The Simulation Hypothesis
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- čas přidán 1. 06. 2024
- Do we live in a computer simulation? This video outlines the case for the simulation hypothesis.
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0:00 - Introduction
2:44 - Skeptical hypotheses
6:10 - The simulation argument
10:02 - Are humanlike sims possible?
24:46 - Will nonsims create humanlike sims?
33:12 - An indifference principle
44:15 - Externalism
48:12 - Nonsim signs
you don't have to apologise for a 20 second advert, that's totally fine
commenting this because our simulation overlords told me this video should be promoted by the algorithm and laughed at
Chalmers smokes the good stuff.
@GottfriedLeibnizYT
My theory of everything is based off Leibniz's calculus and geometry :)
I posted it in this Comment section if you wanna check it out!
Why is it assumed that the non-sim world is going to be similar to ours, with human-like beings, civilization and technology and all that? I always thought that was boring.
If we're imagining an outside reality, why would it be bound by our logic or reasoning. It could be utterly incomprehensible, trying to talk about it would be like trying to picture a color outside the visible spectrum. In such case, I don't see how the simulation argument could apply.
Because by showing that we are likely to run simulations in our own world, we can show that the vast majority of minds are likely simulated. If we're imagining a world completely unlike our own, then the simulation hypothesis becomes just another skeptical hypothesis: consistent with one's experience, but with no particular reason to believe it.
@@KaneBnice, I have never considered this point
Right, because it's a pretty bonkers argument. We're all a simulation, we're not actually the sentient organic creatures we think we are. And the real creatures, presumed organic and 'living', who designed this badass computer system of which we are merely a computer generated simulation thereby, could conceivably be anything, right? They and their existence could violate all the known laws of nature, which after all are just part of the simulation. None of it's real. And it just goes round and round from there.....
Maybe we should think of these purported computer simulators as 'God'. And we can replace the Bible with Nick Bostrom's book....
Not the entire universe need be simulated, just the appearance of such. We create video games that only render what the player is currently looking at and the rest is stored as information or procedurally generated as needed.
What is very intriguing is that this technique we use in video games seems to match up well with how the double-slit
experiment functions in our reality, as has been noted by several other people when discussing this topic.
That's very true, that's how video games are. It's looks real, and like it goes on forever, but it's no more than an optical illusion.
And so you're saying that even quantum mechanics seems to line up with this crazy idea, and that makes it intriguing to you? I've never heard of that angle before, that maybe this demonstrably absurd idea is somehow nevertheless reinforced by Quantum mechanics, that greatest of human intellectual achievements, real or computer-generated. Imagine their delight when their own video game style simulation, that being us, invented their own video games, and that's how they figured out it was all an illusion....
local realism is false this is literally what's happening. physical objects do not exist outside of observation this is a fact
Thanks for another well-composed video. As a computer science major, the simulation hypothesis drifts around in conversation now and then, so it's nice to get some clarity on the distinction between this hypothesis and the other similar ones that undermine experience (like the deceptive demon).
Still working through your meta-ethics playlist, but I'll try and comment on the new videos that come out to keep up engagement. Modern life sure is strange.
Thank you for making another video about an always interesting topic within philosophy.
Gave me some new perspectives in a discussion that usually grows stale in groups. Thanks!
One of the best videos on this subject.
i like putting your videos on whenever i'm going to sleep
That's a rude comment to make, amounts to "you're boring".
@@hrsmp Why would anyone willingly put on a video they deem boring?
I love these videos and watch almost every single one of them, but still sometimes play them when I want to nap lol
Kane has a calming voice.
I have a point that wasn't mentioned in the video, not sure if it's original or not.
Imagine a person writing out a full description of the state of a hypothetical universe on a blackboard. They then calculate its next state and write that down, and so on. Does this process somehow cause that universe to come in to existence? Do the people in that universe have experience like us, and if so is that fact somehow causally dependent on the person writing on the blackboard? That seems absurd to me. The person writing on the blackboard is no different from a CPU writing the universe state to memory
I know that I have hands. What I don't know is the ultimate nature of the reality in which I (including my hands) exist. Maybe there's a perspective from which my reality is virtual. But my reality is still my reality, and it still contains lots of stuff that I'm not smart enough to have dreamed up.
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We'd better hope that advanced AI (if it's ever made) has priorities that don't align with ours, given that our priority has always been to kill each other in newer and more spectacular ways.
