The Computational Requirements for the Matrix 953
goombah99 writes "Nick Bostrom discusses the computational requirements needed to simulate human existence. He offers a proof based on the anthropic principle, that you are almost certainly a computer simulation and not "real". The idea is that given that humans don't go extinct in geologically short time then eventually computer capability will allow complete simulation of the human cortex. Consequently, there must be far more simulations running in future millennia than seconds since you were born. Thus its astronomically more likely you are a simulation than real ... if humans don't go extinct shortly. Recalling the 13th floor, Robin Hanson discusses how one should try to live in a simulation. David Wolpert also weighs in on the physical limits of Turing machines for simulation of the universe. This also may explain why time travel seems impossible: we dont meet visitors from the future since only the present is being simulated."
screw it. (Score:4, Insightful)
hypothesise all you want, it doesn't change the fact that A is A and you have to go to work on monday. the last thing the current american society needs is a new kantian theory to overtake it.
i'm all about philosophy and learning as much as i can, but no matter what, existence exists. wish all you want, carrie anne-moss isn't going to magically appear, and your troubles won't disappear until you get off your ass.
Much like religion (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the articles mentions ways to change one's behavior upon realization that it is all a simulation... sound familiar?
Can the Matrix simulate independent thought? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, if everyone is a digital projection controlled by a computer program, then how is it the humans inside the matrix are capable of independent thought? Why isn't it like "Big Brother" in George Orwell's 1984, where the Thought Police were always watching for crimethink? Even if the computers' super-advanced AI engine could simulate thoughts *for* the human, and trick them into thinking they came up with it themselves, then why would the system allow a human to discover what is outside the Matrix? Is there a certain amount of "tolerance" built into the system? I guess that would explain the need for "agents."
Soo...this goes back to my initial inquiry -- where does the independent thought come from? Is it somehow hardwired to the person's brain through the matrix? If so, they need subconscious experiences (daydreams, nightmares, etc.) in order to have independent thought. So the Matrix must have had a certain level of tolerance built in.
But.... if the Matrix *was* built by a race of cruel machines designed to control humans, then why was the Matrix programmed the way it is? Are they torturing humans with a life they once knew, before AI came into play and destroyed that which they had?
All this makes me want to see "Revolutions." I hope they answer all these questions, like "Who Created The Matrix?" It's too human, too sympathetic to be built by cold, heartless machines. There is religion in the matrix, so someone had to program that in.
What the......? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another event that would let us conclude with a very high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach the point where we are about to switch on our own simulations. If we start running simulations, that would be very strong evidence against (1) and (2). That would leave us with only (3).
and I have to wonder.....this guy is a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford? Jeez, what are they paying these guys for? Pop culture derivative drivel about a movie whose sequel sucked? [slashdot.org]. This is like high school philosophy where you would sit around drinking beer in someones mom's basement saying "so, dude, how do we know if we are really here?" Please. I'm all for arts and liberal education, but let's work at thinking about things that can make a difference.
And by that same logic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad logic is fun (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem is, the probability of the existence of a simulation is not the same as the probability of us inhabiting that simulation. Plus, the existence of massive comuting power does not imply that that power is used for a certain task.
Not Exactly... (Score:4, Insightful)
(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours
(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation."
Obviously this last sentence is meant more to play up the conclusion that we are in a simulation. (2) is the most plausible; it is incomprehensible to me (though admitedly I may be of a lesser mind that those running the simulation) why greater beings would waste CPU time on mere humans.
In all seriousness, though, if we assume 2 to be true and 1 to be false, we can most certainly dismiss 3. And if we assume 1 to be true, where does that leave us?
"Let us consider the options in a little more detail. Possibility (1) is relatively straightforward. For example, maybe there is some highly dangerous technology that every sufficiently advanced civilization develops, and which then destroys them. Let us hope that this is not the case."
Of course most mutations die out. This is how evolution works. Obiously, we can assume that if evolution has gotten us this far, it is likely that it will have created similar intelligent beings and perhaps even more advanced than us (or we ourselves will acheive such a level of mental greatness).
This is a fun intellectual debate (and clearly meant to gain the limelight) but its a bit overblown, too, I think.
