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The Computational Requirements for the Matrix
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."
The episode was "Ship in a Bottle" where Moriarty and his love are sent off in a computer simulation at the end. They think it's all real, but they're really just both in a simulation of the galaxy.
At the end, Barkley wonders if he himself is part of a simulation and says "Computer, end program".
Ok, that's it. I'm a Nerd.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
There is no end to what ifs.....
For example, if a charecter being simulated in a 13th floor styled simulation, did not understand the concept of wireframes (when he reaches the "edge" of the simulated world), would he consider it abnormal?
Similarly, in our "real world", space - the outer void - the vaccum - can be a means of conserving memory by being empty space, so that the "system" is able to process high detailed simulations on planets.... maybe only one planet has life (simulated) because the "system" is only capable of processing the complex simulations of one such biosphere
All i'm trying to say is that it's possible to come up with innumerable theories.. its exciting, it stimulates are brains, but HOW SERIOUSLY are we supposed to take them?
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|\A|ALYS|
The matrix was a good movie but come one thats it a movie. it had so many holes in the plot like why the robots did not just switch too nuclear or something far more powerfull then sucking body heat from people who are living in a virtual world. It seems like every week or so slashdot posts a story about some long ass report about how the matrix could be real. You dont have to justify likeing a movie, just enjoy the movie how it is a kung foo/super human/slowmotion fights. reminds me of that theme song from mystery science theater 3000 (something like) "if your wondering how they eat and sleap and other science facts, repeat to yourself its just a show you shood realy just relax"
The sad thing is that a lot of what passes for modern 'philosophy' is the same drivel being spouted by this guy, only 'cleaned up' in a tautological fashion so that said drivel is impossible to disprove. Also impossible to prove in any meaningful sense, but modern philosophy doesn't recognize empiricism as a valid approach (and in fact tries to deny it by placing much of its supposition in the fantasy realm of the 'metaphysical').
What I find interesting is that people actually get *paid* to indulge in this masturbatory nonsense. Talk about an amazing con....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Two baseless claims.
First, we won't ever have the computing power to simulate a universe. That's simple to find out: If you want to simulate something completely, Your computer hase to be bigger than what you want to simulate. Because somewhere you have to store all the information, and you'll need exactly as much quantums to store the information about them as you simulate. Conclusion: we won't be able to even simulate the earth.
For sure, that doesn't yet prove we aren't a simulation. One can't prove or disprove anything about that, and that's why this isn't science.
There could of course be a universe with enough storage and computing power to simulate our universe (and that could again be a simulation etc). If you know something about quantum physics maybe you can imagine what computing power is necessary - for each single quantum, you need to compute the forces to each other, and some probabilities, too. We're far from even simulating very little amounts of matter today.
But saying it would be more probable we're being simulated is like giving probabilities for the existence of a god - ie one can't say anything about it. It's outside of what one can give something like probabilities for.
The only thing we could look for was if we find evidence for that our universe is simulated with computers similar to the ones we're using today, ie we could search for typical errors or something like rounding...
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
Wasn't that the premise of the original matrix (the one built prior to the trilogy)? It was a paradise, but the problem was that no one believed it and so massive amounts of people would wake from it. Hence the reason why the second matrix was built (going back to Agent Smith's description in the first movie).
I always thought the matrix was more a playground for individual minds to play in. If you set up an environment that is engineered to look like our world, place the minds in the system with some initial parameters (e.g. you are a programmer looking for work and like potato chips and coffee, etc) and then let those objects loose in the system, things should flow fairly smoothly. The matrix was more like a drug to keep the minds of their batteries happy basically, and the reason they chose this section of our history is that it was "the height of our civilization". But even Neo has a choice by the architect in the second movie.
