, then catch it. When I ask students to describe what happened... it's like nobody has ever seen a baseball thrown in their life. What they saw does not match what really happened, because the model in their head was wrong. It did NOT match reality.

Most students will tell me that when tossed straight up, a baseball will start off slow, then continually speed up until it reaches the top of its arc. At the top, it instantly stops, hovers for a short time, then starts falling. During its downward travel, it starts off moving quickly, then gradually slows down until it reaches the point where I catch it - where it ends with zero velocity. Of course, they can't articulate this. This comes from a series of questions I ask, such as, "When it's on its way upward, is the baseball speeding up or slowing down?" The whole thing sounds silly when I lay it out step-by-step in plain language, but I guarantee that about 80% of you reading this thread would have come to about the same conclusions regarding the trajectory of a baseball, if I'd asked you to describe it.

In other words, the world I live in is very very different from the world you live in. You can have half a dozen eyewitnesses all see the same event, and they will all give different accounts of what happened. Everyone's brain interprets the information coming in so that it fits in context with the world model in their head.

So, are we living in a simulated world? Yes. Each one of us is living in a different simulated world.

More reading on the subject of the brain's interpretation of the world (mostly through study of the brain's interpretation of time itself) can be found here. It's long, but it's worth the read.

this is an excellent post.

i explain it this way: imagine that you were born in a self-sustaining submarine, and never got to open the hatch and go outside.  everything you know about the outside world comes from the submarine's sensors (along with simple stuff like feeling temperature changes).   so the "reality" that you inhabit is therefore represented by the sensor equipment, such that the sensors form your idea of what reality really is.  IOW, you only understand the ocean as a series of pictures, and you interact with those pictures instead of with the world.

Rockefeller didn't have to deal with government red tape Musk has to.

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I'd take Musk over Cuban any day.

So... you haven't taken a PHIL 101 class, huh?

my unscientific feeling is that while it's possible, it's not likely.

A good portion of philosophy is studying the logical fallacies that arose from people trying to prove there's a god.

There are no good works of philosophy that have managed to "prove" the existence of God.

But you have to get out of the submarine to fight the occasional giant squid with a harpoon?

 

Then philosophers realized you couldn't prove the existence of anything outside of perhaps the Cogito.  Hence postmodernism.

 

Solipsism is a bitch.

Hopefully whatever is running this simulation has backup power.

Xcom, such a good classic! talk about a fantastic innovative game.

Don't worry about stagnation though, Indie developers are growing.

The old established crop of developers have fallen to the same fate many corporations do, where innovation lags behind paying off investors and shareholders.

Chris Roberts (of wing commander, privateer, and freelancer fame) talked about his time at digital anvil working on freelancer for microsoft. They developed a few fun features on their own outside microsofts guidelines and microsoft panicked when told, I forget the exact line, but it was something around the line of "we haven't had any focus groups study this, take it out!"
Turns out innovative spontaneity happens frequently, Remember nazi zombies? yeah that was supposed to be a regular WWII themed bunker defense gamemode, only this time it wasn't nixed.

Crowdfunding is changing everything, less than 30% of your cash when you purchase a title goes to the developer, the rest mostly goes to publishers and investors. This and the internet are nixing these parties, allowing independent developesr to source it's costs directly from the consumer, effectively cutting out the middle men.

Take a look at Star citizen, over 114 million in funding and 1.3 million users and counting, with no publisher, no investors, they'll get to keep 100% of net. Think of that, every million copies sold after release will bring 50+ million in gross profits. Star citizen is coming along nicely, Cloud Imperium Games is set to rake it in upon release.


I suspect these new innovative companies will continue to grow and take away from established less agile companies. I'm hoping for EA to fall on it's sword like Atari did, and every bland product they put out brings them one step closer to, E.T. the game.

There's a good link that mentions prison simulation or prison complex.  Basically that life is a prison and you can go further into it or try to get further out of it.  YMMV on whatever that means.

Speak for yourself

Sure Mr. Simulator, just substantiate this intelligence into something like a robot so I can show you my appreciation for this work.

Scientist 1:  Um Bob, are you sure letting them out was a good idea?

Scientist 2:  Sure! I created their universe they'll love me!

Scientist 1:  *looks out window*  Um Bob, I think they're a little pissed.