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Bank of America Analysts Say There's A 50% Chance We Live In The Matrix (independent.co.uk)
Bank of America analysts have suggested that there is a 20 to 50 percent chance that the world around us is a "Matrix-style virtual reality." The report stated, "It is conceivable that with advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and computing power, members of future civilizations could have decided to run a simulation of their ancestors." The idea is certainly nothing new, as many influential visionaries have come to similar theories. What some may find most unusual about the report is who issued it. According to Business Insider, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America's wealth management company, sent out a briefing to investors outlining their Matrix theory. In response, Slashdot reader marmot7 writes: Personally, I'd like to see all that brain power go toward a better and more stable banking system, not toward the promoting the nihilistic and self-indulgent idea that this might be the Matrix. Don't worry that banks behave in ways that create instability, it's not real. Just relax and enjoy the ones and zeroes. I have no doubt there are good, well meaning people there. I just don't really need my bank weighing in on the mystery of reality any more than I need them to come up with a unified theory of physics at long last. Well, unless it's in their spare time then by all means.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Why not e, or 12.44426268%? And haven't they something better to do? They are a bank, not a research institute, are they?
Although BofA is HQ'd in Charlotte, NC it was historically a California company and has a large presence in Washington and Oregon--states where pot is either legal or decriminalized and widely used. Just sayin'.
My impression is that banks are about the bottom line and profits. Why is someone at a bank doing that research?
This is just a ploy to further reduce banking regulations. Who needs regulations when this shit is all just a computer simulation anyway?
As with God, one has to ask what kind of morality would lead our descendants to (re)create the pointless cruelty and misery seen in the media.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Religions use a god to forgive them of doing wrong and the belief in an afterlife allows them to not care or take responsibility for negative things they do on earth. If you're agnostic or atheist, you lose that, all you have is nihilism to justify it's all fine to yourself, but now they have this convenient "simulation" to serve the same purpose. "Hey, we're all just AI and the bullshit we and the companies we work for do is all part of this non-consequential simulation!"
So we've now heard from a bank and from a guy who got rich facilitating online beanie baby auctions. I think we can now check off this scientific problem as solved.
All the actual physicists with their knowledge and experience and research can go home.
To be fair, when the Bank of America analysts were asked this, they were all high on designer drugs after celebrating their record bonuses.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... so they have something else to blame about past and future catastrophic financial collapses - The Matrix is to blame!
So, what are we all running from?
At least, now you know where you should NOT put your money.
Is there any chance these were a bunch of analysts BOA picked up on the cheap from the 5300 people Wells Fargo fired recently for setting up phony bank accounts?
Actually, if you read TFA past all the sensationalist clickbait, what the report really said was:
Many scientists, philosophers, and business leaders believe that there is a 20-50 per cent probability that humans are already living in a computer-simulated virtual world.
Which is really not that jaw-dropping, since the summary says practically the same thing.
Breakfast served all day!
What narrow thinking in these comments. I know, "get off my lawn, Slashdot used to be amazing!" has been said before, but all of these comments are simple "LULZ BofA is stoopid!" Come on people, think bigger and more cynically! Why not devote a few analyst cycles to ponder the reality vs simulation question if you're a major finance company? If we are in a simulation, isn't there a healthy chance that simulation includes bugs that could be exploited by economists living within it?
How many billions could you make if you were able to predict glitches in the Matrix?
Bank of America has a 20 to 50 percent chance is does NOT exist in the real world? Tim S.
But the human minds kept rejecting it. Entire crops were lost.
So B-of-A was formed instead.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Sault's law says a thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself. It is an asymptotic goal. And it is unlikely any civilization would get even close to simulating the universe it lives in.
E Proelio Veritas.
About the same odds as BoA foreclosing on your house and sending the sheriff to physically remove you despite the fact that you don't have a fucking mortgage.
If we live in a simulation, then some intelligent being designed that simulation. Period.
