Ever feel like you're insignificant? Well...don't look at this...

You don't really even have to go to 'big infinities' to see these weird results.

Example: Draw two lines, one three times longer than the other using whatever unit you wish, in such a way that you can draw a third line to make a right triangle with the longer of your original lines as the hypotenuse. Make sense?

OK, now draw a line parallel to the third line that passes through any point on the hypotenuse that you wish. That line will pass through a specific point on the shorter of your two original lines.

Draw another line, parallel to the line you just drew, passing through a different point on the hypotenuse. That line will pass through a different specific point on the shorter of your two original lines.

If you've had middle-school level geometry, you might see where this is leading: by the Euclidian definition of parallel lines, no two lines you are drawing through a point on the hypotenuse will ever pass through the same point on the shorter of your original two lines. But this means that, for every point on the hypotenuse, there is a corresponding point on the shorter line.

And this, of course, proves that there are exactly the same number of points on both of your original lines, despite one of them being three times longer in 'absolute' terms.

--
Pauper

Damn, now I feel like I've given something away.

Well I will say no more. It's a good flick.

Also, Calabi-Yau spaces are energy constrained to the laws of physics: expansion has to occur in other spaces otherwise the expansion of the universe would radically alter the Plank constant, among other dramatic things, if I understand the theory correctly.

I recall being here. I might not be recalling the same me being here.

To make sure I didn't mess up the definition, I looked it up before I wrote that post.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Significant

Important is a Synonym of Significant, and thus it has the same applications.

True, but Science isn't about Absolute Truth because it doesn't presuppose that exists. It looks for truths that are useful enough that knowing about a finite amount of the universe allows us to comfortably predict what's going on in the rest of it. The orbit and rotation of the Earth around the Sun doesn't really affect me directly all that much, except it does allow me to predict the Sun is rising tomorrow, and at what time. Universal gravitation allows me to predict things will fall down. What if it is actually invisible fairies that just happen to arrange things to look like Newton and Einstein are being obeyed? Well, in that case we assume they'll continue to do so consistently and move on: all our predictions of how the universe behaves will be the same.

There is no way to *prove* our universe is not a simulation, given that we're not constraining what a "simulation" is or what the hypothetical limits of computer power would be outside our own universe. But if we are a simulation, its possible we might one day discover physical phenomena which are best explained as simulation glitches. If a theory one day emerges that presupposes our universe is a simulation in some hyperpowerful computer of some specific design, and that theory makes predictions about events we haven't observed yet which violate our current laws of physics, and then those observations are confirmed, with enough repeated trials of this we could claim that we have discovered our universe is a simulation to within scientific certainty. The certainty that says that theory explains everything we see, accurately predicts things we haven't seen yet and couldn't have known about, and is the simplest and best theory which is capable of doing so.

Some people say that for every question, there is just another question lurking behind it: that you can just keep asking "why" trying to uncover "deeper" truths. But that fails to recognize that Science isn't about finding those deeper truths. Science only cares about deeper truth when that deeper truth is also more useful to describe the universe. There is a limit on how deep we can ask "why" because human beings are finite and limited: our knowledge and observations of the universe are also limited. Beyond a certain point, we would be asking questions to try to distinguish between competing theories of the world that themselves do not make any predictions that are different. Theories that make identical predictions are identical theories in Science. For the question "which one is the deeper truth" to make sense, we would have to be capable of making observations which could distinguish between the two. And while we can keep getting better at it, there is a finite limit.


Edit: in other words, it is theoretically within the limits of Science to ask "is the best possible explanation of existence that our universe is a simulation in some extremely powerful computer?" It is beyond the limits of Science to ask "and what color is the case?"

No disagreements there.

I'll grant that.

I guess that's what I was thinking about then. But as you say, even this is limited by our concept of what kind of "hardware" we imagine this simulated world is running in.

I don't follow your logic here. Are you saying that if we discover that this is the only universe there is, we are doomed to decay, quiescence and decadence--or something? Why is that? I'm confused, please clarify this
paragraph.


Well, as I say, what time is and how it works is a tough set of questions.

