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I agree with you in general about the limits of simulations and even intelligence itself.

Still, simulations can be used to:
* predict (you are right, they often fail for reasons of chaos theory and limited accuracy or missing aspects);
* understand (where you play what ifs to see the consequences of your assumptions);
* to gain insight (something other than understanding of details, where you gain a sense of the gestalt, a feeling, or some new summarizing key idea, like I say with my sig about the irony of the tools of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity -- maybe we need a simulation about creating simulations to have scientists gain the insight about simulations you suggest many lack? :-);
* assess risk (to some extend, by Monte Carlo methods for well understood processes)
* to consolidate knowledge in an organized explicit way (you can't hand wave as much when you have to implement ideas in code);
* educate intellectually (as fun toys to play with and learn from);
* educate practically (to learn skills by trial and error, basically failing faster and safer like in a flight simulator or nuclear power plant simulator or surgical simulator);
* educate emotionally (to see consequences and possibilities and related narrative, often as games);
* entertain (relates to the above, but is a different focus);
* to serve as a focus for political policy debates about future scenarios (including as different simulators with different assumptions describe different implications of policy -- note weather forecasters use multiple weather models plus their intuition and experience to make forecasts);
* as a form of self-justifying artwork;
* as a way to create entirely new worlds to explore inspired by nature but (as you suggest) often very different;
* probably many more -- in the sense of, what good is a blank sheet of paper?

I learned some of this from thinking about what people like Steven C Bankes at RAND had to say in the 1980s and 1990s:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/bankes_steven_c.html
As well as people like Seymour Papert (of Microworlds educational software fame).
http://www.papert.org/
Or Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with Smalltalk as a simulation environment. As well as what futurists (WFS) and risk modellers (RAMAS) have to say. And from making a simulation about gardening in the 1990s (with my wife, as a more than six person-year labor of love released with source under the GPL):
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

One concern I have about simulations of living creatures (especially intelligent or self-aware ones that can feel some kind of virtual pleasure or virtual pain, like in agent-based simulations) is, what are the ethics? As in, do not do unto others that which you do not want done unto yourself (unless they like that kind of stuff)...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

until they actually do shut you down. http://www.simulation-argument.com/

The simulation argument paper proposes a philosophical argument about this sort of thing. The consequences that they come up with are pretty interesting. Of course, there are arguments against such a configuration of the universe as well...

very very cool experiments, but I'm curious as to what the theorists will say about it.
by the way, the universe is wrong is an option now :)

With just one seeded civilization: http://www.simulation-argument.com/

An earlier post says you cannot disprove the existence of an omnipotent god. By definition of "omnipotent".
Personally, I doubt there is an omnipotent god, and that science does find truths. But you are wrong in saying that science can prove there are no omnipotent gods. Frist of all, we can't even prove that we are not living in a computer simulation http://xkcd.com/505/ (ok, here's the good link http://www.simulation-argument.com/). The basic fact is that if there is a middleman attack in your experiment (omnipotent god changing your data), than the resulting "science" is wrong. And you can't disprove that, you can just have faith that the data is real.
I agree that it's best to trust the data, but we should be honest with ourselves: we BELIEVE the data is real, we have no proof of it.
And yes, I agree that after they burned people for saying the earth circles the sun we need to be agressive against any organized religion that requires its followers to convert all other humans. But that kind of makes me someone who wants to convert others, so maybe we should instead agree to Gandhi's nonviolent noncooperation and stick to that.

The aliens just didn't buy the multi-planetary expansion pack so the sim doesn't contain the communications to detect.

Check out (a) Are You Living in a Computer Simulation. http://www.simulation-argument.com/ and (b) the video Are you real http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebq0tbhap-g Both speculate on the possibility that we are a part of an MMORPG environment as envisaged by the movie Matrix

"For a true believer in Jesus Christ, there is in store, not another body buttressed by the technology of modern medicine, yet in the end subject to death, but a resurrected, transcendent, eternal, immortal body, with powers and abilities we cannot even imagine."

This may also be achieved in other ways, whatever one believes about universes beyond this one: :-)
    http://www.simulation-argument.com/
"This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows 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. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed."

