The chance we are not living in a computer simulation is 'one in billions'

We have absolutely no idea whether it would ever be possible to create a computer capable of calculating all the variables of the Universe, we don't even properly understand quantum mechanics yet, never mind what lies beyond that. Nor do we have any idea whether we will hit some kind of physical limitation on computer design.

You need a computer at least the size of our universe to track information about every single particle in our universe.

>calculating all the variables of the Universe

You don't need to do that. Most of the research into our own perception tells us what we're actually aware of from moment to moment is a lot less detailed or coherent than what we believe we're aware of. You can make a successful simulation without needing to waste anywhere near the computational cost required for fully reproducing every little detail of how the universe appears. Your real target isn't perfectly reproducing the universe, it's creating something that perfectly tricks observers into believing it's the universe.

How is the "universe is a computer simulation" meme differ from the idea that the universe was created by god(s)?

They're both untestable hypotheses that assign creative power to higher beings.

12 I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. 2 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. 3 And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— 4 was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. 5 I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses.

Of all things, why did "computer simulation" become a meme? What does it signify differently than any other ontological construct?

no evidence

Much worse

In the new tech paradigm it's all fake AND there are no consequences for actions

It's a moral relativists wet dream

>implying it isn't an infinitely nested simulation
You actually need to be able to run infinite sub-simulations as well.

He assumes that people would want to create or live in a computer simulation in the first place. Who wants to undergo the grind of No Man's Sky times 10 for the 'exploration'?

We have created computer simulations, whereas we have not yet created universes.

Agreed. In the end its just stating that there's a higher power that created us somehow. It doesn't make our reality any less real either.

How did they beta test this tech? How is this tech actually powered? It would take an ungodly amount of power most likely. I'm pretty sure this approaches AI-Complete territory.

Procedurally generated.

>How is the "universe is a computer simulation" meme differ from the idea that the universe was created by god(s)?

The god idea says there's a magic being who can be used as an explanation for the universe existing because lol magic.

The computer simulation idea in contrast isn't about magic and isn't even used as an explanation for why the universe exists. It's just the observation that our own progress from Pong to modern computational power has been so great that you can easily imagine computation of the near future being capable of simulations indistinguishable from reality. And if we're on that trajectory in such a tiny fraction of time relative to our overall evolutionary history, then it isn't unreasonable to think about how this sort of progress isn't unique but in fact commonplace in the history of the universe.And if it's commonplace, then we don't know whether we're in the prime universe or a simulated one. And if you bring in the Copernican principle that we're probably not special and probably don't have a privileged position in reality (e.g. the Earth probably isn't the center of the universe), then we're also probably not in the prime universe but instead in one of the billions of simulated universes.

Even if it is a simulation your understanding of the word, reality, simulation and everything would be simulated. So either we are not living in a simulation, in which case thinking about whether we are is futile, or we are living in a simulation, in which case all our ideas about how the world is are simulated, in which case thinking about this is futile. QED it doesn't matter.

Sure, but your hardware needs to be able to support infinite layers.

No it doesn't. It just needs to let you think it does.

>retards think assigning statistical chances to things is some kind of magic
True it can never offer a 100% guarantee, but unfalsifiable statements are essentially pointless in the realm of arguments, since you can't really empirically corroborate or challenge them. Educated guesses do matter in the real world.

>Educated guesses do matter in the real world.

You mean they matter in our simulated world?

>How did they beta test this tech?
by testing it?
How is this tech actually powered?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain

Who programmed the simulation?

I did. Sorry for the niggers.

Non-magical biological organisms that are a lot like us because they probably based our characteristics on our own?

*on their own

> you can easily imagine computation of the near future being capable of simulations indistinguishable from reality.

No you can not. Your analogy is like using the progress between horse drawn carriages and modern Formula 1 cars to assume that we will at some point have cars that go infinitely fast. Not only is the assumption of linear progression in technology false, there are physical boundaries that we can not overcome.

False equivalence.

Where did they come from?

>infinitely fast

You don't need infinitely good computation to successfully simulate a universe. It only needs to be good enough to pass for a real universe.

I mean how is it tested when there would be glitches? Wouldn't people realize something is off? And Dyson sphere? Who built this and with what resources? Are humans even doing this or are aliens creating the simulation? See where I'm going here.

