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Tech Billionaires Are Asking Scientists For Help To Break Humans Out of Computer Simulation (businessinsider.com)
Many believe that we live in a computer simulation. But it takes a billionaire and his money to ask scientists to help break us out of the simulation. The New Yorker recently did a profile about Y Combinator's Sam Altman. In the story, Altman discusses his theories about being controlled by technology and delves into the simulation theory. From an article on The New Yorker: Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation. Business Insider adds: The piece doesn't give any clue as to who those two billionaires are -- although it's easy to hazard a few guesses at who they might be, like Musk himself or Altman's friend Peter Thiel -- but it's fascinating to see how seriously people are taking this theory. According to Musk, it's the most popular topic of conversation right now.Earlier this year, at Code Conference, Elon Musk said there's "one in billions" chance we're not living in a computer simulation.
And many believe that vinegar disintegrates chemtrails.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
to have so much money that you're completely and utterly disconnected from reality. Idiots.
If you are jacked in, perhaps that is the "veil" that is commonly referenced in religious texts... as in, we come from the after-life and we return to the after-life once our trials are done here.
So, if you just die... you will end the simulation and wake up in reality.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Seriously people. This is reality. Deal with it. Just freaking get over it. Just because the universe doesn't fit into your limited imagination is no reason to suspect that we are in a simulation or that an invisible man in the sky created the world, or that we are reincarnated from aliens chained to a volcano.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
You cannot break out of the simulation, at least not without outside help and even then the idea of breaking out isn't meaningfully feasible.
If I exist in this simulated reality, then I only exist because of the simulation. Shut down the simulation and I cease to exist. There is no way to remove me. If I and this existence is only here because of an outside "CPU", then there is no way of removing me from that CPU.
The closest you could get is a representation of the simulated me in the "real" world. But it would not truly be me.
So if we are in a simulation, it is completely real to us and completely necessary for us to exist.
Can the next release make these billionaires go broke? Thanks
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It will take about one year, and cost only $20 million. Trust me.
Hey... Think about this for a minute... You find a VM escape vulnerability, and some N-th dimensional sysadmin is gonna have to apply a patch. And then we get rebooted. Do you REALLY want to be responsible for someone rebooting the universe?
What if the outside is worse?
I propose that we study this link between chemtrails and simulated reality... I bet you there is a connection....
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
The Talos Principle is a Portal-like puzzle game in which you try to break out of a computer simulation... or at least break it.
It has one of the most gratifying video game endings ever, IMO.
If you give me an advance of $1B, I'll happily solve the problem ... [for you, I can definitely get you out of your "simulation"]
It's steam engines when it's steam engine time
People use the predominant zeitgeist as a model to understand everything.
In Victorian times, we had steam engines and the blind watchmaker. In the 1910's everything was electricity this and xyz-rays that. Today it's all digitalizamizated technomolology and iPhones.
That and these billionaires think their smarts in one realm of knowledge make them experts in everything everywhere all the time.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So the kind of people who take Dork Enlightenment and Roko's Basilisk seriously now want to create an actual Tower of Babel.
Can't we just take it down a notch and worry about something reasonable - like the AI apocalypse or being wiped out by aliens?
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?
Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7
Activity Recorded M.Y. 2302.22467
TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED
Just take the red pill, dummy!
I wonder if a Dayquil will work...
Where do I sign up for some of that grant money?
Those fools! Don't they know that attempting to break out of the simulation could cause our reality to Blue Screen? Do they really want that to &*^#*&@%*% ERROR: Buffer Overflow In Reality Matrix 19791012-42. Terminating All Processes Immediately And Rebooting To Last Known Good Configuration...
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"...In the story, Altman discusses his theories about being controlled by technology..."
Uh, what the hell do you mean "theory"? That cellular dog leash shoved up everyone's ass that we all are so keen to label "convenience" pretty much says it all about who is being "controlled by technology" these days. We are merely pawns on the electronic chess board of life that we created ourselves.
On top of that, what exactly would this research prove or more to the point, change? You think humans would suddenly act differently? Think you're going to convince the masses overnight to dismiss all forms of religion that recognize a divine creator? Did the movie The Matrix cause a massive change in groupthink? Hardly.
I'm reminded of a certain fictional civilization that waited a long damn time for such an analysis, only to be presented with an answer of "42".
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the heavens.
"Do you have any evidence for any of this?"
Keep asking that and the whole thing falls apart.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"Many," as in "not many."
However, I have a simple solution to their problems. All they have to do is to send me all of their money. They don't believe it's real anyway, and I promise to follow the Silicon Valley ethos and only use that fake money to convince more billionaires to give me their fake money too.
"Earlier this year, at Code Conference, Elon Musk said there's "one in billions" chance we're not living in a computer simulation."
Elon Musk said it, I believe it, and that settles it. (rolls eyes)
Maybe we are the simulation. Maybe we don't exist outside of it and if we leave, we cease to exist.
This is insanely stupid. Entities simulated in computer programs can't "break out" of the simulation: if you stop the simulation, they cease to exist.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The desire for religion must really be genetically programmed if influencial bigwigs like this dream up a new one after the old ones have been debunked.
Truely amazing.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Musk and all his blather would be considered the disorderly ramblings of a mental patient if he weren't rich."
Rich or not, I still consider many of his ramblings to be insane.
If you were to break out of the computer simulation...
Why would our simulated currency mean anything? If we were in the real universe and we had a billion dollars that would be like paying with monopoly money.
Secondly if the universe is a simulation. We are part of the simulation. So if we get out of it, we wouldn't exist. At best we may be able to transfer ourselves into an alternate simulation. Then in that simulation chances are we cannot use our Universe A money there.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What if we're not "in" a simulation but are a part of that simulation. How could we get out if we're just another programmed element of the simulation?
then I'm thankful nobody's put me in a room with no door and no toilet. Wait! I'm in a cubicle, so it must be true.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Looks like humans somehow need to believe in something supernatural.
And many believe that Donald Trump hires only Americans, and doesn't send large amounts of jobs to foreign countries like China, Africa, etc.
And that he was also a successful businessman.
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-federal-income-tax-records-506713
Just believing that doesn't make them right.
You haven't spent much time in the right-wing echo chamber, where every lie is believable and truthiness is optional.
If we lived in a computer simulation, surely we would have some remaining concept of a Scientist that created the Simulation, and us inside it. The Scientist, who can change the software parameters, and can do absolutely anything in our Universe, and knows everything too, but limits His own powers to observe what we do, and, even if He knows the end result, let us choose our destiny with free will (FreeWill_Parameter = True).
As no such idea exists anywhere, I guess it's safe to say that we aren't in a simulation.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Logically if this is a simmulation then one would guess that the players controlled by external overlords would be the most powerful sims. that is to say movie stars or Tech billionaires or Trump like dictators.
Thus your highest calling if you and under-sim is to go be a groupy to one of the "real" players.
So it's a little strange to hear the Real players asking to be broken out of the Simulation. Something is fishy here.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So if you believe in God, the science world think's you're crazy/stupid, but if you believe in a programmer of the universe, it's totally cool and many of them agree. Gotcha.
Many believe that we live in a computer simulation. But it takes a billionaire and his money to ask scientists to help break us out of the simulation.
Somebody has spent WAY too much time watching The Matrix and has lost their grip on reality.
But let's take it at face value and presume we are part of a simulation. There would be no way to "break out" of the simulation (whatever that means) because we don't exist outside of it. It would be akin to trying to bring Pac-Man to life in the real world. It's a non-sequitur.
Never mind the fact that there is zero evidence whatsoever to support the notion that we live in a simulation any more than there is evidence of a divine creator. It's a hypothesis that isn't falsifiable as far as anyone can tell and therefore it is outside the realm of science and firmly in the realm of religion.
Earlier this year, at Code Conference, Elon Musk said there's "one in billions" chance we're not living in a computer simulation.
Elon is a smart and talented entrepreneur but he's out of his depth on this one. His argument is basically naive extrapolation run amok combined with an argument by analogy.
What's your first response to seeing evidence of malware on your system? Reimage the shit out of that thing.
This is even ignoring the likelihood that the simulation even simulates anything related to the world the hardware is in. I mean, at the end of Tron Legacy the gal gets to come to our world through ... the power of boners? I mean, I can see how the simulation can simulate a real-world person (I mean, his meat body would have died meanwhile), but the real world isn't setup to actualize a simulation, you can't just wish things to happen.
Or maybe we break out into a cold dark universe where all matter has been converted into computational elements in service of the simulation. Hell, maybe it's running in sound-wave interference in a black hole. That'll be quite fun! Or, again, maybe the enclosing universe has no relationship to our universe, so not only do we have to understand our universe so thoroughly we can break out of it, we have to understand the enclosing universe thoroughly enough to break into it.
And then, of course, when you come down to it, if you prove that we live in a simulation by breaking out of the simulation, now what you know is that it is possible to simulate a universe detailed enough to be thoroughly believable. So how the hell do you know you broke out of the simulation, as opposed to just running a new scenario in the simulation? If you actually did break out, how do you know that the new level isn't a simulation?
Yes, if we are part of a simulation the last thing we should want is to "break" us out of it because that would mean an end to our existence. Assuming we are some creation of a creator, possibly with some objectives and there is some observation going on outside our reality the first order of business would be to see what we can glean about the objectives of the creator, then assuming we don't view the creator as hostile to our continued existence and growth, then open up some communications and try to negotiate some better conditions while we work out the best way to ensure our continued existence inside the encompassing reality. Last thing we want to do is to go too far and hack a system we barely understand so that we cause some sort of system crash.
Basically we should want to convince the creator that we are worth saving... which is a very common perspective in many religions. Seems a worthwhile objective regardless of your belief system.
The smart move is to try and figure out how to access the admin console and object browser. Then, instead of 'escaping' to a reality you're not equipped to survive, you can make this shit show into your own personal paradise.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
That's pretty much what I thought. If you win in a computer game, why would you want to end it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For a mere $50 million I can break them out of this simulation. Two 9mm Para. to their heads will cost me less than 75 cents.
You know they always quote him saying that then they leave out the part where he justified it. If they included that, his statement would seem literally retarded. He specifically said that the reason he thinks there is a 1 in 1 billion chance is that there will at some point be a billion game consoles in the future.
“Even if the rate [of technological advancement] drops by a thousand from right now—imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale. So, given we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality and those games could be played on a set top box or on a PC or whatever and there would be billions of such computers or set top boxes, it would seem to follow the odds we’re in base reality is one in billions,” Musk said. “Tell me what’s wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?”
Yes... Yes... I see a flaw.... That doesn't make any fucking sense.
Rerun of Matrix?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Let's posit that we are in a simulation. If the simulation creators / runners care about the simulation running "properly" and they detect us somehow violating that (e.g. - by "breaking out" of it), then they likely can simply rollback the state to a previous state and make whatever changes necessary to prevent the same thing from occurring again.
So which one of you people is really Dwayne Dibbley?
You seemed to be objectively bashing trump, then you defended Clinton and lost all credibility.
Clinton is the only credible candidate for POTUS. That doesn't mean she isn't a deeply flawed person. As a moderate conservative, I have no one else to vote for.
I mean...is there anything else to say about this??
It only reminds me the struggle in philosophy between materialism and idealism. The theory that we live in a simulation only remind me of humanity creating gods. It only remind me how lords in feudalism tried to blind humanity.. It is confirmed by the billionaires and Bank institutes that give money for "research" of these theories.. Why?Beacuse they see a profit? No,only to make their power more solid. Fuck gods,new or old and fuck capitalism that is promoting fake knowledge just as feudalism did for hundread of years
The people I know who are most disturbed by the simulation concept are the ones who most claim to believe in Jesus. And they get really pissed when I ask them how it's any different from their creation myth. Fireworks really start when I explain the simulation was developed over 6 phases by a lead developer with the intials G.O.D. and Eden was just the sandbox where they tested the "human" code. Of course, the flood was a major content patch when the simulation exited beta.
Personally, the double slit experiment is all the proof I need that something is controlling the world we live in. How else would those damn particles realize something is watching them?
One day, science and spirituality will meet and the answers that science seeks to answer may very well in fact startle and scare us. Quantum theory may very well help us break through the confines of this matter filled prison.
Define "credible" in any objective way.
By all my measures, she has failed at just about everything she's tried, apart from running for office. And she only got elected because her husband was President of the US. There is just about no reason to conclude she is qualified for the job.
As a moderate conservative, you can vote third Party, and register your vote as a protest against the other two. IF enough people break free from the false dichotomy of the two party system, perhaps we can actually get worthy candidates. But, go ahead and waste your vote on the "lessor of two evils" believing that is your only choice. In the end, you'll get the devil you know and you'll be guilty of contributing to whatever ills she creates for our country. Imagine, three more SCOTUS judges hell bent on dismantling what remains of our Constitution. The first Amendment is going, the second is for sure gone, the 4th, 5th and the rest are swept away as fast as they can. ObamaCare fails and is replaced by single payer, and everyone's healthcare is screwed up in ways that only Government can (think VA for everyone!)
If you think Clinton is the "only" credible candidate, you're wrong, she isn't credible at all.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Find the code for respawning and activate it!
You realize the amount of dangerous shit we could do to advance the species if death was temporary?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Like that failed business man Warren Buffet who lost in one day.
Warren Buffet suffered a paper loss on a stock that he held for the long term. If he was to sell his position in Wells Fargo, he would probably have substantial profits over his initial investment.
Trump has already said he outsources due to the way American law is structured and that he plans on working to change the law to fix that.
American law doesn't require that Trump outsource his work overseas. There are many businesses in the US are that proud to bear the label "Made in USA."
There are a lot of ignorant Slashdotters with absolutely zero knowledge of how business actually works.
You're obviously one of them.
What a stupid idea. If we are living in simulation, then our meddling with it will most probably result in some kind of IndexOutOfBoundException or NullPointerException. There will be no "going out", just crash of the executed program. End of the Universe.
.... we are not a simulation and somehow still be considered unlikely that we are intelligently designed when the so-called simulation that we are likely to be in would have obviously had to have been designed by an intelligent entity?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... if you're part of it because even if somehow the simulations software and hardware allowed you to peer outside you could never leave because your existence will have no meaning outside of it. Its like trying to take pacman out of its game - you wouldn't get pacman, you'd get a small amount of electricity that was the representation of the character in the computer hardware at the time you did it. And outside the computer the information states the electricity represented have no meaning and do nothing.
PennyArcade addressed that very topic recently
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The Ultimate Conspiracy Debunker
TL;DW, a good first test (not only, just first) for whether a conspiracy theory might be true is "if true would this theory have a negative effect on rich people?"
You don't see rich people campaigning against chemtrails even though they breath the same air we do, so you can be pretty sure chemtrails aren't real.
