Convince me I'm not in a Simulation.

  On 2/10/2012 at 2:17 AM, grue said:

good questions from your students. i don't know a lot of descartes scholarship either, but i would imagine that the literature on the cartesian circle has touched on it. i think he makes a mistake doubting arithmetic and geometry in the first place, but i guess he thinks they're contingent or something like that, which would make more sense of it.

You're probably right -- the laws of logic are probably another implicit clear and distinct 'idea' that God has given Descartes.

  On 2/10/2012 at 2:17 AM, grue said:

don't know the sosa, but i don't find it totally implausible on first glance. it reminds me of moore's example of the guy who is dreaming that he is addressing parliament (i think) when he is, in fact, alseep in parliament but talking aloud. it would be strange to think that he was consciously or intentionally talking to parliament in that case, despite the accuracy of his experiences and the correspondence between his dream-intentions and his true actions, because presumably the causal relationships are all skewed. sounds like sosa might have a similar idea in mind; it's hard to say whether apparently "conscious" thoughts in dreams are the real deal because they don't play the same functional role or have the same inputs/outputs as waking conscious thoughts.

Lol @ the Moore! That is even funnier than Davidson's mountain climber.

I'm not sure I would want to identify either the reality or the content of thoughts in terms of their causal or functional role, but instead in terms of their inferential role in theoretical and practical reasoning. And the case that interests me is when you get lucid in a dream by doing something or noticing something within the dream that tips you off. I just find it compelling to think that in a dream I could reason, (1) Here is George Washington, (2) George Washington has been dead for hundreds of years, (3) Therefore I must be dreaming -- and thereby come to have knowledge about my body and mind while my body is asleep and my mind is 'unconscious' in the relevant sense.

Yes, an other side of lucid dreams is when you think : "shit I'm lucid dreaming yet this all looks so real. It's crazy my mind can synthesize a reality with such a high level of detail"

Maybe consciousness, the fact of being a subjective point of view in a (supposedly) objective universe, is a simulated world on its own.

Simulation lives when my dick gets hard.

  On 2/11/2012 at 7:22 PM, lullezucht said:

Simulation lives when my dick gets hard.

  On 2/10/2012 at 4:36 PM, Babar said:

Yes, an other side of lucid dreams is when you think : "shit I'm lucid dreaming yet this all looks so real. It's crazy my mind can synthesize a reality with such a high level of detail"

Well, the way you see reality as a 3D dimensional space with distinct colors, surfaces, patterns, sounds etc. evolving through time is simulation in your brain even in the view point of neurology. We don't have to involve philosophical speculation to say that your brain is constantly running a simulation.

Basically your sensory organs are fed with raw data like photons hitting optic nerve cells causing the light to be registered at certain color, sounds causing ear to register different frequencies, etc. So the brain needs to build a model from this stuff so you can experience it in some meaningful way. This is rather limited amount of data so when the brain builds a model of your surroundings it actually adds all kinds of missing elements by simply assuming they are there.

Take for example a 2D picture. There is no depth information in the picture as it is but you still see it as a 3D dimensional model in your head. All it is is a 2D array of RGB pixels. Yet your brain models it into different surfaces, materials, objects etc. It also assumes that there is also the other side of the car aside from the visible one. So these are not just half-cars etc.

BTW, trying to teach a machine to build a 3D model from a 2D picture like human brains does is fucking hard. I briefly studied machine vision as a graduate student. The machine needs to know all kinds of shit, like for this example what a car looks like, how it looks like when its rotated to a certain position, what materials look like under different lightning etc.

"What is real. How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."

  On 2/10/2012 at 1:37 PM, Babar said:

To this, I would answer that my concept is misunderstood. I'm placing it on a phenomenological stance : in other words, physics, which expresses laws on the basis of experiments, depends on the way these experiments are perceived. If time is "seen" as passing backwards, then the cause-effect chain which these laws are based on is reversed. Thus the laws are "reversed" (or at least they are different). It's like playing a movie backwards : in this alternate reality I'm talking about, lightbulbs produce electricity when exposed to light, and the inverse transformation is not possible according to reverse physical laws that reverse-scientists reverse-discovered in this reverse alternate reality. Got it ?

 

Go !

Actually, physical laws are pretty much time reversible: they are symmetric in respect of time. You can switch the time to go in the opposite direction and the physical laws work as well. For a physicist to calculate for example the path of a single particle the direction of time is not particularly needed. The problem comes when you have system that has multiple micro-elements and then you look at the macro level.

For example, the light bulb can generate electricity from photons hitting the atoms inside the bulb. However, this is extremely unlikely. The system needs to move from the lower entropy to higher. This is because the higher entropy is more likely state. Going from higher to lower entropy is also possible. It's just really unlikely. So the confined electric current is in lower entropy than the spread out light from the bulb. Then the light is gradually turned in to random particle motion or in other words heat as it hits objects. Heat is basically the highest entropy state for energy.