ID may get touted a lot as some sort of pseudo-scientific camouflage for creationism, but in the end, it's still just about an alternative origin to our beginnings than just evolution. Suggesting we are living in a simulation is not only compatible with the notion that we were created, but it would seem to imply it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
While it is a possible world-model, there is absolutely no basis for a probability estimation with a reasonable error margin. These people do not understand what they are doing or, alternately, they are lying in order to get publicity. Oh, and look, it worked!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If The Matrix were able to simulate chemical reactions, such as we are seeing in abrupt climate change, then there would be no need for humans to be used as batteries. Just because a banker in the necrocene can't accept that his precious capitalism is causing our immanent extinction, in no way should he be allowed to speak for the algorithm that controls his mind. Come to think of it, why can't we have an algorithm, crowd sourced by mathematical truths and overseen by humanity, to run for President?
The Matrix (movie) had it wrong -we're not batteries, we're processors... and maybe by overheating us, it's like overclocking. Read Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons http://www.librarything.com/wo...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
When I hear a weather-person say there is a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, my brain translates that into "maybe it will rain, maybe it won't" The weather prediction is 100% accurate.
So, in this case, my brain translated this as "maybe we live in The Matrix, maybe we don't", which as far as I can tell is just restating the question. 100% accurate? Yes. Information (valuable or not)? No.
Don't be sad, fellow AC, I hear ya. It is just that there are a lot of Elon Musk fans and a lot of folks who have heard about (but never read) the fantasies of Nick Bostrom out there, and they really do want their mystical cyber escapism.
I think that we might live in someone else's simulation, but it doesn't and can't matter. Reality is perception, what we are incapable of perceiving has no meaning for us.
With all of the negativity that No Man's Sky has been receiving, largely rightfully, it did pose some interesting ideas about simulated reality. A character in the game uncovers evidence that the universe they exist in (the game universe) isn't the base reality and here I was playing in their universe simulator/glorified RNG from the base reality. Obviously NMS isn't anywhere close to being complex enough but maybe in a few hundred or thousand years from now there could be true AI and machines powerful enough to handle it.
My point is that while we are so down on the entire Intelligent Design being worthy of any consideration, we are simultaneously speculating on other notions that would by definition *imply* it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Have gnu, will travel.
What is a life worth if it's just simulation?
No more and no less than if it's "real". Who gives a squashed shit? If it feels real to me, I'm going to behave as if it's real. And I'm going to get quite cross if you piss on my Wheaties, whether you think it's real or not. Indeed, if you should do such a thing, you will find out rapidly how real I think it is. Which is not to get all internet brave or anything, it's all to make a point; there is only one reason why it would be interesting if the universe were a simulation, and that's that we could then potentially hack the simulation in order to accomplish things which are outside the rules — or at minimum, examine the laws of the simulation so that we could determine precisely what the rules were, so that we could make optimally efficient use of them.
If we determine that this is all a simulation, and then go on living as if we had learned nothing, then the time spent determining that it is a simulation was all a big fuck-off waste of time. It would have been better spent masturbating. At least then, at the end you'd have something.
On the other hand, odds are good that we're not going to be able to break out a simulation even if it is one. The ways in which you break out of simulations tend to involve abusing the simulation. But we're nowhere near capable of doing that. We have barely begun to familiarize ourselves with existing stellar phenomena. How can we even reasonably imagine some case which will break the simulation when we're so unfamiliar with its bounds?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No ass, no dick, can't piss, can't shit.
So, do you just explode when you turn twenty-five?
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
"I have an ass and must pull stats out of"
Remember, you can't spell "analyst" without "anal".
But looking at the image from the presentation cited by TFA, it looks just like a bit of noise thrown in to spice up a bunch of otherwise relatively mundane numbers about augmented/virtual reality as a business. Sort of like some pepper flakes put atop the chicken-and-rice dish.
Do not try to flip a coin, that is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. There is no coin. Then you'll see that it is not the coin that flips, but you.
