20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

[dada]

That is brilliant dada. (Completely serious statement.) All perception is sorted into maps that then become masters. No perception is even seen except through a map whether recognized or not. This is also sometimes called paradigm. It's important to try to see it, and to see that it could be other.

Thanks, Jack!

So I have my map. Then I use it for 'mapping' the action that I perceive. When the map is 'layered over' the action, I've got my paradigm.

For example, math is a map. When I perceive action through the math map, I'm 'seeing' the world through the math paradigm.

It's a useful paradigm. But it's important to recognize it's a paradigm, or I can be fooled, math becomes the master.

An interesting math fact I read recently was that the mathematical mid-point between the length of the observable universe and the Planck length is 5 nanometers. If I forget I'm seeing through a paradigm, I think 'damn, the amount of space between 5 nanometers and the Planck length is the same as the amount of space between 5 nanometers and the length of the universe.'

Of course, the space between a Planck length and a length of 5 nanometers is... very very small. And the physical distance between a length of 5 nanometers and the length of the observable universe is very very big. Still, mathematically the mid-point is 5 nanometers.

Math has an elegant beauty and perfection to it. It's an elegant and beautiful mind-map, used to perceive actions through.

--

Instead of paradigm as a map 'layered over' perception, another way of looking at paradigm is as 'defining a space where the action we perceive happens.'

When writing, I was noticing that there were certain types of 'spaces' where the action and dialogue takes place. I had:

1- stationary 'main' (ex: restaurant, meeting room, throne room)
2- stationary secondary (ex: hangar, bedroom)
3- motion 'main' (ex: command area, deck of airship)
4- motion secondary (ex: back bay, below deck)
5- outside nature, 6- outside 'underground,' 7- city, street
8- 'stage' (concert, theatre, soundstage)
9- dream-scape a 'free-form,'
10- dream-scape b 'symbols'
And space-fight/car chase.

These 'spaces' are like the underlying frameworks, the 'paradigms' through which the action of a scene is viewed. Moving a scene from a restaurant to a board room meeting, or from a forest to a desert makes superficial changes. But switching to a different 'paradigm space' (for example putting a stationary scene in motion, or switching from a nature scene to a dream-scape) changes the 'feel' of the scene. Not only that, but when a different paradigm space interacts with the scene, it can change the dialogue and action drastically.

So there's that. haha

---

"The comfort of the samurai is that we are already dead."

Yeah, but life and death is a choice the samurai makes every moment. If you're a samurai, you always choose death. To choose death is to be clear, resolved, unafraid to fail.

---

"...computational complexity acting as a time constraint on how fast the future can know itself* due to structural limitations, rather than as a theoretical imposition."


My navigation computer (anndemonium) works around the speed limit of light by traveling at the speed of thought. Speed doesn't increase uniformly above 2x speed of thought, it jumps in fits and starts. Anndemonium tells me it's the naughty way the kinky ParaKeets undulate.

So no, computational complexity is not the time constraint. It's the ParaKeets themselves. At speeds above 5x times the speed of thought, the ParaKeets undulate so kinkily that the future breaks down.

[tazmic]

That is brilliant dada. (Completely serious statement.) All perception is sorted into maps that then become masters. No perception is even seen except through a map whether recognized or not. This is also sometimes called paradigm. It's important to try to see it, and to see that it could be other.

So I have my map. Then I use it for 'mapping' the action that I perceive. When the map is 'layered over' the action, I've got my paradigm.

Dada, did you ever read Korzybski?

http://www.generalsemantics.org/the-general-semantics-learning-center/alfred-korzybski/

I think you might find it fun. Time binding, Consciousness of abstraction, not-allness, e-prime (give it a go).

If you ever wondered where Robert Anton Wilson got his ideas from around 'The map is not the territory', his SOMBUNALL and suchlike, now you know. (Although he admitted as much.)

And before that, in one of Ginsberg's letters to Burroughs he raves about a new book he's found, 'You've gotta read this!' - Korzybski. I think it was Science and Sanity. He made quite an impression. And not always the same impression:

… he turns your attention to something less tangible, something that you cannot compute additively, that you cannot demonstrate to others with a brilliant display of ‘whys’ and ‘therefores’. He makes you conscious of structure, relations and order. He helps you feel that you as a living-thinking-feeling-acting individual are a conscious node of interrelatedness in a universe that you eventually feel throbbing with you, through you, around you …

…[his] was not the sentimental approach, nor the metaphysical, which have had such a long vogue. Rather it was an engineering approach. He began with an ‘obvious’ fact, but one so large that it had mostly been taken for granted and never adequately explored before; namely, that humans represent a symbol-producing, symbol-using class of life. In other words, the arrangements by which we regulate our lives and the relationships among us are established through the functioning of our symbol systems. Man has created for himself an environment of symbols, and for better or for worse he has to live with them.

Maybe he was just the first engineer to do psychology?

Quite a few good videos if you follow this one:



Added - a realist and a postmodernist read Korzybski:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q732bKxV29g&t=435

[edited to highlight the throbbing...]

[divideandconquer]

Speaking of Bank of America, at their corporate center in Charlotte, NC, murals much like the ones at Denver Airport are displayed for all to see.

