Subject: Odds we are living in a computer simulation?!
Date: Mon Nov 21 23:48:05 2022
User: Kaos
Message:Spoiler alert follows:
It’s almost zero! I track many news sources and it seems like some fairly reputable outlet is always releasing some new take on this. The most recent one I saw was questions to asks to see if we are really just living in a simulation. Egads. Blame “The Matrix”. Nice work of fiction but almost 100% unlikely. Why?
Computer Programming is hard! The intersection of people who can program well and people who have the imagination to create what we see IRL is one in a quadrillion quadrillion (being kind).
Some things that should be much easier than writing a monstrously complex program simulating our world: The last two seasons of GoT! HBO couldn’t find writers to finish up GoT with anything reasonable. They threw millions of dollars 💵 at this. Even worse, The GoT and LOTR prequels suck. Go back through history, can anyone cite a piece of fiction more involved than what we actually see in the real world? The shame of this all is that when legitimate news sources publish pablum like this, it just makes all the nut cases feel like they aren’t nut cases after all.
The far more likely explanation: the world as we know it is easily explained by the laws of Thermodynamics. The common sense answer is the most likely answer.
Date: Tue Nov 22 01:23:11 2022
User: Kumquat-of-Conciliation
Message:That's (obviously?) an impossible question to know for sure. I've studied this a little bit (nowhere near exhaustively), and "the experts", though they think it quite unlikely, also say its actually harder to say "no" than it used to be. This has to do with stuff like multiverses, the 11 dimensions (or pick your alternative number), quantum uncertainty, etc. The usual suspects. But none of those things lead to an answer, either way. But as the power of AI increases, possibly to a scary degree, I personally don't think programming is that much of a hurdle - thinking way out into the future.
Certainly The Laws of Thermo sort of stand on their own - at least they haven't failed yet. But I don't see how that precludes us being a computer simulation. Any decent simulation would of course incorporate those.
Don't mistake what I'm saying as in any way me believing that's going on; absolutely not. In fact, it may very well be close to zero. But how close is kinda unknowable. If we, as humans, were programming ants, or guinea pigs (non-human ones 😁), would we tell them what we were doing? Not only *would* we not - we *couldn't*. To presume we're absolutely not a simulation is kinda arrogant of ourselves, methinks.
[disclaimers: 1) have never seen The Matrix; 2) have never seen GoT (took me several seconds to guess what that was); have never seen LOTR (and do not know what it is).]
Also......"legitimate news sources", 95 times out of 100, are not gonna have reporters knowledgeable enough in science to be able to understand, much less evaluate such ideas. 'Real' scientists, esp. physicists and cosmologists, don't seem to be dismissing such craziness quite as offhandedly as they used to. Still extremely unlikely, say most, but they also say incredibly difficult to disprove - or at least several now do.
Not that this is a perfect analogy...........but until very recently most scientists scoffed at the possibility of multiverses. Not anymore. In fact, it's another thing that's gonna be perhaps impossible to disprove. Just sayin'.
Date: Tue Nov 22 03:00:38 2022
User: BuzzClik
Message:1100100%
Date: Tue Nov 22 06:15:30 2022
User: Kumquat-of-Conciliation
Message:I can tell........you're one of those types of people.............of which "there's two kinds of people" - and it's easy to which kind you are. 😆
Date: Tue Nov 22 16:03:32 2022
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:LOTR is Lord of the Rings.
Date: Tue Nov 22 16:15:20 2022
User: Kumquat-of-Conciliation
Message:✅ Thanks. Best I could come up with was "Laiders Of The [lost] Rock", but was clever 🤔 enough to know I was on the wrong track there, and was never going to find that lost Rock.
[So.....additional disclaimer: never saw that, nor have read any of the books. Yes - I'm far too left-brained, and am aware I've missed out on great works of fiction (as an art form).]
Date: Wed Nov 23 16:22:04 2022
User: Klepp
Message:Leonard Susskind knows more about this than almost anybody, I suspect.
Link: The World as a Hologram
Date: Fri Nov 25 13:39:29 2022
User: mrbuck
Message:Ask the mice. They paid for it.
mrbuck
Date: Sat Nov 26 07:49:32 2022
User: outskirts
Message:Two kinds of people. The ones who know what lotr is and the other one. Methinks the other one doesn't know he can google acronyms. He must be a stubborn old boomer.
Date: Sat Nov 26 14:02:55 2022
User: BuzzClik
Message:Took a quick poll of 6 people in the room: "What does LOTR mean?" Three knew (two 30-somethings and me) and three did not (20-something, 30-something, 60ish). The substitution of acronyms for language is a form of mild laziness. When someone starts talking to me in acronyms, I tell them to stop.
