Actually I posit the opposite is true. That there ARE more small-government democrats than small-government republicans.
But the key difference between a small government republican and a small government democrat, is that where the democrat simply wants enough government to do the jobs given it and acknowledges that government has legitimacy to do those jobs and that the list may grow since government is a reflection of society..the republican simply wants no government at all, and denies that government has any legitimacy whatsoever.
No democrats actually want to instate totalitarian or authoritarian government with 100% control over everything.
More of us think like Bill Maher and are closer to left-libertarianism (aka real libertarianism, not the RW abomination that worships Ayn Rand and co-opted the name), than they are to Lenin, regardless of what conservatives like to tell us we think.
--
As to the 2nd half and naming it a "child's view of freedom"...the word for that is projection, because forcing one person to endure slavery in the name of another's freedom (specifically another that isn't actually a person, a separate entity, and will not be until born) is not a grown up view of freedom. Nor is forcing a child to be born, but refusing to help or enable that childs freedom following birth. Rather like allowing discrimination against a group in order to accommodate the religious freedom practices of another group.
The grown up view of freedom is that if your outward freedom of action should not affect the intrinsic or inward freedom of another.
IE, my right to not be punched in the nose trumps your right to punch me in the nose.
As for the bathroom, no freedom is being threatened here, other than your prudish 17th century mindset that makes you scared of peoples naughty bits.
It's just a matter of how much you want to think about things. "Government bad!" is a lot easier than "Government shouldn't intrude on people except where people are themselves making problems for other people, and also when small intrusions bring about large overall improvements like building sewers, or similar times, but at the same time we must always be on guard because humans and their institutions tend to follow the same patterns, whether government or private". The "small government" folks are the ones spending state money to declare official state firearms, for example
Except when women exchange the terms as a matter of convenience. Assault? Baby. Abortion? Fetus. Pregnant Women Assistance programs? Baby
If women can't even make up their own minds about the status, you can hardly blame anyone else for being confused.
Not confused; if the woman wants to abort the fetus, Just Say No. And if the woman wants prenatal medical assistance, like just vitamins that she can't afford so the kid is born healthy and undamaged, Just Say No to that also.
Very true. The problem comes from people who use the term 'baby' to describe a zygote or fetus.
So when does it quit becoming a "zygote or fetus" and become a "baby"?
that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes
Shouldn't that be a woman, her doctor, and the father? You're making it out like he has no say-so in the matter, until she decides to have the kid and he's stuck paying child support for the next 18 years. I guess some people are more equal than others.
Somebody's got to pay for the kid, if you plan on keeping it alive, whether in or out of the uterus. That could be the mother, the father, society, or the doctor I suppose, or some combination of the above. I suggest that limiting it to the mother is neither fair nor practical.
In a vacuum, yes this is true, a powerful government can take everything from you. Keep in mind, though, that the alternative is to allow powerful individuals to control everything instead; in that case, a state which humanity has languished in for thousands of years, those powerful individuals will take everything from you.
You appear to believe this is an either/or situation. I would suggest that, as significantly smaller governments HAVE existed, would prove that we do not have a binary solution set, but that there is an entire range of solutions. Some of which would be acceptable to the vast majority of the population. ..
However, for good or bad, our society/civilization/economy has become significantly more complex and interdependent as time marches on; the days of the Founding Fathers when a family could feed itself if the economy collapsed and income stopped coming in are long gone. And, just as with biological organisms, bigger and more complex with a lot of more specialized parts working together, like a mammal, requires a lot more information processing and organization than just a bunch of semi-autonomous entities that happen to be attached to each other, like a sponge or a jelly fish.
A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.
Your reaction is a common "poison pill" fallacy committed by government agencies ordered to cut their bloated budgets. They immediately cut the things that will hurt while keeping the fat safe. Small government conservatives don't want to get rid of the fire departments or the police departments (but a lot of leftists want this one) nor the environmental departments (admittedly this one has become a nest of far-left hate). They want an out-of-control federal government to be reined in, and the best way to do that is the same way you get rid of a cancer, i.e. stop its blood flow.
"Small government" types believe the functions of the government should be limited to hurting people, preferably killing them, whether foreign or domestic. The government has no place helping people. The government may not be competent to collect your taxes and spend them on schools or keeping children from eating lead paint chips, but by God they can certainly decide whether you should get the electric chair or whether we need to invade Iraq. Because after all, individuals are so good with their charity, that's why there never was any poverty or hunger until the government got involved. Even Jesus had to remind the masses to slow down on the charity before they went broke themselves.