This assertion and it's logical implications become more and more complicated and convoluted as the concept is tossed around. Any potential proof one way or the other will always be suspect because of the nature of the problem. Rationality is even suspect. What I'm saying is that this is some of the most useless conjecture possible. We'd be better off discussing Bigfoot than something that can't readily be proven, disproven, or even understood.

retard, the point was that unfalsifiable statements don't become falsifiable because you word them as a probability.

They either evolved naturally in the prime universe or were simulated by other creatures who either evolved naturally in the prime universe or were simulated by other creatures. At some point, there were probably prime universe creatures who evolved naturally to begin with.

So you mean able to fool billions of beings possessing the most complex and powerful natural computer(brain) imaginable?

>simulations indistinguishable from reality to humans must be perfectly representative of the entire universe in total

you realize any simulation we make of the universe would deal entirely with those objects we can actually perceive, right? It could never include objects we are incapable of perceiving, and thus there will ALWAYS be some shadow of doubt over the project.

After all, how many things in the universe can we actually perceive?

Not at all.

Simulating something like that would quite likely run into simple physical limitations. Your assumption that we will inevitably become capable of doing such a thing is unfounded.

Which still requires way, way, way less computational power than faithfully reproducing every detail of the prime universe.

>After all, how many things in the universe can we actually perceive?

Literally everything.

I explicitly acknowledged that you fag

>requires way, way, way less computational power than faithfully reproducing every detail of the known prime universe

fixd, also can you substantiate this claim? It seems to me that if your simulation only needs to *pass* for real, then the human simulation of the universe inside all our skulls already seem to meet your definition.

But where did they come from? That just reads like piling on the original question.

That is not evidence.

If I create some hydrogen sulphide in a laboratory that does not prove there are other versions of me throughout the universe who manufactured all the naturally occurring hydrogen sulphide.

I'll repeat that the simulated universe idea isn't meant to explain the origin of the universe the way the god idea is. The origin of the prime universe is explained the same way it is in mainstream cosmology. We're just probably not in that prime universe but instead in a simulation that was either constructed by creatures in the prime universe or else creatures in a universe simulated by some other layer.

how many fingers am I holding up? Exactly how many particles and how much energy exists in the entirety of reality?

We couldn't even accurately simulate the actions of the sun down to the minute if we wanted to.

*looks*

You have one hand on your dick

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

You don't need to accurately simulate every particle in the prime universe. You only need to create a passable simulation.

You didn't ask for evidence, you asked for the difference.

And the difference is that computer simulations are a reality, so the idea is naturally gaining traction.

This approaches the point of being so "unknowable" that it's effectively irrelevant to even discuss.

His logic denies reality.

I don't understand what you're trying to argue.

The simulated universe idea isn't meant as an explanation for how the universe began. Take the mainstream cosmological view of the big bang and natural evolution, that's what happened in the prime universe. All the simulated universe idea claims is that we're not in the prime universe. It exists and we could be in it, but there are billions of more chances we're in one of the simulated universes downstream from it instead.

We can perceive all those things.

this is ridiculous because it assumes you can replicate conciousness in a computer. Who's to say that my video game characters aren't already "living" then? there's only a difference in complexity

>You only need to create a passable simulation.

a merely passable simulation wouldn't be very stable, and it would actually be very small. You certainly wouldn't be able to run very many simulations within the simulation, since there would be a degradation effect due to the incompleteness of the prime simulation.

The assumption "The universe was magically created and then spawned intelligent life that was capable of making infinitely nested simulated universes" seems more unlikely than the assumption "The universe was magically created and then spawned intelligent life".

>According to the Big Bang theory, the universe emerged from an extremely dense and hot state (singularity). Space itself has been expanding ever since, carrying galaxies with it, like raisins in a rising loaf of bread. The graphic scheme above is an artist's conception illustrating the expansion of a portion of a flat universe.

>After a classical education at a Jesuit secondary school, the Collège du Sacré-Coeur, in Charleroi, Lemaître began studying civil engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven at the age of 17. In 1914, he interrupted his studies to serve as an artillery officer in the Belgian army for the duration of World War I. At the end of hostilities, he received the Belgian War Cross with palms.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître#

>we can perceive all particles that exist

user that's not true

People have been doing that for 3000 years

Dude should read up on gnositiscm. It's the same thing with techno-mumbo jumbo. We are Spirits of light trapped in mortal shells but through God's grace and our own efforts we can transcend this world after our death.

