And the idea of multiple universes makes mute the long ago abandoned idea that the earth is the center of the universe.
Therefore the idea that simulations of simulations are functional interdependent entities, where looking for a model of these simulations is hopeless.
What does that say about ‘reality’?
That there is only a functional reality consisting of various simulations. But since there is no real real realities, what remains are regional, reuficatuons of other inter simulated chains of being.
Right. It is beyond that. Before Kepler, reality was the real. Then after that everything changed. You just have to go to any museum to see what reality has changed into. Artists have it better perceptually using only the logic of the brush and the pallet.
This is why serious artists no longer concern themselves with the reality of the past, unless they are still ultra realists making money on those who are nostalgic of an unrecoverable past.
Apparently you do. The violence of the past wasn’t out of necessity. Children were executed for petty crimes. People were tortured to death, not to get information, just to inflict suffering. Violence and pain were sources of entertainment: where modern sports involve some violence, injuries are avoided, and death is rare and tragic; in the past, suffering, injury, and death were the whole point.
A major shift in the development towards humanity has been an expanding sphere of concern, and a distaste for suffering in anyone. Modernity is incredibly cushy, peaceful, caring. It might not seem that way, but consider that your daily experiences aren’t a representative sample: they’re skewed by what information is repeated, and they don’t include much if anything of the level and nature of violence in the past.
Again, I recommend the book, it was a challenging and perspective expanding read.
I mean, I’m presuming we’re talking about a simulation. And I’m using as an analogy for the relationship between the Simulators and the simulation our own relationship between ourselves and computer simulations we make (and that’s what Bostrom’s paper is about). So if you mean that I’m presuming that, then yes: we’re talking about the Simulation Hypothesis, I’m presuming a simulation.
Let’s put what appears to be your claim into our world: If we were to run a simulated world on a computer, are you saying it would be impossible in principle for us to influence the processes within that simulation? We can edit the memory, the processors, every piece of the hardware and software, and we can do this while the simulation is paused. Are you saying that the simulation can nonetheless detect our changes? Why?
We certainly can make a program that can’t detect our changes, right? I can edit Microsoft Word so it things I typed something I didn’t, and Microsoft Word will have no idea. So why would we assume that, even if it were possible to make a simulation that would be impossible to deceive (which is dubious), that our simulation would be that kind?
It seems as though, like Mongoose, you’re assuming a transcendent soul that could somehow escape the confines of the very circuits of which it is composed.
How I see it is, there are 3 forces, barbarism, civilism, and roboticism (nunnism, the opposite of sexbotism).
Fact is fact of the matter is in modern times these forces are completely out of whack and that is why people hate modernity.
Barbarism - Punching people in the face or pushing assholes is denied. Yet meaningless wars are fought overseas and lots of meaningless deaths in third world countries. It is a total imbalance, on one side we have extreme atrophy of barbarism and on the other side we have an extreme excess. Such an imbalance can never lead to happiness.
Civilism - We are presented a contrast, happy ukelele music while people talk about beef steaks and butchered animals. In the guise of civilization, Freedom of speech is censored and denied, which is Ironic because the only freedom of speech that is denied is any freedom of speech which contributes to Enlightenment and progressive civilization. Therefore Civilism is actually used to destroy Civilization from within.
Nunnism - Zero love zero sympathy creatures obsessed with rules and regs. Harsh punishments for medium and low crimes. Pleasure and happiness is highly regulated (anti-sex, anti-drugs) and there is outrage when the slaves do not obey the system.
Arminius, no I am not. Reality, is, by definition only a set of descriptions which have general reified meaning utility. That is how an extreme representation can hold the conceptual certainty within a common sense social consensus.
It has nothing to do with other nominal meanings having to do with the stability and durability of natural representations , such as Nature. The conceptual social reifications are the human reality, which influence and change reality as we know it. Positivism is that, which has reduced meaning to include all perceptions to conform to the changes brought about by human knowledge, whereupon it (perceptions), conversely , include totally all meaning. Here positivism , or meaning has replaced ontology as a logical system.