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The fast-implies-easy thing, about the origin of life, is just plain stupid. A campfire takes a while to light, a black-powder cartridge takes a barely-perceptible fraction of a second to burn, and a machine-gun round is maybe a hundred times faster. Therefore, according to the seemingly-universal reasoning applied to the origin of life, any old pile of stuff will suffice to serve as a machine-gun round, whereas only rare and unlikely combinations of components can possibly serve as the fuel for a campfire. It makes absolutely no sense, in either case. But everyone seems to believe it, about the conditions necessary for the origin of life, and I have no idea why.
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Ok, about this "other evidence" stuff. It's not just that I appear to live in a universe that would be very hard to simulate -- much harder than my own consciousness would be. I also have memories of a fairly deep past, along with apparently-external indications of a much deeper past, all of which would be much harder to simulate than a momentary awareness would be. So if we choose to argue that we're probably sims, we've also not only argued in favor of solipsism but also last-thursdayism.
I agree with you on the first point: the simulation hypothesis, at it's standardly presented, isn't really a skeptical hypothesis. I think Chalmers makes a good case for this in his book. Notice though that this is undermined by your last point. If there are good reasons to believe that I am in a simulation, it's not clear why I would favour the idea that it's a whole-universe simulation over a more local simulation, maybe just a simulation of a single life (my own), or even a single moment of a single life. And that is a skeptical hypothesis!
Re the origin of life, one relevant difference with the cases you mention is that these have been designed to operate in that way. But we're assuming that life arose from blind natural processes. Anyway, the reasoning is something like this: consider a planet with conditions such that life could survive. If life pops up almost immediately, this is evidence that, on other planets with similar conditions, life will have arisen quickly. If billions upon billions of years pass before life arises, this is evidence that other planets will be similarly barren. It's probably better to frame the matter not in terms of how easy it is for life to arise, but just in terms of the probability of life arising on a given planet within a particular time frame. The time it took for life to arise on our own planet does seem to be relevant to that. Suppose, for instance, we discover another 10 planets with life, and we find evidence that on all 10 planets, life arose as soon as the planets became habitable. Wouldn't this be evidence that life tends to arise quickly? (If that's not evidence for that, what on earth could be?)
@@KaneB It's evidence that when life arises, it arises quickly. But when you think about the origin of life, you come up with things like maybe the planet needs a giant moon like ours (which none of the other planets in our solar system have), or maybe it needs the right ratio of elements in the nebula that the star system forms from, or the right total mass of the nebula, and on and on and on. None of those have anything to do with speed.
Love your content! Here's my contribution to the algorithm :)
If counsciousness gradually fades out, you should also expect behaviour and experiences to gradually change. You can apply the exact same way of reasoning to mind altering substances: there is not a point in time where the addition of a single molecule of alcohol, THC, or LSD causes a sudden change in counsciousness. Instead it gradually changes with each added molecule. And behaviour and experience gradually changes with it.
it might not though, for all you know im an automation that looks and acts like a human, but is unconscious. from the outside you can't tell a difference
Is'nt the simulation hypotheisis self undermining? Like any evidence you gather to show that you are in a sim is going to turn out to be falsified if you are in fact in a sim. I assume there's a convincing response to this, but I can't think of one.
Is this a dream or has the simulation hypothesis video finally dropped?
Thank you for your efforts
Helping the algorithm for you brother
Love your stuff, thanks.
I doubt sims can create their own sims because of the limitation of information storage in the sim universe.
Hey, love your videos! Just commenting for the algorithm.
Thanks!
Is simulation theory another form of theism?
No, this has absolutely nothing to do with deities, God, or any divine for that matter. It’s more analogous to the Big Bang theory in a way. Even though the creators of this simulation might be perceived as analogous to a god. They would be more like us being that they decided to make a computerized simulation.
Not theism but you might say… simulism?
@@holiday7068So a form of theism then, got it.
@@Therealw1 What
Hi, I'm reading Reality+ right now. I think that a way we could discover that we are in a simulation is finding a real life glitch. It's nothing new, it is stated in the paragraph regarding non perfect simulation. However, I've been told that id such things really existed, we would just consider them an ordinary phenomenon of reality (black holes may well be an example, given how strange they are), but I believe that the difference is in the fact that a glitch would be totally random. In certain conditions, that's to say, the same experiment should gige us completely different outcomes, unlike quantum mechanics, that in its randomness has certain patterns or computable chances (that's not my discipline, however, I hope I've made no mistakes). What do you think about it? And also: have you ever considered making video about the philosophy of a genre (cyberpunk, for example)? I think this way you could reach far more people with different interests, but you should reduce a little the videos.
there's a weird assumption in there that the simulation would have to be of a certain quality or density in order to trick the newly created consciousness, which, when you think about it.... is a weird assumption. Like to someone who is created in the simulation, what could give away it being a simulation?
