crank wrote:
I'm confused now. We were talking past each other. I was making the latter claim in the choice of two above. I was saying I think it is possible we live in a simulation, then was told it's not a credible assertion, and I think you replied to that post, so I thought your comment was about the possibility of simulations, not that we were in one. Now that we've cleared that up, or at least are simulating such a state, it's all very clear, is it not, then I can agree-it's likely possible you could never verify you were in one, or falsify that you were in one. Hopefully, this was a reasonable facsimile of a simulation of where we stand.

Since we've come to such an agreeable result, I can assure you there will be no need to reprogramming the data structure pointed to by 'ScholasticSpastic'.

Talking past each other happens a lot- especially in a forum environment. That's why, in my more reasonable moments, I like to extend the benefit of the doubt as long as I can manage without going bonkers. Going bonkers, of course, signals the end of my more reasonable moments.

crank wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

crank wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:
No. The "it's happening now" hypothesis obviously requires highly advanced aliens to be setting up "our" matrix. Belief in this even as a "possibility" requires that your "lid" be "flapping in the wind".

You're the only one flapping anything that I can tell. You obviously have no justification for your assertion about it not even being credible, so you spew inanities instead.

There are people "spewing inanities" in this thread, but I am not one of them. It is you who has to justify your preposterous claims, of what is "possible", not I. I would say exactly the same to theists about their theories.

EDIT: Perhaps you think there are "serious scientists" who support your theory? If so, please name one.

It's very clear who keeps spouting inanities. You can't distinguish between my assertion that it is possible we are in a sim, versus the possibility that such sims are possible. ScholasticSpastic and I were doing the same thing, but that was because I replied to a his post that was a reply to one of your posts, the resulting ambiguity bit me, or me and him.

This started out with you laughing at my assertion we could be living in a sim. My response:

Is this mirth indicative of a disbelief that this is a possibility? Can you enlighten us fools who think it is possible?

You:

It is, indeed, foolish to believe that we are in someone's computer, somewhere, as in David Icke's fantasy novel. The evidence is that we evolved, as biological organisms, and part of a biota.

me:

That's grossly incorrect in two ways. First, I don't 'believe' that, only that it is a possibility. Second, all that evidence you mention is meaningless, irrelevant to the possibility we're in a simulation. Hint: that's part of the simulation.

You to Hack

In science, a hypothesis has to be at least CREDIBLE, hack. Crank's David Icke-style sim-world is about as credible as god-made-the-world. Indeed, theists often fall back on the "you can't scientifically rule it out" argument.
In other words, it is ,let's say, "interesting" that hack/crankworldTM is being portrayed as the norm here!

Me:

To insist such simulations lack credibility requires at least some justification, and there are plenty of very serious scientists who think it highly probable it will be a possibility at some point. The objection I think is most cited, and believed by many respectable, but wrong, scientists and philosophers, is Serle's Chinese Room argument, which is not a valid argument in my opinion.

I've never asserted we live in a sim. I've never said I think, or believe, we live in a sim. I said it's a possibility we are in one. Your replies can't decide which of these they are addressing. Plus, I have no knowledge of Icke's ideas, so it's useless to mention him. The only real issue of interest is whether it's possible to simulate human minds to some high degree of fidelity, if it is, then the simworlds are possible, if not, they're not.

I shouldn't have to justify the claim that it is a possibility. The evidence abounds. From DeepBlue to Watson, and Moore's Law, every trend in high-tech, and the shitloads of people working in the area, it should be obvious it's widely considered to be a possibility. The only absence, from the beginning, is justification for you saying it's not credible.

I'm sorry, but you did seem to be arguing that we at least could be in a sim world right now.
As for trends in electronics, I worked in electronics research before I retired, and it was generally accepted that Moore's law was already beginning to showing signs of failure, because of the physical problems of packing ever more electronic switches that switch ever faster into an ever smaller volume. At some point, you get meltdown.