The Matrix (movie) had it wrong
The people in the movie had incomplete knowledge of many things. That was their guess and should not be accepted as the truth. (I actually prefer this explanation)
"How we profit on that?" given the fact its a bank.
There is a 50% chance that the money that appears in your BOA account balance does not really exist...
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The best explanation for the events the the movie is that the whole thing is just the robots taking care of humans as best they're able. Most humans are happy enough in the matrix, and for the few who aren't, there's this other simulated world where they can fight the power. There are a lot of hints of this in the Animatrix - just made the terrible sequels even more disappointing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As several here have noted, if it's true, they're likely looking to hack the Matrix for profit. So if the Matrix is our reality, you don't want the banks to grok it. They manipulate reality enough already. My theory is that people who sense a Matrix are intuitively sensing the presence of spirit so they seek to explain it using a familiar metaphor, a computer generated simulation. That said, I don't need BoA to check into this idea for me, thanks. I see that investors don't exactly have confidence in BoA at the moment. I'm not sure exactly why. I know that I'm hoping that BoA and all banks work on restoring society's trust. It's unsettling to worry about a whole sector that can bring a lot down with it. Why not save the stoner talk for *after* work and weekends? There's plenty of time to talk about the Matrix then.
So, Now that BoA knows the truth, we can pen test the meta system and hack the world!! Certified ethical wizard will be a new job title!
The good news is we're in a huge particle simulation. The bad news is, you're still just composed of virtual particles and will become virtual worm food when you die.
I'm betting on extinction and a slow reboot
So someone somewhere did a powerpoint preso at a staff function with some info pulled off the Internet, and this makes the Slashdot front page?
Is this what Slashdot has become? How long before we get a daily update about the Kardashians?
basically, what they are saying is that they are not sure if anything is real. are they the kind of people you want controlling your economic future? it's bad enough that they are fools enough to think the way they do, but to let their victims -- us -- know they think that way proves they are not only fools but madmen. vote for Trump! he's crazy enough to destroy the whole, worthless system.
It might be a simple as standing in the right place and yelling "Computer! Arch!" in a commanding tone.
It's just freaky when a bank states this. Ranks up there with Microsoft Lingerie.
Table-ized A.I.
Either we are living in the Matrix or we are not. Sounds logical.
When philosophers and physicists do this it's a fun way of pointing out interesting edge cases or stuff that we need better understanding of.
In this case it just sounds like these bankers are taking those thought experiments far too seriously and not seeing them for what they are.
It's like assuming that a smooth massless elephant is real instead of just a way to model a great big hairy and heavy thing.
Jim: "Things are looking bad. We've lost a lot of money. How can we hide it in this presentation?" .... ummm... hang on. What did you say?"
Bob: "I don't know. We're so screwed, man! Any ideas, Jill?"
Jill: "Huh? Sorry I wasn't listening. I was watching the iPhone 7 keynote. Did you know they are dropping the headphone jack?".
Bob: "How can you be not paying attention at a time like this! We're screwed! We need to find a way to distract people from
Jill: "They're removing the headphone jack from the iPhone. I haven't noticed anything else different because that's all I can think about."
Bob: "Perfect! That's the ticket! We'll just include some sensational nonsense in the presentation and no one will notice the terrible news! But what to include...Jim?"
Jim: "Huh? Sorry. I was spaced out watching my Matrix screensaver....".
I think Dark City from the same time was a far better take on it.
Aliens putting people though a lot of simulations so they could get an idea of how those strange human beings thought.
That actually made sense instead of looking like a weak excuse, such as the battery thing, or your better idea of processors.
Some years everyone was making an asteroid movie, that year it was artificial reality movies.
website: www.simulation-argument.com
In the early 2000s the University of Oxford named Nick Bostrom as the Director for the newly founded institute: "Future of Humanity Institute".
He thinks about "existential risk". If we are indeed living in a simulation, an existential risk is that it will be turned off.