So, going the other direction from heat in surrounding objects creating light (possible but unlikely) and then all the light coming to hit the same spot, the bulb (possible but very very unlikely) and then the photons creating a current by knocking atoms and the current going in one direction (possible but very very very very unlikely) you get a very very very very very very very very unlikely situation.

The entropy can be used to explain also why we remember the past and not the future, etc. But I'm not going to go there now..

This boils down to one question. The spatial dimensions are also symmetric but have no direction like time. They are uniform on the macro level. (If you look at the universe as a whole it is actually pretty evenly spread). Why is time different? Why is entropy in so low state in the past if the time is symmetric like space?

I'm gonna go drink some beer now.

  Quote

For example, the light bulb can generate electricity from photons hitting the atoms inside the bulb. However, this is extremely unlikely.

I suppose you mean that, while the flux of electron goes into the lightbulb and "produces" photons as output, it is possible (but unlikely) that one photon "produces" one electron (I'm sorry but I don't know the exact transformation, so I assume 1 electron ---> 1 photon). Right ? Maybe, with enough patience/time (Babar experiment style), we could observe this experimentally.

As a result we'd get something like

electron ---> photon probability: 99,9999999%

photon ---> electron probability: 0,0000001%

Now imagine we manage to film this thanks to some kind of micro-camera. We decide to play the film backwards. What would we get ? I suppose something like this

electron <--- photon probability: 99,9999999%

photon <--- electron probability: 0,0000001%

or in other words

electron ---> photon probability: 0,0000001%

photon ---> electron probability: 99,9999999%

huh ?

  On 2/12/2012 at 5:35 PM, Babar said:

  Quote

For example, the light bulb can generate electricity from photons hitting the atoms inside the bulb. However, this is extremely unlikely.

 

I suppose you mean that, while the flux of electron goes into the lightbulb and "produces" photons as output, it is possible (but unlikely) that one photon "produces" one electron (I'm sorry but I don't know the exact transformation, so I assume 1 electron ---> 1 photon). Right ? Maybe, with enough patience/time (Babar experiment style), we could observe this experimentally.

Hopefully, I am not remembering this entirely wrong, but basically this is how light is created from electric current:

The atoms have electrons on different orbitals. These orbitals are quantized so there are only certain possible orbitals and each orbital can be inhabited by certain amount of electrons. Also different orbitals have different energy so that when the atom is stable and in lowest energy state all it's electrons are in the lowest orbitals. The electrons can also be excited to rise to higher orbital.

Now when current is running through the bulb wire with free electrons bouncing around they will excite some of the atoms and knock electrons to higher orbitals. But the excited atoms are not stable so the electrons will eventually drop to lower free orbitals. The extra energy has to be released somehow so it will come off as a photon and thus create light.

But the reverse can also happen by a photon hitting the atom, exciting the electron enough to break it free and the electron will bounce away. Have enough electrons moving in one direction and you have a current. But the situation where the photons would constantly hit the atoms and cause all the electrons move into same direction is pretty damn unlikely in the bulb because it's not designed for that, but basically photovoltaic cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_effect is a reverse light bulb. Sort of..

Of course the photovoltaic cell has to obey the entropy law as well and it will increase the total entropy by heating up during the process.

On a side note: apparently we're all Baysian statisticians. And we do this with the primary function to make us move (more efficiently):

Great vid, thanks!

relevant:

Quite good, that XKCD one, quite good.

Carry on...

quite good indeed.

i forgot to mention http://www.theuniversesolved.com i go on the forums sometimes

omg a good XKCD

today is a rare day

you should all just go watch world on a wire innit

  On 3/24/2012 at 2:03 AM, Rambo said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1LCVknKUJ4

how recent is this? this guy is legit. pretty freakin cool even though i dont quite know what it means.

simulate my prostate

  On 3/25/2012 at 3:54 AM, Fred McGriff said:

  On 3/24/2012 at 2:03 AM, Rambo said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1LCVknKUJ4

 

how recent is this? this guy is legit. pretty freakin cool even though i dont quite know what it means.

This is awesome.

He also says something about it in his second to last question asked during this interview.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z9tO0D6W-Y&list=FLiPf7ZdTyIq7rKOValvBKNQ&index=1&feature=plpp_video

plus he's black - morpheus is real!

the whole simulation reality thing is just like religion and all that shite, people coming up with these ideas because they are scared of the fact that this is all life will be and that death is the end of consciousness.

life is blunt, blunt like an oldman whose been through some shit in his life

  On 3/25/2012 at 2:15 PM, Abstract Daddy said:

the whole simulation reality thing is just like religion and all that shite, people coming up with these ideas because they are scared of the fact that this is all life will be and that death is the end of consciousness.

 

life is blunt, blunt like an oldman whose been through some shit in his life

Quite a leap you've made there. Who says the universe being a simulation automatically means there is life after death? Either way, i get bugged by people who seem to approach and then dismiss ideas in such an ass backwards way.