Here is a theory that if true would have a negative impact on rich people (at least to the extent that you regard being alive in a simulation as a negative) and a non-trivial number of them are willing to throw money at the problem to "fix" it.
Which is definitely not proof that the simulation theory is true, but is pretty damning for a lot of other conspiracy theories.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Define "credible" in any objective way.
Senator and Secretary of State. Many men have ran for president with less qualifications than that, and no one accused them of getting elected because of their wife. Trump's only qualification was that he beaten the weakest slate of candidates that the Republican Party has ever fielded.
As a moderate conservative, you can vote third Party, and register your vote as a protest against the other two.
No quite. I got tired of being called a RINO that I switched my party registration from Republican to Democratic last year. I'm voting and donating for the presidential candidate that I believe is qualified to be POTUS.
If the chances are that we're humans IN a simulation, surely there's an EQUAL or GREATER chance that we're actually simulated ourselves?
If the argument is that a civilisation will eventually live inside a simulation, they will want companions, and those might not necessarily be real instead of sufficiently advanced simulations themselves.
As the underlying animals would liable to death, disease and resource shortage, surely the chances are that - eventually - the simulated world would empty of real beings over time and live in perpetuity (given that it's survived that long without the civilisation needing to maintain, as they're all in cyberspace).
Thus, surely there's a similar almost-certainty that they are in fact all going to empty of fragile, dependent, real beings and become virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people themselves, who have a lifespan not nearly as limited as that of even an advanced being?
And that would mean that, given enough complexity, we could ALL be simulations and not even realise it? If the chances are there that most civilisations will ultimately go into cyberspace, surely extrapolation over time suggests that most of those will similarly end up with no real beings but a sufficiently advanced populous of simulated beings inside them, for much longer period of time?
Most likely, I'm not sitting here. And "here" doesn't exist except in the memory of a computer. And "I" am nothing more than a complex program.
Any civilization capable reaching such a feat would surely have destroyed itself long before they were able to get there.
And you link to liberal rag Newsweek which was sold for one dollar. Talk about bad business and living in a liberal echo chamber.
Again, you are entitled to your fact-free opinion. That doesn't change the reality that Trump is a horrible businessman who would make a horrible president.
Holding a job and sucking at it is not a credible qualification for a promotion. Even the Peter Principle in it's usual formulation implies that once you find the level someone is incompetent at you have promoted them sufficiently.
already answered. She was elected on the coat tails of WJC. She moved to NY as a CarpetBagger (look up the term).
I am not a Trump supporter so comparing Trump to Clinton is pretty worthless. As for beating weak candidates, can you explain how Hillary had trouble beating three pretty weak candidates? IMHO 16 is harder than 3. The fact that she had to enlist the DNC to help get her election rigged enough to beat Bernie isn't much better (it is actually worse) than Trump beating 16.
Again, what "qualification" does she have, other than her failed example as SoS and a do nothing Senator from NY, that won because she was WJC's wife. I believe that Monica could have won that election, had she been married to Bill.
You aren't a RINO, you are confused.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That doesn't logically follow. Maybe they didn't fix or find all the bugs. Maybe they left a door open. Maybe one day we're stumble on the right particle interactions to cause a buffer overflow and the whole thing halts and catches fire.
What you are implying is basically identical to the idea that Donkey Kong could step into the real world if the folks at Nintendo wrote a buffer overflow. It's a nonsense idea made by people who haven't thought the idea through and/or who flunked Philosophy 101. Unless you can come up with some actual evidence or a logical means by which the whole idea can be disproven then it is a silly idea. "There might be a bug" is not evidence, it's blind faith.
Holding a job and sucking at it is not a credible qualification for a promotion.
That didn't stop George W. from leapfrogging Jeb into the presidency.
My house contains the gate to the other side. Send me $100,000,000 and wait two weeks and I'll let you see it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I am thinking you would walk into the holodeck wall before anything else...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
That's it really. Tripping. Or a religion.
Only a great intelligence could produce this simulation. And we know that the greatest intelligence will not be biological, but the result of Vinge's technological singularity. At most it will be a hybrid with some biological components. This intelligence, while beyond our comprehension, seems unlikely to be amused by simulation games.
It's possible that it wants a deeper understanding of human foibles, but really- that's our own ego speculating. How interesting are we? So what could motivate this elegant machine to devise such a simulation. Even in an advanced civilization there is a cost to be justified.
This suggests that only the super mega ego of a billionaire would think us worthy of a simulation.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I always vote third party now, whether I agree with the candidate or not. Dismantling the two party duopoly is a more important ... Unfortunately the electoral system is such that even if one or both major U.S. parties were to fail, they would only be replaced by others until a new two-party equilibrium emerged
Since duopoly is inherent in First Past The Post voting, why do you then also believe that voting third party will break the duopoly?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
By now they are so desperate for a non-exploding replacement for lithium batteries that they want to take the red pill to escape from the simulation they can use the rest of us to store power.
So say we all.
You just take the red pill...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
That's actually a quite believable interpretation of the Bible. Player starts out being a genocidal maniac, playing with all the god-level powers they have, sending plagues of locus and flooding the entire planet just to see what will happen. Then we get to the New Testament, where the player is kinda bored just breaking stuff and decides to try to build a nice world.
It's basically everyone's first game of Sim City.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Can the next release make these billionaires go broke? Thanks
Maybe the reason they are billionaires in the first place is because they used the cheat codes :)
Any sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality. However, the corollary to this is IT DOESN'T MATTER if we're in a simulation or not, UNLESS there are glitches in the simulation we can exploit. So essentially, you ask scientists to try to find glitches in the simulation. Are there any physics we already know of that act like glitches in a simulation (double slit experiment, I'm looking at you...).
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
to say she has failed as you have only shows a vast and profound ignorance on your part.
but that's true of most of your comments, including the rest of the one you just made.
though if you insist on the evils viewpoint, then she isn't the lesser of two evils. rather she's the lesser of 4 evils, Johnson and stein included.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Went to Zion National Park with a few friends around 2008. Sat at a table to eat some sandwiches we had bought before going hiking. I had my sunglasses on, my friends were all talking, and I was half listening while staring at the clouds. They were moving across the sky and then just stopped. Paused. I took my sunglasses off, and they were back to moving again. My friends talking didn't pause, they were still talking the entire time. No idea what that was, but all I could think of is a glitch in the system.
The fact that she had to enlist the DNC to help get her election rigged enough to beat Bernie isn't much better (it is actually worse) than Trump beating 16.
The problem that Bernie Sanders had was that he needed to win every election after Super Tuesday with 60% of the votes. He failed to get the votes. The only way he could have won was to eliminate the super delegates that's been part of the Democratic nomination process since the 1970's. He failed to get that changed at the convention. You can't blame that on Hillary.
You aren't a RINO, you are confused.
Correct. That's why I changed my party registration. Moderate conservatives are no longer welcomed in the Republican Party.
Give me the one for sex, sex, sex
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
Now I have one more reason to dread patch Tuesdays...
A similar thing happened to me about 15 years ago. I was playing the Sims and one of my sims figured out that he was really living in a simulation. What happened next was terrifying, he kept playing chess until his intelligence level was maxed out and then he figured out how to break out of the simulation.
He's now out here in the real world and he's mad. He's angry at me for taking the ladder off the swimming pool whilst his family was all it. Sadly, they all drowned. Now he wants my blood.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If we are in a simulation, then we are just an attribute of that simulation. i.e. our very existence are just some logical symbols that are the result of some calculation. We would have no actual physical aspect.
In that context, what does "Break free of the simulation" even mean?
That would be like a video game character trying to break free of the PC that the game he is in, is running on. Logically impossible. "Breaking free" for us is a similarly meaningless/impossible concept, with one exception:
If our simulation is itself running in a simulation (i.e. the PC game is running in a VM) and "breaking free" just means removing one layer of abstraction so we are being simulated in an environment closer to the root mechanism. Then the question becomes why would we even want that?
We couldn't ever leave the simulation entirely because if we are just logical symbols with no actual physical aspect, the uppermost layer of reality would have no support environment for us to continue our existence in.
how do you know that the new level isn't a simulation
As I understand it, that's the logical basis for "the universe is almost certainly a simulation". The idea being that a sufficiently advanced society will at some point want to, and have the ability to, simulate a universe (or at least simulate it to the satisfaction of the people being simulated). As technology within that society progresses they will improve the simulated universe to the degree that the simulated universe can, as societies are wont to do, simulate a universe. Also, there's no reason to believe that, if possible, those societies wouldn't want to simulate multiple universes which may, themselves, simulate multiple universes. It's turtles all the way down.
So the logic goes, if there is one physical universe and N nested simulated universes, what are the odds that this one happens to be the physical universe?
Since duopoly is inherent in First Past The Post voting, why do you then also believe that voting third party will break the duopoly?
Voting 3rd party will not break the duopoly, but it will change the duopoly. No voters changed the Democratic Party more than those who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Nobody changed the Republican Party more than those who voted for Pat Buchanan. Nader pulled the Democrats to the left, and Buchanan pulled the Republicans to the right. In my opinion this was a bad thing, but that is not the point. Those voters were effective. Unless you live in a swing state (and most people don't) your vote for either Hillary or Donald is meaningless. Voting 3rd party is be best way to make your vote count.
Given the lack of updates, I'd say we have been minimized and our owner is checking Facebook right now. No telling what the "speed setting" is, we could be waiting a loooooong time.
The Matrix was not a documentary.
"Shall we play a game?" -W.O.P.R.
JFC, dualists. Musk should dump his money into astrology research if he wants to advance that particular hypothesis. Maybe he'll discover that the sun is the Architect and the planets are the main programmers. On this level of the simulation, anyway. The Big Bang, I suppose, would be the arch-Architect...? Because really, isn't that the logical conclusion here, that "as above so below" type correlations are actually causal? That the lives of organisms and the course of evolution within the dynamical solar system are controlled and determined by the macrosystem motions?
The turing test tests that you can persuade someone else you are a human or a computer by interacting via text.
Perhaps the real test of intelligence is whether or not you can break out of the simulation.
IMHO solving this problem requires a philosopher, not a scientist. I would not be surprised if it could be proven -Goedel-style- that "breaking out of the simulation" is theoretically impossible.
Senator she got by riding her husband's coattails in a safe district. Secretary of State she got in a deal by losing to Obama.
So I'll actually give her credit on the second one. That said, I don't think she's done a good job at any of those. All she learned was how to cheat and get away with things, which isn't what I want to see.
You're going with the muslim concept of heaven, that it's just like earth, but better, and with girls that don't poop. I find that less plausible.
If the girls are advanced Androids that look, feel and act human, but are charged by pure energy, then I can believe they don't poop. Perhaps all the girls in heaven are androids.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So how the hell do you know you broke out of the simulation, as opposed to just running a new scenario in the simulation? If you actually did break out, how do you know that the new level isn't a simulation?
You don't. It's simulations all the way up and turtles all the way down.
timeo Danaos, et dona ferentis
>> so not only do we have to understand our universe so thoroughly we can break out of it, we have to understand the enclosing universe thoroughly enough to break into it.
Presuming you successfully break out of the current universe, I think you automatically get the "were are now in another universe (that you probably wont understand or even be able to perceive)" part for free. In fact I don't think you can avoid it, since there is no logical intermediate state.
Nader pulled the Democrats to the left, and Buchanan pulled the Republicans to the right. In my opinion this was a bad thing, but that is not the point. Those voters were effective.
It is the point, because change for the sake of change is usually Really Bad.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Once you've figured that out Musk, call me.
Simple. We are data. We are the product of an intelligently-designed system. We are not the system itself.
What would they do once they "broke out"?
> Basically we should want to convince the creator that we are worth saving..
Why? To prevent this presumed creator from ending our entire simulation? Why/how would you care or even know if it did? Time is relative, and given we are a construct, time would also be an artificial concept, so maybe it already has.
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe
Or reality could have been created 5 seconds ago, with your memories of the past already prefabricated in your mind.
Clinton is the only credible candidate for POTUS.
Since you phrased it as a statement, it must surely be so.
Unfortunately, given the mathematical realities of the "first past the post" voting system we're forced to work within, the dichotomy is not false. It's possible to change which parties are in power, as has happened several times in the history of the country, but the only stable configurations are either one or two strongly dominant parties.
I'm all for building a strong competing party to replace one of the current ones with something more populist, or even just less corrupt (though that's always a transitory condition, quickly remedied once it wields power worth corrupting) but that's a long-term project that requires dedicating considerable resources to building "brand awareness" and enthusiasm among the electorate, and one that's not appreciably aided by voting for candidates that have no chance of actually getting elected (well, not beyond reaching the minimums required for the party to gain access to public funds and other legal hurdles)
By making a protest vote, knowing it will have no direct effect on who wins the election, you'll be guilty of contributing to whatever ills *whoever* wins inflicts - including if it's the "greater evil" that you refused to vote against.
If you really want change, then go out and participate in activist organizations trying to either build viable third party support, or establish less easily captured voting systems such as instant runoff voting. As long as your only contribution is casting a ballot every couple of years, your real options are limited to either voting for the lesser of evils, or abstaining (or protest-voting), and thus willingly surrendering your support to whoever happens to win.
And lets be honest here - no matter how many viable parties are actually on the ballot, you'll *always* be voting for the lesser evil, because *nobody* is going to agree with you 100%. There will always be a compromise to be made, and whether that compromise falls below the arbitrary line you call "evil" or not, is a distinction that exists only within your imagination.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think Clinton is typically flawed for washington senators, representatives and similarly powerful bureacratic positions.
I had to research her a lot this year and
1) Cinton's been the target of a propaganda war for close to 20 years. This would destroy most people.
2) The clinton foundation is very well run, has a much higher share of money that goes to help people than the american cancer society, has reasonable wages for its employees, and is highly rated by charity navigator.
3) Clinton's actions show she is willing to put the good of the party and the country ahead of her personal good.
4) Clinton's a patriot and even a bit of a nationalist.
5) Clinton's wonky, intelligent, and creative and open to feedback from staff. She is more of a cooperative than authoritarian leader but has the strength to make decisions and stick by them.
I think if you dig into her history on non conservative sites, you'll find the same things.
Personally, I thought she was unelectable but, you know... Trump.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Logically if this is a simmulation then one would guess that the players controlled by external overlords would be the most powerful sims.
You are assuming that the simulation is multiplayer. Maybe it is single player, in which case only I am real, and you and Donald Trump are simply artifacts of the simulation.
Proof or it didn't happen.
