The Philosopher Nick Bostrom of Oxford build a simulation argument that we are most likely in a simulation, to claim we are in the one reality, that could not be differentiated from billions of likely constructs is to put us at the centre, to claim a special reality just for ourselves, it’s dowright anti-Copernican!

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

I wrote this in a post on a blog I made earlier today, it reminds me of the movie Inception…

Be Humble because you are made of Earth,
Be Noble because the Earth is made of Stars,
Be Awed that perhaps what we make of the Earth and Stars is the same stuff of what dreams are made on.

Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

The pixelation that is mentioned probably refers to Planck distance and Planck time.

“Right now the fastest NASA supercomputers are cranking away at about double the speed of the human brain”

Which super computer is that?

I’m looking at the top 500 right now and at the top is Sequoia with theoretical peak of 20 Petaflop = 2 * 10^16.

If you take Kurzweil’s estimate of 10^16 flops for simulating a human brain, then I suppose this is indeed ‘twice the speed of a human brain’.

But Rich Terrile speaks of ‘supercomputers’… iow: multiple.

I don’t see multiple supercomputers cranking out 20 Teraflop. Number two on the list does slightly over 10.

I would like to see some clarification before I take Rich Terrile seriously.

Unless we were able to make contact with our “creators”, or we somehow found irrefutable proof, we’d never be able to prove the existence of them….and I don’t think we would ever be able to find such proof — even if the Post-Singularity world…even if we surpassed the speed of light and “woke” the universe…had the ability to engineer and colonize new universes to keep our intelligence growing indefinitely….no matter how high we go depending on the scenario, it wouldn’t matter — the creators would be like Gods to us no matter how God-like we ourselves became.

Thinking about it, I find it impossible to believe their would actually ever be found proof that we live in a Simulation — whether it’s because it’s regulated perfectly, or was created that way from the start…I honestly can imagine no less then utter perfection because that’s simply how advanced the creators must be to us, even in a post-Singularity world….it HAS to be that way — they cannot be mere human beings and we are avatars in a computer game they invented…their intelligence would have to be nonpareil.

And thinking about it….we’re never going to find evidence that we are in a simulation; not unless they themselves appeared to us. Perhaps they won’t bother until humanity has gotten as far as they can go (post-Singularity perhaps?), or perhaps not….perhaps the simulation will go on forever because they are like a Deistic god who has forgotten about us, monitors closely without revealing their presence, …or perhaps the billions of years our universe has been around been is only subjective — perhaps, in truth, our universe has been around for only a very short amount of time…after all, if subjective time is expanded depending on how large the intelligence….then for the creators, they would get epochal events done seemingly in the blink of an eye, no matter how much we ourselves increased our own intelligence.

We are bound by the limits they have instilled into the simulation, and unless their is a new future after the Post-Singularity world where we can continue to climb higher and perhaps reach their own intelligence (perhaps the whole point of the exercise?), we’d never be able to break free of this flawless simulation or even prove we live in one in the first place: That’s why I say, not only is the whole argument kind of moot unless they reveal themselves, but we’d never really be able to do anything about it….not unless they gave us something, like perhaps the option of leaving.

Indeed, if we simulate a universe of our own for whatever reason, it could be that we are simply continuing a “loop” of sorts…

Quoted straight from the “Singularity is Near” – felt appropriate since Kurzweil went into this, and other existential risks in the book. He basically asserts that GNR should be our real concerns, as he sees the Simulation idea, alongside others like Alien visitors to Asteroid impacts, as too unlikely.

I agree with you 100%.

People always say we have the ‘hardware,’ but I claim that that isn’t the case. Until you can engineer a way put 100 billion completely independent ALUs in an array, with nearly limitless connectivity between any nodes, you don’t have the hardware for brain emulation. Why not?

Simultaneity. I’m not talking about massively parallel. I’m talking about completely independent pieces. (If a GPU could have 100 billion kepler cores, that might get you closer.) The thing is that nothing happens on a computer unless one of two conditions are met: 1. it was exactly and specifically programmed to happen and 2. the state of the ‘thing’ in question is affected by the processing unit. The state of a ‘thing’ in a digital system cannot change unless it is acted upon by something, namely a processing unit of some sort.

That’s not how it works in the brain. Every single one of your 100 billion neurons are acting independently at all times. They are firing, ‘cooling down,’ receiving chemical signals from other parts of the brain (whether nearby or far away), and so on. Every single element can change its state autonomously without being acted upon by some external system, let alone a central processor of some kind.

It’s a difficult thing to explain, but it is fundamental to this problem. Smashing a bottle on a table doesn’t require trillions upon trillions of individual physics simulations governing the interaction between every atom at every time step. It simply happens. It simply is. Even a mediocre simulation of the same thing on a computer is extremely difficult to do – ask any graphics programmer!

The point is this: people talk all the time about us having the hardware to take on the task of emulating the human brain, but this is not the case. Mathematically these entities do not behave the same way, because in a real physical system, the state of everything is autonomous. On a computer, you have to specify it exactly. Capturing a convincing emulation without all of the underlying continuous mechanisms that govern each part and its subparts is, well, not likely to happen on classical computers.

From what we have observed, particles interact with each other probabilistically, every single time, say, an atom collides with another one, they exchange an infinite number of virtual particles. That’s a nightmare for a computer to handle. Sure, computers the size of microbes will soon be able to solve protein folding simulations. But its very hard, and some argue impossible, for something smaller than a protein to simulate a protein. Why go to such length to make the laws of nature so complex, the universe so large, make everything so hard to handle, when simple laws could suffice? The “stacking” problem is automatically solved if the laws are too simple to allow advanced computer simulations, as are many of the problems that the supposed programmers would have to face.

Hm, simulating history.Make sure it is politically correct!

Also this can’t be a simulation because in Grand Theft Auto if I cause lots of trouble after a little while of good behavior the police leave me alone…..
:P

…which leaves us with the same basic (age old) quandary: The ultimate truth is unknowable. What came before the start and how/why did it start? This (“it could all be a simulation”) is all an intriguing possibility, but it offers us little beyond an existential brain puzzle.

That’s the problem with all theories involving a creator of superior faculties instead of from a lower state. It always demands the question, “okay, where did that creator come from? You end up dealing with an infinite regression of creators.

We are all better off assuming that are in an uncreated, evolving, objective universe made of actual matter from which life and then consciousness arose. Not subjective figments in a greater mind or fragments of a greater mind.

This one could also have that recent news story about the team trying to simulate history, I cant find it with the search function :-( tried the keywords “simulation; simulate; simulat; history; historic; histor; sociology; automaton;” etc… though i tried to limit the results to “AI/Robotics” and “past year”…

That’s leaving out an awful lot of biology, to say the least. Still, a machine of that size that’s simulating even a simple artificial neural network could still evolve some interesting behaviors in a well-constructed VR environment.

Is it possible that we are just in a simulation? Yeah. But it seems strange that a programmer would create a program that is aware of the process by which it was created. I’m beginning to believe reality is fractal, and as we were created so too we have the ability to create. As above, so below.

Hmm, it’s hard to understand how consciousness could work in our (physical) world, but it’s very easy to imagine how it could work if we live in a simulation. It would work similar to 3D game today, only better.

The consciousness lives in a world outside ours.