But even with a "resurrected, transcendent, eternal, immortal body, with powers and abilities we cannot even imagine", the daily concerns of today will be gone for such people. Human behavior and aspects of personality emerge out of genetics (capabilities), history, environment, and free will (whatever that means) -- change the environment and capabilities and the behavior and much of personality is gone in that sense. Maybe it is better that way, but it would be very different. It would be a fundamental transformation, like a caterpillar into a butterfly. For more on this from a theological perspective:
    "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore"
    http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671
"When it comes to spiritual growth, we humans are solar-seeking beings; eager for the bright lights of clarity and the bliss of illumination. Paradoxically, we all need to walk through the shadow of the dark night in order to discover a life worth living, according to psychotherapist and spiritual commentator Thomas Moore. Unlike depression, which is more of an emotional state, Moore calls the dark night a slow transformation process, which is fueled by a profound period of doubt, disorientation and questioning. Ultimately, a journey into the dark night will reshape the very meaning of your life. As a self-proclaimed "lunar type," Moore is comfortable leading his clients and readers into the shadows, where ambiguities and mysteries lurk around every corner. He describes the dark night journey in stages, starting with feeling distant from your life even as you continue to go through the motions. The second phase is "liminality," meaning living on the threshold between the known self and the unknown self. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable phase as the dark night may "take you away from the cultivation and persona you have developed in your education and from family learning," he explains. After dwelling in this murky darkness, there's a stage of "re-incorporation," in which one integrates the profound inner transitions into daily life. Like a tour guide to the underworld, Moore leads readers through all these phases, offering tools and rituals for making the journey more tolerable or at least more meaningful. He also speaks to the many arenas and stages of life in which we might find ourselves stumbling through the dark, with chapters on marriage, parenting, sexuality, creativity and health. The scope is ambitious, and at times the structure seems disjointed--but this is perhaps Moore's best contribution since Care of the Soul, proving once again that he is a wise and formidable spiritual teacher."

One might suggest we go through fundamental transformation after transformation along the path of life.

Feel free to address the science, not the messenger, whenever you want to.

There are quite a few scientists with hypothesises on what the universe really is - a stray claytronics experiment? a really small cellular automata? a simulation?

All of those hypothesises are as scientific as "Intelligent Design" (and the simulation argument - you know, Matrix and the like, are actually exactly that)

Anyway, that's for a completely other discussion. My guess is that you hadn't thought about it - you can study all those hypothesises in a scientific way.

Stephen Wolfram, a new kind of science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science

Nick Bostrom, simulation argument:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

(sorry no good link on a speculative claytronics universe - you'll have to extrapolate catoms -> atoms yourself .. )

sow doubt on the climate change scientific consensus

1) There's no consensus on climate change
2) A consensus in science is not scientific

. . . in the proper context. The true beauty of this is that no one can really understand the infinite. For all you know, you may be your own god. See http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html. On the line between knowing everything and knowing nothing, we all sit so close to nothing that the probability of knowing/guessing the ultimate truth of the universe (even if there is such a thing) is infinitesimal. Therefore, evolution is as likely to be wrong as creationism. The advantage of creationism is that is gives hope to people who otherwise have nothing. The advantage of Darwinism is that it help us understand biology. Being right or wrong in the absolute sense is like arguing about when the next rock will roll on a planet in a galaxy that is one billion light years away. It would seem more relevant to argue about Brittany Spears' next lover.

Just for fun, theoretically, you can put payloads into orbit and on routes to the moon/planets/asteroids if you give them a solar sail. (People could not survive that trip, unless encoded in data bits and silicon.)

Maggots and leeches are proving effective in medicine in various ways.
    "Maggots and Leeches: Old Medicine is New"
    http://www.livescience.com/health/050419_maggots.html

In round figures, people are about 90% bacteria by numbers, and about 10% bacteria by weight. Bathing too often may disrupt your bacterial ecology and lead to infections or skin problems, and growing up in too clean environments may lead to immune problems. Although exactly what is too much is problematical. See:
    "The filthy, stinking truth: The messy history of cleanliness, and why our obsession with dirt may be making us sick."
    http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/30/dirt_on_clean/

Until we actually landed on the moon, the best scientists still thought landers might sink into dust. Someday, we may turn the Moon into a green paradise using greenhouses and artificial lighting or mirrors.

Psychologically, the individual's perception is still the center of everything (though people try to move beyond that in their thinking). Quantum mechanics reflects this. Still, we may be living in a simulation in which case, like those living in Plato's "Cave", most of what we assume may be just a shadow of the truth:
    http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Anyway, just having fun with your points. I like your insightful comment that knowing enough to be dangerous (as opposed to nothing or lots) is a source of difficulties.