Ah yes, the goold ol' : /dev/earth
# shred --flood
> American law doesn't require that Trump outsource his work overseas
In many industries, that is in fact the effect of US law. US labor and tax laws are such that the total cost to employ workers in the US is roughly 2.3Ã-- their take-home pay. So employees taking home $10/hour cost roughly $23/hour once you pay various federal, state and local taxes, unemployment, workers comp, etc etc. So of you have a widget that requires $10 of material and one hour labor @ $10/hour, production cost is about $33. $10 materials, $10 to employee, $13 taxes and compliance). Since it costs $33 to make under US law, obviously you can't wholesale it for any less than $33 production cost.
100 miles south, your competitor producing a nearly identical product has production in Mexico, where the cost is $10 material, $10 to the worker, and $5 taxes and compliance. Total production cost $25. This competitor can wholesale at $30 and have a 20% margin.
The person buying wholesale can pay $30 for the product made in northern Mexico, or at least $33 for the US-made one (which still leaves the US manufacturer zero profit). Which do you think the retailer will choose to buy? The less expensive one, obviously. The company with much higher tax and compliance costs goes out of business.
In most countries, business taxes and similar costs are based on the motivation to have business in their country. In the US, we have a significant interert group influencing policy based primarily on emotions, including envy, with no understanding of, or concern for, the economics or the results of the policies they support. "Fuck those companies" is this groups attitude, and the companies respond with "okay, we're not wanted here; we'll go where we're wanted".
You can see the same effect between US states. Many billions of dollars of businesses have moved from California to Texas due to the tax and regulation in California. Unemployment has gotten bad in California, while there are plenty of jobs in Texas.
The "brains in a jar" hypothesis or thought-experiment is very very very old. I seem to remember studying the writings of Descartes and Plato.
Spending money on this huh?! This does seem like "touch the face of God" -- what other societies desired this? Take your stuff with you!
oh well - they plenty of money to piss away. Maybe I'll go into the business of studying strange phenomenon and taking rich people's money to do it. My code name will be Fox Mulder.
So I'm going to assume for a second that these people "really" think this is a possibility, and that it's not just stupid PR crap. Seems to me the reason they believe this is that their lives really do feel like a simulation, because they are that disconnected from the typical Everyman/Everywoman existence that mere mortals have to live. That, and the fact that the whole line of thought is just an exercise in who can be the most self-aggrandizing. Trust me, if they do break out of the simulation, they'll wish they took the blue pill.
Since you phrased it as a statement, it must surely be so.
The electoral map is more specific. Trump has only one way to win the election by winning Florida (can go either way), Ohio (no Republican has ever won the presidency without this state), and Pennsylvania (last voted Republican in 1988). If he loses any one of these states, it's game over. Pennsylvania looks like its out of reach for Trump. The media floated Maine and the Western states as alternatives in the electoral college, but those are long shots in comparison to winning the trifecta.
And they're nuts. Humanity has a solid evolutionary record on this planet. Life might have originated elsewhere, but it became human here. If humanity exists elsewhere in the universe, it almost certainly originated here and was exported, either via alien influence, or some improbable human culture that developed the ability to travel between worlds without leaving any archaeological evidence. The only other option is convergent evolution - and to converge enough to be called human (say, able to interbreed?) is so outlandishly unlikely as to make the alternatives seem positively mundane in comparison.
Yeah, yeah. Battlestar. Whoosh. etc.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I am a scientist, and I am here to help. Please give me lots of money and I will spend it trying to solve this critical problem :)
Given the final vote totals, Sanders wouldn't have won even if the superdelegates had been eliminated. The only way he could have won is if the superdelegates overwhelmingly voted to give the nomination to him instead of Clinton, and thus denied the popular vote (she won both more primary votes, and more elected delegates, than Sanders).
Bwahahahaha, WTF are you smoking?
Reality. Have you ever tried it?
OTOH, he does pair programming with Satan. Though I think having one put in the features and the other putting in the bugs is not strictly Agile doctrine.
There's a rope for that.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
It is the point, because change for the sake of change is usually Really Bad.
Nader supporters were not voting for "change for the sake of change". They were specifically voting against the centrist policies of Bill Clinton (fiscal restraint, free trade, welfare reform, etc.). The got the the change they wanted, as the Democratic Party has mostly abandoned those policies.
Likewise, Buchanan supporters wanted the Republican Party to focus on the "culture war" of social conservatism. Those voters also got what they wanted.
Please note: The 3rd party voters got what THEY wanted, not what YOU wanted, and not necessarily what was good for the country.
10% of voters accelerated the destruction of the country. Thank you very much, fools.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
And here is the "Blame Bush" for explaining why Clinton is qualified, tying to justify it to a Libertarian who sees both Trump and Clinton as basically the same coin.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
When leaving the Holodeck, please remember your mobile emitter.
If leaving the matrix, remember the food taste better inside and that the plot gets lost easily.
If you're leaving a dream, remember the level you're in.
Don't forget you're afraid of the ocean, so don't sail off into the sunset.
Me? I'll eat the steak.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
Actually, it is the Government working in collusion with the two parties to rig the system.
Imagine every primary there were no "D" and no "R" after peoples names, and you got to vote for anyone you wanted. The Primary would be for choosing the top 2 candidates from the entire candidate pool. Tell me, by what legal means does the Government have in helping parties choose their candidate. When you can answer that, you'll understand that the system is rigged at the highest levels, and why candidates suck.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Well in the reality that is everyones other than yours she is clearly a psychopathic power crazed loon, a pathological liar, a clear security risk, already in the pockets of foreign powers, and a fucking out and out criminal that is currently under investigation for possible treason and would have already been in jail by now had she not also have had the Director of the FBI and the Attorney General in her pocket because they are (almost) as corrupt as her.
remove healthcare from jobs other places have that.
Sure, but that just pushes the problem back one level, which is the same argument that people had against the fundamental premises of intelligent design in the first place. (the arguments against how it was being used to covertly try and insert religion into science were also entirely valid, but that was an objection to ID's proposed integration into science classes rather than a flaw with its fundamental premises).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Well in the reality that is everyones other than yours she is clearly a psychopathic power crazed loon, a pathological liar, a clear security risk, already in the pockets of foreign powers, and a fucking out and out criminal that is currently under investigation for possible treason and would have already been in jail by now had she not also have had the Director of the FBI and the Attorney General in her pocket because they are (almost) as corrupt as her.
Don't you ever get tired repeating the right-wing echo chamber talking points?
Newsweek was indeed sold for a single dollar. A fact. A fact free opinion would be a statement about Trump along the lines of "would make a horrible president". It might prove true but he needs to be President first. And what makes Trump a horrible businessman? Four of his companies, out of many he has run, filed for bankruptcy over the past 20 years or so. A legal and prudent move when your business fails. I'm no Trump supporter, just stating fact based opinions.
He needed 60% because of the DNC "Super Delegates" hand picked by the DNC to support Hillary.
Bernie Sanders ran an outsider campaign against the status quo — and lost. As for the other guy, I don't even remember his name because his campaign didn't amount to anything. If blaming Hillary floats your boat, be my guest.
Funny how most of the slashdotters assume that we are being simulated. We could be just emergent properties of the simulation. The simulation could be just a scientific endeavour into quantum mechanics for example. We just happened to coalesce due to the math.
(Sigh, the preview doesn't show numbers in the list so be warned if there are double numbers)
There are 4 possibilities that I can see:
Breakage results in:
There's that saying "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." or "The simulation you know is worth more than the simulation you don't." After all, if this reality is a simulation maybe the next layer out is as well. It's turtles all the way up.
Don't you ever get tired of living in total denial and narrow-minded ignorance?
For example, people that bother to do even trivial levels of their own research can easily see Hillary is a criminal, but they are not necessarily supporters the right wing either, however that just wouldn't fit into your lazy and ridiculously over-simplistic worldview that is entirely fed to you by the media would it?
What other pearls of wisdom do these tech billionaires have for us poor benighted mortals, that they've gleaned while gazing into their navels in their Eames recliners?
Actually, a sim coming into the real world is trivial -- if the runners of the sim help. They just put you in a blank simulation and change the inputs to reflect 'real world' sensory data. Make a robot body or something. Maybe they'll have to project the sensory data down to a form you can perceive, or just put you in a blank room with a computer that can talk to the outside. The simulation simulating a real person is much harder...
Newsweek was indeed sold for a single dollar.
So what? I'm not the one harping about Newsweek.
A fact free opinion would be a statement about Trump along the lines of "would make a horrible president".
The way Trump runs his businesses and his campaign is great way to determined how he would his Administration. Both are horrible examples.
Four of his companies, out of many he has run, filed for bankruptcy over the past 20 years or so.
Trump lost a billion dollars on his 1995 tax return. Fortunately, it wasn't his money to lose. The banks and investors got soaked for those losses.
I'm no Trump supporter, just stating fact based opinions.
While ignoring other facts that don't support your opinion.
It's not that you're wrong; it's that there's no reason to think you might be right. Any sufficiently-creative person can make up a plausible unfalsifiable hypothesis. What's so special about yours?
Hmm...
Here's my idea for dealing with this stuff, since it looks like it might never go away. One of the properties of my idea is that we're going to stop hating L Ron, and start using him for inspiration. I know that's going to be a turnoff to some people, but bear with me.
We should give an assignment for all children in school, where they're required to make up a grand unfalsifiable hypothesis. Such things shouldn't just be something you blindly consume; you should make them, too. The world is just as much your ideosphere as anyone else's. And to make it more fun, after the assignment, have a group activity where the kids talk about everyone's entry, and vote on whose idea best optimizes some particular commercial or social goal. (e.g. How to make the most money, how to kill the most people, how to best retard academic progress, how to divert the most economic resources to building a cool monument, etc.)
Would this be legal in taxpayer-funded public schools? I think so (since it doesn't adovcate or disparage any particular religion), but I'm not sure (because, yes, it is pretty transparently intended to overall subvert mysticism).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
So, you'd rather support Stargate then Battlestar. Got it.
Intelligent Design is just a scheme conceived by radically religious nutjobs as a desperate attempt to legitimize and justify hanging on to outdated god concepts contrary to all the tangible evidence.
Even flat-earthers have an at least superficially more logical/consistent argument for their beleifs.
Given that, its hard to frame any kind of serious response to any argument that includes any reference to ID.
I have a thought, that if you live in a world complex enough that can give rise to self-replicating life and consciousness, then it's probably real enough. It's like being Turing complete...
Don't you ever get tired of living in total denial and narrow-minded ignorance?
Even as a Republican I never bought into the right-wing echo chamber.
For example [...]
There you go again with the right-wing echo chamber talking points.
American law doesn't require that Trump outsource his work overseas.
It doesn't require it but it strongly encourages it. Textiles are almost impossible to make in the US. I found one company that makes dress shirts in the US. They start at $120 per shirt, so that's a very small market.
Trump's idea is to remove those incentives for moving jobs overseas, and put in policies that strongly encourage companies to do their work here instead. This is needed to stop the trade deficits that are bleeding the country of jobs and resources.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
And here is the "Blame Bush" for explaining why Clinton is qualified, tying to justify it to a Libertarian who sees both Trump and Clinton as basically the same coin.
Uh, no. The Bush clan wanted Jeb to run for president. That didn't sit will with George W. and he ran for president first. Now Jeb is sidelined, perhaps permanently, from becoming president in the future. A real tragedy.
I believe that we will reach the point where we will technologically be able to transcribe our thoughts into reality and there will be no seams where we start and our technology ends. One potential outcome of this may be the ability to scan throughout time and scoop bits and pieces of it into our own thus rendering everything eternal.
... and it is us. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug ...
I think Clinton is typically flawed for washington senators, representatives and similarly powerful bureacratic positions.
I had to research her a lot this year and
1) Cinton's been the target of a propaganda war for close to 20 years. This would destroy most people.
2) The clinton foundation is very well run, has a much higher share of money that goes to help people than the american cancer society, has reasonable wages for its employees, and is highly rated by charity navigator.
3) Clinton's actions show she is willing to put the good of the party and the country ahead of her personal good.
4) Clinton's a patriot and even a bit of a nationalist.
5) Clinton's wonky, intelligent, and creative and open to feedback from staff. She is more of a cooperative than authoritarian leader but has the strength to make decisions and stick by them.
I think if you dig into her history on non conservative sites, you'll find the same things.
Personally, I thought she was unelectable but, you know... Trump.
But she'a a liar!
She consistently lies to the American People!!
So you're going to break out of the simulation and get into the real world. Best of luck to you, Neo. Problem is, once you're in the real world, you're right back to square one. Still only a 1 in a billion chance that it's actually real.
> There you go again with the right-wing echo chamber talking points.
Its you that is the stuck-needle my friend.
Go do some research into why hundreds of millions of $ are flowing into the Clinton Foundation from the Middle East, go look at Trey Gowdy's cross examinations of Clinton, Comey and Lynch. Go look at how Hillary is connected to them. Go look at who owns her.
Oh wait you're a Hillary supporter. What am I thinking? Even though the internet puts all the information is right under your nose you still aren;'t going to bother to get off your fat ass, inform yourself and do any actual fact checking, because you have the media to do your thinking for you so you can just stay on the couch and keep drinking the Hillary Kool-aid, and spout fact-free crap about echo chamber talking points. because that's the braindead American Way you've been sold and choose to follow because it means you don't have to actually do anything or actually use your brain.
I find it not extremely unlikely that the core units of intelligence are scattered across the universe to make new core units that interact with each other for the purposes of entertaining the whole. Everyone who ever was will be encoded in it to be entertained and entertainig to everyone else. Find something someone did funny? Copy the routines into yourself or some other quasi-being of your choosing. Spacetime only exists to keep everything from happening at the same place and time.
... ask scientists to help break us out of the simulation.
Break out to where? It's probably turtles all the way down.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
She lies maybe 25% of the time. That's bad, but Trump lies around 75% of the time.
OK, so some god or very, very advanced being or race is creating us and our perceived reality. That means that they want us to exist and exist inside this matrix as well. If we somehow could break the jail and get out and still exist wouldn't that risk retaliation for such as escape? Plainly said would we be pissing God off?
Lets say there is some code that allows some other reality to interface with ours. Lets say there are several realities with this sort of beholdeness to each other and add to varying degrees. None of them are any more or less a simulation to any other. You can't break out to a "higher" level, but you can break across. People have essentially built Portal cores in the real world. That is all "breaking out" amounts to at it's most simulation consistent. The real world cores are still running on processors that are indifferent to whether they are running programs that control servos in the real world, or a 3d shell inside a Portal game. The programs are different, but that just means the rules for operating servos are different. Brute forcing a break out may be possible. It all depends if a feedback loop can be established between the here and the not here.
There's no reason not to consider the possibility that any reality can open any other reality or even the same reality in eternity mode and access any point in any reality's spacetime with a pointer.