Crank, this is your post, in which you support surreptitious' assertion that we coulod be in a sim world right now:

crank wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:It could have existed elsewhere in the Universe in the past
It could exist elsewhere in the Universe that is non observable
It could exist in a parallel Universe that is equally non observable
It could exist in the future of the Universe after we become extinct
It could exist nowhere else at any time at all apart from here on Earth

It could exist and be running a simulation that we are in.

I don't dispute what you say. How could I? No one knows, we can speculate all we want, but without any evidence, that is all we have, speculation. I'm all for looking for evidence. Finding evidence might be the thing that could jolt some sense into our semi-intelligent species. It's hard to describe a species that is hellbent on destroying itself as intelligent.

So, anyway.... is the sim thing topical to the probability of proximate alien civilizations? Or are we really, really offtopic?

DavidMcC's new bugbear - Sim-worlders!

CdesignProponentsist wrote:DavidMcC's new bugbear - Sim-worlders!

That's catchy! He just might take it up!

DavidMcC wrote:Crank, this is your post, in which you support surreptitious' assertion that we coulod be in a sim world right now:

crank wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:It could have existed elsewhere in the Universe in the past
It could exist elsewhere in the Universe that is non observable
It could exist in a parallel Universe that is equally non observable
It could exist in the future of the Universe after we become extinct
It could exist nowhere else at any time at all apart from here on Earth

It could exist and be running a simulation that we are in.

I don't dispute what you say. How could I? No one knows, we can speculate all we want, but without any evidence, that is all we have, speculation. I'm all for looking for evidence. Finding evidence might be the thing that could jolt some sense into our semi-intelligent species. It's hard to describe a species that is hellbent on destroying itself as intelligent.

I never said 'I did not say we could be in a sim.' I've always said that it's possible we're in one, but I don't believe or assert we are in one now. I have not 'surreptitiously' done anything, I've tried to be as overt and frank and explicit as possible. If I misspoke at any time, there's been more than enough repetition to make things clear.

The demise of Moore's Law gets predicted if not announced almost yearly. That was only one of the numerous reasons the past gives us a lot of reason to think of continued progress in the future.

ScholasticSpastic wrote:So, anyway.... is the sim thing topical to the probability of proximate alien civilizations? Or are we really, really offtopic?

If we're in a sim, then we'd be really close to an advanced civilization. It's part of the framework of whether or not there are other intelligent species out there. Plus, it's my thread and I brought up the side topic myself. Now, as to this David construct, I think we're going to have to review his algorithms.

crank wrote:

ScholasticSpastic wrote:So, anyway.... is the sim thing topical to the probability of proximate alien civilizations? Or are we really, really offtopic?

If we're in a sim, then we'd be really close to an advanced civilization. It's part of the framework of whether or not there are other intelligent species out there. Plus, it's my thread and I brought up the side topic myself. Now, as to this David construct, I think we're going to have to review his algorithms.

Clarified and clarified.

Although, from the perspective of being meaningfully close to an advanced civilization, I would consider secret ETs running my sim to be even less rewarding than distant ETs that were in my sim. Whether contact ever happens is entirely outside our control and probably isn't something the ETs running the sim are particularly excited about. At least, no more so than the idea of talking to your computer's operating system about its interests is exciting to you. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

ScholasticSpastic wrote:

Ven. Kwan Tam Woo wrote:
How is it an observed phenomenon?

Are you prepared, in this forum, to question whether natural selection is an observed phenomenon? Because it's at least as supported by observation as any astronomical phenomenon.

Yes I am - this is a skeptics forum after all, and I see no good reason to limit my skepticism to fringe science and religious beliefs. Saying that it's as supported by observation as any astronomical phenomenon is not exactly a ringing endorsement.

How do you determine that one organism is "better" adapted to its environment then another, except in retrospect?

Um.... Nobody decides which organism is better adapted to its environment. The environment- the sum of all selective forces, including niche partitioning, resource allocation, mate selection events, and geographical ephemera, is what decides which organism is better adapted to its environment. And just because we usually tend to observe that it has happened in retrospect, this does not mean that our observations are any less relevant.

