• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Living in the Matrix

simulation #342288865b

It seems almost inevitable that we are living in a simulation...
the galactic civilisation that we *may* create in the far future will almost certainly have converted a very large amount of the solid matter into computer processing material...

aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/MatrioshkaBrains.html
Link is dead, as is the website / domain. Archived version accessible at:


https://web.archive.org/web/2002021...adbury/MatrioshkaBrains/MatrioshkaBrains.html

and the potential for simulation will be so vast that there could potentially be many quadrillions of virtual universes, some based on reality and some not...
and the chance that we happen to exist in an unsimulated , primary universe is vanishingly small.
However this does not mean that we should change our behaviour or beliefs in anyway.
(assuming the simulation is lifelike we can carry on as normal and hope the simulating entities do not run out of budget..)
one example of a fictional simulated universe or cosm within another given here
http://www.orionsarm.com/xenos/Mucoid_Empire.html

heh heh
steve b
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I work with alot of sad computer programmers who wear long leather jackets, so I'm partly there already ;)
 
Inverurie Jones asked:
Does it matter?

Well, yes wanna know whats up,
fight some MIB:madeyes:
if this is a simulation lets
change the rules.
sakina
 
JerryB said:
I work with alot of sad computer programmers who wear long leather jackets, so I'm partly there already ;)

A coat may be long and black.
A jacket may be leather.
The two must never be allowed to breed.
 
In the beginning was a universe that grew sentient beings who developed machines capable of creating a completely simulation of their universe. They started it running and it simulated their universe accurately to the point that it evolved sentient beings who created machines that could run a complete simulation of their universe. The pattern repeats, creating a recombinant, a super-dna made of endless universes creating themselves time and again...
 
Breakfast said:
In the beginning was a universe that grew sentient beings who developed machines capable of creating a completely simulation of their universe. They started it running and it simulated their universe accurately to the point that it evolved sentient beings who created machines that could run a complete simulation of their universe. The pattern repeats, creating a recombinant, a super-dna made of endless universes creating themselves time and again...
But we could be living in a mutant virtual universe, and the immune systems are trying to decide whether to resorb our database- and use the energy for better uses
steve b
 
Seeing as, IMHO, The Matrix is a bloody dire film, the thought that the whole Universe may be like that fills me with dread.
 
JerryB said:
Seeing as, IMHO, The Matrix is a bloody dire film, the thought that the whole Universe may be like that fills me with dread.

I liked the movie.

Are we living in the matrix?

No!
 
The Matrix was a good film but a blatant, un-deliberated work of fiction. I think an artificially intelligent machine wouldn't bother going through the effort of creating a Matrix just to placate some humans so that you could use them as batteries?

Wouldn't it be easier if the machines produced their energy from vole farms?

These little rodents are small, compact and dumb, but have a super fast metabolism, creating more energy per unit, and you wouldn't need to embellish a SIM world for them… Easy!

Also... why contend with the obvious danger of handling that lethal virus, which is the human race!

Doesn't compute?

:D
 
Curzone said:
Wouldn't it be easier if the machines produced their energy from vole farms?

:D
To paraphrase Ernest Adams-
Apparently, in The Matrix the human beings have blocked out the sun, so the machines couldn't actually grow any grain to feed the voles anyway.
But there's still coal, oil, gas, uranium, hydro, the wind, the tides, and geothermal energy to tap - any of which would be more efficient than using human beings, or voles.

steve b
 
I really liked the matrix for the first few minutes, until it became clear it was the same old boring Terminator future inhabited by Descartes in a leather coat. Then it just got dire.
 
See the relevant Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

See also:

A Glitch in the Matrix IHTMs:
forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9849
Link is obsolete. Current link is:


https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/a-glitch-in-the-matrix.9849/

For films there are:

The Matrix (obviously):
forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9274
Link is obsolete. Current link is:


https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-matrix.9274/

The Thirteenth Floor:
forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24164
Link is obsolete. Current link is:


https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-thirteenth-floor.24164/
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Breakfastologist said:
I really liked the matrix for the first few minutes, until it became clear it was the same old boring Terminator future inhabited by Descartes in a leather coat. Then it just got dire.