Go do some research into why hundreds of millions of $ are flowing into the Clinton Foundation from the Middle East, go look at Trey Gowdy's cross examinations of Clinton, Comey and Lynch. Go look at how Hillary is connected to them. Go look at who owns her.
These manufactured scandals have failed to indict Hillary on any criminal charges.
Oh wait you're a Hillary supporter. What am I thinking? Even though the internet puts all the information is right under your nose you still aren;'t going to bother to get off your fat ass, inform yourself and do any actual fact checking, because you have the media to do your thinking for you so you can just stay on the couch and keep drinking the Hillary Kool-aid, and spout fact-free crap about echo chamber talking points. because that's the braindead American Way you've been sold and choose to follow because it means you don't have to actually do anything or actually use your brain.
All I have to do is keep repeating that these are right-wing echo chamber talking points and wait for your head to explode.
Yeah, and you're the type of person who'd say that there are no connections when 10+ outlets suddenly all come out yesterday with exactly the same talking points about Pence and his non-2020 campaign. Or that 90% of beltway reporters either vote democrat or are registered democrats, or that 80% or so of reporters in general are democrats. Even when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. There might be right-wing talking points, but there sure is a democrat echo chamber.
Om, nomnomnom...
Trump's idea is to remove those incentives for moving jobs overseas, and put in policies that strongly encourage companies to do their work here instead.
Hillary has proposed the same thing. I trust her to appoint someone who will get the job done. Trump will be too busy putting his name on the White House.
Or that 90% of beltway reporters either vote democrat or are registered democrats, or that 80% or so of reporters in general are democrats.
Donald Trump made the assumption that Lester Holt, the NBC moderator for the first debate, was a Democrat. Holt is actually a registered Republican.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-calls-first-debate-moderator-a-democrat-records-show-otherwise/ar-BBwpmss
There might be right-wing talking points, but there sure is a democrat echo chamber.
What you see in the general media is a corporate echo chamber that pounces on anything and everything to drive up ratings. If Trump behaves himself after the next debate by not tweeting at 3AM in the morning, the media might go back to making up stuff about Hillary's health.
You seemed to be objectively bashing trump...
Well, yes, because:
All these things, and more, are verifiable fact, a matter of incontrovertible public record. And yet, despite years of trying, the Republicans lacking anything at all in the way of constructive alternatives to Hillary's plans, have tried to attack her for made up "offenses", and failed to make anything stick.
wow.
if the universe is a simulation THERE IS NO BREAKING OUT OF IT YOU CRACKPOT FUCKTARDS.
if you break the simulation, with "break" as in the "break key" over your right hand, as in "break process", as in a machine halt, you break everything, period. you break me, you break you, you break your billion dollars you narcissistic fucking assclown.
jesus i hate these rich little hitlers.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
She lies maybe 25% of the time. That's bad, but Trump lies around 75% of the time.
And this is the best the country could come up with for presidential candidates!
We are doomed!!
Donald Trump made the assumption that Lester Holt, the NBC moderator for the first debate, was a Democrat. Holt is actually a registered Republican.
And that has what do to do about the topic at hand? Besides you trying to shift things.
What you see in the general media is a corporate echo chamber that pounces on anything and everything to drive up ratings. If Trump behaves himself after the next debate by not tweeting at 3AM in the morning, the media might go back to making up stuff about Hillary's health.
No, what you see is the democrats having an active hand in the media. Or did you forget that the Obama administration was directly leaning on reporters and media organizations by denying them access, or that multiple media organizations(as shown by the DNC leaks), were publishing both DNC and Obama administration talking points as original reporting. In some cases going as far as to directly sending stories to the DNC for reviewing to ensure they comply with their viewpoint.
Om, nomnomnom...
I'm skeptical of the idea in general, but I can imagine at least three things the billionaire *might* be thinking that isn't completely, demonstrably stupid:
Stop right there, Everything about this is stupid and pointless. "Researching" something that has zero chance of ever being proven is basically fraud on the part of the researcher. Even if this alleged billionaire was serious and earnest about paying people to research this idea, taking the money of someone that foolish is effectively fraud. Anyone smart enough to actually look seriously into the idea should immediately see it for the nonsense that it is. It's effectively the a technology age version of "researching" whether heaven exists.
And that has what do to do about the topic at hand?
You're making the assumption that media is liberal because most people who worked in media are Democrats. A half-dozen corporations own the US media market, and corporations tend to be conservative organizations.
No, what you see is the democrats having an active hand in the media.
I see corporations with active hand in shaping the media. If it leads, it bleeds. Why do you think the media was so eager to cheer George W.'s war in Iraq?
Exponential growth sustained for a sufficient length of time—never more than a blink of the eye on an evolutionary time scale—is indistinguishable from the hyperbole event horizon.
Step right up.
Anyone can play.
Just strap on your Extrapolator 2000, and posit anything.
You can't be wrong.
Everyone's a winner, every time.[*]
[*] someconditionsmayapplymillennialsnotincludedgetyourstoday
unless (as another has pointed out) they aren't observing us at granularity that makes us relevant as individuals and therefore they aren't prepared to take notice of our/your attempts.
for instance the simulation could be an exercise in observing the formation of galaxies, or maybe galaxy flocking or something. maybe there are observable patterns in the formation and lifetime of a universe that are only observable from cluster-scale granularity.
maybe it's just an advanced form of lava lamp. everybody would have one in their home. people would stop by and remark ooh that's a gaseous one, very pretty isn't it, and the indisputable fact that it's very likely that there are simulated beings and civilizations somewhere inside of the thing is just a curio, one of the reasons to even have bought the thing to begin with. maybe children with a lot of time to spend indoors just peer into it looking for said life forms and civilizations, never really finding one but it's like looking for four-leaf clovers, you do it any way.
but i am seeing the real potential in these pursuits. if you can break the simulation then maybe you can hack the simulation.
somebody else noted that this research is more likely to be used to enslave people, to create the simulation to begin with. i guess, but that's a rather 180-degree approach.
more aligned with the stated intent and probably more likely given these are the sort of people driven and greedy enough to have billions of dollars at their disposal, i think they are probably looking for ways to hack the simulation and get anything they desire.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
All you have to do is die. End of simulation.
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
You must be using a different definition of contemplate than I am familiar with, because we already do contemplate such things. But to further address your question, I believe we are Turing complete, and there is a proof that such a thing can handle any operation.
The principle of intelligent design is the notion that we are intelligently designed. Period. Nothing more, and nothing less. Whether that intelligence was a civilization that predated us in this universe, an omnipotent god, or some other kind of entity that we have not even imagined yet is immaterial. I won't pretend that ID is not often used by religious people to try and crowbar their beliefs into science, but ID, at its core, is simply the premise that we were intelligently designed. Its biggest failing is that it fails to account for the origin of the designer, but then that is not what it was ever intended to do anyways. My point is that if it is somehow probable that the universe is a simulation, then it can be no less probable that we are the product of intelligent design... and if we refuse to acknowledge intelligent design as likely on the basis that we can find no evidence for it, we must similarly reject the notion that the universe is just a simulation, and accept the reality of what we appear to experience, since those experiences are what leaves science to conclude that we are not the product of intelligent design in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>> These manufactured scandals...
>> All I have to do is keep repeating that these are right-wing echo chamber talking points and wait for your head to explode.
Thanks for proving you really are nothing more than a stuck needle. The really sad thing is that Its exactly the Democrat brainwashing propaganda, not even your own thoughts let alone any solid counter arguments that you're regurgitating. Just repeated braidead generalisms and canned sound bites.
just remembered that i've written some short fiction on this exact topic.
http://eyenot.livejournal.com/...
#56 in this one also mentions slugs in the next-higher level of reality:
http://eyenot.livejournal.com/...
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Unless you live in a swing state, "protest votes" are the only way to effect any change. Voting for either major party in a non-swing state neither changes who wins the election nor sends any kind of feedback inducing any party to change. You're just voting for business as usual, whatever that should happen to be.
Voting for a third party doesn't influence who wins the election either, but it influences the statistics that the major parties use to target their platforms to capture those lost votes.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The side affect of verifying we actually exist in a simulation, is to accept the fact that something created and is controlling the simulation. Therefore, religious people may be right in saying there is a god.
>> The principle of intelligent design is the notion that we are intelligently designed. Period.
Nope. Leaders of the movement have said the designer is the Christian God.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki...
>> My point is that if it is somehow probable that the universe is a simulation, then it can be no less probable that we are the product of intelligent design...
Nope the system may be the product of intelligent design, but we are a product of the system. With the simulation concept, at best you could claim we are indirectly the product of ID.
> and if we refuse to acknowledge intelligent design as likely on the basis that we can find no evidence for it, we must similarly reject the notion that the universe is just a simulation...
If there is no evidence for it, then I totally agree. Religion, ID and the simulation hypothesis all remind me of the old maps that label the most remote lands/seas with "dragons be here" rather than have the cartographer admit he simply has no data.
Thanks for proving you really are nothing more than a stuck needle.
The purpose of Slashdot is to keep me amused at work while I wait for a script to finish running. Thank you for your participation!
Thank goodness Gandhi was dealt into this session as just a Great Prophet instead of being the head of a Civilization....
If being a liar was an automatic disqualification, then nobody would ever be in office.
Personally, I dislike most politicians because all of them are where they are because they pandered and lied in order to get into office.
That said, lying is not necessarily bad. It is actually pretty much human nature to lie.
I expect politicians to lie so there has to be other measures by which we evaluate potential leaders.
Personally, I think that a good measure of a person is how they treat the people that they don't like. By this measure, I think that Hillary is a much better person than Donald Trump.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I've at times been taken with the idea that the universe is a video game and that we are playing it. In which case if you break out it might turn out to be time for dinner, or bed, or something analogous.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, since it's the Ds and Rs running the government, how exactly do they collude with themselves? Even the unelected bureaucracy mostly get (and hold) their positions through loyalty to the parties.
I agree that doing away with government supported party primaries would help considerably, a non-instant single-stage runoff if you will, but so long as it's still first-past-the-post, it doesn't fundamentally change the situation - If you have four major candidates, A, B, C, and D all vying for the primary, then if A and B both appeal to roughly the same majority, they risk splitting the vote and having only only C and D make it on the ballot.
It's a good first step though. Accompany (or follow) the change with a switch to instant runoff voting in the primary, where the rules are at least theoretically much easier to change, and the two who make it to the final ballot will reliably be those with the greatest public acceptance.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Good to see where your priorities are. I hope you will also be too lazy/unconcerned to actually vote.
Nope. I'd rather support science than fantasy.
That the Stargate mythology embraced a fantasy that was at least passingly consistent with observed reality was, for me, a more interesting literary choice, but had minimal impact on the quality of the story.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Trump's idea is to remove those incentives for moving jobs overseas, and put in policies that strongly encourage companies to do their work here instead.
Hillary has proposed the same thing. I trust her to appoint someone who will get the job done. Trump will be too busy putting his name on the White House.
Bullshit. She's a fucking Globalist writ large. She will continue proxy wars and bombing in the Middle East, importing H1-Bs to replace Americans who will train them, open the borders for anyone who wants to come, and encourage any job to move overseas and jack up tax rates on corporations (currently the highest in the world) to even higher levels. She loves TPP (oh - she's she denied it when Bernie opposed it, but will either "change her opinion" or just come up with something worse with a new name), she supports TPIP, she loves NAFTA and wants it expanded, etc., etc.
I don't trust her for shit. She works for Wall Street, the banks, foreign nationals and multinational corporations (all of whom she has cozy relationships with). Disaster.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I hope you will also be too lazy/unconcerned to actually vote.
I've voted in every election since I turned 18-years-old in 1987. I'll have my ballot in the mail next week. ;)
I don't trust Trump for shit. He works for Wall Street, the banks, foreign nationals and multinational corporations (all of whom she has cozy relationships with). Disaster.
FTFY
If it is a simulation, the best way to get out of it without committing suicide is to learn everything about it so you can find out how to manipulate it such that you can leave while maintaining your own existence. Of course, since the reality we'd be going into is most likely another simulation of presumably greater complexity, we would then have to learn everything we could about that one so we could then leave that one safely and enter it's progenitor reality.
In a situation like that, we'd likely have so many layers of reality/simulation to learn and overcome, and of increasing complexity, you can rest assured that the final universe will have gotten tired of playing sims and turned off their computer long before we reached them.
Speaking of which, does anyone know how many times they've reloaded save game?
Ctrl-Alt-Del = The big bang
Only if you presume that we are the equivalent of an unintended side effect of the simulation, and not simply an intended product of its design. We would be, in effect, the result of a software bug.
This may very well be entirely true, but we have no basis to assume as much.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If somebody is controlling the computer simulation, and we all play the lottery, and dream of what we could do with all that money, the devil controlling the simulation must either rig the lottery machine, or anticipate what all of us may do with the winnings. Both are unfeasibly hard to do undetectably. [ This advice brought to you in association with... ]
John_Chalisque
You seem to have an unspoken premise that "social responsibility" requires that all businesses must operate completely within the home town (county? state? country?) of the person who founded the business.
That is of course at odds with what most people would call "social responsibility" - if I grow rice for consumers in Phoenix, most people would say the responsible thing to do would be to grow it in a wet place (Louisiana), package it somewhere, then sell it in Arizona. Insisting that rice sold in Arizona must be produced by wasting huge amounts of water creating swamps in Arizona seems rather silly, and quite IRRESPONSIBLE.
If I grew up in Montana and I want to have a business developing software used by ranchers and farmers, why must I have the business in Montana? Why not have the business where the programmers are, Denver, Austin, Dallas, or the Bay area? It seems quite silly to ask developers to move to Montana.
Let's put that aside and pretend for a moment that "social responsibility" DID require that anyone who wants to run a business must do so in their home town. In this thread we're talking about how T&C costs (taxes and compliance) influence where companies put their various operations. Are you under the impression that California's very high T&C are CAPITALISM? Really? Huge government fees are capitalism? Might want to refer back to fourth grade social studies.
Reminds me of the plotline of Star Ocean 3...
> He failed to get the votes.
Yea, that's not really disputed. The issue at hand does involve WHY, however, and the supposedly-neutral DNC actively strategizing against him is literally what everyone is complaining about with "establishment" candidates this year.
It's a fact that the DNC CFO was in emails trying to get play on Sanders' religious status ("My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.").
It's a fact that Schlutz shat all over him in emails that clearly showed her allegiance against him, and was promptly promoted into the Hillary campaign as soon as she resigned (arguably, she was already part of it, yukyuk yuk!).
It's a fact that Hillary's lawyer emails the DNC with advice that sounds like they just coordinate like, all the time, against Sanders.