He has collected and summarised the various aspects ("how would you change your behaviour if you knew you were living in
a simulation?") at the above website.
It is unlikely that any one of us here has more to contribute on the topic than what this guy has already forgotten.
Enjoy.
Oliver
No ass, no dick, can't piss, can't shit.
He is dying and brings very bad news.
Dies irae
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'd love to know what they base it on. The typical argument is that, at a given point in its maturity, any technological civilisation will be able to produce simulations that are sufficiently real that the inhabitants can't tell that they are inside a simulation. At this point, they will do so at least once and there will be more simulated realities than real ones. Some of these simulations will be complex enough for recursive simulation, and so the number will grow. If we assume that the base reality is at least as big as ours appears to be, and has been around for as long as hours appears to have been, then there must be a great many technological civilisations (even if you assume an average of only one per galaxy, it's a huge number) that have reached the point of being able to build simulations. As such, the number of beings inside simulated realities vastly exceeds the number in the base reality and so there is a far greater probability that you are in a simulation (and probably in a recursive simulation) than that you are in the base reality.
A similar argument states that this probability is further increased because we can't yet build realistic simulations and you could significantly reduce the computational requirements of your simulation by not making its inhabitants sufficiently technologically advanced to require recursive simulation.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
One possibility is that some sort of god-like creature, or creatures, use a matrix like situations to test systems and find potential flaws or benefits. Another possibility is that humanity exists as a potential AI life force generator. We have seven billion people on the planet. Suppose each person has a computer running a matrix of its own design, complete with things like entirely altered laws of physics, chemistry or even mathematics. After these universes ran for a period of time some would be found to be superior to others. If we can create a matrix better than the one we now live in our true purpose may be at an end. Perhaps we could transfer to the new and better matrix or perhaps that big hand in the sky just hits the off switch on our universe.
We've never simulated anything with true knowledge, as we understand our use of the term. Thus, no simulation has ever had knowledge that it was in a simulation.
It kind of bugs me that people like these geniuses keep saying the we live in the matrix, but what I really think they mean is that we live in a simulation. When they say these things, and acting all profound, you expect them to get the basic constructs right! Matrix = real universe, but with a big Mofo electrode sticking in your spinal cord fooling your real brain. Simulation = simulated universe, simulated brain, ghosts all the way down. And I didn't read the article - i just wanted to sound like I knew what I was talking about.
It would appear we may well be "The Ghosts in the Machine"
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
This idea seems to be hip right now, although it is just a variant of Kants critical idealism or the arbrahamic revelation psycho-cults (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) idea of a god from which all things come.
It's really weird when you see institutions that have so much power perpetrate such nonsense. And goes to show that 'civilized' society isn't to far from societies who think they have god on their side when they blow themselves and innocent bystanders up. Or think it's a brilliant idea to gas 11 million innocent people and invade Stalingrad. Anything can be justified if you can tell the people you have God on your side. Or that we are all living in a simulation.
It seems that people, with abrahamic religion and new age out of fashion people are turning to other bullshit to justify immoral actions.
After all, if this is a simulation, then a bank misbehaving isn't all that bad, right? I can see were this is intended to go again.
Straight into a new version of the dark ages, with some cyberpunk aspects to it perhaps.
Evil people at work with evil plans are spreading this nonsense. You're best off taking it with a pound of salt.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The narrative behind the "Matrix" or "computer simulation" interpretation of the world is just a sequel or variant of the very old religious idea of the human created to live in a world controlled by God or gods. There is nothing new and nothing to see here. It is very boring it gets so much public attention.
Achille Talon
Hop!
...huh, I guess they were really serious.
âoeOnce a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller...you're part of the road.â -
I don't think I've ever read a sentence of such unfathomable stupidity on this site. Good job I guess?
