It's looking more and more like we may live in a simulation

reply to post by jonnywhite


I don't know where to start. I been thinking, reading, learning for about 50 years now. If this is a Sim program that we live in, where do we un-connect or do we leave this Sim at death? I think the Sim we are in wants us to un-connect with out dying or before we grow old regenerate then reconnect. There is some truth in the Matrix programs. The Matrix movie makes several points that if he's the one why not we all are the one. We all have this energy to re-connect anywhere we want to create our own Matrix. They are trying to find this Higg Blossom, but the Higg Blosson id the God Particle or better it's our souls I figure. If our soul or memory is a part of this we should be able to connect to the mainframe of this Sim. Or known as each free will. The only way for this to happen is we are in a 3D Sim and yes we are in a matrix. Don't forget about Peter who was able to leave the boat and go out with Jesus walking on the water but got scared etc. Jesus was a man just like you and me. He was teaching his fishers of men what he learned. I bet if we knew his secret we be like him. We could create our own world.

weirdguy

The illuminati have the cheat codes

You jest, but I think you are on to something, cause i sure as hell don't have any cheat codes.

reply to post by ExquisitExamplE


I'd star your reply if I could, but Chrome is acting up on me where ATS is concerned.

Anyway: these are basic philosophical questions, as I am sure you have surmised. The trouble is that they beg more questions than they answer. Do "players" chose the "starving child" (of any country) subroutine (class) because they seek a "harder" game? Perhaps its like an old pen and paper RPG, and we chose our class based on merits and flaws, advantages and disadvantages? The price we pay for a relatively easy life is banality, apathy and ennui. We have the time to indulge in distractions like "real" versus "unreal" and have that much harder of a time seeing the world for what it really is? Perhaps those most disadvantaged by the game are they who see it most clearly? Maybe there is a clear advantage there that we just can't see from our narrow perspective?

I have no way of knowing. Frankly -- the nature of our relative inequality makes the whole SIM theory ring rather hollow, and some of the solutions to the problem of absolute poverty and hunger in a SIM universe create more problems than they solve. It's my guess that the real meat of this question lies in the question of overarching purpose, with regard to the creation and maintenance of SIMS. What in the universe are we running from that we seek pleasure, entertainment and enlightenment from SIM-space?

It must be something desperate and awful. Something like the entropy death of the actual universe itself. Perhaps the entire reason we are here now is because the real world is winding down, like a frozen clock?

Maybe SIMS are just a back-door into a warmer, more energetic past?

Why would an advanced civilization simulate something in the first place?

fenson76
reply to post by ChuckNasty

 

No I didn't say I did. Learn to read.

Thank you for answering my question... Maybe you are the one who needs to 'learn to read.'

I said it's a plausible as saying that I have to observe the world for it to exist, ie Quantum physics. Lets not get personal with saying things like dementia. Not funny.

No one is perfect. I once had temporary dementia and actually believed chem-trails were real...but I pulled my head out. In my opinion, this is another BS CS wannabe - created to sell books.

No science will prove with out a doubt, that we live in a simulation... Or hologram.... Matrix, etc.

reply to post by ExquisitExamplE

Ummm.....I've often pondered if what we perceive as time are only transverse slices like those movie frames...that rather than a connected series of pictures are instead, separate universes that are interconnected by decision strings/strands. That perception of "reality" and time flow is only, consciousness sliding from one universe to the next. Perhaps the active impingement of consciousness either overt or sub is the vehicle/engine which propels "itself" from one universe "frame" to the next....all through choice/decision...IE., "the will" to proceed through this experiential...experiment.

I really like an infinite universe paradigm...in which infinite possibility has room for expression...one thought/consciousness impingement/decision...harmonic, at a time, happening with infinite sets of possibility concurrently of course...

YouSir

Interesting theory, although I feel it's bunk. So some sick, twisted species has created a simulation where there is murder, war, and terrible medical conditions? Naw.. I don't think so.

I don't care how advanced a civilization is, I can't even imagine the power needed to simulate everything you see on a daily basis. Even in my office alone, the amount of computing power needed to simulate smell, brown needles on a bonsai tree, how the water flows in a fountain, my computer and all ITS calculations.. naw. I can't imagine someone would even want to simulate to that degree. Personally, I think too many people got wrapped up in the Matrix movie. Once that came out, there were an abundance of "living in a simulated" world theories.

reply to post by fleabit


Well, you have that part backwards at least. The Matrix came out because enough philosophy was concerned with SIM theory / VR and various apsects of transhumananist thought, like "uploading consciousness into a web or network," and machine AI.

fleabit
Interesting theory, although I feel it's bunk. So some sick, twisted species has created a simulation where there is murder, war, and terrible medical conditions? Naw.. I don't think so.

But that is exactly what we are if we are not a simulation. So why is it not possible for a simulation also.

I don't care how advanced a civilization is, I can't even imagine the power needed to simulate everything you see on a daily basis.

We are only a speck in the universe so that power seems quite possible to me given size and resource.

A simulated universe, that supposed to reflect a real universe or a previous one. I wonder if the maker of the simulated one, ever get confused.

Maybe they are trying to add a program to the universes programming, to prevent catastrophic problems. Like time travel for example. Would the actions you make in the past make an instantaneous result in the future, or would time split itself into a separate stream, where that future result wouldn't effect a future already in motion, where it splits of into another part of the universe.

I mean, we can make our choices when ever we want, where we want, but time is said to be set in stone, right from even before it existence.