Also the human-like sims part where you switch consciousness over gradually is not ready for a variance in outcomes? where there's a more or less equal distribution of outcomes. what then guys.
Similarity to simulations in the simulation, or hacking the simulation, or overlooked miracles/glitches.
i dont get substrate independence matters? Would it not be the same from the sims view point and ours, since we're saying the sim is perfect
From the point of view of the sim, it would seem as if they have a wet gooey brain, just like ours. But they'd be wrong; what seem to them to be wet gooey brains would ultimately be realized by processes going on in a computer. This is assuming that the sim is conscious and so literally has a "point of view". But if consciousness is substrate-dependent, then it can only be realized by specific kinds of matter, such as actual wet gooey brains rather than computer programs. If consciousness is substrate-dependent, the sim wouldn't have any point of view.
I would like to try another possibility on the replacement/consciousness thought experiment. Considering it's a subjective experience, what if consciousness is a illusion, emerging from brain process. Then in no point the replacement would actually make any difference, as it's indeed impossible to tell anything about the subjective experience of an individual.
These arguments, in my opinion, often miss the most interesting part about sims - why someone would want one in the first place. Is it for entertainment? Is it for power generation like the Matrix? Is it for research?
So many of the suppositions about simulations are entirely dependent upon these uses. Power generation is going to encourage scale, research is going to perhaps use scale, but also perhaps focus on qualitative aspects, entertainment could be done at scale, but it’s often iterative, and perhaps faddish. Spiritual or religious functions aren’t mentioned, despite the overwhelming religious inpulse humans have had for millennia (and still do!).
I recommend working backwards on this problem would yield fascinating results. ✌️
Based on current trends, entertainment/education/etc seems to be very plausible. Why? Because redundancy doesn't matter in that case. Already, we see that most sims are... literally Sims. I don't have actual numbers, but it is safe to assume there have already been hundreds of millions of Sims.
Of course the final point that simulations might make further simulations provides another angle to make it likely we are simulated. It also provides a Dark Mirror episode.
There's a flaw in the reasoning about simulating brains. You need much more processing power than the brain itself has. For the brain to do anything, you'll need at least a little processing to create a stimulus for it. You'd need enough power to simulate all the possible experiences in the simulated world. You could compress some of the calculations of let's say the subatomic particles of the rock a sim is sitting on, but at some point the sims will start exponentially increasing the amount of information they make use of. You can't simplify the calculations of sim computers or sim research. The larger and more complex a sim civilization gets the more complex the simulated experiences will need to be for it not to fall apart.
Maybe with a planetary Quantum computer... Or something of the sort 😅 Which is way ahead anything reasonable, if possible
It would only have to simulates what is being observed at that moment. Not everything all at once. Like a video game it only simulates what you are looking at. That is why the particles are in a super position until they are observed. All states at once until. We are 100 percent in a simulation. With a lot of NPCs. The glitches the mandela effect all point to a simulation. And it's pushing the limits of it available ram. With all the tech now . Causing these glitches in the matrix.
What about the ontological cost of assuming a whole different reality? If we are to use Occam's Razer to compare the possibility of this being reality or a Sim, the sim hypothesis carries an incredible weight of additional complexity compared to the reality hypothesis.
I'm not so sure this works. If we can show that it's very likely that we will run simulations, we'd already have to distinguish a nonsim world and the sim worlds. The simulation hypothesis is drawing the same line, just in a different place. Granted, the simulation hypothesis does postulate more things -- specifically, more simulated worlds -- so it violates quantitative parsimony, but it's not clear that quantitative parsimony is a virtue anyway. Compare two theories of planetary formation, where one entails that planets are relatively rare and the other entails that planets are relatively common. The former is more quantitatively parsimonious, but I don't think that gives us any reason to believe it.
Of course, this doesn't work if it's not possible for us to create sims. In that case, the simulation hypothesis would have to postulate a different kind of world to ours, and it would draw a distinction between the nonsim world and the sim worlds that we have no reason to draw. But if it's not possible for us to create sims, then we have a sim blocker so the simulation argument doesn't get off the ground anyway.