??

Tell me which existing particle we can not perceive?

Dude should read up on gnositiscm. It's the same thing without techno-mumbo jumbo. We are Spirits of light trapped in mortal shells but through God's grace and our own efforts we can transcend this world after our death.

>replicate conciousness
>Who's to say that my video game characters aren't already "living" then?

You're acting like consciousness is some single attribute that things either just "have" or "don't have," when I think a better understanding of it would be as a suitcase word for lots of little details of behavior. And yes, existing programs already have some of these details of behavior today. Why do you think self-driving cars exist? It's not that those self-driving cars have been explicitly programmed with everything they need to do to maneuver around on roads with other drivers on them. They were trained to learn this in ways that are comparable to how we learn.

I think the argument against this is that you'd need a computer bigger than the universe to simulate it.

Computers don't compute on a subatomic level, unless you count passing electrons from atom to atom. Therefore, a part of the computer in charge of computing a certain subatomic particle would have to be larger than the particle it is simulating.

If it were the same size, it wouldn't be simulating, it would just... well... be.

Additionally, each individual particle would have to be computed at the same time as one another. Each particle would have to have its own computer, which would be hook up to a network of other computers. This networking may or may not result in a an even larger computer system.

I think the universe is much better explained as an abstraction of the interactions between its fundamental particles.

If we can't perceive it, how can we know they exist? Although It's ill informed hubris to assume we can observe every particle in the universe at this point.

>you'd need a computer bigger than the universe to simulate it

Only if you're trying to perfectly simulate every single detail of a universe. Which you don't need to do. You only need to make a passable simulation. You don't need to simulate a tree falling in a forest when no one's there to hear it.

> You don't need to simulate a tree falling in a forest when no one's there to hear it.

You do actually. The simulation would very quickly become inconsistent if you didn't.

>The assumption "The universe was magically created and then spawned intelligent life that was capable of making infinitely nested simulated universes" seems more unlikely than the assumption "The universe was magically created and then spawned intelligent life".

Sure, and both are way less likely than the assumption the universe non-magically emerged and then spawned intelligent life that was capable of making finite nested simulated universes.

Yes, everyone knows George Lemaitre was a catholic priest. What's your point? There's still a mainstream cosmological model of the universe's emergence that doesn't involve creator gods.

You can simulate the illusion of consistency.

Magically in this case simply means "beyond our (current) ability to understand". And you need some magical creation occurring at some point, unless you have a theory for existence came to be in the first place?

Their existence is defined by our ability to perceive it. If we can not perceive it, it effectively does not exist.

>Their existence is defined by our ability to perceive it. If we can not perceive it, it effectively does not exist.
We know colors exist that we can't perceive.

And as your simulated lifeforms become intelligent enough to understand more and more of their universe, your simulation eventually becomes equally complex as and thus indistinguishable from 'the real thing', because that's the only way to maintain consistency.

That's ridiculous. We can observe individual atoms and know certain subatomic particles exist. If what you are saying is true, then why would we be able to even see atoms? In fact, we 'see' atoms by firing electrons at them and observing how the electrons bounce back. This proves the existance of atoms and subatomic particles

>Magically in this case simply means "beyond our (current) ability to understand".

No it doesn't. "We don't know" isn't the same as "it was magic."

>And you need some magical creation occurring at some point, unless you have a theory for existence came to be in the first place?

Here's a scenario that doesn't involve magic:

There's an eternal ground of reality that's always just existed, and unlike the God iea, it's super-simple and not at all intelligent. And one of its attributes is it's always in a mild state of flux. So little universes that aren't eternal and do have beginnings and endings emerge from it like bubbles from the ocean. And the prime universe is one of those bubbles. It began with the big bang, but it wasn't the case that all of reality started with the big bang, just that particular universe.

The key thing that keeps it out of the magic zone is not putting inane characteristics like intelligence on the preexisting ground of reality since intelligence requires a shit ton of prerequisites for it to exist, making it the worst possible candidate for an attribute of the least built up, most basic state of reality prior to any particular universe's beginning.