Here is the big issue with Moore's law and it was forseen in the 1960s:
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis."

So, we are about to see a lot of divide-by-zero errors in economic equations as computing prices falling to zero drives almost every other price towards zero.

Given an essentially infinite lifespan, intelligence greater than ours, a body capable of manipulating the physical world at least as well as a human can (actually, wouldn't even need to be that good), an AI entity would have very little difficulty colonizing space. Humans need a habitable biosphere that is vastly different than most of the universe; robots could easily survive in virtually any location in the universe.

You know, that's a very good argument against the Singularity being possible (or us being in a virtual universe, tying into the Simulation Argument wonderfully!)

At least one of the following is true:

(1) intelligent species are overwhelmingly likely to go extinct before creating intelligent, self-reproducing machines;
(2) such machines are overwhelmingly likely to maintain a stable population or completely wipe themselves or each other out rather than expanding to fill space.
(3a) such machines have no use for materials on Earth
(3b) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation (or the machine have declared our solar system a 'nature reserve').

1. The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small
2. Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours
3. You are almost certainly in a simulation.

If they succeed, you can strike option 1 & 2. Good thing it's Microsoft, though :-)

just about everything except (and maybe not except) philosophy

I have no idea what current philosophy academics are interested in, so I can't accuse them of not keeping up. But if they aren't keeping up with AI, the Simulation Argument, Bayesian theory and other such statistical things, QM's implications for the many-worlds hypothesis, and computer science research into semantics, just to pull a few things off the top of my head, they are wasting their time in several fields traditionally included under the rubric of "philosophy" (epistemology, ethics, etc.).

We still have no rock-solid answers to speak of to the old questions, but for the first time in millennia, we actually have some data for some of them... and we're only going to be collecting more. And even what little data we have has opened up more questions; "what does it mean to be human?" will begin to take on new overtones when we start asking just exactly how augmented does an ape have to be before it is "human", just how smart does an AI have to be, and, of course, is a binary definition of "human" even feasible, and if not, what is? And so on.

(I know for a fact there are philosophers interested in this. I simply don't know if they are in or out of the mainstream. Certainly they will eventually be in the mainstream.)

We probably will not produce it by accident, either, unless and until we are reproducing the human mind.

If you assume substrate independence, you end up here.

This means that not only are we living in a simulation, but we're being run on a digital computer.

Thank you, Nick Bostrom.

http://www.simulation-argument.com/classic.html That's what you're thinking of. And honestly, it does make some sense, but I'm not sure if replacing God with unbounded recursion is much more pleasing.

here's the simulation argument paper : http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Ah, but you are neglecting the simulation hypothesis

This was brought up in 2003 as the Simulation Argument. Really, really short version of the 12-page paper:

There's three possible scenarios; Either no one's interested in running ancestor simulations, no one reaches the level of advancement necessary to perform them, or some people are able & willing. If the universe is as large as it seems to be, there must be some set of entities that want to, and similarly some set that reach the level of advancement needed (matroshka-brain-level processing resources). Therefore, unless the fraction of entities that are able and the fraction that are willing are both infinitesimal, then ancestor simulations are almost certainly running. Since someone who reaches this kind of technology will have an unimaginable amount of computing power, they can run a lot of simulations of a lot of people. So either no one wants to, no one can, or we're almost certainly in one.

In any case, I doubt that we can confirm that we're in one or break out before the singularity. Unlike our computers, where software in a hardware-VM can confirm that it's in a VM because our simulation incompletely simulates the processor state, a simulation run by a superhuman entity would have both the intelligence and cpu power to make sure that nothing was left out of the processor's state.

More interestingly, what level of computing power (in the math/turing sense) would the runners of our simulation have? An N-qubit quantum computer could solve the halting problem for an n-bit Turing machine by enumerating every single state simultaneously. Can the simulation-runners solve our simulation's halting problem, which must then require a level of power beyond a quantum computer?

There exists an abstract universal computer whose repertoire includes any computation that any physically possible object can perform

Nick Bostrom has also discussed the question of are we living in a computer simulation here:

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

and Sir Martin Rees has discussed the idea in a number of places so there is nothing really new in Whitworth's paper.

or not.

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? http://www.simulation-argument.com/

You're not the only one.

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

This guy has "proof" that we are living in a simulation.