Of course the universe is a simulation... (Score:5, Insightful)
- you consider the world to be composed of things with surfaces and textures, yet in fact most of everything is interatomic space. Matter is a simulation.
- you consider yourself to be a being, complete and individual, yet you are built from trillions of cells each with a lifecycle, not to mention hosts of other organisms that cohabit your body, even your gene pool. Individuality is a simulation.
- you think you are reading this text, and yet it is just a sprinkling of letters and dots and random ideas. Language is a simulation, the Internet also.
- you believe you exist, and yet we are truly just temporary assemblages of matter acting as hosts for the multilevel game of life. Existence is a simulation.
But none of this means much: as in the Matrix, if I stab your simulated heart with a simulated knife, your simulated body will simulate death. And your simulated consciousness will try very, very hard to avoid that. Welcome to the Real World.
Time Travel Impossible? (Score:3, Insightful)
If this indeed were a simulation, the rules would only be as strict as the design allowed, and they would only be broken when the designer(s) allowed...
...unless, of course, you buy the Architect's explanation in the Matrix Reloaded that a perfect design, by which sentient entropy would never lend itself toward a "system crash", is slightly impossible.
Re:Episode of Star Trek (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the......? (Score:3, Insightful)
And you asked that question because...it might have been fun? Aren't these people entitled to a little fun too?
Please. I'm all for arts and liberal education, but let's work at thinking about things that can make a difference.
IME, the human body works better longer if it's exercised regualrily, and with different regimens. Concentrating on a single regimen can lead to specialization of the body, which can be bad - I would guess Arnold Schwartzeneggar isn't a great gymnast, for instance. The human brain is no different - it requires different types of stimuli frequently to remain at it's peak.
As well, seeing college professors think - and using pop culture to give the thought processes a well known context - may stimulate a few young minds into becoming great minds by giving them cause to be exercised. I'd say thier doing thier jobs - getting people to think and hopefullly learn something.
Soko
If you can't tell the difference... (Score:4, Insightful)
There isn't any evidence of artifacts of some simulation, beyond the existence of the laws of physics. And there certainly isn't any way to break it. If there is a higher power/controlling computer, they don't seem to care about us that much.
In terms of what we mathematically define as computation (given the observed rules of the simulation we know as life), it would be pretty hard to simulate what scientists view, measure, and track with our computational technology. The geometric rate on our computational engineering will probably slow drastically in the next century (to be liberal), so we can't count on a trillion times more space and speed.
Re:woooah (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plato's Cave (Score:5, Insightful)
There are probably better ways of judging the movie than scoring how much time it spends regurgitating what everyone's said about the cave allegory already, but all of these methods are by and large predicated on waiting for the actual story to finish. You know..see where they're going with it.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
For touch, you just simulate the smallest texture difference that a human can feel. For sound, all you need to do is simulate the sounds that a human can hear.
All of these would need to have a certain safely margin to account for people whose senses are better than others, but all that you really have to feed the brain is sense data. As long as it is input propperly,
Now, you would need to physicaly simulate things, but you can reduce the complexity of a model arbitrarily if you are willing to sacrifice quality. The computer detects that we don't need high quality simulations of tables, so it only simulates where the corners would be and fills the rest in as a polygon.
Of course, all of this assumes that you have a more-or-less sentient computer. It would have to be able to decide when we don't need obscenely high quality simulations in order to save its processor power. That wouldn't require true sentience, but it would take quite a bit of clever AI programming.
All of this is a gross simplification. It would still be impossible with modern computing methods because it would require a computer larger than Jupiter, and that's not even with a power source.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:4, Insightful)
Just consider current generation of 3D games. Some games can make your heart beat faster, or make you jumpy, etc. The point being that eventhough at a concious level you know it's only a game, your brain is still fooled subconciously into thinking the game might be real, and thus, makes your heart go faster and pumps up the adrenaline (as if you're gonna be running away from that monster for real).
Now, imagine that game with 3D goggles, perfect sound, etc, where YOU are not conciously awear that it is a game...
This is the future, and I think we'll see it far sooner than most people realize (20 years tops).
Re:screw it. (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually the "fact" a is a and that you have to go to work on monday are only "facts" because you agree with them. So they are really opinions. And speaking as an american citizen fed up with the excess and lies of this country I would gladly see a theory, any theory, that brought about non violent change in the way we live our lives.