It definitely proved what everyone on both sides suspects- the amount of power in these closed groups is large, and their fairness (at least on the Democrat side) is just a farce. If Trump didn't have huge support on the right, he would have been erased as well.
So no, Sanders couldn't get all the votes. But it is clear he was never playing by the same rules as Hillary, and that groups that should have helped him or stayed neutral instead did the opposite.
I get that you are going to vote for Hillary, and it is in your best emotional interest to downplay the fact that everyone around her always seems to be up to some shady shit. But there's really not much room on this topic: the emails show a lot of bullshit, and they are presumably just the tip of the iceberg, the only part we got to see due to the actions of some hacker. It doesn't take much creativity to extrapolate from what we do have. This was a rigged game. It was unethical at the very least, and I wouldn't be surprised if something criminal popped up at some point, either.
That is true, so long as a sufficiently small percentage of the population does so. Get a major percentage doing so though, say for instance enough to send a message actually likely to incite change, and things aren't quite so clear cut.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The entire premise of most religions and an afterlife would make sense in a simulation where those who pass the test arise in the real world or a new simulation.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
If that's what they're doing...
Kind of gives the term new meaning.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
And stupid these people are.
First, there is no way to quantify the probability that we are in a simulation. Sure, it is a valid scenario, bit the "estimates' given are about as valid as the "proofs" used to "show" that God exists: They are utterly disconnected from observable facts. All base-date for the "estimates" is made up and/or presented as "obvious".
And second, if we live indeed in a simulation, why do they think there even is a possibility to "break out"? There is no factual basis for that assumption either. Sounds like some people have mistaken "The Matrix" or a documentary.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...then all of his billions are just simulated, and the scientist isn't getting paid in anything real.
> Only if you presume that we are the equivalent of an unintended side effect of the simulation,
I don't think I've ever used the word unintended, but I think its self evident that if we are in a simulation, then we probably aren't a directly intended product. If the creator had simply wanted one or more humans, he'd just build them directly, not create a whole system that included multiple random factors that can each significantly affect our development, such that what would ultimately be created would only have a chance that it would be what we currently are.
If this is a simulation, then it was clearly created more as an experiment to find out what would happen, not just as a factory to mass produce humans.
Excuse me for asking but are you religious? Your arguments seem to keep wanting to elevate the importance of humans to being the "centre" or "main purpose" of everything, rather than just being another life form on the planet (i.e. one attribute or component of our reality, no more or less important than any other). In my experience that "self-importance" seems to be somehow self-evident only amongst practitioners of any of the 3 Abrahamic faiths.
Yes. In effect, Bernie actually needed the superdelegates more than Hillary did to win. Of course, he wasn't going to get them, even though he tried to make a case for it, because they tend to vote for whoever has the majority of the popular vote, and that was Hillary.
One can argue whether the election was skewed against him, but if so, it was more due to DNC scheming than superdelegates, which were never actually a factor, except, I guess, psychologically for some people.
Well I did basically call it a creation myth in my post. At least my way there's no artificial morality written by a corrupt clergy who only wants to control the people and take all the wealth.
The nice thing about my way of putting it though is that it doesn't just explain everything in religion but everything in science as well. The quantum substructure of the universe -- why render an invisible level of detail. All the weird stuff in quantum theory. Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead because it's not rendered yet in the simulation. Electrons are just probability waves because their exact location has no macroscopic effect. Double slit photon experiment -- just render the aggregate result.
He explains it right now on youtube.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He's one of the best nuts and bolts teachers for those looking for more of a facts based analysis of the Bible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Tell those billionaires to use their wealth for the good of all. There's only one escape from death and that's only for a select few in a narrow time frame. Everybody else gets to die. Quit worrying over it, pay attention to how you live....
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Clinton basically checks the checkboxes for what you'd want a President to have done. But yes, she wasn't good at those jobs.
I'm not sure if I would prefer a bad plumber to someone who has never done any plumbing to work on my pipes. It may be academic, depending if the damage goes over a certain threshold.
Although, at this point, I think people are simply going to vote for which of the two of them is less likely to start a nuclear war, which unfortunately is probably Hillary. God have mercy on us all.
At one point I thought that, even though I disagree with the Libertarian Party on a lot of specifics, they'd be a safe protest vote, but after Johnson can't even figure out what Aleppo is on live TV, I don't think I could vote for him with a straight face. Foreign affairs is far too important for him to not have that shit on the tip of his tongue with a ready answer. He doesn't get a pass on that. It was a mistake, but a mistake he would not have made if he'd been thinking about it seriously.
There really is no difference. If the religious concept of God is the creator of the universe, then by their definition, the universe, is an artificial construct created by an intelligent mind for some purpose. In other words, it is a created simulation. Labelling it with words like computer and programming is just a technicality of our language. Obviously it is "programmed" to run on some "platform". Terminology really isn't that relevant. Even if it not a programming language or computer as we (currently) define them, the concept is still right.
Bernie has been an outsider the entire time. It didn't require anything untoward for a slate of superdelegates to be generated to favor Hillary because Sanders was absent for those decisions. Hillary might have been the only one playing the game, but Sanders should have known the score going in. And I think he did, he never expected to even deal with that, he was probably as surprised as everyone else was that he had gotten that much support where superdelegates were even a factor.
You can determine how smart and able to recognize facts somebody actually is that way. The "Jesus!"-freaks are not really doing well in that area in the first place.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I get that you are going to vote for Hillary, and it is in your best emotional interest to downplay the fact that everyone around her always seems to be up to some shady shit.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm "emotional" and "downplay" about Hillary's shit. If you look at the electoral college, Trump's chance of winning the election is slim to none. He must win Florida (can flip either way), Ohio (no Republican has ever won the presidency without this state), and Pennsylvania (last went Republican in 1988). If one of these states go to Hillary (Pennsylvania is likely), Trump becomes the world's biggest loser. With Trump being an equal opportunity offender, he needs a miracle to win (assuming that he haven't offended God already).
42 enough said...
Computational theory of mind.... so silly! The things you can get a billionaire to invest in when they operate on a foundation of unwarranted assumptions.
... he's abusing his own fame to push his own unfounded beliefs. I wish he wouldn't try and quantify it by saying there's a very high probability we're in a simulation, a very low probability we're not. As a person in a scientific / engineering industry there's a chance he'll get people believing he knows what he's talking about. Especially people who distrust religion and want to believe that people in the scientific / technology fields are credible
He can't justify those numbers in any way
Being smart about something has no relation to being smart about everything, as we've seen with inventors, leaders and thinkers of the past that had beliefs outside their fields that are seen as outrageous today.
His argument... there are some beings that have humungous computing resources (why?how?assuming murphy's law extends forever?) that have been simulating what (a few generations of people? several billions of years of the whole universe? and why?). There are so many assumptions, it's ridiculous.
Maybe the tap water got somehow tainted with hallucinogens?
It not like that there are some strange little tit bits that'll support the simulation thesis, but overall it doesn't add up at all.
http://wavewatching.net/2012/0...
"... currently under investigation for possible treason"
If you believe in an objective reality, this is statement that can actually be very easily verified. I suggest you look into it.
If we are in a simulation, then who said that the factors are random? They might appear random to us, but for all we know, that is also an intended aspect of the simulation, assuming that we are in one.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The problem is that ultimately, Mexicans make cheaper textiles because they accept a lower standard of living. The only way to combat that directly is artificially making foreign products more expensive. Which is to say, trade protectionism.
Yes, there are definitely improvements to be made in the tax code and in the red tape, but the bottom line is that it's going to be cheaper to make these items elsewhere. The only thing keeping that industry here was that they did not have skilled workers and the investment to do so. The high price of US labor over the past decades has ensured that industry was able to deal with that overhead cost and still make a profit. You'll have to do something punitive to keep US companies from using overseas labor, and I foresee that blowing up in our face.
The US, for better or worse, is permanently out of the textile business and many other businesses which used to support a great deal of workers, or at least until something fundamental changes. We're better off trying to compete in new areas where the money hasn't already been spent to transfer operations overseas.
These pseudo-"explanations" are a staple of religious (and some other) propaganda. It works by making you accept and "understand" the steps and then piling complexity on top of that, so many people do not notice that the steps are founded on nothing. Hence they have a complex explanation that they cannot debunk and that looks reasonable in all parts they can see, but that actually is a complete fabrication. Many then think they have seen enough and the fabrication must obviously be valid. It plays on human mental limitations and vanity that makes them overestimate their own level of understanding. And it works very well on many people so it gets used time and again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But can you explain why the exact same reasoning cannot be utilized to just as readily dispute the likelihood of us living in a simulation?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sure.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/new...
Wouldn't the same arguments being used to posit that we are living in a simulation also apply to those who are supposedly running the simulation? Just how many layers of simulation are there? Beliefs of this sort just fuel nihilism. It should be disposed off in the great dumpster of useless thoughts.
-Bob-
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the heavens.
Who else read that in Lorne Greene's voice?
Ah, but it was Patrick Macnee who gave that opening credits introduction, not Lorne Greene.
Patrick was the voice of the Imperious Leader and Count Iblis (in two episodes).
Occams razor.
The fact that she had to enlist the DNC to help get her election rigged enough to beat Bernie isn't much better (it is actually worse) than Trump beating 16
That's not a fact, that's an opinion. And my opinion in response is that most Americans aren't interested in having a socialist.. sorry, a "Democratic Socialist" as a President. The United States is not quite THAT liberal.
Uh, no. The Bush clan wanted Jeb to run for president. That didn't sit will with George W. and he ran for president first. Now Jeb is sidelined, perhaps permanently, from becoming president in the future. A real tragedy.
George W. was always the more popular choice for President. I think Jeb was more thoughtful and articulate, but W knew how to court and -motivate- the powerful evangelical side as well as the business side. Jeb wasn't quite as good at the motivate and inspire thing.
That is the only explanation to the current presidential election!
The people I know who are most disturbed by the simulation concept are the ones who most claim to believe in Jesus. And they get really pissed when I ask them how it's any different from their creation myth. Fireworks really start when I explain the simulation was developed over 6 phases by a lead developer with the intials G.O.D. and Eden was just the sandbox where they tested the "human" code. Of course, the flood was a major content patch when the simulation exited beta.
Actually, the flood was a fat fingering mistake. You see, one of the developers was just trying to debug the simulation by running God's Debugger by using gdb --reset. The problem was, that was the command to reset God's Database (gdb), not God's Debugger (gdbug).
The developer's name was Lucifer some such. Apparently as punishment he was relocated to the basement and is only allowed to write accounting scripts in visual basic.
~X~
They're politicians, of course they're dishonest. We should count ourselves lucky when we get an option that's not outright criminal. That doesn't change the fact that one of two people is going to hold the single most powerful office in the country, and by abstaining from voting between them, you are de-facto endorsing the choice of the idiot majority.
Is it victim blaming? Sure - but in this instance the victim absolutely has a choice. Three of them actually. And they can absolutely be blamed for voting "greater evil" or "I don't give a F$#@!", which are the only alternatives to the lesser evil. By the time election day has arrived it's already far to late to have any other effect.
And the winner is hardly getting paid to support you. They're paid to fill an office, which on paper means they're supposed to *represent* you, which is not the same thing at all. But in reality most of their pay comes as bribery (excuse me, "lobbying") which you have no control over. The only way they get any pay at all related to you is if you personally contribute to their campaign fund, or your vote helped swing a third party over the threshold to receive public funding.
As for the "theocratic mindset", I agree completely. But to lose the mindset, we must first lose the theocracy that has a political chokehold over our lives. Sitting back and giving the greater evil control over the country because you couldn't stomach voting against them doesn't help that cause. Getting out there early in the election cycle, and even *between* elections, publicly pressuring officials, building public support for alternatives, etc... THAT is where the battle is fought. By the time election day comes around, if there's not a decent candidate on the field with a realistic chance of winning, all that's left to decide is how badly we lose.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
My friends live here.
Investigating Comey != Investigating Hillary
BTW Comey is a Republican.
I am not disputing the claims of religion here, I am disputing the argumentation techniques used to convince people. The argumentation techniques commonly used these days to claim us living in a simulation is "likely" are pretty similar, if less refined and more dependent on mysticism. Religion had, after all, millennia to refine its propaganda-techniques and is a huge wealth and power-concentrator, so it does attract competent marketing people.
When it comes down to it, strongly believing we live in a simulation is just as stupid as strongly believing the usual religious claims and the arguments given by the simulation-proponents are not any better.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If that scenario includes running the simulation you just broke out from - if uou can hop in and out- at keast you are a layer further out the rabbit hole
unfinished: (adj.)
People stupidly vote for who they think is going to win, rather than who they actually want, like it's some kind of goddamn horse race and all that matters is "picking a winner", rather than making the winner. If it weren't for the superdelegates predetermining that Clinton was going to win, chances are Bernie would've seen a much better popular vote too.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If we're in a game then Trump is the PLAYER CHARACTER -- the avatar of a petulant, spoiled brat whose uber-world billionaire father is paying developers to create our simulated world, just so that his son can enjoy bullying, insulting, etc.
Musk &co. Please hurry and break us out of this computer game before the next patch, when developers who must be desperate to keep the abusive, immature punk happy promise to let him fire nuclear weapons.
I'm glad to see money thrown at philosophical problems but virtually every person who has ever studied this problem in a rigorous and intellectually honest way has concluded that it is impossible to prove whether or not we are in a simulation. It is also impossible to conclude how such a system might work even if we are in it. How can anybody propose a theory of how we might exit a simulation about which we know nothing?
There is no difference in terms of evidence between the "brains in a vat" theory and the "evil demon theory (that reality is the manipulation of the senses by a demon) because if our senses cannot be trusted then we cannot know anything. This is what Cogito Ergo Sum is about, but I would argue that even that goes too far. The only thing that can truly be proven is that something exists which produces something that looks like my consciousness. Unfortunately there isn't much space between accepting that and what you get if you allow a provisional acceptence of sense data in. In order to seriously consider what we might do to exit a simulation we have to find a consistent set of rules to follow about logic and evidence which doesn't depend on sense data Somebody is going to say "mathematics!" at this point but don't forget that mathematics is an arbitrary system which we developed. Our sense data has told us that this system has descriptive predictive power. If sense data goes away then we can no longer make that assumption.
I have no problem with people getting a budget to play around with these ideas. I would however bet everything I owned that they don't get anywhere (and no I will not give you a prize for noticing why that would be a really good deal for me).
Arguments for the sim hypothesis are always Polynomial or Geometric. Our reality is massively and multiply re-entrant ... complexity of reality is combinatorial. Limit as entity count approaches VERY VERY LARGE .... ==> 0.