This could explain where the aliens and time travelers are. They're just not part of the simulation.

Ok, you self described hackers. Find the bugs in the universe and viola, you can do anything you want.

By your account ID is not a hypothesis, because it does not fit the observations. Or rather, evolution explains the wealth of observations much, much better.

As for The Matrix, I'd say that this topic is currently in the realm of philosophy by which I mean logical thought experiments that may or may not have a bearing on our life. Until Matrix theory is testable it's not science. ID doesn't even have a place in philosophy, because it's not logical.

BTW, I recently read two nice articles with opposing viewpoints regarding Matrix theory: Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? and Gehirn im Tank (Brain in a tank, in German only.)

So, how long before Multivac tries to commit suicide? Seriously though, does this lend credence to a strong argument in favor of the ancestor simulation theory?

Ancestor Simulations are supposed to take info from the past to see how we arrived at the present.

Joking aside, this would indeed seem to be an early version of an Ancestor-Simluation. Which would appear to imply that we are living in computers ourselves, since even now we are trying to run such simulations. And that opens up a really big can of worms:

Are simulated universes nested recursively? To what extent? Do they regress forever? Do "higher up" simulators judge and/or interact with their simulations?

Regardless, singularity FTW!

" ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows 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. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed."

For those people who want alternative explanations, (like that this world is not real - we're living in a simulation), then the "Electric Universe" idea that there are "circuits" behind the nature of the universe is probably very comforting. I'd like more predictive ability, less descriptive pseudo-science before we take it seriously.

Or so you may think.

It's interesting that when you apply computer science to biology at their most fundamental levels, you simply confirm the feasibility of solutions long since developed by what we believe to be completely natural evolutionary processes.

The Universe is a giant computer. Or a simulation running inside another one. Either way, it doesn't matter.

Basic probability also suggests that if there was any civilization capable of creating computer simulations the size of 'universe' (as we see it) then there is huge chance that we actually are such a simulation.

In that case our simulation may purposely use one civ per universe...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

For what I consider a much better treatment of this topic, see: The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?

This stuff is a big deal, and the Great Filter paper actually manages to draw some useful concrete conclusions from the question, or at least useful concrete questions.

Also related, albeit a little more tangentially, is "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?". "We're in a simulation and there are no extraterrestrials in the simulation" must be considered one of the leading possible answers. (I'm not advocating it either way, I don't have an answer. Nor do I consider this post anywhere near a complete list, just some relevant pointers.)

someday? there is a high probability it already has.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414993/
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf

Of course we're living in a simulation.

Hm. That's an interesting idea. One of the articles at that site includes the observation that such a simulation wouldn't have to simulate everything down to the greatest level of detail at all times, but could conserve computing power by just simulating things that are under direct observation.

"If the book you are holding in your hands is a simulated book, the simulation would only need to include its visual appearance, its weight and texture, and a few other macroscopic properties, because you have no way of knowing what its individual atoms are doing at this moment. If you were to study the book more carefully, for example by examining it under a powerful microscope, additional details of the simulation could be filled in as needed. Objects that nobody is perceiving could have an even more compressed representation. Such simplifications would dramatically reduce the computational requirements."

Isn't that what actually happens in quantum-level experiments? If we are observing the double slits, the photons do one thing, but if we're not watching the slits, they do something else?

Which makes it quite likely that we're living in a simulation ourselves...

Maybe it was a matter of deadline.

However, there is no evidence of one species becoming another and that is what would have to happen for a lower form to evolve into a human.

I'd say that's naive, at best. By "no evidence" you mean what exactly? No movies of an animal changing into another? Just look at the fossil record at 30 FPS, and it becomes a movie of species change. That's not even the best evidence. The best evidence is testable, and right here in the present; DNA. Every human and animal and plant on earth shares DNA exactly the same chemical structure of DNA, and many cellular features as well. We're all built out of the same stuff, and the differences lie only in a few percent of the DNA base pairs. There are two possibilities: God had a funny sense of humor and built every living thing out of the exact same stuff to nearly identical specifications, or evolution used the same blueprint for everything. It can even be argued that god would have used evolution as a handy tool to create everything. After all, why do more work than necessary? That hardly seems perfect or wise. How do you explain mules or other cross-bred species?

As to evolution, what you are talking about with the evolution of bird flu and the evolution of lower species to human are two different things.