Obviously we can perceive them because we know they exist. Perception is not the same thing as the human eye being able to distinguish them.

There are two questions here:
>A) What is wrong with the view that we are living in a computer simulation (i.e. simulationism)?
>B) What is wrong with the Internet-famous argument Elon Musk gave for simulationism?
Most people ITT are answering the first one but OP asked the second one.

Musk's argument is roughly:
>(P1) Based on the advancement of our own simulation technology, we should assume simulating a universe is possible.
>(P2) If simulating a universe is possible, we should assume civilizations that came before us and advanced to higher technological sophistication than us did it.
>(C1) So we should assume past civilizations were universe-simulators.
>(P3) If past civilizations simulated universes, we should assume they simulated not just one but a huge number of different ones (say billions).
>(C2) So we should assume there are billions of simulated universes created by past civilizations.
>(P4) If there are billions of simulated universes, then for any creatures now in existence, the probability that they find themselves in the one unsimulated universe ("base reality") rather than a simulated one is the number of base realities (1) divided by the number of simulated universes (billions).
>(C3) So any currently existing creatures have a 1 in billions probability of finding themselves in base reality.
>(P5) We are such creatures.
>(C4) So the probability that we find ourselves in base reality is 1 in billions.

Going by your logic though we would have never tried to find out because we would have assumed only our perceptions are real.

Knowing something exists isn't the same thing as perceiving it. You can infer something's existence abstractly without perceiving it.

>No it doesn't. "We don't know" isn't the same as "it was magic."

Yes it does because that's the way I used it. That's how language works. I used magic as a placeholder for "beyond our (current) ability to understand".

Your scenario in no way an answer to the question of how existence came to be. "It was always there" does not excuse you from answering that question, and it certainly isn't any less "magic" than an almighty godlike creator.

>We can observe individual atoms and know certain subatomic particles exist.

You can make a simulation where people believe that, yes.

>So little universes that aren't eternal and do have beginnings and endings emerge from it like bubbles from the ocean.
Wouldn't it run out of bubbles eventually?

>"It was always there" does not excuse you from answering that question, and it certainly isn't any less "magic" than an almighty godlike creator.

It's less magic because everything we know about intelligence tells us its emergence was entirely dependent on large amounts of prior physical evolution. It's one of the latest attributes to emerge in the history of known physical phenomena. If you're coming up with attributes for the eternal ground of reality that allows for finite things with beginnings like the observable universe to come into existence, intelligence is the worst candidate for an attribute. Having a non-intelligent ground of reality in contrast makes a lot of sense. In both cases there's a preexisting eternal ground of reality, it's just that in your case you inexplicably have it being a magic guy which shits all over the whole point that it's supposed to be the least built up state of reality.

We are now starting to argue semantics, but in my point of view this means we can perceive that it exist because we can perceive the logical inference that leads us to conclude that it exist.

How complex of an algorithm would you need for that? Wouldn't that just increase the size of your computer even more? That is, if you had make an algorithm for every possible scenario in which intelligent life discovers that they live in a simulation? Would the creators even be able to account for every scenario?

No, the bubbles pop and go back to the ocean and everything's conserved.

Then where do minds come from?

I don't think it's semantics to recognize the huge difference between perceiving something vs. inferring it through mathematics. They're two totally different processes.

You are assuming that what holds true in our universe is a useful indicator for what holds true outside our universe and can be used to infer things about how our universe came to be. This assumption I deem unfounded.

>You didn't ask for evidence, you asked for the difference.
Is this a troll? Do you have difficulty keeping track of the context of a conversation?

If what you say is not valid evidence then there is no difference.

>computer simulations are a reality,
loaded statemet, you have yet to prove it is a reality

>the idea is naturally gaining traction
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

You're obviously full of shit. I'm only interested in why you are so obsessed with this meme.

Are you all from some reddit echo chamber or something?

How did you attach this spook to your ego? Are you riding on the belief that all your problems will be solved once you hack the matrix?

What do minds have to do with anything? "Mind" is a word for the abstraction of behavior organisms exhibit. And these organisms are made out of matter which exists in one of the bubble universes that emerged from the timeless ground of reality.