My question was how do you determine that one organism is "better" adapted than another, except in retrospect? In other words I'm asking whether natural selection has any predictive power as a scientific hypothesis, or is it an exercise in post hoc rationalization? Case in point: your definition of the environment as "the sum of all selective forces" (including sexual selection, which can result in features that are *harmful* to an organism's survival). How can we possibly know what all these selective forces are beforehand, let alone how they sum together?

It's like saying "the hardest workers rise to the top of the corporate ladder". We start off with some preconceived notion of what it means to be a "hard working", e.g. putting in long hours. But as soon as we encounter corporate executives who don't have a history of working long hours, we can take advantage of the malleability (i.e. vagueness) of the term "hard working" and say that it is a combination of putting in long hours and schmoozing. And when we encounter execs who don't fit either of those categories, we just extend the definition of "hard working" even further to include picking the right projects and teams on which to work. And so on. But the more we take advantage of the inherent vagueness of the term "hard working", the less meaningful it becomes to say that "the hardest workers rise to the top" and the more impracticable it becomes to predict which present-day corporate underlings will rise to the top. Actually this analogy is deficient, because it only offers one highly malleable term in which to hide whereas natural selection offers two: "better" (or "fitter") and "environment". To say that present species have survived as opposed to extinct species because of natural selection is a tautology at best, and post-hoc circular reasoning at worst.

All of our observations of stars other than our sun are more than three years old. So maybe I should decide that astronomers aren't really observing anything important.

I don't see how that follows, nor how it relates to the topic at hand.

Many societies, and indeed many species, have managed to survive for long periods of time without any notion of "natural selection".

There you go demonstrating your ignorance regarding how natural selection works. It isn't a notion. It doesn't involve teleology of any sort. If I try to insert the actual scientific understanding of what natural selection is into your sentence, the result is gibberish.

Yes it is a notion. All theories and hypotheses are notions, including scientific ones. Natural selection is an interpretation of data, it is not the data itself. Perhaps the result is gibberish if you try to insert your understanding of natural selection into my sentence.

Some of those societies even had major cultural institutions which ran counter to the ideology of natural selection (e.g. Buddhism).

Yet more demonstration that you haven't a clue how natural selection works or even what it is.

Then tell me what it is and how exactly it's supposed to work. Demonstrate to me that it means something more substantive and meaningful than "survival of the surviviest" or "survival of the luckiest".

Extinction would appear to be an inevitability; natural selection is, at best, something which delays the inevitable.

There is nothing about natural selection which delays extinctions. Extinctions are part of the process of natural selection.

I agree that extinctions may be considered as the "negative" part of natural selection, (i.e. one organism survives at the expense of another organism going extinct).

There are tons of predictions made by scientist based on natural selection, I can't think of any, but it's routine. 'Survival of the fittest' has long been recognized as problematic, not much more than a tautology. A more accurate description, from wiki, is "Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction (i.e., fitness) of individuals that differ in phenotype.

Ven. Kwan Tam Woo wrote:
Then tell me what it is and how exactly it's supposed to work. Demonstrate to me that it means something more substantive and meaningful than "survival of the surviviest" or "survival of the luckiest".

Actually, while natural selection means quite a bit more (and less) than this, "survival of the luckiest" is all I need for my points to stand. The more worlds a species spreads to, the more tickets they've bought in the galactic lottery and the less likely they are to go extinct at a given time. Not going extinct for longer periods of time means they stick around longer- and thus their technological era is more likely to overlap another species's technological era sufficiently for them to discover each other. What many people forget is that intelligence- should it exist and persist in the universe- is separated by gulfs of time every bit as massive as the gulfs of space which intervene. The odds of any two proximate civilizations happening at close to the same time are just as problematic as whether they'll happen at all. Meanwhile, random events are happening all the time- galactic collisions, supernova, gamma ray bursts, atmospheric losses, solar senescence, etc. These are events that most conceivable civilizations don't get to control except by having moved away from where they occur.