If we are in a simulated universe, the Great Programmer can play all kinds of games with hash tables and such to make mince meat of our perceptions of time, sure. But lacking any real evidence that this is true, maybe it's better to just invoke Occam's Razor and keep it simple.

But we can speculate all we want here and that's certainly fun.

We already do make simulated realities. We just don't populate them with conscious beings. Yet.

The universe is doomed to heat death and if this is the only universe and we can not figure out how to manipulate the laws of physics we're doomed ^.^

It's not that a programmer can't do that... it's that a programmer/scientist wouldn't do that as the point of creating a simulation to the extent we're talking about would likely only be done in an experiment.


Arcana. I am not talking about the same thing. There is a difference between what I'm thinking of as a simulated "reality" and a Virtual reality which is more what you're talking about and others are thinking about.

Virtual realities are attempts to emulate the *appearance* of the real world. Simulations are attempts to model or replicate the mechanical functioning of the real world.

I can't guess what you might mean by a simulated reality, but the term refers to things we already do. More importantly, what the rest of the thread was talking about in terms of simulated realities are extremely advanced versions of what we already do. The difference between simulating galactic evolution, say, and simulating all of reality is a question of resolution.

In any case, my point was not that MMOs are simulations, but rather that its strange anyone who plays MMOs would believe that *no one* would create a simulated reality simply because there would be no scientific value to doing so. Even if that were conceded, and its a ludicrous point to concede because we use scientific simulations already, there's no reason to believe scientific motivation would be the only reason to do it. There's every reason to believe if the technology became available to do it people would do it for entertainment value, or to prove it could be done, or simply because they could.

If the universe is singular and doomed to annihilation and an eternity of
non-existence that's really depressing, I'll agree.

There are few physicists, Freeman Dyson and Frank Tipler are the ones I can think of, who've speculated about ways we could avoid the end of the universe.

• Tipler's idea focused on how we could control the way the universe collapses in a Big Crunch. He imagined ways we would build machines that would continue to work as the universe got hotter and hotter. His required a close universe.
• Dyson thought about ways to build computers that continued to run as the universe got colder and colder in the heat death. His idea required an open but nearly flat universe.

Sadly both of these ideas are now out of date. We now know the universe is doomed to "The Big Rip" long before a Heat Death or a Big Crunch. The recently discovered cosmic acceleration and dark energy is going end the universe many zillions of years sooner than the Heat Death or Big Crunch will.

I guess someone clever is going to have to figure out how to survive in a universe fated for the Big Rip.

Isaac Asimov explored what to do about the end of the universe in his short story, "The Last Question." Of course this question was given to a computer to solve.

But if the universe is a multiverse that is infinite and eternal, this problem will never come up. Entropy may win locally but Eternal Inflation and Poincare's Recurrence win globally.

I know they are both "simulated" but I'm trying to explain the slight difference in purpose and scale when there isn't a word for it. The simulations needed or games and such are different than those used for scientific purposes. It's not just a matter of resolution, but a matter of how and why we would do it. Someone who is a scientists wouldn't run the program because there is no way to run it without blocks in the AI while an artists wouldn't care to do something that wouldn't be immediately obvious and likewise would probablt have no qualms in putting in those blocks.

I prefer the classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

That result would only be 'weird' if you used it to claim that both lines were equal.

The lines obviously aren't equal, but you could use that result to claim they contained an equal number of points.

I will remind you again you are talking about something scientists currently do on a smaller scale. And I have no idea what artificial intelligence specifically has to do with it.

Come up with an experiment where at the very least an entire world has to be simulated full of Sentient artilects. I'm pretty sure there isn't one. And even if there was one there would be massive moral implications that I'm pretty sure no enlightened person would ever do.


Also that doesn't remove the possibility that our universe is really just a singularity inside another universe which itself is inside another universe.