Exactly. An infinite number of Descartes... It's probably the future we deserve...

;)
 
Re: simulation #342288865b

Eburacum45~ said:
It seems almost inevitable that we are living in a simulation...
the galactic civilisation that we *may* create in the far future will almost certainly have converted a very large amount of the solid matter into computer processing material...

http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/MatrioshkaBrains.html

...
A speculation that may prove that wide eyed scientific speculation has achieved the science community equivalent of a nervous breakdown.

Not too far off those poor sods who wake up one morning to find that everybody in the World is a robot, except them. Delusions within delusions. :shock:

Yes, I saw the BBC documentary where a bunch of very intelligent scientists all came to the conclusion that true reality must be very like the one that only very smart people like them could conceive of. The intellectual equivalent of disappearing up their own fundaments.
 
Well, over the couple of years since I wrote that last post, I have changed my mind somewhat.
The Matrix argument seems to assume that the 'real' universe is very similar to our own. In actual fact, in order to run a simulation as complex as the universe we perceive around us, the hypothetical 'real' universe would have to be many times as complex as our own.

Either the simulated universe we inhabit is much simpler than the real universe (there are a number of data-compression tricks that might allow that)
or
we don't live in a Matrix after all.

We have no real way of telling which is correct at the moment.
 
I have read the argument posted by that professor and I cannot see what all the fuss is about.

The beginning of the report has a premise - it seems to say that humans are unlikely to survive long enough to reach post human stage.

It then seems to say that if humans did live long enough to reach post human stage that they are probably running simulations of their past in order to see what actually probably happened in their history.

It seems to suggest that if humans did live long enough to reach post human stage then they are probably running such simulations now, and that we may be living only as part of one such simulation.


IMO this is a poor argument for us living in a simulation.

Just because we may not survive does not mean we cannot be here now, and just because we may survive does not mean that we are in a simulation.

I am no mathematician, but I would say that there is no way to prove anything as being a certainty, only a probability (no matter how absurdly high or low that probability may be).

I think it is (I will choose a random figure to sound clever here) - only 20% likely that we are in a simulation based on the number of strange coincidences I have witnessed in my lifetime.

Bit like the sight of two black cats walking by that somebody on this forum pointed out as happening in 'The Matrix' on page one of this thread.

8)
 
cant these so called super machines create something that flys
and thus able to send solar energy back?
 
Okay, lets have a look at the nuts and bolds of how to produce such a simulation. First you need very accurate modelling of the physical processes of the real world. This is fairly easy on the macroscopic level, but modelling the interactions of atoms and subatomic particles accurately would be impossible. You would need a massive amount of computing power to model each atom correctly; it would be much easier to build a real universe and let it run its course.
So if you were determined to make a virtual model of the world you would have to approximate the behaviour of subatomic particles; that would be okay, as they behave much more predicably en mass. A very convincing model could be built up, with realistic materials behaviour, realistic atmospheric modelling, even realistic biology for the human and non-human inhabitants of your virtual world; it would hold up to scrutiny until the inhabitants decided to start examining the behaviour of subatomic particles.
You could say that our current knowledge of quantum physics has ruled out the possibility of our living in a simulation.

Except there is a way round even this. Virtual worlds that exist today simulate that world from the point of view of an observer; the observer can only take in so many megabytes of information per second. If we are living in a point of view (POV) simulation, all our sensory input would be modelled for us; a quantum physicist in a virtual world would be fed specially fabricated data to convince her that the world she is living in obeys the rules of QED right down to the quark level.
The world would be mostly simulated at a much coarser resolution for those of use who don't use (for instance) electron microscopes and X-ray crystallography.

In such a simulation, it would be unlikely that the simulees would have physical bodies, or even physical brains as we know them; the 'brain in a vat' scenario is quite unlikely. It seems more likely to me that the simulees will exist only as programs themselves, running on a gigantic mainframe somewhere. Running humans as programs within the simulation would allow finer control on the inputs and outputs and ensure that the illusion could be complete.
 