False anthropic principle applications (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a common misapplication of the anthropic principle. All the weak anthropic principle (which is the only one appropriate) states is this: For you to be here now, conditions in the Universe must be right to allow you to be here. In probabilistic form, it simply states: The probability of your existence being made possible by the history of the Universe is 1.
Most people with something to prove use this to make probabilistic arguments based on the probability of life, or the number of existent civilizations, but these are misguided. The anthropic principle tells you nothing about how many civilizations are out there, or how likely other similar creatures are, it simply says that for you to be here, the Universe must allow your existence.
Arguments such as the ones made in this article are based on a faulty understanding the anthropic principle. They are assuming a probability distribution that they not only have no reason to believe is true, but which the anthropic principle says nothing about.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
And why not assume that they did some simplifications? Why should we assume that the universe that we exist in the the one that the simulators run? It could be much different and the laws of physics different as well. It may be able to run simulations of huge amounts of atoms because that may be a trivial amount of processing time to a much more complex universe.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
There are so many ways to do that, that it might conceivably be better to simulate at a lower level than to deal with all the possible special cases, or allow people to detect the flaws.
As for processing limitations, it's might not be impossible if you can underclock the minds of participants - put them in suspended animation or something.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be easier from a programming standpoint to simulate all of the individual atoms, but that would be prohibitively slow. We're talking tens of thousands of years for less than a second of simulation time using conventional computers on anything less than a planetary scale.
Quantum computers and chemical computers could speed it up greatly, but it would still take massive amounts of raw processing power to keep track of all of those atoms, let alone let anything interact with them.
You can never see anything smaller than the smallest dot that your eye can perceive. However, you can design devices to enlarge objects (or increase the resolution of your eye, depending on how you look at it).
One of the huge problems with The Matrix is the question of how people were actually put into it. If anyone had memories of the real world, then they would undoubtedly find a way to pass them on to their children. So, that implies that none of the first generation of Matrix denizens was ever outside the Matrix at any prior point in their lives. Yet they had parents. The programs in the Matrix aren't compassionate at all, so they certainly couldn't have raised the children. Perhaps they had been imprisoned for millennia, but if that were the case, I would have expected the robots to have wiped out the last of the independent humans. Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage. We can only stop new ones from forming. Perhaps the robots were able to create synthetic sets of memories for the first parents, but again, how? That would require someone in the Matrix in the first place so that his memories could be copied. Perhaps the first parents were willing subjects? I don't really see that as in The Animatrix, the general populace was destroying the robots in the streets. That would be like southern whites agreeing to be slaves to some blacks during the Civil War. Very few would. Perhaps enough did that they were the first generation.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: And by that same logic... (Score:3, Insightful)
If there are an infinite number of worlds, then there will (by the nature of infinity) be an infinite number of inhabited ones as well.
Sorry.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, there are limits to our own understanding of both the extremely small and the extremely large. What if those limits are not that far from the limits of our "simulation"? How would you tell? Build bigger accelerators/telescopes? How big would they need to be?
Our knowledge of "what should be" is based purely on obseravtion. We're always testing the boundaries of our knowledge. But who's to say that when we delve deeper into the depths of the cosmos we won't discover a message:
orRe:Time travel (Score:3, Insightful)
My point is the fact the people who use this as an argument suffer from a self importance complex. For example, let's say you were in africa, and never saw monkey. This does not mean they don't exist... either you were not were the monkeys were, or the monkey's just were not interested enough to say hello.
Old philosophy (Score:5, Insightful)
Descartes, ( Born March 1596, died Feb 1650)
This all goes down to the old questions:
While trying to explain the other two, don't forget that the only proof that you have that the world out there exists comes through your senses. For all you know, there are no other people out there - maybe your senses are being mislead:
Re:who says it needs to be a certain speed? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:1, Insightful)
And you don't need to simulate touch at all - just inject him with some anestheic to disable those sense. He wouldn't miss them because he'd have never experienced them.