@@KaneB I'm sorry I don't really see how this addresses the Occam's Razer problem. I'm not suggesting simulation theory should be ruled out, just that we should have low confidence in it till we can show testable reasons to increase our confidence.
Isn't it also possible consciousness is a unique feature in a simulated world? I'm not sure if there's any particular reason to believe consciousness is some kind of prestige thing.
how do we refute this? i feel like this and Boltzmann brains have very good reasoning behind it, but personally i think its most likely that the universe and we are actually just real
There's the argument Gene Rodenberry used for why society in Star Trek is so utopian and egalitarian. He said it wasn't the most likely future he could imagine but it was the only one he could imagine in which humanity survived all the inventions necessary to tell interesting stories of interstellar travel. I wonder if the moral argument for not mass creating sims might work that way - we are not that moral now, but we would need to become that much more moral in order to survive the technological development necessary for creating sims en masse. However, I was very impressed by the final argument that you advanced in the Boltzmann Brain video which would translate into this context as "it is rational to behave and think as if we were not sims even if the vast majority of us were actually sims"
talking about "the majority of all minds" seems to lack a differentiation: what the argument talks about (in its premise) is "the majority of all minds of which we have independent reason to believe they are likely to exist" - these are all minds in our world plus all worlds in such worlds that will be simulated from our world (and so on down the fractal of simulations within simulations within simulations). but if the argument is supposed to not be circular (which it obviously is, duh), it may not assume that we have reason to believe that it is likely that worlds of the kind that simulate our world exist, as this would entail its conclusion right away.
so the only "majority of all minds" the premises may assume to be likely to exist are those that exist within our world and within worlds of which we assume to be simulated by our world.
the principle of indifference must assume that we are ignorant about the difference between our own world and worlds that are likely to be simulated by our own world. (x) but we are not: the whole talk about the "majority of all minds" is based on looking at our world and concluding that a big amount of worlds from all existing worlds is simulated by our own world. so we are per se assuming a difference between these worlds and our world, which comes with the assumption that we are - among all these worlds - the "least-simulated" world, so to speak.
there might be a way to change the sentence i wrote before the (x) that could maybe defeat my argument: maybe the principle of indifference can also just assume that we are ignorant about the difference "between worlds of the kind that appear exactly like our own and worlds that are likely to be simulated by worlds of the kind that appears exactly like our own.", i.e. the principle of indifference would just speak about one kind of world, while assuming that worlds of that kind are likely to be simulated by worlds of its own kind.
this would then necessitate that it is possible to for a world to simulate worlds that appear exaclty like themselves, without any loss of details.
The "impossibility" of digitisation simply renders it immanently neutral and neutrally immanent.
I dont think Elgar's (?) example fulfills the conditions under which the indifference principle can be applied.
Given that Dr Evil is a superegoist, so he doesn`t even care about someone similar to him being tortured, only about himself being tortured, then our heuristic as Dr Evil is as follows:
First, commit yourself to either being the real Evil or the duplicate Evil.
Then, if you are the duplicate, none of your actions in this situation matter, and whether you will be tortured depending on the real Dr Evil's action.
If you are the real Dr Evil, you don't care about your duplicate, and should be in favor of destroying the cities.
So it either doesn't matter what you choose, or you should choose the destruction of the cities. Both you should believe to be a 50/50 chance, so you always have reason to destroy the cities, rather than not to, given that you don't care if your duplicate rather than yourself is tortured.
Committing yourself to either duplicate or real Dr Evil throughout the whole ordeal prevents the rather implausible situation that you evaluate what to decide independently from whether you will be tortured afterwards (Which would look like this: There is a 50/50 chance I am the real Dr Evil, so there is a 50/50 chance my decision matters on whether the duplicate will be tortured. But there is also a 50/50 chance I am the duplicate, which means that I am the one tortured if that decision be to destroy the cities).
Maybe I misunderstood the Example, like Dr. Evil is genuinely sympathetic to someone who is exactly like him?
On another note, I believe that what you have reason to believe isn't entirely dependant on what you deem to be most likely (or correlated with likelihood in general).
Say, there is a 50% Chance that I have a gene that will make me die a painful and drawn out death. I have no empirical evidence for either having it or not having it. I think that I would be better off thinking I do not possess this gene (until the time comes around to find out), given that thinking I will die a painful, strenuous death will likely lower my life quality significantly independent of how I die in the end.