TinFinger says:
cant these so called super machines create something that flys
and thus able to send solar energy back?

I agree the Matrix back story was flawed on many levels, but the special effects were good.

If this reality is a simulation why can't the "powers that be" add a flying car or a ray gun (a real ray gun, with a ray and victims who glow before they disapear). In the early 70s, when I was little I was promised a flying car on Tomorrows World.... well I'm now 40 and I don't have my flying car. I know I've mentioned this before but I feel that I'm owed by the BBC.

If this is somethings idea of a really exciting simulation, then they need to get out more. It would be extra exciting if there were more super heros and fewer office jobs. Fewer wars and cheaper high quality wine would also improve things a bit.
 
Or its a kind of simulation that is selfevolving. Give it a few basics [atoms] and a formula and see what happens kind of thing. Every now and then somithing might be "tweaked" or helped along.

As for quantum physics, it could be an artefact, basically us looking too close at something we don't "need" to know. What we see might be bits from the real reality and hence they don't quite fit in with our knowledge of "normal" physics.
 
eburacum said:
Well, over the couple of years since I wrote that last post, I have changed my mind somewhat.
The Matrix argument seems to assume that the 'real' universe is very similar to our own. In actual fact, in order to run a simulation as complex as the universe we perceive around us, the hypothetical 'real' universe would have to be many times as complex as our own.

Either the simulated universe we inhabit is much simpler than the real universe (there are a number of data-compression tricks that might allow that)
or
we don't live in a Matrix after all.

We have no real way of telling which is correct at the moment.

I had a thought about this Matrix idea the other day.

If we are living in a simulation, there may have been little shortcuts to save space and processing power, a bit like the techniques that games designers employ.
What I'm thinking is, in this theoretical scenario, all we can actually explore in the Universe is (so far) the Solar System. We've sent out the Pioneer spacecraft, and as it approaches the outer reaches of the Solar System, it has paradoxically started to slow down. Scientists have no explanation for this phenomenon (so far).
My idea is this - perhaps the simulation hadn't been created outside the Solar System, so now we've gone out that far, the simulation is now having to dynamically create new space as Pioneer flies outwards. In other words, Pioneer is self-creating reality. The extra demand on computing power is causing a massive system overhead that is slowing everything down. This could cause time in the space local to Pioneer to run more slowly than the time here on Earth.

Even so, I think you're right - the real Universe would have to be considerably more complex than what we perceive to be reality.
 
Mythopoeika said:
...

If we are living in a simulation, there may have been little shortcuts to save space and processing power, a bit like the techniques that games designers employ.
...
So, it's time to start searching for the 'Easter Eggs' and 'Cheats', is it?

Perhaps, the 'WalkThru' has been hidden in Rosslyn Chapel, by the 'Master Architect'?

:shock:
 
Simulated reality

I was reading somewhere recently (can’t remember where) how all developments and new innovations contain the seeds of their own destruction, a kind of half-life if you like. The fact that we still depend on steam engines will bear this out and how automotive technology was all invented at the start and has not really progressed. He went on to say that computer technology got stuck in the seventies; a statement that I found surprising?
I think the bottom line of all this is the fact that everything becomes institutionalised eventually and all innovation/progress stops. Once you put a committee in charge, say goodbye.
Thinking about this for a while I realised that it was correct and that there is a bias against moving forward past a certain point.

To create a simulated reality, you first need to define reality and that’s one large problem. Unless you want to create A reality of your own, which is a different thing.
To create a reality on a computer has it’s own problems and constraints, as the program can only be as good as the best programmer. If we take the premise that all progress has stopped in this area, we are left will advancements that only entail speeding up of existing methods then no one is likely to come up with any life simulation better than we already have (better graphics excepted).

We seem to be limited in some way that is inescapable.
Is this a prime directive in our matrix program? Are we limited by the lack of imagination of the programmer?
 
