View Full Version : Are our lives simulations?
This is sort of expanding on the "Brain in a vat" idea. I was thinking, what if our lives is just one big simulation for some higher being. Or if my life is a simulation to someone so hey would know what would happen to humans in certain conditions. Sort of like the film "Dark City" except without he perpetual darkness and the mind powers. Opinions, expansions?
dal7timgar
2008-07-16, 23:26
Just yours.
DT
PS - The Matrix is 9 years old, forget it or start thinking about it in more complex ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ysbczEYvKY
Rainbows
2008-07-17, 20:21
There's one theory that concludes that it's overwhelmingly likely that we are in fact all simulated intelligences. It makes the assumption that complete artificial intelligence, 'constructed sentience', is both physically possible and will be at some indeterminate point in the future of humanity commonly implemented. The logic goes thus (simplified slightly to be easier to follow).
Say humanity consists of 999,999,999 people, who amongst them manage to construct a single human-normal AI. Thus, 1 in 1,000,000,000 sentient humans are simulated intelligences. If one is constructed, it seems obvious that more will be constructed, 'tis the nature of humanity. If another 9 are constructed, roughly 1 in 100,000,000 sentient humans are simulated intelligences. Another 90 on top of that, and it's 1 in 10,000,000. The odds fall fast. The theory really kicks in when it's pointed out that, given the constant refinement and minituarisation of technology, the processing power required to give life ('life') to an AI will occupy less physical space than that required to support a human from life 'til death (including accommodation, farmland, everything) and as such there will be technically less limit on the number of AIs than there will be on the number of humans.
If capabilities rise from beiog able to construct one AI to being able to construct 100 within their own self-contained, simulated universe, the number of artificial intelligences could rise exponentially. If we could do it with 100, we could do it with 1,000... perhaps even a world's worth. And if we could construct one such world's-worth simulation, we could surely construct another. In short, if humanity does attain this level of technological accomplishment, we could quickly achieve a state where there are more sentient constructs than there are actual sentient beings, and the odds of a real-seeming sentient being thinking "am I real or a construct" become vastly stacked in favour of them being a construct.
There are any number of holes you can pick in the logic if you want, though. I'm sure there are enough resident pedants in a philosophy forum to do the job for me.
Rainbows
2008-07-17, 20:31
Oh, and there's a related theory which adds to that, which hypothesises that it may be possible to simulate an entire universe from birth to death, complete with the emergence of any sentient forms of life which struggle their way out of the primordial shit-slick. Impossible in our universe (ask any physicist), but a universe which simulated ours wouldn't have to follow our physical laws, or indeed be anything like it. There could be higher-universe beings who simulate sandbox universes for fun, playing around with the values of fundamental physical forces like we'd toy with settings on an online gravity simulator.* Or it could just emerge as some bizarre, non-sentient property of said higher universe, I'm pretty sure anything outside the scope of our universe would be so utterly beyond our comprehension as to be not worth troubling our minds with.
*That might explain a lot. "Hey, hey, let's make all these random phenomena tend towards this one ratio, uh... *keyboard mash* 1.61803. Yeah, that'll do. Lemme just tweak this little planet so it's favourable to the formation of life and... yeah, alright, we'll give it a few hours on fast-forward and see what the little guys make of that when they discover mathematics and philosophy. Heh." Thus rendering all human endeavour ultimately pointless, for the pessimists.