On the one hand we have bible thumpers shoving bullshit at us, on the other hand "wake up sheeple - we all live in the Matrix!!!" Anyone wanna cook up more fairy stories about why we exist? We're here (and we're fucking up the planet we live on - we need to stop doing that as it's the only home we've got at the moment), the universe is before us and that's all that really matters.
If you are into belief systems, the sky is the limit, or is it?
This is speculation not science or analysis. It's not much different than people who lived centuries ago speculating about the nature of gods without any real evidence.
Remember that time...Neo got his butt whipped?
Yeah, he told the Tick there was no spoon. That didn't turn out so well.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It definitely puzzles me how on Slashdot the two links are to a popularist academic and an entrepreneur with no theoretical standing instead of the originator or any other number of real articles over the last decade.
Just curious - should I care what marmot7 has to say about BOA? Any other random people want to chime in?
Do you have ESP?
Everybody says : "100% chance Bank of America wasting peoples' money theorizing about the matrix"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You would think if this were a simulation, the designers would have come up with a more plausible set of circumstances.
The two hypothesis have the same exact amount of validity and come from the same kind of unscientific thinking. It's not surprising they could be compatible.
Both are totally made up, plausible, unfalsifiable neat ideas. We have no reason to believe these things might be true, but we also can't prove they're false. Science isn't happening here.
Sure, you can speculate it. Nobody ever complained about speculating creationism either. It's a good thing to do. It's a fun thing to do! Each is a great basis for many great stories. But, yeah, it irritates me when they use the word "theory." That word means something, and these things aren't theories.
And it's a little infuriating when some dickhead says "n% likely" as though this isn't a totally arbitrary shit-dripping number pulled from his reeking ass. That's where they crossed from "neat idea" or maybe "illiterate person who doesn't know what a theory is" to being dishonest sacks of shit. They are lying (not merely speculating) when they assign a probability. Anyone who tells this lie knows he can't show his work. That's not merely an error or mistake, unless you wanna call it an ethical error.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
their culpability for the 2008 economic meltdown?
mark
Gosh to think there might be life on another planet - but darn they are so far away we'll never be able to find them.
Of course - now it all makes sense. If I wanted to keep my subjects from discovering the outside world - I'd put it so far away that they'd think it was impossible to travel there and find it.
By the simplest probability model, there is a 50% chance of any particular individual being alive. Therefore, we ARE in the Matrix with a probability of 1!
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Three escalations to get BOA to pay an insurance premium from money already in my escrow account and they have time for this?
Of course they'd think we were. They *are* the Matrix.
Then you'll see that it is not the coin that flips, but you.
I thought that was only in Soviet Russia?
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
If it's just the Matrix, it will be reset before anything too catastrophic happens anyway.
That's like ... 16 walls!
Either we do live in a Matrix style environment or we don't.
We simulate weather, but it never rains in the simulation. If we are simulations, we might be simulating something very different from ourselves.