Eburacum45~ said:
Apparently, in The Matrix the human beings have blocked out the sun, so the machines couldn't actually grow any grain to feed the voles anyway.
But there's still coal, oil, gas, uranium, hydro, the wind, the tides, and geothermal energy to tap - any of which would be more efficient than using human beings, or voles.

Animatrix, a series of anime shorts expanding upon The Matrix universe, gave the impression (in Second Renaissance Parts 1 and 2) that the use of human beings, instead of some alternative source of energy, was motivated by something akin to hatred of humans and revenge for the humans' attempts to 'cleanse' the planet of all intelligent machines.

Ironically, keeping the humans alive at all (albeit in a perpetual coma-like state) may have been an act of restraint and compassion, to avoid having to kill innocents as long as they weren't threatening the status quo.
 
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

(Harlan Ellison.)

A short story about a super-computer that destroys most of humanity but keeps the last few specimens alive in a kind of constantly mutating Virtual Reality in order to torture them for all eternity. The only way that the humans can 'defeat' the super-computer is by taking their own lives - although it does its utmost to prevent such suicide attempts from succeeding. (No martial arts, though. And the good guys don't prevail. So you won't be seeing it in the multiplexes any time soon.)

Read it here
 
Does a simulation this complex have to include hangovers?

Do we live in a computer simulation? Researchers say idea can be tested
December 10th, 2012 in Physics / General Physics

The conical (red) surface shows the relationship between energy and momentum in special relativity, a fundamental theory concerning space and time developed by Albert Einstein, and is the expected result if our universe is not a simulation. The flat (blue) surface illustrates the relationship between energy and momentum that would be expected if the universe is a simulation with an underlying cubic lattice. Credit: Martin Savage

A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water.

The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three possibilities is true:

The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage.
Any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history.
We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

He also held that "the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation."

With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But the UW team has suggested tests that can be performed now, or in the near future, that are sensitive to constraints imposed on future simulations by limited resources.

Currently, supercomputers using a technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics and starting from the fundamental physical laws that govern the universe can simulate only a very small portion of the universe, on the scale of one 100-trillionth of a meter, a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, said Martin Savage, a UW physics professor.

Eventually, more powerful simulations will be able to model on the scale of a molecule, then a cell and even a human being. But it will take many generations of growth in computing power to be able to simulate a large enough chunk of the universe to understand the constraints on physical processes that would indicate we are living in a computer model.

However, Savage said, there are signatures of resource constraints in present-day simulations that are likely to exist as well in simulations in the distant future, including the imprint of an underlying lattice if one is used to model the space-time continuum.

The supercomputers performing lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations essentially divide space-time into a four-dimensional grid. That allows researchers to examine what is called the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature and the one that binds subatomic particles called quarks and gluons together into neutrons and protons at the core of atoms.

"If you make the simulations big enough, something like our universe should emerge," Savage said. Then it would be a matter of looking for a "signature" in our universe that has an analog in the current small-scale simulations.

Savage and colleagues Silas Beane of the University of New Hampshire, who collaborated while at the UW's Institute for Nuclear Theory, and Zohreh Davoudi, a UW physics graduate student, suggest that the signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays.

In a paper they have posted on arXiv, an online archive for preprints of scientific papers in a number of fields, including physics, they say that the highest-energy cosmic rays would not travel along the edges of the lattice in the model but would travel diagonally, and they would not interact equally in all directions as they otherwise would be expected to do.

"This is the first testable signature of such an idea," Savage said.

If such a concept turned out to be reality, it would raise other possibilities as well. For example, Davoudi suggests that if our universe is a simulation, then those running it could be running other simulations as well, essentially creating other universes parallel to our own.

"Then the question is, 'Can you communicate with those other universes if they are running on the same platform?'" she said.

Provided by University of Washington

"Do we live in a computer simulation? Researchers say idea can be tested." December 10th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-12-simulation-idea.html
 
A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants.

Our descendants? How does that work? Time travel?
 
Back
Top