If you did that to millions of people, over many generations they'd probably work out there own system of science based around the physics simulation that exists in the game, which is their reality.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, the simulation has to know exactly what you're doing and what you're perceiving in order to feed the information to your brain. If you turn your head, that isn't a physical motion. The simulation detects the impulses that indicate you desire to turn your head, and adjusts your visual and physical feeds to simulate that motion. So it's certainly capable of determining that you are peering through a microscope and adjusting the level of detail accordingly. How detailed is the simulation? Precisely as detailed as it needs to be, but no more.
One interesting result of this is that observation would affect the behavior of the universe. Also, changes in the environment, such as the presence of a second slit in a screen, might alter the algorithm used to calculate the behavior of, oh, I don't know, maybe photons.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
> at all. All that you need to simulate visually is the smallest object a
> person can resolve with his unadied eyes. Everything else is simply mapped
> on top of that.
From a programmer's point of view, this is a bad idea. After all, you will
need special plugins for every device that aids the eyes. You have to check
if any of your simulated physicians invents a tool like a microscope, and
then hot-upgrade your simulator to provide consistent results to him.
Although more work at the beginning, you save yourself a lot of time and
hassle when you just do it right from the start.
We Are A Simulation of a Simulation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Mouse's comments at the dinner table addressed this directly.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Especially if the computer is programmed with the assumption that the brain should not be allowed to be aware of the LOD (wow, I never thought I'd use that term in philosophical debate).
BTW, anyone with keen interest in tihs topic with a good sci-fi tastes have just gotta read greg egans "Permutation City". Its a classic.
defining your terms (Score:2, Insightful)
"Modern Philosophy" is a movement in the literature that reflects a more mathematical and scientific approach to the philosophical ideas originating back in ancient Greece. Philosophers usually credit Rene Descartes for the transition, but Descartes is a bad example of good philosophy because his arguments go in logical circles. David Hume is a little better because did take an empirical approach to philosophy. I'll bet you'd enjoy Hume's writing, he insists that the problems in philosophy would all just disappear when the philosophers finally define their terms.
"Post-Modern Philosophy" has developed more recently (perhaps what you meant by 'modern'?) and rejects anything not based on empirical evidence. The goal is to eliminate the underlying universalist assumptions of philosophy in order to bring philosophy closer to reality.
That being said, 90% of all philosophy is "drivel" (as you put it) but the ability to distinguish the remaining 10% is priceless. Secondly, none of it is impossible to disprove. You have several ways to disprove philosophical "drivel":
1: Attack the soundness of the argument. Check that that each step logically follows from the previous. Look for circular reasoning, statements that try to prove themselves.
2: Attack the validity of the argument. Sometimes philosophers say things that downright aren't true.
3: Attack the assumptions. Every argument has them, and if you can destroy them then the rest of the argument will crumble after.
Basically, if you want to challenge philosophy you're going to have to do so in the philosophical arena. When you combat overgeneralizations about reality with overgeneralizations about philosophy you're just making more problems than you began with.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if the simulation is poorly written, which we can't assume. It is not conceptually difficult to imagine that the "zoomed in" parts of reality exactly match the approximation to a fine enough level of detail that we can not tell the difference, even in principle.
So observation doesn't affect anything in any coarse way, it just affects the depth of the simulation, and there's no experiment you can run from the inside to tell what's going on. Simulation or no, the double-slit experiment will behave the same, or the simulation is broken.
Re: drugs are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, but wait . . . The quantities in the equations are completely made up and meaningless. So, let me rephrase my earlier assessment: This is complete hookum. Because the number of hypothetical "ancestor simulations" is large compared to the number of actual developing civilizations, we are "almost certain" to be in a simulation rather than real? Huh?
Let me present an alternative, equally plausible hypothesis: The entire universe is being run by tiny, invisible pixies, who implement all the laws of physics by grabbing things and moving them around in exactly the right way when we perturb our environment. (Why they do this is unknown.) Unfortunately, there is no empirical test that can distinguish between this situation and one in which the laws of physics arise just because of the way real particles interact.
Let's all just agree to pretend that we're not living in pixie-world or The Matrix, OK? It makes no difference, anyway, and it's a whole lot simpler. And if you want to kill your neighbour or your boss, you can't console yourself that they were just simulated anyway.
Re:screw it. (Score:3, Insightful)
No matter what the "true" structure of the world is, whether there is an objective reality behind it or not, the fact remains that in order to survive and function in the world one needs to pretty much live ones life as if A truly equals A.