And, in fact, if the sim ONLY emulated physics being "looked at" to cut down the combinatorial explosion effects, it would in fact make determination/breakout of the sim that much easier. The anomalies between "looked at" and statistically indeterminate sets of envents would continuously widen, eventually reaching a measurable displacement that would be noticed.
Bottom line ... while not having any bona-fides but my math intuition, I''m really quite confident the arguments for reality being simulated are grotesquely in error.
-- TWZ
-- TWZ
> That's an interesting point, and a clear example, thanks.
> The next problem though
I sure appreciate such a gracious comment from someone who seems to perhaps disagree with me a bit. Civility of discourse is quite pleasant. I wish you were logged in, so I had a name to associate with your pleasant conversation.
Well earlier I swore my head off because that's just what I'm apt to do given free reign of expression, and mostly because I was pissed at the utter stupidity of the suggestion that there is somehow a way to 'break out of' your own entire universe that created you.
However, I've spent some time thinking about it and hmm maybe it's not so stupid.
If you look back in the comments you'll find someone who surmised that the actual goal of the billionaire(s) funding this "research" is not to break out but to create a simulated environment in the first place for the purpose of enslaving people.
That's kind of inspiring to look at things from a different angle. And personally lately I've been considering this "simulated universe" thing as an alternative form of religion. I'm normally hovering somewhere around atheist/mythological myself, and so something like this nestles perfectly in between both of those. I find it entertaining to talk and think about.
But one of my first thoughts about this when was it... last year, when this theory first hit the news? Was that the most useful application of knowledge along this line of inquiry is towards hacking reality itself.
If it's a simulation, that means you can find a way to overload its stack and include things in the set of its Turing input to instruct it to fill its virtual memory with, meaning you can control the laws of physics if you want to. Not a bad incentive.
It occurred to me as I went on railing about this thing that the intent of the billionaire(s) may not be to "break out" but to do exactly that.
If anybody's interested in organising a religion around this thing keep me in touch, I'd love to submit some things influenced by an early childhood and adolescence spent studying world religions and philosophies. I'm also interested in the hacking side of it as well, and maybe those two categories are actually associated.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
You're making the assumption that media is liberal because most people who worked in media are Democrats. A half-dozen corporations own the US media market, and corporations tend to be conservative organizations.
I'm not making an assumption. There's numerous studies, reports, personal polling and so on that show that the media is *democrat* not liberal. If it was liberal, most people wouldn't have a problem with it. The trust of the press wouldn't be under 20%(in some cases under 10%) and declining. A liberal press doesn't push anti-liberal ideas, it doesn't push democrat party talking points, and it doesn't push regressive ideas that belong in the 1950's or earlier as liberal enlightening ideas.
I see corporations with active hand in shaping the media. If it leads, it bleeds. Why do you think the media was so eager to cheer George W.'s war in Iraq?
Really? I guess that's why they spent 7.5 years doing nothing but complaining about it and parading every single coffin that came back, despite that more soldiers died under Obama's government then under Bush's. Or why various media organizations have teams dedicated to attacking only one political organization, in some cases only single candidates despite having national reach.
Om, nomnomnom...
Always good to see a fellow 'believer'.
*does the hand signal /?\*
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Another interesting thing. There are arguments that we should not be researching this at all, because it might upset the scientific minds that simulated our reality to begin with. That assumes that those minds are studying this simulated universe with a granularity able to perceive our individual actions.
Well, assumptions in this case carry very close to equal weight so let's run with this one.
So, we can also assume that it could be harmful to research this? That means we can green-light a doctrinal tenet of our simulation-religion that says it's perfectly okay for a person to simply hear some information regarding the universe being a simulation, and begin spouting off about it as I have been doing, without reading any further. That makes every new member of this 'religion' a perfect expert on the subject so long as they have been given a passing acquaintance with the subject matter.
Which is great, because that tenet creates a demand for a minimal, bullet-list style, outline of what the subject matter entails. Any fellow acolytes want to give this a shot?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Precisely. If it were Johnson-R and Trump-L, the candidates would have entirely different polling numbers even if everything else about them were identical to today.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Since duopoly is inherent in First Past The Post voting, why do you then also believe that voting third party will break the duopoly?
Because Gary Johnson supports ranked voting (instead of FPTP) and majority voting (instead of the electoral college).
At least he might have a platform to start the conversation. The major party candidates won't.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
No business man with multiple ventures wins all the time. Losing 4 times in 20 years is not bad at all. Rockefeller went bankrupt several times. Clearly you don't know anything about what makes a good business man. They have all had failures and triumphs, but they didn't give up and that is what Trump has done. Meanwhile Obama has failed at every single agenda item in 8 years. Not a single thing could be considered a success and Hillary has accomplished absolute zero.
List their successes I bet you can't. Don't say Obamacare cause it's literally crashing and burning. It's not reduced costs and its a huge failure, just as Bill Clinton who said so.
Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.
I bet it's the same damn billionaires who fear A.I. -- These guys are way too deep in tech, they believe the movie The Matrix. Perhaps it was this simulation concept that inspired the movie... Course both directors of The Matrix have transitioned into women so that makes a lot sense. Women who were into Kung Fu, Anime, Comics, and Sci-Fi. Yep it's possible I guess. Women trapped both in a male body but they are really little boys who never became men. Oof, brain popper that one.
It tastes like steak to me...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Sure... but I think that's a bit of a hand-waving argument when we don't know a thing about what is outside of the allegedly simulated system.
I would further suggest that if we are an intended byproduct of the simulation, the so-called assorted random factors that led to our origins may have easily been the easiest method available at the time to have actually created us. In the same way that it is often easier to design a full blown physics simulation system for a 3d game and let the physics engine take care of the details of object interaction instead of trying to code all of that directly into the game logic, even if the latter may appear more efficient for certain limited behaviors.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'll just point out that you could have a candidate that tells the truth 100% of the time, and half the nation would still think he/she was a liar, because his/her truths wouldn't fit their worldview.
Most people don't have a complete understanding of how the world works, but they are unaware of the limits of their understanding, and when contradicted their first impulse is often to suspect the honesty of the person who contradicted them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Wow. You're serious.
Okay...
1) ALL politicians lie to the american people. And it's not their fault. It's the voter's fault.
Almost all politicians lie 25% to 33% of the time.
A majority of these are lies of omission (about 66% to 75%).
But about a quarter to a third of their lies are bald faced flat out howlers.
2) Various fact checking sites show that Clinton lies a little less than other politicians on average. Probably not because she's noble but because she knows everything she says will be fact checked. Most of her lies are unprovable, "I can't recall" or lies of omission.
3) Trump lies (provably) over 70% of the time. And he lacks the cleverness to lie by omission. Most of his lies are bald faced howlers. When called on his lies he a) attacks the interviewer (and he's mostly retreated to the safety of sean hannity now to avoid this) b) immediately covers the lie with several other lies, or c) changes the subject. If lying is important to you- Trump verifiably lies 2-3 times more than Clinton.
4) In the debate, Trump lied 34 times- Clinton lied 4 times. I think two of her lies were kinda weak. In any case, trump lied almost an order of magnitude more than Trump.
5) And the entire point of the Debate was to set Pence up to either a) agree that trump lied or b) provide a lovely attack ad which shows Pence lying AND also reminds the public of Trump's lies, insults, and word salads. I WANT a president who is clever enough to box an opponent in with lateral thinking like that. I don't want a president who can be baited with a tweet or set preening with a lame complement by a hostile foreign leader.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So what if our universe (and all the other universes in the multiverse) are just analog simulations? Our 3D universe + time is just a hyper sphere. If the Meta verse is 5 dimensions or more, then just as an infinitely large 2D space can be folded into a finite 3D space, then they could take even our (infinitely?) large universe and put it into a "small" 5D object. So storage wouldn't be a problem.
Imagine the beings in this 5D universe. Say they wanted to create some intelligent entities to converse to. They could create universes like ours and, because they have an extra dimension, could "reach in" and alter anything they wanted just like we can change anything on a piece of paper. Also, if time to them is just another dimension, perhaps they could "scroll" through it and alter events (or at least view) events at any time. All they would have to do is set up the laws of physics (ok ok) in the simulation and (maybe) it would be easy for them to generate an infinite 3D space there because to them an infinitely large 3D verse would be just a point.
(Actually it seems like we are NOT living in a digital simulation because it seems like there is a huge amount of wasted space. Look at the heavens and the billions of light years of apparently uncrowded perhaps uninhabited space. Unless they truly have infinite resources, it seems like a huge waste regardless of what they are trying to create (intelligence? Pretty starscapes?).
Unless you live in a swing state, "protest votes" are the only way to effect any change.
Can you point to any historical examples of protests votes effecting any change? I'm genuinely interested.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"The problem is that ultimately, Mexicans make cheaper textiles because they accept a lower standard of living."
No, because the wage part of making an item of clothing is a small fraction of the overall cost, typically 1$
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
The reason is quite logical: the "real" players have also suspected they live in a simulation. After trying to get in control of their simulation and failing, they decided to make their own simulation and see how their simulator life would try to solve the riddle.
They are prodding us towards the answers or guesses they have made themselves. In antique times they might have been the famous philosophers like Plato, telling us we cannot see the real world.
A somewhat more worrying possibility is that they run this simulation to find a solution to their environmental destruction. Maybe they are as helpless to guide their whole population to act responsibly to save their home planet, and they search for new ways to control or manipulate themselves to do it.
Totally not true. I saw it happen on Star Trek.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Logically if this is a simmulation then one would guess that the players controlled by external overlords would be the most powerful sims.
You are assuming that the simulation is multiplayer. Maybe it is single player, in which case only I am real, and you and Donald Trump are simply artifacts of the simulation.
You are assuming there are any players. Perhaps it's just a lab experiment simulation run in fast-forwards to see how long it takes for clouds of helium to realise they are in a simulation.
Maybe plenty other simulations are running at the same time with the laws of physics tuned differently and that the real universe (if it is real) is so very different from what we could ever imagine.
I find it hysterical that people believe in chemtrails in the first place...
well if you're the only person in the universe, then you are literally the centre of the universe and you're STILL wasting time on Slashdot. Way to go.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That actually could be an awesome premise to a science fiction story
Or just read Neuromancer for a non-human equivalent.
Fuck it, just read Neuromancer anyway. It's still some of the finest writing available on the planet.
I'm starting to think that Reagan would be too far to the left to be welcomed in the Republican Party now. Nixon is definitely out with that clean air policy and an attempt to deal with healthcare that would have been to the left of what Obama managed to do.
Trump's idea won't work. It might have some short term effect, but that's the best case.
Cut taxes. Labour becomes cheaper in the US, but still not as cheap as Mexico or China or India or any number of other places. On top of that, due to lower tax income infrastructure starts to be neglected. Education suffers, people's health suffers. The things that make the US attractive despite the higher wages start to go away. And the consumers in the US can't afford high margin products anyway, because of their low wages.
At the same time, other countries are building up their infrastructure, their education and their healthcare.
What the US needs is not a race to the bottom, it needs quality jobs and better education. You can't go back to the 1950s, when US manufacturing benefited from the rest of the world still recovering from WW2. You can either compete with China to set up the lowest cost sweatshop, or you can concentrate on high end manufacturing and service jobs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm not so keen on Princes and Kings so think of it something other than a tragedy.
That another Clinton is having a go is a similar aristocracy problem to a second Bush, but at least she (and just about everyone in both parties) is better than that useless vacationing little Prince who thought he was God's own representative and that anything could be done in the name of fighting evil. We can thank God that he was too lazy to do as much damage as a more active deluded person could do, but even then he made a mess.
Maybe, but who has done those jobs well this side of the Reagan administration?
He's proved it folks!
He does live in a totally different reality to the rest of us!
You win JustNiz - pity your reality is so shitty though.
See "washington senators, representatives and similarly powerful bureacratic positions" for details.
Everyone after Carter has had to be "too good to be true" ever since he lost due to actually giving people bad news. A lot of people would love to be working instead of unemployed today in an economy as "bad" as the one he told the truth about. Be honest in politics and everybody dumps on you, even rabbits attack you.
Sucks doesn't it?
So we get liars. We get the little sugar coated ones or the big steaming dumps of lies that Trump keeps leaving around for us to step in.
If you're rich, you get to be crazy without meds or getting locked up. Well you still get the meds, but you get to choose them...
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
TPP is a backdoor way to try to cage in China with trade by giving sweeteners to other countries. Everything else in it is window dressing or malware designed to fuck up copyright in other places as badly as in the USA. She (and a very long list of others both R and D) loved it for that reason.
That's the story behind it.
Personally I think the reason behind it is stupid, the implementation relies on China going to sleep for a decade and the sweeteners ignore what effects they are going to have at home while still not being enough to stop those other countries trading more with China.
The Chinese must be laughing that we are prepared to hurt ourselves so much to impotently swing in the air near China when there isn't even a fight on.
"As a moderate conservative, you can vote third Party, and register your vote as a protest against the other two. IF enough people break free from the false dichotomy of the two party system, perhaps we can actually get worthy candidates."
I too wouldn't want Hillary to be nominating the next three Supreme Court justices, but we have to weigh that against Trump's dismal lack of knowledge on technical issues, which was on display yesterday in Nevada. Not content with insisting that Nevadans are wrong about pronunciation of the state's name, he went on to dodge questions about Yucca Mountain in a really obvious way ("Hey look everybody! I know nothing about this!"). An informed Republican would have taken the opportunity to point out because spent nuclear fuel still has over ninety percent of its original energy, storing it for a generation until we can start using molten salt tech to burn it up completely would be a savvy move. It would strengthen our move toward energy independence, this time on the carbon-free front, while being another opportunity to portray Harry Reid as an idiot.
Consider cane sugar and steel as two examples where trade protectionism had unintended consequences. Car manufacturing moved to where the steel was cheaper and the protected steel industry had no reason to innovate so is now beaten on both price and quality by everyone this side of Albania.
Ok I know we've done this but.. 1. Advanced humans somewhere have sufficient technology to create artificial realities containing conscious humans. 2. They go on to create and maintain billions of these artificial realities. 3. Their motivation for doing this is unknown, and they are sufficiently immoral to include extreme suffering within at least one of them. 4. There is a single 'objective' reality which the advanced humans inhabit, and billions of artifical realities that they have created, therefore our reality is probably one of the artificial ones. Do I understand the argument correctly? It's can't be that stupid and pointless... can it?
On top of that, due to lower tax income
Lower tax rates do not necessarily lead to lower tax revenue. In fact, lowering a rate to a point that the US has a structure for companies competitive with other countries, it encourages more companies to headquarter there. Combined with incentives for repatriating the trillions of dollars US companies are hording overseas, it could well lead to significantly increased tax revenues.
You can either compete with China to set up the lowest cost sweatshop, or you can concentrate on high end manufacturing and service jobs.
