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December 31, 2005
Saying Hello to Emerald City
From Multipolarity Memes:
The probability of living in a simulation appears to depend on the ability of the world to produce lots of simulations of itself: so in our particular case you can see upon analysis that the evidence for living in a simulation is quite strong - we are after all living in the computer age and we are about to witness the birth of the realistic computer simulation. There is a self-reinforcing attractor effect here. Being in a world which demonstrates that creating simulations of itself is a causal norm increases the probability that this world is itself a simulation, so long as at least some of those simulations being created are extremely similiar to the original copy in the sense that they would have to preserve both the feeling that it is the original copy and its ability to copy itself. ... It would seem that our decisions on what types of simulations to create also effect the future decisions of our simulators in a transactional strange loop. So if we decide to create lots of 1st person solo-simulations for example, then this would have a significant "strange effect" on the individual. For instance it would organise substantial differences in the probability of one person being in a simulation compared to another person sharing the same topologically connected space. Furthermore this means that it is possible, with sufficiently enhanced mental reasoning, to reformulate the very nature of the simulation one is living in, without needing to directly access any substrate host worlds." -edit from my previous blog on what i called the "interestingness selection effect"Jerry Paffendorf's acc2005 talk "Brave New Virtual Worlds" is now online Link
See also:
Nick Bostrom's "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?" Link
Marshall Brain's "The Day You Discard Your Body" Link
(To author of Multipolarity Memes blog - please contact me at psidoc at gmail.com)
Posted by paul at December 31, 2005 12:42 AMI've read this through three times now and still don't get it.
Is my ignorance also a simulation? Or do I simply need to simulate more intelligence? :P
The text at the other end of the Marshall Brain link, on the otherhand, is brilliant.
Posted by: Upwinger at December 31, 2005 05:23 AMI like the idea of "The Truth" a universal, as in preachable to anything self aware no mater how alien, religion from iain banks recent book the algerbraist.
A nice argument for belief in it is that in order to end the simulation you have to get everyone to believe it is a simulation at which point it is no longer worth running.
If this is a simulation - who is the simulator...?
see also:
www.ultrafeel.tv/advaita.htm
Upwinger, sorry if my explanation was poor. An argument like this deserves a better roadmap but i was trying to keep it as bitesize as possible for my blog. Unfortunately i cant reference the original post because it wasnt online long enough to be archived.
Basically where my thinking diverges from Bostrom's is in his assumption of a singular baseline reality (or "host world" in my terminology) to which our simulation runs on finite resources and so the number of levels from baseline and the motives of the architect(s) would be fixed. But in an all-inclusive metaverse there will be multiple host worlds running the same simulation we inhabit, meaning multiple motives which effect the external variables of the simulation and a potentially infinite depth of levels. The simulation cannot be perfectly identical to the original so there is also a shift factor (maybe toward increased interestingness? Karmic adjustment? multiple motives anyhow)
Since we are part of the causal network of simulation architectures it follows that our designs, or pre-designs since we dont yet have the means to create them technologically, have influence over our bearing in the continuum of simulations we find ourselves in. And that that influence is set to increase dramatically over time as our techno-enabled minds stride towards the same moralistic/aesthetic perfections that our more technologically advanced simulators eventually achieved.
I hope that clears things up a bit :)
Posted by: Jam1r0 at January 2, 2006 11:59 AMJam1r0 -- That does help quite a bit ... thank you.
I also very much enjoyed the "Letter from Utopia" currently posted at Multipolarity Memes -- and I hereby recommend it to everyone.
http://www.nickbostrom.com/utopia.html
Namaste
Posted by: Upwinger at January 2, 2006 04:33 PMSee James Albus, *Engineering of Mind: An Introduction to the Science of Intelligent Systems* (available from Amazon.com.) Compliments Moravec's and Kurweil's and Hawkins' stuff.
Just a reference-post. Happy '06, Everyone...!