Maybe to ensure a certain civilization survival rate, from future problems. Maybe from themselves?

Yet more scientists who think their authority can make a garbage hypothesis they propose somehow seem less like complete garbage. And possibly sell a book.

Exactly the same with Dr Eugene McCarthy of the University of Georgia, who as you may know has recently claimed humans are the result of chimpanzee-pig hybridisation. Although in this case his ties to macroevolution.net lend to the idea of creationist undertones. But still.

Thanks for the responses and I think these scientist are just facing reality. At some point, you have to take your head out of the sand and then began to look seriously at these things. You can't keep saying, well this just can't be true in the face of the evidence.

There's some good books on the Universe being boiled down to information. Seth Lloyd Programming the Universe, Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information and Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes by Charles Seife. The whole debate between Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind is also fascinating about information being encoded on the event horizon of a black hole.

I think Terrile gives a great analogy. Some calculate that the brain does 20 million billion calculations per second. Terrile said this would be like 100 Olympic sized swimming pools filled with salt and each grain of salt represents a calculation. This is mind boggling computation.

Say a future generation has classical and quantum computers capable of calculating 1,000 Olympic sized pools filled with salt per second. There's many reasons to run simulations.

If you can simulate 13 billion years in a few hours, then you can continue to simulate 13 billion years into the future. You can keep running these simulation to see which events unfold and maybe you can find different things to look for.

You can run simulations as a game especially if there's a full immersion experience. You can immerse yourself as the President of the United States or immerse yourself as your favorite rock star or singer.

So simulated humans could surpass "real" humans whatever "real" humans may mean. Maybe there isn't any "real" humans and everything is a simulation within a simulation.

Anyway, this future civilization creates a million simulations. Humans within these simulations create simulations. So you have simulations nestled within simulations.

There could be a 1st generation simulation. Then a 2nd generation simulation and this can just continue. We could be in a trillionth generation simulation and the big bang is the simulation rebooting itself. So you could have a million "real" humans and trillions of simulated humans which grow exponentially faster. This would mean odds are that we're living in a simulation and not a "real" universe whatever that may mean.

We have no evidence that volume exists. Everything could just be information on a 2 dimensional surface area that we compute. So there's not an objective tree out there or an objective mountain that we see out there. Our brain simply computes a tree or computes a mountain.

Again, this is a simple and elegant theory because we're just talking about information and computation.

Here's another video that talks about these things that are discussed in places like Wired and the M.I.T. Blog.



Also, this could be a way to avoid death. Think of how concerned civilizations are with death. In a simulation life after death is simply a matter of computation. When you die, your consciousness is still being simulated. You then meet with other conscious simulations that were your family and friends and talk about the simulated environment you just experienced. This would mean the simulated consciousness is reincarnated into different simulated environments and reincarnated when the system reboots itself.

On a lighter note, maybe multi-dimensional beings outside of time created these simulations as some sort of prison. It would be like the Star Trek episode where Q's punishment was becoming mortal.

And the 4th possibility about the Simulation Theory is that it's a complete load of bull....

This may intrigue the readers of this thread.


en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by FrankPoster


Actually, it's simulated bull put forth by a simulated person's simulated brain using simulated logic.

Yet, don't dismiss the idea so quickly. As an attempt to understand "reality" it has value. As a guiding principle of behavior toward others, it is disturbing. It negates morality. If everything is simulated, then why care about consequences? After all, nothing is "real" if everything is simulated. The idea, as others have noted, is a more elaborate postulation that everything is pore-determined, i.e. there are no such things as free-will, choice, and personal responsibility. Deprivation, poverty, hunger, starvation, disease, suffering, abuse, torture, murder, mayhem, etc., are not "real", so don't worry, do what you want, and pay no heed to the simulated effects of your simulated decisions and simulated actions since they are the result of something outside yourself over which you have no influence.

I think there are two universes, which is why everything seems different after we sleep on it. We move from one simulation to another overnight.

reply to post by neoholographic


A simulation where we don't remember anything of our ultimate reality?

That is highly unlikely.

I would never ever believe this is a computer simulation unless I was pulled out of it.

And, yes, I give my full unconditional consent to be pulled out of it right now and will not hold anyone or anything liable

reply to post by neoholographic


If you were right then that means someone of superior intelligence operates everything. God keeps coming back as a reality aye!

So if you were true, another one will be or is in existence and therefore superior being is still in control.

reply to post by 0zzymand0s


I was thinking it could possibly be that it's a recreation of the past to study something that happened to find out the cause or else it's all been always just digitized and random, so the entire things always been a simulated program, like the chaos theory, but for ones and zeroes. The reason for that is that it's easier to store knowledge and information in digital rather than physical form. Already made evident by how mass storage works on our computers. So just as in traditional physical world being just a "fluke" so is the "virtual" world, it's just how the programming went. And apparently that's just how the digits worked that's the whole thing maybe there is no rhyme or reason

reply to post by KellyPrettyBear


Is this the real answer to UFO's? It's just the program checking up on the tenants. No records to leave behind because it cleans up as it leaves.
IF this surmise is true. I would expect every thing to run fine UNTIL the tenants try to talk to the landlords. Then we either get in touch or they end whole thing and start again. That might be the ultimate goal for this nursery class. Who can write the fastest program that gets a sentient response. The ultimate Turing test done on a galactic scale.
Time to get off the imagination pathway and get back to reality...