Service jobs are not going to help with the trade deficit. The US is still the premier manufacturer of weapons, one of the few exports left. High-end manufacturing, yes, as well as but China is not going to buy our robots for their factories (though others might). One of the things that helps the weapons manufacturers are rules that require them to do certain things within the US, as well as significant amount of federal dollars to develop high-end products. Meanwhile, other industries face crippling regulations for the smaller companies, and tax incentives that encourage large companies to create jobs offshore. Both of those things need to be fixed before ANY significant improvement in the job market can happen.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Instead of lowering taxes to encourage profits to come home, why but just change the tax rules so that they have to? That's what the EU is doing. Tax is paid based on where business is transacted, not where they funnel the profit to.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Instead of lowering taxes to encourage profits to come home, why but just change the tax rules so that they have to? That's what the EU is doing. Tax is paid based on where business is transacted, not where they funnel the profit to.
That could work, too. The US tax system is a screwed up mess right now. US citizens can't even get bank accounts in many countries because of the onerous reporting requirements the IRS imposes. Needs to be something simpler.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
..that tech billionaires are a delusional bunch.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Isn't this the sort of thing ancient cultures uses meditation and hallucinogens for? Drive your brain to chaos, and a computer siulation's lack of precision may become evident. For a simplified mathematucally anenable model to play with, start with a numerical simulation of the Lorentz attractor, or the logistic map, using arbitrary preecision in general, and occasionally doing a few calculations using more limited precision: do this in parallel using different patterns of precision limitation, and one with maximum precision. See how quickly qualitatively different behavior results. Do the same with simulations of non-chaotic or near chaotic systems. Driving a system to extreme levels of complexity can potentially be used to study imperfections in a simulation of that system. Now try and imagine how one would do something analogous with mind and brain. If nothing else, this would make for a fun plot device for a psychological scifi novel.
John_Chalisque
Logically if this is a simmulation then one would guess that the players controlled by external overlords would be the most powerful sims. that is to say movie stars or Tech billionaires or Trump like dictators.
Close. The players would be the ones with lives filled with action. So, if your life consists of sitting in a basement unemployed and surfing the internet, you're probably a non-player character, but if you get shot at a lot, and shoot back, you may be a player. It's not fun to be shot at in real life... but in a game, it's the whole reason you're there.
My guess is that the game was called "World War!" and they probably just forgot to turn it off after finishing play.
(Of course, it depends on what the unknown players are playing. They may be playing ''Sim City: Planet Earth'', in which case politicians and engineers are major players.)
Nader pulled the Democrats to the left, and Buchanan pulled the Republicans to the right. In my opinion this was a bad thing, but that is not the point. Those voters were effective.
Maybe. Nader also pretty much discredited the Green Party in the United States as being primarily a spoiler party for the Republicans.
The voters were effective-- but their greatest effect was to marginalize their party.
If we're indeed just part of a simulation and we're hoping to break out of it, what are the chances an Age of Empires Titan could break out of that simulation and enter our own simulation?
You may well have a point, send me a cheque and I'll get top men on it straight away. Top men.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Holding a job and sucking at it is not a credible qualification for a promotion.
That didn't stop George W. from leapfrogging Jeb into the presidency.
Actually, it was the Supreme Court that didn't stop George W. Bush from leapfrogging Jeb into the Presidency. ;-)
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
>worthy candidates
Like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, you mean?
Except Clinton has a card up her sleeve that Trump doesn't. Namely, the willingness to increase taxes to address the situations you point out. Where as Trump, king of debt, has already declared he intends to borrow even more since interest rates are so low.
So no, disagree absolutely. Trump's only "plan" is to whip out the good ol' credit card. Not a sound economic policy by any stretch.
I'm drawing a line in the sand right here, motherfuckers. You segfault my reality with your bumpkin shenanigans and I'll make sure your entire line gets redacted.
>Slashdotters with absolutely zero knowledge of how business actually works
You say that after mentioning that Warren Buffets one-day paper loss on an investment that has provided a return many times greater than the amount he invested, held as part of a diverse portfolio that provides liquidity, only when needed, for his insurance operations, and in any case only represents a small fraction of Berkshire's net worth, compared against Trumps complete blow out?
What if you exit the holodeck, but in reality you only think you exited, and you're still stuck in the holodeck the whole time, its just simulating your exit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is an old idea, see Plato's "Allegory of the Cave".
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I had a conversation with a Hillary supporter about Johnson, and they were going off on Aleppo moment of Johnson. I looked at them, and said "If it weren't for Hillary, I doubt Aleppo would be an issue at all. She and Obama are a large part of the reason for that war". The look was classic.
In Syria there is basically a Tri-sided war going on. You have the Pro-Assad, the Anti-Assad, and ISIS all fighting each other, in what can best be described as "paper, rock, scissors" of war.
We can't bomb Assad forces without Russia getting pissed off. We can't bomb our "friends" the Anti-Assad people, and we can't really go after ISIS because they look exactly like Anti-Assad rebels half the time.
I actually think that Johnson is the best of the three, simply because he is pro-liberty.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Working for lasting change involving third parties means not just favoring a third party to the point where it becomes one of the big two, but giving third parties a role in politics.
Instant runoff voting is good, since it means I can vote for the candidate I like while still favoring the candidate I think electable and acceptable over the candidate I really don't want. This makes third-party candidates more electable.
What would be even more significant is proportional representation, which (as far as I can tell) can be done without amending the Constitution. "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States...." doesn't mandate individual House districts. It would be possible for a state to have parties submit ordered slates of candidates and allot seats based on a party votes. I don't think this is going to happen, because state governments have historically stayed very close to the US Federal government model, but it appears legal,
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I really don't think Nader had much of an effect on the Democratic Party, other than by getting Bush elected. Nader got fewer than three million votes, and only the fact that the race came down to an extremely close election in one state allowed him to potentially make a difference. The voters that influenced the Democratic Party most in recent years are the ones who supported Sanders.
Replacing an organization by another is normally done by working outside the organization. Pushing the organization to be more what you want is best done by working inside the organization.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
>> pity your reality is so shitty though.
You aint seen nuthin yet if Hillary gets in.
Clinton is one of the most honest candidates this campaign season (Sanders and Kasich are about as honest). Her security issues were basically about trusting the wrong people. I don't know why you'd think she would be in the pockets of foreign powers, and she's never been convicted of anything criminal despite decades of scrutiny and attempts. She's not under investigation for treason. She wasn't indicted because neither the FBI director nor the Attorney General wanted to treat her differently from people who did what she did.
Psychopathic power crazed loon? What's new? You pretty much have to be one to launch a credible bid for the Presidency, and saying a major party candidate is one is about like saying the water is sure wet today.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
> Low taxes are not a solution to unemployment. They might encourage companies to move, but the jobs are low paid. If they were not low paid, the taxes wouldn't be a big factor and there wouldn't be much incentive to move them.
I sure WISH we could get free money by taking a billion from this person, a billion from that company, and it had no effect. Free money! That's simply not the case, though - look at California versus Texas over the last 20 years. Due to T&C costs, companies have moved from California to Texas. Unemployment is now 50% higher in California. The average income in Texas buys a house two and half times larger than California. Those are the facts. California tried to get that "free" money, just tax the hell out of everybody, nothing bad will happen, right? Now they're a tad fucked, mush worse off than Texas, where the opposite approach was used.
It would also be nice to think that only melon-packing jobs are leaving, but that's not the case. The software company I work for had two offices in the US, employing many systems architects, programmers, etc. The median salary is likely six figures. Now they've opened offices in Cali, Colombia, and that's where they are hiring the programmers and project managers. These are six figure jobs. You CAN still get a melon-packing job in California, though http://joeproduce.com/ .
Our health care system does need some work. It needs several changes. A month ago I went in for an annual physical. I've become absolutely convinced that the first, most important, and simplest thing we need to do is have upfront pricing. Doctors sent my wife and I for MRIs. We called the place we were referred to and asked how much they charge. It was a little difficult to get that information - nobody seemed to know. $2,200. I Googled "Dallas MRI" and called the first place that came up - $1,200 9AM-5PM, $1,000 after 5PM, and a $150 additional discount if I fill out the insurance paperwork instead of having them do it. A 5 minute phone call dropped the price in HALF, but virtually nobody does that. A month ago, I went for an annual physical and my doctor said he wanted to do some blood tests, so we did that. I got a thick envelope in the mail with some really good information, and a bill for $3,000. If the doctor had said "I'd like to do $3,000 worth of blood tests" I would have said "no way!" We probably would have done a few important tests, with a reasonable price. So upfront pricing would be very good, I think. Further, insurance companies already calculate the *average* price for each procedure in each geographical area. I'd love to see that disclosed ahead of time, "we'd like to do an MRI and charge you $2,200; the average price of an MRI in Dallas in $1,400." Who wants to bet many providers would realize they'd better say "the average price is $1,400, we're going to charge $1,250"?
Another thing we need to do is figure out the difference between INSURANCE and HEALTH CARE. Insurance, whether it be auto insurance, home insurance, renters insurance, or medical insurance, is designed to cover unexpected, high costs that you can't budget for. Home insurance is for when your house burns down, not replacing a $10 air filter in your AC or maintenance such as mowing the grass. Car insurance covers you when your total your car, not when you need an oil change or brake pads. I notice that when I go to my doctor for a flu shot, there are two doctors in the office and three people handling claims paperwork, because they deal with a bunch of paperwork and bureaucracy for every $20 flu shot, making it cost $40-$50 in the end. Again, a simple way to cut the cost in half is to use insurance as *insurance*, and use a $20 bill for a flu shot.
The US government is designed to be, is supposed to be, very different from the government of North Korea and similar prices. It's supposed to be FAIR, it's supposed to be TRANSPARENT, it's designed to be ACCOUNTABLE. We have a series of public hearings before each decision is m
So what on both points? did you even bother to read the headline let alone the article itself?
>> Trey Gowdy isnâ(TM)t finished with Hillary Clinton
I realise that you're a Hillary fan so not too bright, but even you must see this main thrust of this article isn't about Comey.
If the Aleppo gaffe is your biggest worry: Information can be learned or farmed out to more capable subordinates. Morality, decency and honesty cannot.
Imagine every primary there were no "D" and no "R" after peoples names, and you got to vote for anyone you wanted.
The primary is the means by which a political party decides which of its candidates it will send to the general election. It's not specified in the Constitution how this should be done; it's a party process. I don't think it makes sense to remove the (D) or (R) after the names, and in some states voting for dems or repubs happens on different days. It's not an election to whittle down the candidates, it's a party function, because each party has one candidate in the general.
>> Clinton is one of the most honest candidates this campaign season
Bwahahaha. Nice troll.
>> Her security issues were basically about trusting the wrong people.
So you're saying that she had nothing to do with the decision to set up her own mail server? What are you smoking?
>> I don't know why you'd think she would be in the pockets of foreign powers,
Oh I don't know, perhaps its the literally tens/hundreds of millions of dollars going into the Clinton Foundation from Saudi regime and other middle eastern tyrannies?.
https://theintercept.com/2016/...
Donald Trump made the assumption that Lester Holt, the NBC moderator for the first debate, was a Democrat. Holt is actually a registered Republican.
Doesn't matter how he's registered... he was clearly pulling for Clinton with his constant interruptions of Trump, to the point where he was flat-out arguing with him. Holt did nothing of the sort with Clinton. He wasn't a moderator, he was a participant.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Normal elections are usually like this: I agree roughly 65% with one candidate, and roughly 40% with the other, so I choose the 65%. Those percentages are based on policy as well as character, past performance and a belief in the candidate actually doing as promised.
This election, I agree 5% with one candidate, and 3% with the other, with everyone shouting at me I'm a fool to not vote 5%
I totally agree this is all hypothetical, since you're right that we don't (and quite possibly can't) know a thing about whats outside.
Given that it makes most sense to use mechanisms that we already know to reason about anything new, occams razor is valid. Of course it may not be right or even valid to use it, but its a good starting point until we know more.
You example of the physics simulation makes sense, but not always. It depends on what you're tying to achieve. For example if all I'm trying to do is establish whether a particular box would fit through a particular doorway, then using a physics simulation is both massive overkill and non-optimal.
If this is a simulation and it has this much complexity I'm not sure I'd want to (or be able to) live in the world that created it. I wouldn't mind having the power to enhance our experience of the simulation. I'm all for cheating the gods. But, I'd like to keep living and I doubt I exist in a tank somewhere - I exist in whatever data this simulation uses.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
I think if you dig into her history on non conservative sites, you'll find the same things.
For the most part, I don't distrust her motivations. I distrust her honesty, obviously, but I think her worst flaw is she has something of a "I know best" attitude. Almost all of these scandals she's gotten into were a result of her rejecting the advice of experts who knew what they were talking about because she thought she had a mental picture of what was going on and what would happen. Whether it was ignoring security warnings in Benghazi, or ignoring sysadmin warnings about her private email server, situations that could have been avoided had she followed the recommendations given to her. I know a few very intelligent people who have that as part of their personality, and it can be frustrating when they walk into pitfalls after you try to warn them away.
Precisely!!! There's no tank of human batteries to escape from. If this is a simulation we're simulacra.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
The very existence of the Pumpkinhead Redeemer, let alone the fact that a significant number believe in him, is solid evidence this is some sort of controlled simulation
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Seeing trump and Clinton as similar in any way other than carbon based organisms is prima facie evidence that your opinions are unreliable.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Oh heck, there are lots of rent an evil places.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
If THIS is what happens to one's mind when they spend too much time (& $) soaked in computer technology --imaginary crazy unsubstantiatable theories that *everything* is a computer-- then I'd better get our of this biz fast! o_O
Yeah, and you're the type of person who'd say that there are no connections when 10+ outlets suddenly all come out yesterday with exactly the same talking points about Pence [google.ca] and his non-2020 campaign
You know, I have no connections to the media so I don't hear what rumors they might be circulating, what they're talking about, or any of that. But needless to say, I came to the same conclusion.
Maybe they came to the same talking points about Pence because, given the performance and the circumstances surrounding it, it was a FUCKING OBVIOUS conclusion to make? In fact, it was obvious well before the debates because everyone was saying it. Most Democrats wish they had Tim Kane as their presidential candidate. Most Republicans would rather Pence be the candidate as well. Very few are actually excited about their candidate, which is why are aweful as the other side is, neither side is really able to get traction against the other. Both candidates SHOULD be so very easily beatable, but when they're both the worst choices, it's a tossup that Hillary is narrowly winning at the moment.
Pence is hitched to a very bad candidate. No surprise that he wants to be seen on his own terms and to not get dragged down by Trump. That the "smart politician" way of doing things, to pay your dues by supporting your party, and look good while doing it. Trump is the outsider, but Pence is the more established politician playing by traditional politician rules.
