SwiftLion

If the simulation hypothesis is correct and we're just elements of one, what could possibly make you think we're equipped to understand anything about the world simulating us?

"Hey guys hurr durr, I'm gonna go climb down in that anthill and chill out by the food stores. O noes! The antses' chemical precursors indicate they might suspect that a larger world exists! Better throw them off by banning dimethylchloroisothiosolonone!!"

SarMegahhikkitha

Can you tell me why everyone here and in /v/science downvotes posts about the Simulation Hypothesis to invisibility? Why is a debate about this subject so threatening? Of course I would find a better source of debate about the subject if scientists were willing to debate its validity .

SwiftLion

Because it isn't science yet. The bleeding edge of theory is always hypothesis, and still farther in the whack-job direction, is conjecture. They're just sick of talking about something with no experimental predictions and no data to examine.

They aren't trying to silence you. They just don't care.

SarMegahhikkitha

Yet they won't shut up about string theory. Yet even in /v/conspiracy they downvote it to invisibility instead of ignoring it moving on. Not weird?

SwiftLion

Not weird. String theory was in this boat in the 90's, and nobody gave a shit about it then, because it didn't make experimental predictions. The only reason it's making a comeback is that it has a new shot at showing some predictive power.

SwiftLion

No, that's pretty easy. The top one, there's a somewhat questionable editorial addition to the title. The bottom one just presents an article. That's just poor news aggregator etiquette on your part, not information manipulation.

SarMegahhikkitha

Hsu and Zee have suggested that the CMB provides an opportunity for a potential creator/simulator of our universe to communicate with the created/simulated without further intervention in the evolution of the universe. If, in fact, it is determined that observables in our universe are consistent with those that would result from a numerical simulation, then the Hsu-Zee scenario becomes a more likely possibility. Further, it would then become interesting to consider the possibility of communicating with the simulator, or even more interestingly, manipulating or controlling the simulation itself.

It would be insanely easy to determine the "signature" for organic life and immediately identify what exoplanets contain it, like spending 5 minutes writing a definition for a virus scanner. Then to learn the language, a civilization this advanced would have AI that learns the languages the same way a baby learns (with the advantage that it's not scouring the internet but actually observing our interactions). By associative learning it would be very easy to map our brains non-invasively; every time we're touched our somatosensory cortex is activated for the place of touch, every time our motor cortex is activated the associated muscle moves. If the AI is automatically figuring out that every area of our labial premotor cortex is associated with a phoneme then it's trivial to have a read-out of our thoughts.

Someone doesn't write a game like The Sims to look at the pretty swirling scenery. They want to see the thought bubbles, they want to be voyeurs. They may even want insertion hooks to meddle with the reality covertly (e.g. by learning the association of people's emotions with amygdalar activation and messing with their minds). In fact, they're likely to have ethical treatment laws the way we have for animal testing, and they may be obligated to intervene in societies that go to shit.

SwiftLion

Well, before I respond directly, let me just take a moment to say thank you (sincerely!) for responding to my post like this. Voat tends to bring out better debate in people, and if I'm gonna act like I think somebody's opinion is stupid, somebody should call me out to explain it.

So, I don't believe the simulation hypothesis is absurd, nor do I think that it's entirely out of the question that the simulators would like to communicate with the inhabitants of their simulation. I do, however, think that the implication that any part of the simulator's work would involve communicating with humans at this stage in our development is absurd.

The magnitude of our universe is stunning. It's a gigantic place. The amount of clock cycles it would take to manage all the matter that comprise Earth are almost inconceivably small compared to the remainder of the universe. If they wanted to simulate us, and they cared about something our size, wouldn't the solar system be enough? Even if we assume that the remainder of the universe outside the solar system is a lower fidelity, mostly-static version of things, we still have made a few centuries' worth of observations and we see consistency there. So, the rest of the universe must be assumed (with current data, at least) to be chugging along on its own outside of us.

Now, hypothetically, let's say we go a particular path down the technological singularity. Let's say that we conclude, "Biological life so far is meant to be a self-sustaining package that keeps the chemical precursors of conscious thought ready to go". Let's say that we then conclude that all symbolic logic is more or less created equal, and let's say that we achieve synthetic consciousness. Then, the ideas of 'food' and traditional society fade away, living humans are chemically transformed until our brains have become synthetic processors that are still conscious, and let's say that we decide to set up a chemical process that begins slowly organizing the entirety of matter contained in the planet into structures that create conscious thought.

At THAT point--this planet-being AI that we've created will STILL be so insignificantly small that the remainder of the simulation dwarfs it by magnitudes we'd need to express as "gigantic numbers taken to themselves as exponents multiple times". I definitely believe the simulation hypothesis is possible. But, I think it's patently absurd to think that sentiency as we've made it, this far in our history, is advanced enough to be of direct interest to our simulators.

SarMegahhikkitha

Whenever we do research on planetary bodies, the first thing people want to know is which organic compounds are detected. Can you really in good faith claim it's not nature to have a hard-on for "things like us"? If you're looking at just the information content of the universe, and you have the processing power to simulate it, you certainly have the power to detect carbon chains. And I guarantee you that if you were writing a research paper about the simulation you created, and wanted some shtick to get grant money, you'd definitely check for if there's life, how to characterize it, compare/contrast it to life with other simulation variables. You wouldn't waste all that computing power for pretty swirls, you'd compute the regions of highest Φ and study them. And here I'm still talking about you, personally, calling absurd what you would most definitely do as a researcher, and not a 4th or higher-dimensional being with vastly superior sentience and capabilities.

SwiftLion

Talking about the intentions of such beings is just as silly for one of us to try to do, as it would be to claim to "know the will of God", if such a thing is real.

SarMegahhikkitha

Speculating on the "Will" of mathematical purity is not masturbatory since it must be mathematically perfect and that allows us to rule out possibilities at the very least.

SwiftLion

I said nothing about the will of mathematics. Your conjecture that our math here even holds there is at least suspect. There would likely be fewer simulations of a universe exactly the same as theirs than simulations of other interesting sets of parameters, so who even says your estimation that Phi is a value they're looking at?

We still haven't got a convincing argument that math is actually true. We know math is not "real", but it just seems damn useful and we suspect that it is probably true because of that. There's no reason to think that a civilization simulating a universe with sentient inhabitants has similar math to the tiny little specks of life inside the simulation.