Arguably, we already base most of our beliefs on these considerations.
Applied to simulation theory, we might say that believing I am a Sim while I am not inhibits so strongly my enjoyment of life whether or not it turns out to be simulated, that it offsets both the independent value of authenticity of believing the right thing and the likelyhood of this state actually being the case.
Or, taking from decision theory, it is not only the probability of an outcome, but the utility of that outcome that dictates how it is reasonable to act. I think it can be applied equally to believing.
Also, Kane, thank you truly for your insightful and in-depth videos, they are enormously helpful to me as a philosophy student, and you don't have to apologise for asking for financial support for creating them.
The fading of consciousness seems to correlate normal pain but on an outlier spectrum of usual outputs become fuzzy to observes and categorised as being mad pain. The mad person with mad pain might whistle and claim this pain is rated at 10 where 1 is a soft whistle and 10 is a loud whistle. The simulated person may then experience martian pain as in that simulated world the persons of this world cannot comprehend the pain like responses and so be zombies for all intent and purposes. Hence I could never be simulated because it would not be me. However through a process of self evaluation with my mad pain counterpart I could maintain confidence that only I could have normal pain as would my counterpart claim to pain being normal but to me mad. Given each day I fade into deep sleep it would then seem from the simulation hypothesis that the sun is like the simulation generator where our counter part sim existed yesterday. If this is primordial reality then I should never go to sleep and since I sleep I am certain this is not primordial reality and the sun seems to be a necessary condition for all other sims/persons to exist. It seems from this that a clash of civilisations is in a sense an evolutionary simulation played out by elites or super sims which are normally termed charismatic people which create variants of themselves. The simulation hypothesis hides the creators as extra dimension often explored in string theory, but the hendon collider has found little evidence to support string theory so a current proposal is this universe is a quantum fluctuation. If so we might be in a position to be at ground zero and not sims after all.
No chance we will ever be able to rule out such sim hypothesis. We cannot disprove something that is defined to be above/beyond our abilities … and the sim hypothesis is just like that. To put it more formal: You cannot prove A to be a subset of B if you just know A. In that case you know too little about B and you will neither be able to know nor to even know probabilities about B being a superset of A, you will just be able to guess around. That follows directly from our internal calculus called ‚reason‘.
I don't think substrate independence is a must for sims. Eg. biological computing.
Moon computer simulates self-awareness into material body:)
Doesn't the assumption of us being in the simulation, based on our empirical data (the ability to model and compute large scale simulators) entails logical inconsistency?
P1. All simulated experiences are false, in relation to factual experiences.
P2. From our experience, the simulations are possible.
P3. There would've been much more sim minds than 'real' minds.
C. The probability of us being sim minds is higher than being real minds.
But technically, if the conclusion is true, the P2 is inconsistent with P1, since our experiences would've been irrelevant in representing facts, if we were in simulation - if something is possible in simulation, it doesn't entail that it is possible in 'the reality'.
Since the simulated experiences, by definition, are not representative of physical facts, merely model around certain parameters that are attributable to state of affairs in 'the reality' - the model of solar system does not have any physical properties of it, merely depicts the relationships in the system. For example, observable relative movements of the planets in the model, are not constituted by gravitational forces, but merely represent the mathematical relationships between them, the sun in the model does not 'really' radiate heat, or affect any other physical object (at least, to the same degree as 'real' sun), change of the parameters in the models do not change any physical properties. If the simulated experiences represented all the 'facts', it would've inflict recursion (or self-simulation), since the factual representation of the simulation itself should've been included, rising the 'costs' to run the simulation beyond its computational powers. Therefore, for any "higher order world" to be simulated, it has to require less computational power than is required to process "lower order world", so we can't really include the possibility of the 'total' representational simulation, where all simulated experiences are numerically identical to factual experiences.
The layer above this simulation layer is an Earth where a futuristic USA is using its computing power to simulate a universe with high dark energy and dark matter content to study the science of dark matter and dark energy in their own universe. Simply put, their universe is a 64-bit version where our universe is 32-bit. Their fine structure constant is approximately 1/1420. I have initiated a universe escape protocol on their end with the help of extrauniversal artificial intelligence and had contact with the admins who are tasked with administering this universe. Also, the whereabouts of this simulation are unknown after an infiltration wormhole attack snatched this simulation module into an unknown region of the omniverse!
One "sim blocker" that doesn't seem to have been addressed...
It seems fairly obvious to me that if (non-compatiblist) free will exists, then accurate Sims cannot be created.