[tazmic]

Was that a glitch in the matrix?

[dada]

Thanks, tazmic. I do appreciate Korzybski. And yeah, it was thanks to Bob that I first became aware of his work.

Although if Ginsberg told me, 'oh you gotta read Korzybski,' I don't know if I'd have been so quick to look into it. haha

I never got that Ginsberg. I always get this picture of him scribbling feverishly late into the night, and his stuff never grabs me. Maybe I should try again.

[tazmic]

Thanks, tazmic. I do appreciate Korzybski. And yeah, it was thanks to Bob that I first became aware of his work.

Although if Ginsberg told me, 'oh you gotta read Korzybski,' I don't know if I'd have been so quick to look into it. haha

I never got that Ginsberg. I always get this picture of him scribbling feverishly late into the night, and his stuff never grabs me. Maybe I should try again.

I wouldn't be encouraged. Perhaps what Ginsberg really meant was 'Burroughs has gotta read this!' Which would make sense, as it certainly made a mark on him, but apparently little on Ginsberg himself.

[justdrew]

the American Ghost Dance...

https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/10/06/1352205/tech-billionaires-are-asking-scientists-for-help-to-break-humans-out-of-computer-simulation

Many believe that we live in a computer simulation. But it takes a billionaire and his money to ask scientists to help break us out of the simulation. The New Yorker recently did a profile about Y Combinator's Sam Altman. In the story, Altman discusses his theories about being controlled by technology and delves into the simulation theory. From an article on The New Yorker: Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation. Business Insider adds: The piece doesn't give any clue as to who those two billionaires are -- although it's easy to hazard a few guesses at who they might be, like Musk himself or Altman's friend Peter Thiel -- but it's fascinating to see how seriously people are taking this theory. According to Musk, it's the most popular topic of conversation right now.Earlier this year, at Code Conference, Elon Musk said there's "one in billions" chance we're not living in a computer simulation.

[mentalgongfu2]

At Recode's annual Code Conference, Elon Musk explained how we are almost certainly living in a more advanced civilization's video game. He said: "The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale. So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?"

Yes.
Off the top of my head
1) if we're in a simulation, then the "realism" of our games is only "real" with respect to our "reality," which is in fact a simulation.
So our games are just a simulation of a simulation, and Musk assumes our simulation is a simulacrum of an objective reality we have yet to experience, when it could just be a galactic version of tetris or some such, i.e. sharing some mechanics with "reality" but not actually close to it.

2) Musk's analogy fails to account for the players and characters in the game. Are we all pre-programmed AIs responding to the input of another being pressing buttons on the cosmic controller? This would discount free will. Wouldnt be the first belief to do so, Calvinism, for example, but what would that make Musk? Who is pushing his buttons?

3) one could object to the assertion that our games will be indistinguishable from reality. As real as they could get, you still have to log on to play, making them quite distinguishable

4) one in 1 billion? Figures lie and liars figure.

[justdrew]

to simulate the observable universe to the level of exacting detail our science and tech routinely utilize would require a rather large ball of comptutronium. There are limits to computation just like anything else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_computation

If it's not too complex to run, then we have to assume the simulation is also "lying" to us somehow or constantly rewriting our memories to "fill in the gaps" and fix discrepancies.

just consider the vast amount of data storage and processing required to actually simulate a complete human body down to the quarks. now raise that complexity level to x^x power and maybe there's a rough estimate. It would probably be easier to just create a universe and meddle with it as required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcomputational_problem

Now, these billionaires should also be able to know this, so...

[JackRiddler]

This is such a dumb speculation. Seriously. Computer programmers wondering if god is a computer programmer who decided to devise our universe as a video game. For the kicks or on a bet, perhaps. This has no more inherent validity and infinitely less poetic truth in it than the traditional scenarios of gods and origin myths.

[coffin_dodger]

This is such a dumb speculation. Seriously. Computer programmers wondering if god is a computer programmer who decided to devise our universe as a video game. For the kicks or on a bet, perhaps. This has no more inherent validity and infinitely less poetic truth in it than the traditional scenarios of gods and origin myths.

Well said.

[Sounder]

This is such a dumb speculation. Seriously. Computer programmers wondering if god is a computer programmer who decided to devise our universe as a video game. For the kicks or on a bet, perhaps. This has no more inherent validity and infinitely less poetic truth in it than the traditional scenarios of gods and origin myths.

Thanks Jack, spot on.

[smoking since 1879]

This is such a dumb speculation. Seriously. Computer programmers wondering if god is a computer programmer who decided to devise our universe as a video game. For the kicks or on a bet, perhaps. This has no more inherent validity and infinitely less poetic truth in it than the traditional scenarios of gods and origin myths.

yes indeed. but i guess thats what you get if you grow up folks in the simulated-world-of-academia(TM)

[Belligerent Savant]

.
What -- no Westworld viewers here? The premise is essentially a much smaller-scale version of the fanciful thoughts presented by Musk/others.

Perhaps the series is a carefully timed subtle 'reveal' of our actual reality....

[Luther Blissett]

I am currently viewing that television program. Perhaps it is a slow reveal, though I don't believe anyone has actually peeked into the simulation and truly known what they were looking at.