I would say that control came by limiting choices. This comes from the societal structure that is put in place, something which most people are more than happy to live within. The few that refused to accept that were shown a different reality (i.e. unplugged from the matrix). However, the one wrench that Matrix:Reloaded tossed into the mix was Neo's ability to sense the machines on the other side. This would indicate that the true architects of the matrix built a buffer zone in which those minds that didn't believe the first matrix would wake up into the second thus saving them as a power source for a while longer and ensuring that every once and awhile you could flush those who would attempt to destroy your creation. By controlling the resistance you have complete control as Orwell showed us in 1984.
This text roughtly assumes that the simulator is basically an american guy and the main reason for simulating a universe is to go to a party. Very deep philosophy. The simulator might well be a zen poet two centuries in the future interested in the pattern of human emotions, or some alien student trying to build the most absurd form of life. There is simply no way to know. So trying to please this simulator is completely absurd.
The talk about seeing the weaknesses in the simulation because certain parts are not simulated also takes the wrong perspective. Assuming you build a simulation that is not homogenous, you will make sure that the where there are simplifications they will have little influence (i.e they are not noticable). As for the hypothesis that certain people are not true, I don't like when people start talking about true/chosen/über/whatever people.
This is just some guy projecting his own bias on some theoretical entity and using this to justify his own (egoistic I might add) approach to live as being "logical". I agree that this is not what american society needs, but I fear it is what it wants. Of course, this has been the stuff of religions for centuries, replace simulator by god and voilà!
High level emulation. If there is a microscope for you to look through, it is being emulated, then whatever has created the microscope can program it to rewrite everything you look at with it in a way that makes sense to your species.
it would be mind-numbing to write (much less RUN) a program that would fully emulate every atom in the world at all times. all you have to do (ask anyone in movies) is emulate the minumum amount to look realistic on screen. if someone needs to look closer, emulate what they're examining properly, only while they are examining it. Otherwise you can very easily emulate a white box with bumpmaps, rather than the wood, the drywall, the paint, the electricity, and everything else that makes a wall. until someone examines the wall, you can get away with just a white box with paint-like bumpmapping.
Here you assume that the system running the simulation exists in a world much like the one we experience. It's pretty easy for us to simulate a simple 2D world, for all we know, this is some dumbed-down simulation with 'only' 3 dimensions.
By understanding the Message of The Matrix, you will come to understand many of the logical inconsistencies in the film. Everything in that movie got put there for a reason and the W bros felt no shame altering some of the content so more people would understand the Message. So while it may ire geeks, it makes the movie easier to swallow for people new to these sorts of ideas. I personally just pretend that Morphius said, "Humans can perform up to 10^5 Teraflops (or whatever) of complex operations that the robots steal to add to their available processing power." I think you can see how this would require a much longer dialog between Neo and Morphius to inform the average viewer of what that means.
What do you think?
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Crulx
On the Summer Reading List thread, many slashdotters mentioned The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Within Ch. 6 was a description of how Prime Intellect "rewrote" the Universe, as follows:
So basically, the visual portion of this world would just be like a raytracer running constantly. Whatever the eye can see it simulates and draws; out of the eye, nothing is (and need to be) simulated.
Your own brain already simulates the outside world. What? You thought what you saw was really what's out there? Your brain is only showing you part of the story.
Most people don't realize that the brain gives them a description of the outside world, not a picture of it. Try drawing a still life. What? Too difficult? Why? If you actually saw the world as it is, it wouldn't be too difficult, the only problem would be making the brush strokes. But instead, you need knowledge of the technique of perspective, you need knowledge of shading, etc. Why do we need knowledge to draw a world we're seeing with out own eyes?
Furthermore, what our brain presents is not the whole truth, even if it is a partial truth, which this article presents an article against. We see three dimensions of a world that could have many more, according to some theories. Some people only see two dimensions of this world. Some people don't see any dimensions of this world. Why do we assume that other important things, like specifics about the very way things are, are not modified by are brain? They are, at least indirectly, by our evolved emotions, but we assume that there's no modification at the sensory level. When it seems so easy to introduce noticeable differences at the sensory level by hallucinogens, why can't we believe the brain is already doing it to an extent?
