Posted: Nov 08, 2018 4:58 am
gobshite wrote:What do you think "original" means? Of course it is the progenitor of the simulation process.
And it 'originated' by some means that wasn't a 'simulation'. This still tells me nothing about the difference between an original and a simulation, the 'original' being 'something that is not a simulation'. At least 'progenitor' is specified well, in terms of some recursion.
If we want to assess the quality of the simulation argument, let's begin with definitions of 'original' and 'simulation' that are not tautological (not original <=> simulation).
I'm fine with 'simulation' being 'a process originated by an intelligence', but then we have the problem of 'intelligence' to kick around, but that's not a bad thing, is it?
Much of this can be reduced to "there's more to it than meets the eye", and that's an old thread in filosofeezing, and is Destroryer's approach, I think. I always want to ask people who discourse in these terms why there has to be something more, and what I get back is that the imagining of 'something more' is intended as an illustration of how great somebody's imagination is.
scott1328 wrote:It is ill-posed because it is non-falsifiable. What possible observation could one make that would falsify the claim: Is the universe a simulation?
The proper question to ask is: Is there any evidence that our universe has features that are in common with what we might attribute to simulations. That is why I asked earlier, and I will ask here, could our universe be a cellular automaton?
Perhaps answering that question would go a long way for modelling our own universe in computer simulations.
Our universe could be a cellular automaton without being a simulation, could it not, giving us another kind of model for what we see. Stephen Wolfram revived this idea a few years ago somewhere in the pages of a very thick book.
scott1328 wrote:What I see is a startling lack of imagination in this thread. Why, if our universe is a simulation, should one suppose that the "substrate" universe to be anything remotely resembling our universe? Perhaps the inhabitants of the "real" universe are playing with toy three dimensional simulations, like we play with toy two-dimensional simulations. Perhaps the inhabitants of the "real" universe are experimenting with funky rules from which emerge what we call our fundamental constants and laws of physics. Perhaps they aren't simulating anything, "we" simply emerged from how their computers do calculations.
This is an exercise in imagining resources that need not follow any rules we have ever identified. "Hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings" as Douglas Adams put it.