This was a political act, manifested at a time when Hegel-Marx became antithetical to use the word loosely, anthithetical to the views of empire, that predicated upon western Christian-Protestant values of laissez-faire Capitalism.
A lot of modern philosophy consists of revision due to political changes, and this kind of political change defines the reality we live under.
Science has even changed what a Nature consisted of, it has become less stable, predictable, more prone to decay. Our views of general Reality, has lost it’s presumed fixed, protected and immobile view of it, as much as we try to hold on to it, as our conscience bothers us, nevertheless that we should, y efforts to conserve those values of reality that we cherish.
The Natural setting will always remain what it is, it is the artifacts that we manufacture to augment that reality which are becoming more natural. In Your own long forum about machines overcoming men, it is suggested that this process, if not held in check, will totally destroy the real real, the natural natural, because with exponential human growth, it is conceivable that we will loose much of what we still can realize as naturally real.
In this sense, it makes more sense to talk of this trend, moving away from Nature, then it is to remember Rousseau’s back to nature. The fact is Hobbes’ social contract has proven to be much more accurate.
I have explained exactly that several times. Are you going to read it this time?
The presumption mentioned just prior is the mistake. Relatively simple simulation worlds can be made such that nothing being simulated can become conscious of the fact that it is simulated. Those are trivial cases, obviously doable.
There is a HUGE difference between what is impossible and what is perhaps difficult. It is not rational to presume that better technology in the future will make things easy just because something is merely difficult now. When something is impossible, it doesn’t matter what happens in the future, that something isn’t going to happen.
We are discussing the potential for a simulation to be made wherein it is impossible for simulated subjects to be conscious of their own simulation. We know that very simple minded cases, such as video games, can produce entities that are simulations and completely unaware of their simulation. Your presumption is that such video games can become tremendously complex, such as to have billions of fully conscious simulated individuals by our standard of conscious, and yet still be unconscious of the simulated situation. I am asserting that such can only happen under limited conditions:
Logic is not taught or allowed to the individuals within the simulated world (the old religions)
Experience and/or education within the simulated world is very limited for each individual.
Between logic and experience, ALL things can be known. The reason for that is that ALL things are actually logically connected in the same way that all mathematics is connected. A person cannot know that the average male is shorter than the average female and also have a great deal of the experience of seeing only taller males than females. That would constitute “cognitive dissonance”.
Many people can live with cognitive dissonance via compartmentalization, as long as they do not experience anything that demands resolution, such as trying to start a business of selling women’s clothing that is always and conspicuously taller than men’s. Potential customers keep telling the person that the women’s clothing is too large and/or that the men’s is too small = no sale. If the person is not concerned with the success of the business, too distracted to attend to it, or just too stupid, he might not ever wake up to the fact that his presumptions have been in error and something is wrong.
The real world (as we know it) is very complex and thus cognitive dissonance arises now and then. But in most cases, the issue is resolved by more than one of the many who experience it. To prevent ANYone from ever resolving their cognitive dissonance would require that ALL people experiencing it be either unaware of it, unconcerned with it, too stupid, or too distracted to attend to it. And those are exactly what is currently used to artificially produce very many social situations.
But does that mean that with improvement, no one at all could ever be conscious of their cognitive dissonance such as to resolve it to be an artificial artifact?
You are talking about billions of people interacting in subtle, complex social and psychological ways along with billions of machines also responding based upon input from those people. The complexity of the situation is almost incalculable. But worse is the fact that if your intervention is not going to produce even more potentially detected dissonance, any attempt to intervene with each case of dissonance would require far greater complexity than was already there, exponentially more.
And thus the attempt to remove the problem through intervention would in fact guarantee that the problem grows.
Try pouring a hand full of dry sand onto a table (the natural event - entropy). Afterward, stack the individual grains of sand into a well shaped pyramid (intervening with the natural flow - anti-entropy). Assuming that you manage that, try then to poor a truck load of dry sand onto your driveway and then stack those into a similar pyramid.
With the truck load of dry sand, the entropy concern is the same, but the anti-entropy issue is undoable.