You people are no different then those that lived 6972 years ago. Ignorant and belligerent in other words stupid. There are 3 types of people that have always been around, 1 the shift the Alpha dog the commander. 2 the witch doctor the religious leader, 3 last but least the fools the followers. Just look any any time of history who died and for what reason, it is always the same. We need food, there riches, or territory. And most of the time it is the same reasoning they will invaded, they are heretrics, and lastly remember it is for good of the empire. Sound familiar. Then came the crusades 300 years of war the distraction of the god wild they eliminated higher learning. Then came the so called start of banking, control of riches who could get pledged or what they for collateral. You keep forgetting what words mean, you never look at your vocabulary. This terms are use to misdirect the masses, the use of layers was never to help but to misdirect people. Democratic or for any other type of government is never for the people, it is for the in powered. Not for the fools or slaves they are the work force. Can you have war with out banks up to a point, people will up revolt “let then eat cake” So what happen no monarchy then what the same crap with and idea of some liberty. Religion lost some it’s power in some pleases do to monarchy making new religion to fit there stiles. But they had most of the riches in there banks and knowledge of books and trade. Moving to today do you think that information the you are so willing to give so freely today is used for what. Your ventilate it is to what ends, how much you pay every month to a lending institution,. Will you ever stop being in that hole, no because you buy that $700 cell every year even if you do not need it. Stupid needs require stupid people. Was that cell any better than your previous one no it has less safeguards more ram more storage that is it. It has more ram because it needs it for more monitoring of what you do, that is it. You are tracked every where you are every thing that you do, why would you need GPS. Are you in some far away place, you can get local tracking via cell towers down to a millimeter. The more they know the better they can please how smart you are how do talk to how much of a treat you are. Information is the trade to know how to control you, and you keep tweeting exposing your life on Facebook and of those medias. Your confusing your social lives to that of true friend, was Facebook there when you needed real help. Did tweeter get you out of a jam when you really needed it. Idiots stating a fact is not putting your self at risk, stating you likes and dislikes is feeding the lion. You do really tell you priest or your any one for that matter everything that you do, do you really confessed to some else or to your god. If you are smart just your god in private, and no one else. The point of this is the matrix is you life to predicate what will you do, and how many are going to something different you are. Any time that you do something that no one else those you are a heretic, and will always be use against you by those in power. Making matter simple to control the masses. So are you going keep the lion in powered, or are you going to be an individual. That is up to you.
Everybody says : "100% chance Bank of America wasting peoples' money theorizing about the matrix"
More like "Everybody says: "100% chance Bank of America wasting peoples' money pasting in references to Nick Bostrom's theories and Neil deGrasse Tyson's speculative comments about that idea" - they just threw that in with a reference to Bostrom and Tyson that they probably picked up from some casual reading, I don't think they actually did any theorizing of their own. (I won't speculate on how many bong hits were involved in the process of writing that presentation.)
It's a way of looking at things in a different way and identifying what stands out when you do so.
Consider it being like staining a microscope slide to increase the contrast between two different cells. The cells don't really look like that but you can't get much information about them as they really are.
Simple logic if not enough sometimes. How about this - you have a box and you want to keep things inside dry, so you imagine where the water could get in. Simple logic tells you to just not expose it to water but that's fairly pointless. It's the same sort of thing, thinking about possibilities. Thinking of the impossible can be a tool to identify real possibilities that are similar.
When the question about a simulation make you understand that we don't know enough about thing X for it to be simulated then you have a start on some understanding on thing X which didn't really stand out as an unknown before.
That's what it's really about.
Feynman had some good stuff to say about thinking of the impossible as a way to get to the possible but I'm not sure where to find it (google Feynman diagrams and you'll eventually find something that describes this well). Treating stuff as if it was going back in time resulted in finding real relationships between particles in that case. The reality was not so mathematically simple (like the simulation idea is mathematically simple) so was a lot harder to see than thinking of the impossible than seeing what possible things came close
Thinking of the impossible is sometimes just a polarizing filter to make possible things stand out.
Something as mundane as engineering design often starts with impossibly simple forces on impossibly simple objects to make everything easier to calculate - for example finite element analysis. With each interation you build up towards something closer to reality, say an aircraft instead of a massless cube. The aircraft is initally modeled as a lot of little massless cubes (and sometimes triangular prisms) then relationships between other cubes and different properties are added so that really difficult problems can be solved in easy little chunks. It may take a lot of steps but you get there in the end by considering a complex thing in terms of much simpler things.
No doubt that wall of text contains many profound insights. Try using paragraphs, O Enlightened One.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
not sure, but maybe he's trying to say that math *may* not be the universal language of all the possible universes, but just a result of how out particular simulated universe is organized.
i certainly can't imagine how a universe with non mathematical laws would be like; I suspect nobody does. It could, however, just be a distortion field of our point of view, I. E. a lack of perspective. I also can't imagine a quantum world, but I accept its because I didn't evolve in one (ok, I did, but you know what I mean)
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
This is why I invest every bit of my money with Bank of America.
The know things. . .