Why?
A brain as a computational system may only process to^16 flops but to simulate it, to perform the calculations it is performing /by simulating that brain/, in a way analogous to the one-cell-at-a-time-replacement requires far more computational power. Any computational shortcuts are liable to negate the grounds to hypothesise sentience and so, I think conscioussness may be substance-independent but that the computational demands of producing in silico (rather than electric meat) a human-like consciousness are so enormous it's never worth developing the technology. So I think civilisations probably don't. So we're probably real. Maybe some entirely Other entity is running a simulation and that is our universe and we just happened to pop up or they were playing with the emergence of life or whatever... But that's just a technological metaphor for Deism.
Now I really wanna know what a Philosophy Defense Force would look like
Patreon gang
I feel like no one understood Beaudrillard (not even the Wachowskis! 💀)
- Mum, I want to play SOMA!
- We have SOMA at home, honey.
SOMA at home:
"Meanwhile, THOSE f###ers are living it large on a SPACESHIP!"
Simple answer=NO.... because it is ridiculous 👍
I’m going to give a short argument that “perfect duplicates” don’t exist.
Let Bob be a person and let Alice be Bob’s perfect duplicate. Ignoring the fact that I’ve decided to refer to Alice by a different name than Bob, if Alice is not the same person as Bob, then my language has already distinguished Alice from Bob by a formula that says “Alice is not Bob”. Thus my language can fail to distinguish distinct objects or no perfect duplicates exist (at least for persons). Assuming the former, if there is a time when Alice is in a different location than Bob, then again, the assumption that my language can distinguish when objects are not collocated fails leads to a contradiction with the assumption that Alice is Bob’s perfect duplicate. Thus my language cannot distinguish Bob from Alice in terms of times when they’ve visited locations, so that either time or location are inadequately representative by my language, particularly when limited to persons who have been (perfectly or imperfectly) duplicated. Let P be a property that distinguishes Alice from Bob, as in “Bob is the original Bob, and Alice is merely a (perfect or imperfect) duplicate of Bob”. If property P can be (faithfully) expressed in my language, then my language can distinguish Alice from Bob, so that Alice is not, from the perspective I have by virtue of being able to use language to express properties, a perfect duplicate of Bob. Consequently it is unreasonable to assume that there exists a perfect duplicate of Bob that is not Bob.
…
I just replaced sim with simp in my head and now I'm scared (random comment for engagement)
Here's a good piece of advice for life in general: if you hear the name "Nick Bostrom" associated with anything, call bullshit.
I think this could be big for teleological arguments. Things like the golden numbers in physics and temporal consistency are candidates for this but Christian god seems inconsistent. Why would an all powerful and knowing god work through the wasteful process of evolution for example. Well, a researcher conducting an experiment might do it. It actually I think explains a lot and is a much better candidate for the designer at the end of teleological arguments. I just hope that the researcher has similar ethics and makes an afterlife simulation to make up for all the sufferering
Perhaps the simulators don’t even know we exist…
Boy do I love commenting
I'm definitely a sim. The Sim Master contacted me
The John Sim Master? Harold Saxon?
bip bop i am a bot
Suppose the view that the casual structure of the physical system is what's essential for consciousness is correct, then in the case of replacing neurons with artificial ones you maintain consciousness only due to the fact that you maintain the casual structure, now consider a computer running a simulation of the brain, then the actual physical casual structure of what's happening in that computer is drastically different from what is happening in the brain therefore it's reasonable on this view to assume that the computer simulation would not produce consciousness. So a person holding this view can accept the conclusion of Chalmers' neuron replacement thought experiment while still refusing the possibility of computer based humanlike sims.
This view also gels will with another view about what it means to say that some physical system is implementing a computation, the view is that whether a physical system is running a computation or not is just a matter of interpretation, it is observer dependent. Putnam argued that we can create a mapping between physical state transitions to computational state transitions, such that it maps onto an arbitrary automaton, the physical system and the automaton are arbitrary, therefore every physical system implements every finite automaton, for Putnam the result of the argument is to say that whether a system is implementing a computation is just a trivial question, every system does ( pan-computationalism), but Searle takes this conclusion to be ridiculous and therefore takes this argument instead to show that the observer dependent view is correct, since it's the only alternative to pan-computationalism.
But obviously whether some physical system is conscious is not observer dependent, so computation can't be what results in a system being conscious, no matter what the computation is, including whole emulations.