You have the same situation with complex simulations. The simulation mechanism isn’t trivial to begin with, but it has a systemic flow (the entropic flow). If you were to intervene with the more natural simulation in order to force an outcome, the simulation mechanism is thwarted and replaced by a carefully managed effort to align the events toward a preferred outcome (anti-entropy). If the entire system is not very complex such that there are not many events requiring intervention, it would certainly be possible to make corrections without leaving any trace.
But as the system gets more complex, with each additional intervention, more intervention will become necessary in order to remove all detectable traces. Each intervention creates its own potential dissonance trace which then requires more intervention. You end up with an exponentially increasing requirement to adjust the situation with each adjustment that you attempt. You have to predict yourself with each adjustment you make (“because I am correcting this one in this way, I will have to go correct those in this other way. And because I am going to correct all of those, all of the others will have to be corrected in yet another way. And because…”). With a system that is complex enough, the intervention requirements become infinite and thus truly impossible to achieve, regardless of what technology you develop in the future.
You can tell every woman whatever it is that she wants to hear. But then to not get caught, you have to make sure that they do not speak to each other or keep them all tremendously stupid.
I am not saying what it is, but how it has come to be defined as it is.
The only way it has come to be interpreted as what it is, is through defining it, because, all other metaphysical descriptions have ceased to be effective in
describe it.
Take away the definitions, what is left? Descriptions?
How close since description to
definition has come, that such distinctions are merely
formed our of trite foundations!
Or is it memory modifications? The former is a consequence of things like the latter, namely that a simulation of a mind is made of the medium on which it is running.
That last step is unfounded. Yes, increasing complexity increases the complexity of intervention. But we have no simulation for which the complexity of intervention would be infinite.
Moreover, for the type of intervention I’m talking about, the complexity would scale linearly. Let’s say every simulated mind has a “simulation error detection” (SED) process, which would notice the error and become aware that it is in a simulation. Every time the Simulators see that the process returns a positive answer, they can just rewind the clock, flip the value between when it is detected and when the answer is returned, and set the simulation in motion again. The SED is effectively disabled, and, because the SED is the only thing that could notice anything amiss about that, no one notices that anything is amiss.
More generally, detecting incongruity must involve comparing an expected result with an actual result. And a Simulator that can manipulate the memory in a simulation could intervene to change the expected or actual result so that no incongruity is detected.
These should scale linearly with complexity, not exponentially, because at most interventions that will be necessary in each CPU cycle where the process could be triggered is equal to the number of minds in the simulation (i.e., the number of SEDs that could be triggered). That’s a hard cap on the number of interventions, and it scales linearly with the number of minds.
A definition IS A precise, unambiguous description. That is the definition of a definition.
And I cannot agree that “all other metaphysical descriptions have ceased to be effective in describing it [Reality].”
The PRESUMPTION that I keep repeating and referring to is your presumption that: “there is no level of learning that can remove them from it.”
It would really help if you would actually READ things before arguing them.
It is NOT TRUE that there is “no level of education that can remove them from it” for the reasons that I have repeated several times now. But you probably didn’t read those either.
Well I have news for you. Infinity isn’t going to be reached in the future either.
Simple minded BS. You go around deleting people’s memories and just see what happens. If you make them stupid enough, you can keep doing that. But if they are going to be thinking people, “What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”
A world of worlds if you’d say.? No? Maybe the “simulation” was life. And now that we have a view of said simulation the world we know will try to define it as fact or fiction subconsciously. A preconceived idea was never truly accepted as true if it never was actually conceived. Yet consistently demonstrated logic would have never even existed if this were all false. So to say life is of a pre-constructed simulation based on microbial to astrological matter… Well that’s like saying life as we know, was once a scripted requisite that had pre-concepts of life and death along with how life constructed relativistic rules. Was this than a God? How then could life have wrote its own script for how lifes applications already work? Is there something someone’s not telling us?
Come now James, I know you can do better than that.
Is my “simple minded BS” so simple you can’t rebut the specific case of a process that 1) scales linearly with the number of minds and 2) defeats detection by flipping at most one bit per mind?