Any amount of philosophizing notwithstanding, if you are walking towards a brick wall, you will avoid getting hurt if you treat it as a solid object and not as an illusion or a simulation.
You needn't be a Randroid to operate this way. It's just common sense. You deal with local reality as it is until and unless you have to deal with phenomena that indicates otherwise.
Existence may or may not exist. We could be living in a simulation, hooked up to each other like one big Beowulf Cluster. We could be just a dream in the mind of Brahman. But in everyday life, operating as if reality is what it is is very necessary.
There is nothing wrong with speculating about the nature of the real. Just remember to maintain your airspeed lest the ground come up and smite thee.
Re:have to (Score:3, Insightful)
I would refine this to mean, given a set of instantaneous (time dependent) options, you may choose which-ever one you wish.. BUT, these options are not infinite nor continuous. Thus the physical world around you is limiting your choice. You are molded by your environment necessarily. Moreover, your character will likely be limited in it's sophistication so that it can't see many of the more desirable options. Thus there is a definite degree of pre-determination. Not only do we have few choices in life (which are given to us by the fate of historcal progression), but we are pre-determined (through biology and our own past) as to which choices we are capable of making.
While this still leaves us with an enormous responsibility (in terms of a multitude of diametricly opposed options), I'm not convinced that we are capable of making any decision other than what we were meant to; meaning what our mechanical biology is statistically configured to do. If our brain is nothing more than a mechanical/electronic switch-board which makes value judgements based purely on thresholds of triggering, and those tresholds are altered by periodic chemical states (moods), then we are deterministicly given our past (our prevoius moods and experiences) and our present environment will merely be inputs into this switchboard - the outcome would merely be mechanical. Granted this is only an assumption, but science slowly providing more and more evidence of this.
For example, a person biologically prone to aggression (which isn't normal for a person), when presented with an irratable peer, and absence of calmer people in the surrounding environment to disuade him, is pre-determined + environmentally encouraged to choose to fight. Without a possible alternative, this choice is not freely willed.
For these extreme cases, I do not believe we have much free will.. In softer cases (should I buy coke or pepsi, and thus macro-scopically determine the economic fate of our country), I'm willing to give to the argument of free-will. It is plausible that in the chaotic interaction at the atomic / quantum level, our thresholds (when presented with a nearly 50/50 point) may or may not trigger, thereby altering our decision. In this critical chaotic region, our personality (and the coriolis effect of the earth, solar system and universe) may all come into play. Any concept of a soul, or weighted simulation may make the bizarness of life happen.
But the possibility of this does not prove it's existance..
My point finally being, free will is by no means logically sound, though it is not disproven either.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful)
This could certainly apply to a simulation of our universe, also. Maybe we're all running in slow motion in our simulation, because it takes a minute of real time to simulate a milisecond of our time.
Re:What the......? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I find interesting is that people actually get *paid* to indulge int his masturbatory nonsense. Talk about an amazing con...
Right, now that we've shown that it's possible to gratuitously flame all sorts of academic disciplines, can we move on to an understanding that philosophy, like every other discipline, is a really complex thing that requires detailed study to make useful comments about. A non-graduate philosophy student has about the same chance of meaningfully engaging a graduate philosophy student as an undergraduate biology student does of being useful on the cutting edge of biotech.
Suffice it to say that there are a lot of very good arguments why, despite the problems you have with contemporary philosophy, it's still the best way to go. A relatively simple one, first formulated by J. Hillis Miller about deconstruction, is that if it were the case that we were living in the Matrix, even if that possibility seems unpleasant and intuitively unlikely, wouldn't it be best to know? Especially since almost all new ideas, and even lots of old ideas, seem intuitively unlikely.
The biggest problem philosophy has as a discipline is people who think that what they discuss in the bar at 2am is remotely similar to what's discussed at a graduate or above philosophy seminar. It's not. Real philosophy is, quite honestly, vastly too complex for 99% of the posterbase here. Many of them could probably successfully study it and some might be able to get on to a PhD in it. But as it stands, the number of people on this board who are qualified to seriously comment on post-doctoral work in philosophy is negligible.
Re:Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of peopel are saying this, and I agree, but I agree the opposite: I believe the simulation runs many times faster than real time.
