Is it just scifi escapism or what? Where did this stuff come from?

  • vertexarray [any]
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    edit-2
    3 years ago

    I haven't bothered thinking about this properly until now but the part of it that caught my attention was the statistical argument:

    If we were theoretically capable of creating simulations of life as we know it, surely a sufficiently sophistocated simulation would have the capacity to contain a simulation of itself, and so on recursively, so what are the odds that we exist in the 0-level base reality instead of one of the millions of recursive simulations?

    However it just occurred to me that the same thing could be said about the dream of a 200 foot giant squid that lives in a liquid oxygen ocean in another galaxy, so, eh, not too compelling

    • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
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      3 years ago

      What if we're running on the equivalent of a shitty redstone computer in minecraft

      • vertexarray [any]
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        3 years ago

        Psychic quadrupeds running minecraft on their communal wetware to simulate a bunch of theocratic barbarians who ambulate by falling forward

      • RootVegetable [they/them]
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        3 years ago

        Welcome back, SethBling here, and today we have built a simulation of reality using repeaters and command blocks

    • nohaybanda [he/him]
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      3 years ago

      The statistical argument is just pseudo-scientific woo. It's bad statistics. To make any kind of probability model (and validate it) you need to have sampled multiple universes and go from there. We only have the one, and nothing in our current experimental methods can change that.

      It's basically a slightly twist on Pascal's wager, where you take some unexamined pre-existing phylosophycal beliefs and arbitrarily assign "probabilities" to them. Bleh