This cosmic winnowing- not whatever special fitness a particular species may possess- is what I'm referring to when I say that natural selection is at work on this level as well. Species which spread beyond their homeworld are more likely to persist for longer periods of time. It stands to reason, therefor, that whatever species we meet is more likely to be a colonizer rather than a clod-hugger. And it also stands to reason that we will increase our own odds of encountering whatever civilizations are out there (or will eventually be out there) if we colonize other worlds as well.

crank wrote:There are tons of predictions made by scientist based on natural selection, I can't think of any,

Neither can I. Sure, natural selection might be an assumption underlying many scientific experiments and predictions, but this is not the same thing as actually testing the predictive power of (the concept of) natural selection itself. In other words, natural selection appears to be an expedient - if tautological - postulate rather than a truly scientific (i.e. falsifiable) hypothesis.

'Survival of the fittest' has long been recognized as problematic, not much more than a tautology. A more accurate description, from wiki, is "Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction (i.e., fitness) of individuals that differ in phenotype.

Which is just another way of saying that survival of the fittest = survival of the fittest.

The term "phenotype" also conceals another problem: the phenotype of any given specimen will - owing to the random nature of the mutations upon which natural selection supposedly acts - contain a jumble of advantageous, useless, and disadvantageous mutations. So it is not simply a case that:

PhenotypeSpecimen A= PhenotypeSpecimen B + advantageous mutation 1

Rather, it is more like:

PhenotypeSpecimen A= PhenotypeSpecimen B + advantageous mutation 1 + disadvantageous mutation 2 + useless mutation 3 +....(and so on).

And then we have to consider other complicating factors such as the role of epigenetics, the capacity of a specimen to alter its behavior and/or environment in such a way as to neutralize or even benefit from a seemingly non-advantageous mutation, the incredible dynamism of the natural environment, and the highly non-linear relationship between DNA and observable biological traits.

ScholasticSpastic wrote:

Ven. Kwan Tam Woo wrote:
Then tell me what it is and how exactly it's supposed to work. Demonstrate to me that it means something more substantive and meaningful than "survival of the surviviest" or "survival of the luckiest".

Actually, while natural selection means quite a bit more (and less) than this...

..."survival of the luckiest" is all I need for my points to stand. The more worlds a species spreads to, the more tickets they've bought in the galactic lottery and the less likely they are to go extinct at a given time.

Perhaps, provided that species:

• can manage to create robust and self-sustaining space colonies to begin with (imagine, for example, how incredibly fragile and dependent a pioneer colony on Mars would be);
• doesn't destroy itself in the process of reaching a space-faring level of technology (we humans seem to be well on our way to meeting this fate);
• doesn't destroy itself after having reached a space-faring level of technology (e.g. inadvertently triggering a supernova after an attempt to directly harness the power of a star goes awry);
• doesn't succumb to some kind of interstellar super-plague as a result of its colonization efforts;
• manages to evade detection by advanced genocidal ETs who might perceive other space-faring lifeforms as an intolerable existential threat; and
• doesn't evolve into other species as a result of space colonization (in which case we have to ask whether that species has really given itself a hedge against extinction).

Not going extinct for longer periods of time means they stick around longer- and thus their technological era is more likely to overlap another species's technological era sufficiently for them to discover each other.

However, in the nearer term there are formidable nearer-term selective pressures against space colonization (e.g. the total lack of a breathable atmosphere anywhere else in the known universe; the inherent cultural and political instability of human societies). All previous human experience of colonization has involved the colonization of places that already had bountiful complex ecosystems and - in many cases - helpful indigenous people. Without the first factor, human colonization of new lands would have been a non-starter right from the get-go; without the second factor, human colonization in more recent times would have been much more difficult and probably far less successful. Absent these two factors, space colonization is so different - both in terms of quality and degree of difficulty - from colonization as we know it, that it hardly makes sense to even call it "colonization".

Meanwhile, random events are happening all the time- galactic collisions, supernova, gamma ray bursts, atmospheric losses, solar senescence, etc.