At first, processing power is slow and you must run simulations slower than real time. However, technology progresses, and eventually the simulation can be run parallel to real time. (As others have said, the simulation does not have to calculate everything, just as Quake doesn't calculate walls and objects you can't see; also, judicious use of lossless compression can keep the memory requirements down; instead of 1 trillion atoms, it just says "chair", etc.)
With the simulation running in parallel, you can simulate the current world and develop technology, while the real world is developing different technology. And of course you can run multiple simulations, so technology (and processing power) will expand much faster than before.
Note that this could be the case even with simulations running slower than real time -- they can also be used to work on advancing technology, because their efforts can be coordinated with the real world.
So at some point we'll have enough processing power to simulate faster than real time. And then technology will really take off, because we'll be able to perform experiments "in the blink of an eye" which would have taken years or perhaps millenia to perform "in the real world."
Of course, it would be nice to eventually be able to make it to that "real world"...
My favorite anecdote is from Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus Trilogy [amazon.com] in which a minor character at one point states, "I've realized that we're all living in a book, and I think I've figured a way out."
He's never heard from again.
Tiny detail but it stayed with me all these years. I want out.
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:3, Insightful)
The scientists are going to try to deduce what-caused-what even if the only actual 'cause' is some Matrix-generating heuristic that doesn't actually always tie to a simple law or rule. It could even be tied totally to something outside the 'Matrix'. For instance, if every other Tuesday in the world housing the simulating processors (regardless of the time being represented in the Matrix), the 'sun' servers go down for maintenance, there is no way for them to figure out the true cause. Now they may notice that it happens more frequently when the sun starts acting up (bugs) or that soon after it appears brighter (after-patch bugs), but they're going to have to choose some "cause" in their science that can never actually be 100% accurate. (Kinda interesting that this sounds familiar to the equations in our own world, even though those equations do seem to get better and better.)
The point is that cause-and-effect will be generated by the humans in any environment they exist in. It's not necessary to code cause-and-effect in to a great degree, but I'll agree that it is helpful. Yet, the 'virtual' science they invent could very well be completely foreign to ours even if the simulation is based on very good heuristics simulating our world. That doesn't mean that humans wouldn't lead happy, normal, and productive virtual lives.
Additionally, the AI has plenty of control. If the AI wants to invalidate a discovery, a simple upgrade/patch can make the experiment irreproducible. Humans will not fully accept science that can't stand-up to experimental/imperical refutations.
Want to invalidate cold fusion? Oh, that's been fixed in the latest patch (thanks, auto-update). Is the AI unhappy that humans found that dangerous atom-splitting exploit? I'm sorry, in this version, you're going to have to try much harder to split the next atom. Or it's only possible for very rare materials.
But, don't despair, in this new update, all orgasms last a tenth of a second longer and (Hurry-This-Week-Only!) we're decreasing the chances your ball will land on 0 or 00. Enjoy!
Re:and this my friends is why (Score:2, Insightful)
Buffer overflows == Wormholes? Null pointers == Black holes?
Re:Old philosophy (Score:1, Insightful)
If anyone has Descartes' Discours de la méthode on hand, which is iirc, where he proves God's existence, that part might be interesting to read. It sounds like a complete kludge. Just like when Descartes argues that we are but automata, and then goes on to say that there would be two ways to differentiate automatas from real Men(speech and soul, i believe)...
The Inquisition, or Galileo weren't so long gone when Descartes was alive - maybe he thought he would be better at helping Humanity master Nature by staying alive? Anyway, those who would make good use of his thoughts and w01">could be expected to decipher and filter the BS.
Logical Flaw (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a logical flaw here - the author is assuming that the existance of a large number of simulations equates to likelyhood that one or more of the simulations will be used to re-create human life/the human experience of life.
Just because simulations will undoubtedly exist does not mean that those simulations will be used to recreate human beings.
Not clocked? (Score:2, Insightful)
That might work if our reality were clocked.
There's no reason to believe it isn't. Google for "Planck time".
you're talking about the difference between a slow versus a fast chess game (they are identical), whereas "reality chess" would be a turn-less game
Video games are clocked at 60 turns per second, and the player can't tell. The difference between chess and Starcraft is that in Starcraft, the pieces do not move nearly as far in a "turn".