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> two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation I'm very curious who these two billionai
by Artoemius 10y ago
> two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation
I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.
- superplussed 10y agoOne of them is obviously Musk. I could guess on the other, but it would only be based on the "wildness" of the other billionaire's imagination.
- Artoemius 10y agoMusk strikes me as an imaginative but a very rational person who deeply thinks about stuff, so this is confusing to me. His argument that our world is most likely a simulation does seem logical given our current knowledge. However, breaking out of the simulation is completely another matter, more in line with Hollywood thinking than with anything that scientists can be engaged to do, at least currently.
- psyc 10y agoNick Bostrom's argument.
- jonnathanson 10y agoIt's completely wacky, but if you've got a few mil to drop on wacky ideas, it starts to seem a bit less wacky in the grand scheme of things. It's basically a wager: "There's a small, but perhaps nonzero chance I'm living in a simulation. I've got the throwaway cash to fund an escape attempt. This investment has a massive chance of being completely wasted, even if this is a simulation. But if there is even a tiny chance of figuring something out, I might as well take it."
- wyldfire 10y agoWhat would it even mean to 'escape' a simulation? In my mind I'm imagining when I write code to model a real process and even at some super high-fidelity simulation I can't imagine an 'escape'. Maybe if the simulation were so self-aware it could conduct local privilege-escalation attacks and replicate itself like a worm/virus? EDIT: aside -- "Microcosmic God" [1] was a great short story along these lines [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God
- stale2002 10y agoAssume a non omnipotent being, with non-infinite resources is creating a universe simulation. What decisions would we expect a person like this to make, when designing this simulation? Since they do not have infinite resources, they would likely take shortcuts, and make compromises and tradeoff when designing the simulation For example, if light did not have a speed limit, and interacted with the entire universe instantly, this would be very hard to simulate. You would save resources by giving light a speed limit. We also expect that they might abstract out the nitty gritty details of how things work at the atomic level. If you don't really care that much about how very small particles interact with each other, you might have these numerous calculations evaluated lazily, when they are "observed" by the higher level entities. Things get really interesting when you start thinking about what kind of bugs a god programmer might be likely to make when designing their simulation. Are there any weird natural processes, that would be much more elegant if our equations modeling them were changed very slightly, almost as if the equation was a mistake in the first place? Another attack avenue is to combine two natural processes in unexpected ways, to try and find "edge cases".
- sudoscript 10y agoHow do you know your own thought processes aren't a part of the simulation? Logic is a great tool to analyze the simulation unless it's been baked on purpose by our overlords. On a different note, does simulation hypothesis strike anyone else as the idea God just explained in pseudo scientific/computing terms?
- nathan_f77 10y ago> an imaginative but a very rational person who deeply thinks about stuff. You can find smart, rational, deep thinkers who adhere to any and all of the world's major and minor religions, as well as atheism. You don't even need to take a position on religion to conclude that no-one really knows what's going on.
- n72 10y agoDon't think so. See around 17:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqEo107j-uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqEo107j-uw
- melloclello 10y agoIf one is Musk, then the scientist is doubtlessly Max Tegmark.
- zardo 10y agoThere's no way out. It's turtles all the way down.
- R_haterade 10y agoImpossible. That would cause a stack overflow.
- zardo 10y agoLet t be a turtle. For each t there exists a turtle k such that t is standing on k.
- maxblackwood 10y agoElon Musk and Peter Thiel, probably.
- nerfhammer 10y agoMy guess as well