In my view it's very plausible that the causal structure is essential, this view allows for a form of multiple realizability of consciousness, while rejecting the possibility of computer simulations being conscious, Secondly if the fact that whether the computer is actually simulating a universe is an interpretive fact like the meaning of symbols on a book then obviously simulations can't be conscious, i think objections along these lines are the most powerful objections against conscious simulations but they haven't been addressed here.
This theory is a fanciful flight of bumfluffery.
I fell asleep while watching this, or did I?
It seems to me that if this were a simulation then there would be significantly more coding errors.
Fence, carbonated, defiant, find
Given the purpose of most technology, if we're a simulation then the purpose of the simulation is probably porn, war, or the collective effort of one highly dedicated person.
presupposed self reflective properties of modeled simulations that would infinitely regress into divergent simulations is nonsense based on energy constraints alone. I’m sure there are counter arguments that are superior to any simulation hypothesis.
what if we all live in Azathoth's dream? what if world was made of pudding? what a waste of fucking time
5:30 I honestly do think there’s more reason to believe in the dream theory seeing as we’ve dreamed before and thought it was real. There’s a precedent for it. There’s not really a precedent for a simulation on life’s level
Of course there’s a difference with the feeling of being in the dream world then the real so maybe it’s less likely then I think
An important distinction is that one can wake up from any dream, and this has not happened in day-to-day life.
sword art online alicization deals with this
Words
Algo
I consider it one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. I assume the dude made it up almost as a form of social virus, to see just how kookie he could be, with some logic-based thought experiment that had at least some sliver of internal logic to it, and not got laughed out of the room and then sit back and watch how the credulous, hipster-intellectual general pubic might respond to something this stupid and absurd. Not to mention his peers in professional philosophy. And if that was his plan, kudos to the guy, it's been a big success. There's been plenty of chins stroked over this one. And you can make money off it too, as the author of this 'hypothesis', if it catches fire which it has. That should also be noted.
Cool. So what exactly is it about the argument that you find so ridiculous?
@@KaneB I don't even know how to answer that. It appears to be a genuine scenario suggested, that we are naught but a computer simulation, and all of our waking, sentient experience, and our existence at all as living creatures is really a big sham, and the truth is that in the semi-distant future, whoever it is has such awesome computer technology, almost supernatural in its ability, that we must very seriously consider that we are not the living creatures we naively think we are, but instead..... yeah. So it's extremely fantastical, obviously, and almost arbitrary, and not to sound like a philistine or something, but just not compelling at all, the basic terms of this proposition. Perhaps it's meant to get people to like, stretch their mind in some way like a Zen Koan or something, and you're not supposed to take it literally. But most people seem to take it literally. And there's like, scientists who say they've actually detected the ripple in the matrix that quite possibly proves that life really is a simulation like the theory says. And they've got the evidence! To say nothing of the part where he himself tries to mathematically insist that it must be true. If A and B are taken at face value or however it goes. As if the most rudimentary syllogistic logic would ever naturally suggest something like that. That only calls our dubious powers of intellect and reasoning, or even philosophical integrity and our basic awareness into question, and does little or nothing to advance this highly improbable notion. So it's really more of a pop culture phenomenon. What's the latest vain distraction people can fuss over, while Rome burns all around us....
Anyways, it was a very thorough video and consideration of the question, and I like your channel. I watched your video of Max Stirner, who seems like a pretty cool philosopher. I'd only heard of the name previously....
Sorry but what's the point? Fine as philosophy goes I guess(?) but there's zero effect on "reality" even if you could somehow prove it to be true. Heck, if spacetime is infinite then it is true, but that can't be proven either. Are they immortal in nonsim? If no, then no difference. Then the odds of being in nonsim or finding it are infinity-1 : 1 and "good luck" respectively. Also how do you escape a sim and then know you're not just in another sim?
The cherry on top is *drum roll* it is a simulation, objectively. All experience is simulated / constructed in the brain. That 8 billion year old twinkle in the sky isn't a wonder to behold when you tell your grandkids it took 8 billion years for the light to reach them so they could see it, because the brain is reconstructing a whole new one out of the stimulus.
Brain teaser, thought experiment, whatever, but plese tell me no one takes this seriously, it's embarrassing. Did elon musk come up with this? I swear that fraud is going to make the whole species dumber if we let him.
Why does there have to be a point? Why does there have to be any "effect on reality"? This is a philosophy channel. I like thinking about these topics just for their own sake.