All of which could prove just as fatal to an interstellar species (or at least an interplanetary species) as a single-planet species.

Species which spread beyond their homeworld are more likely to persist for longer periods of time.

The deafening silence of the cosmos thus far does not seem to support your contention.

Ven. Kwan Tam Woo wrote:

crank wrote:There are tons of predictions made by scientist based on natural selection, I can't think of any,

Neither can I. Sure, natural selection might be an assumption underlying many scientific experiments and predictions, but this is not the same thing as actually testing the predictive power of (the concept of) natural selection itself. In other words, natural selection appears to be an expedient - if tautological - postulate rather than a truly scientific (i.e. falsifiable) hypothesis.

Am I missing something here? There are all kinds of predictions relying on natural selection that routinely get confirmed. There is one I read about a while back, with dark and light versions of some desert rodent, and the relative populations of each depending on whether they lived on dark rocks or light sand. And I then all kinds of microbe testing where many generations can be observed. These tests are so common I can only assume I'm missing something you would say makes these not tests of natural selection.

The Americas were colonized by human beings without any indigenous people being present.

hackenslash wrote:

crank wrote:My question in relation to this, are the assumptions behind the Fermi Paradox wise ones? The particular assumptions I'm questioning are that advanced civilizations would want to multiply and spread throughout space, limited by time only as to how far the spread.

The real question is one that apparently isn't being asked, and it shows why the Fermi paradox isn't a paradox. It's a shame LaTeX isn't working, because I dealt with this pretty comprehensively in my post dealing with the Drake equation (although it should be pointed out that both Fermi and Drake were talking about technological civilisations in our own galaxy).

Our nearest galactic neighbour, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light-years away or so. What that means is that anything any astronomer might be looking for in that galaxy would have to have set out on its journey to us 2.5 million years ago at the very least. Any technological civilisation that has arisen in Andromeda in the last 2.5 million years would be completely invisible to us, as would any signal from any civilisation that went extinct more than 5 million years ago. And that's even before we get into the fact that much of what we'd be looking for would be massively dispersed over such a distance. I deal with why that is in THIS POST.

Most galaxies are considerably further away than that, so their signals (or whatever) would have to have been radiating away for sufficiently long that light could have reached us.

As for your particular question, it's not an unfair assumption that a technological civilisation would go through many of the stages in technology that we have. In particular, it's reasonable to assume that we would see some radiation emanating from any technological civilisation as a result of their technology simply because of the 2LT. Everything that uses energy gives off heat, which is a manifestation of entropy, so it's not unreasonable to assume that we might be able to see it, a long as it's actually had long enough to get here.

In sum, this astronomer's statement is far too strong. After all, we've only been able to detect many of these signal for about 80 years.

This.

Executive Summary:

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

ScholasticSpastic wrote:
Thus, it is more reasonable to expect that if we ever detect aliens they will be an interplanetary civilization rather than a bunch of clods sitting on a rock. It's not necessarily because clod-sitters don't happen. It's because clod-sitters probably don't happen long enough for us to be likely to meet them.

This problem is somewhat magnified by the fact that we are also a bunch of clods sitting on a rock!

Spearthrower wrote:

ScholasticSpastic wrote:
Thus, it is more reasonable to expect that if we ever detect aliens they will be an interplanetary civilization rather than a bunch of clods sitting on a rock. It's not necessarily because clod-sitters don't happen. It's because clod-sitters probably don't happen long enough for us to be likely to meet them.

This problem is somewhat magnified by the fact that we are also a bunch of clods sitting on a rock!

But we haven't yet collectively decided if that's the way we want to remain. By my reasoning, we increase how long our species gets to stick around as well as increasing our likelihood of meeting any aliens- if there are any aliens- if some of us jump off this rock. Unfortunately, most humans haven't yet come around to the understanding that doing as I say is in their best interests. Given that values are relative, I suppose my sci-fi fantasy may have to take a back seat to bling and sports super-stardom if that's the way more people want to go.