You know, now that I think of it, it does sound familiar. Whenever people first start playing SimCity, they build up a small city and start unleashing disasters on it just to see what they do and to have a little fun. Then they get bored and just kinda leave it running for a while, intervening now and then, until they eventually just leave it the hell alone (or close the program). Seeing as how God was supposedly vengeful in the Old Testament, and hasn't rained down sulfur much lately, I'd say it's possible we all exist in a very advanced version of SimCity.
Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms.
suppose for a moment that this is a simulation with a finite amount of memory to parameterize the "world". the state of this system is propgated from time slice to time slice by some set of finite difference equations. well this means that everything is perfectly self-consistent. if you devise any experiment within the simulation itself to measure any observable then you will discover it is self consistent. The laws of nature a person living there would formulate would in fact be the correct ones for that system. you would never be able to discover an inconsistency.
consider for example QM. basically in a quantum world there ARE limits on resolution. indeed the limits are surprisingly like how one creates a simulation. for example, in any practical 3-D game the voxels of distant objects have larger volumes than the close by ones that you can see more clearly. likewise fast moving objects in the background are less precisely placed from frame to frame while maintaining on average an accurate speed.
its as though someone gridded the game in such a way as to have hyper cubes of constant delta-P time delta-X. hey wadda ya know that's the heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the approximate distribution. Thus one does not have to memo-ize everthing the game player has looked at carefully, you can recreate it on the fly each time something is inspected at high resolution simply by drawing an approximate sample from the distribution. The fact that two looks never quite agree is written off as the "hiesenberg uncertainty principle", or to the QM notion that inspecting an object can change its state.
Another hiesenberg principle is the energy-time uncertaintly (to measure the energy of something precisely takes increasing amounts of time). Again this is in keeping with a simulation. to compute the simulation to increacing levels of precision will take more time.
and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Finally to digress a bit. Just suppose for moment the supposition that this is simulation is true. then might it might also be possible that the people doing the simulation are also simulations. and so on ad infinitum. the interesting thing is that at each layer of this onion it seems to me that the plausibility that you live in a simulation increases. this is because with each subsequent layer the plausibility of sufficient computer power prior to extinction improves.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No. You are missing the big picture...
The human brain is the most complex and powerful computer system in existence today. Granted it's not terrific at raw number crunching, but for pattern matching, association, memory storage, creativity, interaction. etc it's tops.
The machine's computers don't need to run simulations, they just need enough computing power to induce certain perceptions within each brain and to coordinate the functioning of all the brains that are near one another in the simulation. The knowledge to do this it taught/programmed in from birth. Your brain is completely capable of inventing people, having two way conversations with those invented people, and designing and re-designing physical locations on the fly. All without you conciously thinking about it.
Let me describe this more elaborately:
Assume you and I are living in a simulated world while having this conversation. The machines don't need to simulate my typing on the keyboard, or the text on my screen, or the air I'm breathing. My brain knows how to do that (it was tought to by the machines). You brain knows all those things also. There is no need for the main computers to simulate that for the both of us. The main computers simply assure that we can interact from within the same context of this computer system. There has so be some way for the messages to pass between us.
Of course, there's no reason to believe that's even the case. Perhaps you are simply a figment of my imagination, a simulation within my brain, and so is this computer system. Suppose that each and every brain plugged in to the system runs it's own complete simulation, just making things up as it goes along. There is no way to proove that another person actually exists, as anyone else you ask may also not exist, but instead be part of your simulation. As such they would be under your control and say whatever needed to be said. Think about the complexity of your dreams that you recall.
The role of the machines in this case is simply to regulate the simulations we run within our own brains, making sure that they don't become too extreem in the negative or positive sense. There is no need for the plugged in brains to ever communicate with each other.
Then again (and this is a guess), Neo never actually woke up from the Matrix, and the whole "real world" thing is simply another "simulation" introduced by the machines to get this anomoly out of the code. Perhaps Neo was dreaming the entire thing.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people