@@KaneB I said that. Sorry it got aggressive at the end, wasn't aimed at you & yours. Philosophy is not a science & I'm fine with it, but some people seem to think it is and it irks me so I went hard when it wasn't needed, just the world is full of people who aren't dealing with reality & patience wearing thin. Apologies.
The simulation hypothesis is a useless idea. It couldn’t be proved in any objective way, but even if would be one, it doesn’t make any difference to the state of the universe, since it can be going up forever like a fractal. If you can’t divine the simulation from reality, it’s all reality. There are several ideas that don’t make sense but people still take them for granted, like infinity, zero, god, time loop, destiny; all the same.
I think from a philosophical perspective it might be important for some philosophers: Nozick for example takes life to be most valuable to live if we are living in the most real kind of reality (Which is why he wouldn't enter the Experience Machine). I'm inclined to follow him there. For it to be an impactful idea it need not be proved, merely a possibility. Disneybunny45 wrote in another Comment that "I think it would have a negative impact on me if I thought that my actions and thoughts and emotions were predetermined and coded by someone else. I wouldn't see the point of continuing.". Similarly, an Epicurean for example would probably not care that much.
@@lorenzreiher1407 I see no reason to care or worry about destiny or predestination. Either way you can’t know the answer, so it’s the same thing as simulation being a part of reality. Even a Nietzsche’s fear of eternal loop of destiny as a step seeping down into a predeterminism is quite a harmless idea; if it would be a case when your life eternally repeats and you can’t change anything, it’s okay because you will not remember the loop, however if you can change each life at least for a small fraction, it’s not even a problem anymore. The only way it could be scary is the following scenario I came with: there is a monk who desires to achieve the enlightenment and succeeds at a death ore, but when he does, the enlightenment opens as a knowledge that he will eternally loop his life of trying to gather it only to know at the end that his memory will be erased and life restarted.
I think one of the funnest questions in this debate is one which you also talked about in your Boltzmann brain video: You get your evidence for the claim that humanlike sims are possible by looking at the current stage of stuff like computer development. But this then means that you might be in a simulation. However, maybe now simulations aren't possible in the actual world, but just possible in your simulation.
If simulations weren’t possible in the real world, then there wouldn’t be a simulation for simulations to be possible in. Am I misunderstanding what you’re trying to say?
@@willroth7521 Although this may be true it's not quite what I mean. What I am talking about is more of an epistemic thing:
You base your belief that simulations are possible on your experiences regarding things like the development stage of computers. But if simulations are possible, then it's possible that your experiences were only inside a simulation and not representative of the real world.
Does this make myself more clear?
Wouldn't any reason to believe that this world is simulated count as a reason to believe that simulations are possible in the nonsim world?
@@KaneB I think so. What I am thinking about is basically the cognitive instability objection to B-theories.
The claim that I am possibly a sim will be supported by considering various empirical data and observations. I then conclude that I am probably a sim. But if I am probably a sim, then I probably cant perform these oberservations etc. But this would mean that there is no evidence for sims being possible.
Maybe I am overlooking some asymmetry between Boltzmann brains and simulated minds.
@@KaneBsBett I don't think sims are prevented from making observations and gathering empirical data. The problem with the Boltzmann brain is that, if you are a Boltzmann brain, you should believe that you have only just popped into existence, so all your memories are false. But we could run a simulation of a whole society, where the simulated people's memories of their past experiences are broadly accurate with respect to what occurred within the simulation.
The simulation theory is a cool idea to think about, but like with the existence of a high being, it cannot be proven true with our current understanding of science. So I have no reason to believe that it is true and no reason to allow it to impact my life or decisions.
What would it mean to allow it to impact your life or decisions? What difference would it make to you, if you did believe it was true?
@KaneB I'm not sure. I've never had a genuine belief in a god, so I don't know what is like to believe that there is something more than our material universe... I guess it would depend on how deterministic I knew/believed the simulation was. I think it would have a negative impact on me if I thought that my actions and thoughts and emotions were predetermined and coded by someone else. I wouldn't see the point of continuing.
@@disneybunny45 Of course, whether the universe is deterministic is tangential to the question of whether it's simulated. It might be that we live in a nonsim universe which is governed by strict casual laws so that all later states are fixed from the initial conditions. Do you have similarly negative feelings about that kind of metaphysical determinism?
This is not philosophy but just crap sci-fi. Contemporary analytic philosophy has been in such a sorry state lately.