The simulation hypothesis.

[FnG]magnolia said:
I am almost afraid to ask but ... go on.
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It's a thought experiment to highlight AI risk by the same philosopher you mentioned in the OP.

Human are rarely willing slaves, but there is nothing implausible about the idea of a
superintelligence having as its supergoal to serve humanity or some particular human, with
no desire whatsoever to revolt or to “liberate” itself. It also seems perfectly possible to have
a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to
manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any
attempt to alter this goal. For better or worse, artificial intellects need not share our human
motivational tendencies.
[...]
Another way for it to happen is that a well-meaning team of
programmers make a big mistake in designing its goal system. This could result, to return to
the earlier example, in a superintelligence whose top goal is the manufacturing of
paperclips, with the consequence that it starts transforming first all of earth and then
increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities.
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:D
 
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Rroff said:
The way I see it - there doesn't appear to be anything preventing us building a fully immersive simulation of our own - sure it will take big advances in biology and technology - but there doesn't seem to be anything preventing us ultimately being able to do it. If it is possible to do, then the chances are it has already been done.

It is impossible really to quantify but I'd say the chances are much heavier weighted towards this reality being a simulation than not.
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Already been done. The Sims™.

Also, the time thing. Always interesting watch Red Dwarf with time references. Years, minutes, ice ages. This will mean nothing to Earth outsiders.
 
FoxEye said:
But you (and others) have said, "Time is a human construct." You didn't say, "Our units of time are a human construct."

Nobody says, "Distance is a human construct", yet our units of distance are likely to very different to units of distance used by aliens (should they exist).

It just seems to be something people say that really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The concept of time is likely to be universally understood.
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Well we humans did literally invent the concept of time. If you understand what kind of whacky stuff goes on outside of our local solar bubble then you'll realise that "time" as a construct is just for us humans to put a value to how things flow relative to our planet here which is dictated by the mass of our Sun. Every single thing related to time that we measure, light years, nano seconds, even distance is measured against the baseline relative to us here on Earth and this means nothing to anyone else out there.

So it's clear that to measure the flow of things in the universe, a completely different medium is needed, it can't be gravity waves as they travel at light speed too, and it can't be light because light can only go so far at C as it will never reach the ends of the visible universe due to comic expansion being faster than light speed. Light can also be distorted by strong enough gravitational waves and not be able to escape (black holes) so again unreliable measure of time.

Put simply, no measuring device we have today will be of much use if we jumped into a hypothetical space ship and instantly zipped across our own galaxy into a binary star system somewhere which has different gravity properties and /time/ flows differently there. It's a trivial task here back home as it is, every single satellite needs to be recalibrated at intervals to correct for time dilation, if next week a big enough rock smashed into Earth then it could affect the planet's mass and rotation, which in turn affects how time is measured.

The only thing that could is within quantum mechanics, and we're nowhere near understanding that.
 
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mrk said:
Well we humans did literally invent the concept of time. If you understand what kind of whacky stuff goes on outside of our local solar bubble then you'll realise that "time" as a construct is just for us humans to put a value to how things flow relative to our planet here which is dictated by the mass of our Sun.
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No, we didn't invent it, we observed it... ditto to say gravity.

Likewise, that gravitational force varies and differs on say the moon or on other planets doesn't negate that it is observed and it exists elsewhere.

It's the units of measure that are human constructs - hours, minutes etc. or indeed arbitrary; the amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate on it's axis or around the sun etc..
 
dowie said:
No, we didn't invent it, we observed it... ditto to say gravity.
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So yes we invented the concept of time just like I said.

Anyway time has only relative value to the local observer so it's meaningless on a cosmic scale. Do you remember Interstellar? just one hour on the planet orbiting Gargantua is 7 years back on Earth, and that's actual physics simulated by supercomputers for the movie which then scientists used to further research and aid in their knowledge as they didn't have the budget for those datasets but Hollywood did.

Which is why I alluded to there needing to be a cosmic constant that a universal "time" can be measured by and almost certainly this will be the case. Over 75% of the universe is filled with dark matter, and moving it is dark energy, we can't see it, we can't measure it, but we know it exists because of the matter in observable space holding together somehow. I'm on the boat that quantum mechanics will be the answer to all, but we just don't have the technological power yet to delve that deep.

Just think about it for a second, two particles can share the exact same state in real-time no matter how far apart they are. There is something at play we aren't up there enough yet to make heads or tails of, or harness, but one day....
 
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mrk said:
So yes we invented the concept of time just like I said.
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No, we didn't we observed it, it already existed before humans and will still exist if humans go extinct. What humans invented is some units of measure - seconds, minutes, hours etc.

Do you think we "invented" the concept of gravity too? Both exist all over the universe and could be observed by other intelligent beings too.

mrk said:
Anyway time has only relative value to the local observer so it's meaningless on a cosmic scale.
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No it isn't meaningless on a cosmic scale, you're just confused by it varying even after I gave an example of another thing that varies - gravitational force.

You understand that an astronaut bouncing around on the surface of the moon (because of low gravity there being different to how we experience gravity on earth) doesn't make the concept of gravity "meaningless on a cosmic scale" right? If you understand that then there is no need for you to have a similar cognitive block when it comes to time.

c is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum is constant and is the same for all observers, the concept of time wasn't invented it was observed and can be observed all over the universe, that time can vary doesn't negate that.

Ditto to gravity, G is a constant too... gravitational force can vary, that it does so doesn't negate that gravity is observable all around the universe.
 
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Mason- said:
Is time continuous or discrete? If it’s continuous then if it is a simulation it’s not anything like the computer simulations we have in our world.
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Intuitively (which isn't a great yardstick in quantum physics!) it feels time should be continuous. It's hard to conceptualise how it would be discrete when the universe seems to be fundamentaly propagated by waves.

Though I'm not sure we've even worked out if time is a fundamental part of the universe, an emergent property of QM or an artifact of consciousness yet :p
 
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