As indicated on the "boomer" thread, when someone starts inventing acronyms and refuses to define them, that is taking "stubborn old boomer" to a totally different level.
Date: Sat Nov 26 14:32:23 2022
User: outskirts
Message:Lol. This isn't talking. This is writing and reading. And I'm sorry, my bad. LotR isn't really an acronym, because it's not spoken. It's just initials. Initials that I didn't invent. Lol. How did you pronounce it?
Date: Sat Nov 26 14:53:13 2022
User: BuzzClik
Message:LIU.* You are mistaken.
*look it up
Date: Sat Nov 26 15:10:09 2022
User: cellmate
Message:
i googled TTDOC recently... didn't help
Date: Sat Nov 26 15:17:51 2022
User: TNmountainman
Message:Yep - that's the SMO* I was referring to in the "boomer bashing" thread. "TitanticTonys_deckofcards" was a truly brilliant guess, but as I recall, that was declared not to be it.
*still-mysterious one
Date: Sat Nov 26 15:19:39 2022
User: TNmountainman
Message:And the way this thread is evolving.............seems more and more like one of those computer simulations that boomers are always bashing. 😁
Date: Sat Nov 26 15:22:53 2022
User: outskirts
Message:Like I've said to you before. You have your obsession. I have a life. You win.
Date: Sat Nov 26 15:24:32 2022
User: outskirts
Message:For poor misguided buzzy
ac·ro·nym
/ˈakrəˌnim/
noun
an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word
Date: Sat Nov 26 15:31:45 2022
User: TNmountainman
Message:Since I've "won"........🙄......🏆.......does that mean you'll finally, after all these months...............reveal the great secret of TTDOC (and how to pronounce it 🗣, of course)?
Date: Sat Nov 26 15:48:43 2022
User: BuzzClik
Message:Date: Sat Nov 26 14:32:23 2022
User: outskirts
Message: “Lol. This isn't talking. This is writing and reading. And I'm sorry, my bad. LotR isn't really an acronym, because it's not spoken. It's just initials. Initials that I didn't invent. Lol. How did you pronounce it?”
I pronounce it L O T R.
“Acronyms can be pronounced as words, like NASA and UNESCO; as individual letters, like FBI, TNT, and ATM; or as both letters and words, like JPEG (pronounced JAY-peg) and IUPAC.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym
So, clearly we are reading words that can be spoken, including acronyms.
How do you pronounce the acronym FBI?
Date: Sat Nov 26 16:13:19 2022
User: cellmate
Message:
TTDOC = TitanticTonys_deckofcards
For whatever reason, i missed the obvious cues in the reference from user Narrows that the TT was TitanicTony
Perhaps TTDoC, as like KoC, might have helped clarify
Date: Sat Nov 26 18:57:55 2022
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:So, could an AI invent the dialogue on this thread?
The ability of AI to think outside the box is still extremely limited. Here is an interesting article - linked below - where players are back to beating the best Go-playing bots by making stupid moves. Seems like this causes the computers to need to go where they haven't gone before. It reads like one of those old Star Trek episodes where Cap't Kirk caused Harcourt Fenton Mudd's 'droids to short-circuit by talking illogically to them.
Link: Wacky plays beat top Go AI bots
Date: Sat Nov 26 19:39:51 2022
User: TNmountainman
Message:Could AI reproduce anything remotely similar to this thread? Of course not. Could AI do so in 10 years. Almost certainly not. But in 50 years? 100 years? I have no idea, but I can't imagine ruling it out.
Date: Sat Nov 26 22:23:28 2022
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:Well, so maybe the flip side to “Are we living in a simulation” is the “why haven’t we found signs of intelligent life elsewhere”?
One leading theory is that “intelligent” life quickly self-destructs. There’s no time for it to create an AI simulation of the depths of what we see in the observable universe.
And, again, as a teacher of programming, there just aren’t that many good programmers. And, luckily many of the good programmers, such as Denny, are working on noble causes, like tracking Covid, with freecell thrown in as a side gig.
Date: Sat Nov 26 23:14:09 2022
User: TNmountainman
Message:As time goes on, and things like COVID "crop up", the Fermi Paradox seems evermore prominent - which is a way of saying the odds of "self-destruction" taking us down keep increasing. But is that a definite progression/regression across the universe? No way to know, of course. But it doesn't take very many Putins or Kim Jung Ils to take everybody down. Or asteroids. Or ebola-like pathogens.
We've, or at least "I've", brought up the Paradox 2-3 times earlier herein. I think its a fascinating mind experiment.
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