"I want to simulate the evolution of a universe, using my perfect Theory of Everything, under X parameters to see if it converges to/differs from the real universe, thereby testing the plausibility of those parameters in the universe's history."
Or just
"I want to simulate the evolution of a universe with wildly different physical laws, to see what happens."
In either case, if it simulates everything down to particles, intelligence might plausibly emerge, whether intended or not. If we ever decide to run a simulation, or if we ARE a simulation, its purpose wouldn't necessarily be to observe the simulated meat-creatures (you could probably get by without simulating the billions of light-years of "uninteresting" space in every direction, if that was all you wanted to do).
Plus, if we're a simulation run by something in another universe which may behave entirely differently, who's to say our idea of the experiment's ethicality would even be applicable?

No point as we already know that even if we could go back and restart the universe at the beginning and progress it forward things would be different. There are things that are just random enough that build up over time that causes something big to be different

No point as "low" resolution passes can do that already and tell us all we need to know. We hen would only use those simulations to give us a basis of an environment where we would then run evolution based algorithms to see anything we need from that stand point. And there is no need for the particular or atomic resolution because the "low" resolution would already know how that works and nothing but rather intelligent creatures work on the level where those things would be needed to be simulated.

There is really no reason to simulate sentient life because we can see it all around us. Even if we did we wouldn't let it go for this long because once sentient life is produced we're raise them up into our universe. As far as morality problems...simply put, any intelligent being smart enough to get to that level would recognize the immorality of letting such a universe as this run is if they can stop it. We're talking hundreds of billions of just humans that are sentient beings being tortured, killed, etc and points of view just being eradicated pointlessly. And why Morality would matter in that is simply because what morality is, which is a method for sentients to create the best world they can with each other.

The thing is the experiment would be such utter cruelty and it's not like they could uplift a lot of the AIs, because a lot of the AIs just wouldn't understand and or would and would be furious so their only option would be to let us die and be deleted. That would be akin to murder in their eyes, because Sentient Artilects and "people" are the same thing. Of course this concept won't sink in for us for another half century to century so meh ^.^

...and this is always true, at every point in time, in any conceivable universe?

It could be a sadist running the simulation to lord over the pitiful Sim-beings.
It could be a Boltzmann brain simulation of the universe, which would have had no intent at all, it just randomly fluctuated into being.
It could be the last surviving sentient during heat death, simulating a new universe because its is done.
It could be beings so much more intelligent than us that they consider us like we consider animals, and our simplistic suffering is acceptable or irrelevant to whatever their purpose is.
It could be beings so different than us that they don't even recognize our concepts of suffering or ethics.
Heck, if it's a simulation, what happens over a few millennia to some weird clusters of water molecules on one small ball of iron might not even be noticed because the simulators are busy observing the formation of galaxies over billions of years.
It could be a situation far less exotic than any of these, simply involving someone who doesn't agree with your assessment that it would be pointless for any number of reasons. I'm doing that right now in this thread, so you've got empirical evidence that such viewpoints exist.

I'd also point out that we are speculating about the motives of beings we've never even met yet. That's always risky or at least not very productive.

So to recap, we speculating about the motives of myserious beings using speculative ideas in physics to build simulators based around speculative ideas in computing. Phew, that's a lot of speculation!

Some of what you said is possible and some are not... Most are unlikely though.

funny enough though is that it really doesn't matter as much as people might expect because it all ends up being data that can be and in most cases would be uplifted/transferred... Only a few instances I can think of where it would matter...

It's not really all that much "speculation." We are assuming the assumptions that that science does. This means that logic and math is the same all universes. Among those things is that certain things are ultimately selected for and thus are more or less 100% guaranteed. For example ethics will always be that harm is selected against as "bad" and things promoting life are good. Likewise those things that increase survivability like technology and intelligence will always be selected for and pack mentality will be as well.

Same thing applies to technology and where it will go (mainly because it is part of evolution). Technology will always favor tech that is geared towards immortality, comfort, intelligence, energy production, and expansion to accumulate as many resources to produce a sustainable or increasing amount.

Basically what we are likely to find is...what's the phrase... variation within "speciation" by which i mean you might find some entity that is more logical or more sadistic or more benevolent or more creative, but you're probably not going to find something that is so alien to us that we couldn't understand them. The difference in understanding would only come in the form of why they are doing it in terms of knowledge, but not why they are doing it in terms of motive.