At last, a reliable thinker. The fact is, Hillary has done more good for people in need, from 9/11 responders to veterans to impoverished children, than all the other candidates put together. And i say that as someone who likes Bernie and Stein.
Even if somebody were to opine that they disagreed with Hillary but her intentions were good I'd at least think they were reasonable but misinformed. But this need to live in a black and white world where whoever you didn't like was the embodiment of evil, this susceptibility to tossing around meaningless adjectives like "corrupt", to parrot every charge leveled b against the candidate whose main failing is not being your favorite without noting that every one has been investigated and found basically trivial at worst; people just watch way too much TV drama.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
No, what you see is the democrats having an active hand in the media. Or did you forget that the Obama administration was directly leaning on reporters and media organizations by denying them access
Are you saying this is not standard operating procedure for the White House, regardless of which party is in power? "Access" has been a weapon for decades now that the White House can use to try to being the media into line.
Research does not consist in memorizing every insane right-wing talking point so you can list them, outside the rightwing world where adhering to authoritative opinions passed down is the badge of all virtue. For the rest of us, it constitutes digging up facts not handed to you, and making up your own mind. Such as the extensive list of admiring comments about how Hillary is just wonderful made by every Republican up until she became the likely candidate after 2012, including trump. The same folks who now somberly toss around the words corrupt and criminal to impress the folks on whom calling names works.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I appreciate seeing Egan brought up. I've always felt he was overlooked by the masses as the father of "stuck in the machine" popular sci-fi of the 90's (13th Floor and The Matrix owe him much recognition).
The movie The 13th Floor was based on Daniel F. Galouye's 1964 novel Simulacron-3 , so I don't think you can credit that to Greg Egan, who was only 3 years old when the novel came out.
(Nevertheless, I'll second the nomination of Greg Egan as a writer worth reading.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
What makes you think she did not have an equal number of equally qualified people giving her the opinions she followed? For instance, the entire Republican party which voted every year to reduce the security budget for foreign diplomatic posts? Do you think if she had decided to unilaterally somehow find a way around that, they would today be praising her wisdom? Or if she had placed her email on the state dept server, that would absolve her of being blamed for carelessness when it was indeed hacked? The fact is the hillary bashers begin with the conclusion that they don't like her and generate the evidence why a posteriori, and the proof of that is how they can flip their argument 180 degrees to cover whatever she does. She's a hardcore socialist, who's in the pocket of wall Street. She's a frail and confused old lady, who's also a criminal mastermind with an iron fist. Etc.
just like Obama, the muslim socialist tool of wall Street who belongs to the white-hating church.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I'm sure it's great way to get people on acid excited though.
Regardless, once you actually achieve a simulation with self-aware deep AIs running around whose existence relies on the existence of the simulation and the rules that govern it, there's nothing virtual about it, IMO. That's a new reality. And in the context of that reality we are the gods. No doubt we'll 'trip when we're able to do something like that.
3) Clinton's actions show she is willing to put the good of the party and the country ahead of her personal good.>
Then she should have told people to vote for Bernie, since he polled better against Trump.
Stop! Dremel time!
my favorite and the best part of this is the implicit conviction that "we" are part of a simulation and yet that "we" could "break out" of it. far more likely would be the same thing we see in our own simulations: there is no person "in there" separate from the "in there" to begin with. if we are simulated, we are simulated, period. then in some ultimate "real" reality, "we" don't exist at all. so there is no breaking out, any more than it would make sense for Mario to break out of Super Mario Brothers. believing otherwise is reflective of the typical unthinking arrogance of tech billionaires: "we're inside a simulation, but WE ARE SPECIAL PARTS OF THE SIMULATION." that's not how simulations work.
It's 52% Trump to 12% Clinton for outright lies.
Trump
True12 (4%)(12)
Mostly True32 (12%)(32)
Half True39 (14%)(39)
Mostly False48 (17%)(48)
False97 (35%)(97)
Pants on Fire48 (17%)(48)
Clinton
True60 (23%)(60)
Mostly True73 (28%)(73)
Half True58 (22%)(58)
Mostly False39 (15%)(39)
False27 (10%)(27)
Pants on Fire6 (2%)(6)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If he had won, she would have done so. The same as she did for Obama.
Doing what you suggest would say we wanted a quitter with no grit for president.
Clinton is a hard fighter who loses with grace.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Drive to a place where you never would have considered going otherwise. If you discover a place that resembles a wireframe model, we are in a simulation.
The fact of her crimes and lies has already been proven
You said she would put the country and party ahead of herself. If that was true, she would have told everyone to go with the sure bet on Bernie Sanders, instead of now where it's a toss-up between her and Trump. She's gambling the future of the country on her ego. Not that that's anything out of the ordinary for a politician, but it belies your claim.
Stop! Dremel time!
I said she put the interests ahead of her own- not that she was stupid. Bernie couldn't beat her. He sure couldn't have beat trump.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is true - however, it means that the two established parties are being directly subsidized by the government - it's not the parties that pay for the polling places, etc.
If We the People are paying for the primary, why should we give special consideration to two of the many parties? We could instead do something like a single open instant runoff primary with totally open results (i.e. the "first pick" results, as well as the lineup after 1, 2, ...N-1 candidates were eliminated). Then the parties could all decide who they want to back, and the populace knows exactly where all the candidates stand.
I also seem to recall that there's at least one state, maybe a few, that do in fact do "partyless" primaries, with only the top two candidates being put on the election-day ballot, even if they're both from the same party.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> Holt is actually a registered Republican.
It doesn't matter what he's registered as. It was obvious from his actions that he has clearly sold-out to Hillary. It wouldn't surprise me if Hillary had told him to register as a Republican just to cover her ass when questions are inevitably asked because he's so obviously biassed.
I disagree very strongly with that point because I have not been that naive for decades. There are a LOT of scammers that will be attracted to this and people who are not scammers will stay away because they are worried about their reputation. In science, unlike business, once you have a reputation of being mixed up with fraud your career is over.
As an example, Horvath's hydrogen car scam did NOTHING to progress technology. None of the hydrogen cars today are based in any way upon what he did, because his car wasn't really running on hydrogen.
You don't have to be a Hillary fan, considering the alternative.
You also don't have to be too bright to understand that Hillary is currently not under investigation, contrary to what you wrote.
The old adage applies: You are entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts.
Sure..... but if the universe were a simulation, then what makes us think that the fact that we can't see what kind of purpose we might have in it means that we don't have one? It arrogantly assumes that we know more than we really do about what the intentions of the designer of the simulation would be.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I said she put the interests ahead of her own- not that she was stupid. Bernie couldn't beat her. He sure couldn't have beat trump.
Sure he could. Nobody likes Trump or Hillary. They are voting against the other party, not for their party. But people would actually vote for Bernie, as indicated by the polls.
Stop! Dremel time!
Becuase doing nothing is the steady state. Having a purpose has to be designed in. Not having a purpose doesn't.
I liked Bernie. I would have voted for Bernie happily.
But if he couldn't beat the most unelectable democratic candidate in years, he had no chance against trump.
Clinton (who I considered unelectable in 2015) beat Bernie without use of the super delegates which were simply icing on the cake. Your position might be more credible if Bernie had beat Clinton in the votes and regular deleges.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Saying "purpose" was overkill.... I was only rather suggesting that if what we experience as the universe were a simulation, there is no particular reason to believe that we were not an intended byproduct of that simulation... not because we are necessarily special, but because it makes the assumption that the designer or designers of the simulation did not account for all of the factors in the simulation before they started it running. We can't understand everything about the universe because we are *part* of that system, but there is no reason to presume that someone who could have designed would not understand every aspect of its operation as well as we might be able to understand something that *we* create ourselves.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I too would have voted for Bernie. I will not vote for Hillary or Trump. Here's the thing: I'm not alone in that. Hillary will only get votes from Democrats. Bernie would also get votes from independents, and even some from Republicans who dislike Trump. Considering most people despise both Trump and Hillary, the only qualification a major party candidate would have to have to win would be to be neither of them.
Stop! Dremel time!
look at California versus Texas over the last 20 years. Due to T&C costs, companies have moved from California to Texas. Unemployment is now 50% higher in California. The average income in Texas buys a house two and half times larger than California.
Sure, but you have to live in Texas. Here's another way to say it: it's worth having a house half the size to be able to live in California.
> it makes the assumption that the designer or designers of the simulation did not account for all of the factors in the simulation before they started it running.
Exactly. I mean thats the whole point of simulation. if you already know what the simulation is going to do, there's no point in even creating/running it. Therefore we have to presume that the creator didn't already know that we would come along. To put it into perspective, If you take all of known time (i.e the uptime of the simulation) and represented that as a single day, mankind has only just appeared in the last nanosecond or so in one infinitesimally small part of it. Given that, It seems to me to be the height of arrogance/ignorance to assume that we are even a significant part of its overall reason..
> We can't understand everything about the universe because we are *part* of that system
And thats why I dont believe it would actually be possible for us to get out of it.
Presuming this is a simulation, and someone claimed they found a way out, I'd immediately bet all the money I could get my hands on that upon exiting they would simply cease to exist.
I'm fairly convinced that the best we could ever realistically hope for is finding some way to communicate with the outside.
I didn't suggest that we were a significant part... only that if the universe was a simulation, then complex life was probably an intended byproduct of that in the same way that when we design software, we can write it for a specific purpose to do a particular thing, and even though all of the results and byproducts of the software are exactly what we expected, the software can still be useful (or entertaining, or what have you).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm really glad you like California so much, if you live there! I hope you can stay there forever, if you love it there.
If in the future you do as so many Californians do and come to Texas for thr available jobs and the much lower cost of living, please keep in mind there are *reasons* we have more work here and lower cost of living. Please don't go on incessantly about "you should do it this way, like we did it in California." If we did it the way California does it, we'd get the same results as California, and people would be fleeing from here. We prefer our way. Thanks, enjoy CA and thanks for the Guirradelli chocolate - that stuff is delicious.
Logically if this is a simmulation then one would guess that the players controlled by external overlords would be the most powerful sims. that is to say movie stars or Tech billionaires or Trump like dictators.
Thus your highest calling if you and under-sim is to go be a groupy to one of the "real" players.
So it's a little strange to hear the Real players asking to be broken out of the Simulation. Something is fishy here.
"simulated" fishy. Actually, am I to understand that simulated billionairs with simulated money are asking simulated scientists to use simulated technology to break us out odf a computer simulation? Am I even commenting on a real /. or a simulated one?
Yeah I missed the humor that is now plain in hindsight.
You're absolutely right, there is/was some attractive things about California which caused people to be willing to pay so much to live there. The climate is nice, for any definition of nice if you choose the part of CA that has the weather you like. Unless of course you like weather, four very distinct seasons. High-paying jobs WERE big draw, those jobs have been moving away over the last twenty years.
I do understand some reasons people like California. And I get annoyed when they decide they need to GTFO of Ca because they can't get a job there or pay the sky-high rent, so they come here and insist that we start doing exactly the same things that caused high unemployment and high prices in Ca - advocating for exactly the things they fled from.
maybe you should dump that fantasy land you live in and rejoin us in reality
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Actually, it is the Government working in collusion with the two parties to rig the system.
Imagine every primary there were no "D" and no "R" after peoples names, and you got to vote for anyone you wanted. The Primary would be for choosing the top 2 candidates from the entire candidate pool. Tell me, by what legal means does the Government have in helping parties choose their candidate. When you can answer that, you'll understand that the system is rigged at the highest levels, and why candidates suck.
JFC you are ignorant.
parties arise naturally, and in a FPTP system it WILL devolve into 2 parties.
no rigging, no collusion required.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
no they are not.
that war exists because asshat Assad began bombing his own people when they demanded more democratic political reforms.
no part of that involved hillary or obama.
no part of his continued bombing of alleppo involves them.
you a fucking moron.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
you just described trump who actually has bought off attorney generals.
meanwhile: saying it thousands of times doesnt make it true, unless you got any proof.
and for 40 years the RWNJ havent had shit for proof. not that that stops them from throwing accusations.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
if you think pence isnt positioning for a 2020 run, you're an idiot.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
because he corrected donald on a couple of blatant false hoods?
because he tried to do his job as moderator?
you're a fucking moron.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
those words.
i dont think they mean what you think they do.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I wouldn't be surprised if there really isn't a way to do it. The simulation might be running on hyperturing machinery, with the software mathematically proven to be incapable of "breaking the fourth wall".
If you look at the behind-the-scenes production design material for _Tron Legacy_, the "direct digitization of matter into information" laser from the first film was retconned into a system where basically the positions of each molecule were mapped, magic happens resulting in the conscious personality being transported into the computer world, and the raw matter that makes up their body is disassembled and stored in tanks attached to the device so that their body can be recreated in the physical world when they want to leave.
It doesn't explain everything, but the production crew did think about the problem you mention. Quora (sp?) is given a physical body using matter that was in those tanks.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Are you like 12 years old or something?
Interesting thought that we might exist solely for some (Presumably hyper-intelligent) being's entertainment. We could be no more than a video game or a jar of sea monkeys to them.
I think that a lot of these people just want to be neo. The research is probably 50% a useless pursuit but it may indirectly contribute to our understanding of reality which in some ways may fit into certain patterns that may be simulation like.
It's really a thing you know isn't real for most of us but you sometimes indulge in for fun like ghosts. I've had a couple of matrix experiences when not particularly paying attention because of glitches in the brain. Once I walked of a train and someone walked on, then I walked onto another train and someone who looked exactly the same walked off, it was like the same sequence in reverse, a weird kind of dejavu as if both me and the strange walked through some some strange mirror like portal. Another time I walked into a toilet cubical and I could swear I came out of a different one than I went into. If you're lost in thought and not paying attention your brain can do some trippy things although ultimately, it's explainable.
We live in the Kobayashi Maru scenario!!!
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
And they're nuts. Humanity has a solid evolutionary record on this planet. ...
You're essentially saying that the world is not an illusion because it's not an illusion. That's not an argument.
Like it or not, the simulation thesis, or the malicious demon thesis, or the veil of Maya, or the various theses of the various Gnostics, etc. basically hold that sensation itself is an illusion, so when you point to evolution (etc.), you demonstrate nothing. You need to demonstrate somehow that sensation is veridical, and that proof has eluded consensus for quite sometime.
-- Christian Danchekker.
Ezekiel 23:20
All of this has happened before, and will happen again...
>The only other option is convergent evolution - and to converge enough to be called human (say, able to interbreed?) is so outlandishly unlikely as to make the alternatives seem positively mundane in comparison.
Listen to Carl say "Billlllionsss of Billllllionsss of ssstarsss" a few more times.