Different only in magnitude. Viruses reproduce much more rapidly, and the changes to make a virus cross hosts are less than the changes to differentiate a species. I am especially astonished that creationists don't realize the implication of cross-host diseases. It directly implies that animal and human biology is so similar that evolution has been proven to work for viruses. It means that the virus has literally evolved from one animal into another. How much harder could it be for those two animals to simply have a common ancestor minus the changes that kept the virus specific to one species?
Why can't you accept the fact that there is a being greater than man? A being that has the power to create the universe in which we live. A being that set up the rules that we discover via science. That being is God, and he is the one that is responsible for us being here today.

Why can't you accept the fact that the universe exists on its own? Both questions are simply philosophical positions, and I have no trouble holding either belief. However, the evidence I've found so far points to at best an autonomous universe that obeys its own laws, all of which have nothing to do with humans specifically. Essentially, the reason I can't believe in your god is that he would have to behave inconsistantly. For example, god is assumed to be omniscient, but humans are supposed to have free will. Obviously, one of the two is false because if god knows what we will do before we do it, we had no choice in the matter, and moreover god created the universe realizing all the horrible things that would happen in it, and still called it good. Sending over 90% of the human population to hell for eternity is a piss-poor design plan that god actively chose, if you assume him to be omniscient.

I don't reject the idea of some person creating a universe just to see what happens, but by my definition that person would not be a god, but instead just someone with a lot of computational resources. In fact, the simulation hypothesis derives a high probability that most conscious minds are actually living in a simulation, assuming the standard laws of physics that allow increasing computer power. Basically, the argument is that since we will eventually have vast computation resources, we will probably be able to simulate the entire earth, and since we're morbidly self-fascinated, we will probably attempt at some point to simulate our past history, e.g. now. The alternatives are that the species dies out completely, or computational resources are fundamentally limited to something less than what can be used to simulate the earth (or at least the surface of the earth). The former is a possibility, and n

"What happens when you hit the border?"

Your process throws a SEGV and terminates as you attempt to write outside the bounds of the simulation.

or a bug in the simulation of ours

Thanks. I think there's way too little talk about the possibility that we're just another incarnation of The Sims - http://www.simulation-argument.com

Changing cosmological constants and our inability to explain the underlying structure of the machine performing the simulation are explained quite nicely in that theory/religion/philosophy - and we could, if we wanted, try to find signs of being in a simulation in several ways.

Or, we could just accept that currently anyone even mentioning this possibility is being regarded as a crackpot ;)

The same way we know we don't live in Middle Earth: because we don't. Now the question of living within a computer simulation is something else entirely.

This guy at Oxford University poses an interesting argument about the likelihood that we're all living in a simulation.

This has been covered: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Otherwise we should all believe in santa claus and the tooth fairy because we can't prove their absence.

Presumably most of us don't. Not because we can somehow prove they don't exist, but because we make the reasonable assumption that some proof would have been found for their existence by now if they were more than childrens stories, as well as because it is easy to prove that many things that are attributed to them doesn't match reality.

The latter doesn't prove they don't exist, merely that the childrens stories can't be accurate.

The exact same argument can be applied to the existence of god.

However, if you keep not finding proof for the existence of something but keep finding places where the theory of the supposed entity doesn't match observed fact, the natural choice is to believe that entity does not exist.

To turn things on it's head: Until there is proof for the existence of something, it is natural to not believe. Otherwise we would all be believing in an infinite number of imaginary things just because there's no proof against it.

Now, often it is fair to withhold judgement, or alternatively to believe that something could possibly exist, because you believe the idea of something matches reality sufficiently to be plausible, even if there is no direct evidence. But there is a vast difference between believing something exist, and accepting that it might be possible for it to exist (and the latter is not inconsistent with not believing).

Personally I don't believe in any god. However I will gladly concede that it could be possible, in the same way as it could be possible that we all live in a Matrix style simulation, or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world out of pasta.

I've yet to see any proof making god any more likely than the alternatives. On the contrary - a Matrix like simulation seems plausible because it is only a matter of extrapolating current technological innovation, and if the technology eventually exists, then it is likely, given humans strong interest in history, that more than one such simulation of will be run based on human history, in which case the odds of being in one is higher than the odds of not being in one (simply as a result of there being more simulation than realities). Tthis is known as the "simulation argument", by the way.

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a posthuman stage;

(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);

(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

It follows 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.