Republicans haven't meaningfully stood for small government... ever. It's a trope passed out to the Libertarian wing of the party, but it's just a load of shit.
It's certainly true there are a lot of Republicans that would like to see a smaller government. There just aren't enough to control the party. There are, however, far more small-government Republicans than there are small-government Democrats.
As to freedom, well, so long as it isn't women looking to control their own bodies, or cis individuals picking the bathroom of the gender they identify with, oh no, not then.
Yeah, this is a load of horse shit. A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her. As to the bathroom thing, again, there are two freedoms at odds. I don't have any interest in sharing a public restroom with women regardless of how they view themselves.
You have a child's view of freedom.
Yeah, even though they may have a beard and masculine clothing and all, if they have 2 X chromosomes they should use the ladies' room. Similarly, those folks with the dresses and makeup and nicely coiffed hair and silicone boobs should be sharing the public restroom with you, because they have a Y chromosome. That would certainly be best to keep the public comfortable.
Tell us more about the adult's view, daddy.
But don't you remember, how good life was in those older days? Think back of the 1950s and 1960s. Everything was better then. Ok, if you weren't a woman. Or black. Or gay. Or pretty much anything but a white protestant male. But if you were, life was better. You had a house, a chicken in the pot and two cars in every garage! And even if you were just a normal worker! You had a job that you could feed your family on, your wife didn't go to work (the mere idea alone, a working woman! Can't get a husband, eh?).
This all changed for the worse, and Republicans want those glory days back! Is that really so bad? Ok, granted, it's not so great for non-white, non-hetero, non-religious non-men, but for us it's going to be great again! Ok, maybe not all of it because we sure as fuck aren't going to get working wages that can sustain a family again from Republicans, but at least we'll get that those black atheist fags will have it worse!
Now ain't that something?
And..... things didn't change, the people who think they need to "take their country back" did. "Our parents worked and saved all their lives and moved up, but we can't because all the immigrants took everything from us". Really? Because it's not the immigrants I see parking luxury SUVs at the malls and loading them up with expensive crap that's currently fashionable and will be landfill next year, then stopping off at whatever overpriced food outlet is current because God forbid that any event in life does not include some sort of purchase of food and drink, then packing all those new vacation clothes to head off to their annual trip to Disney World. I look at those folks at the Trump rallies on TV, and they all seem to be quite comfy in their fashionable outfits and shiny new boots.
They already control nearly every moment of our lives.
I don't know in Amerika, but in the rest of the world the LEFT is the one trying to control everything you do, lest you say something somebody wouldn't like
It's no different here. Outside of who you screw, whatever "gender identity" you imagine yourself to be, and your wife's/girlfriend's/mistress's options if you get her knocked up (assuming for the sake of argument that you swing that way), Democrats are all about micromanaging your life.
Forcing you to stop spewing mercury into the air, or stop selling drugs that kill you rather than cure you, or stop slavery, or not require your employees to do things that kill them isn't quite the same as regulating allowable sexual positions.
I was about to comment this, but you beat me to it.
Republicans have Fox News. Democrats have, well, everything else. I'm not even a Republican and I can see the clear projection happening here. Whenever either side gains power politically or socially, they flex their power in an authoritarian way. You just don't mind it so much when it's the "right" person controlling you.
Leaving aside the question of whether the Democrats have all nonFox media, nobody's made this a law. The liberal nanny state isn't supporting CNN with your taxes. The cable police don't come around to make sure people are watching liberal media. We don't even have a fairness doctrine any more.
What's the suggested solution; that the small government free market folks pressure the government to require more rightwing media outlets?
the Hugo tendency to reward works that leaders of the movement deem "niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun."
Works collectively known as "science fiction".
more space opera! stuff that makes syfy network movies. that's what we need. a good sf piece should be soothing and not at all challenging.
He didn't form anything. It's a very old philosophical argument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality) and was made into a major motion trilogy 15 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_%28franchise%29). Also known as the simulation argument, there ave been a few philosophical papers written on it in the last few years, notably one that says odds are we are likely in a simulation that came out about ten years ago (along with he proof).
If we're all characters in a sim, then we might as well all be characters in a solipsistic dream. In either case there is only one reality/POV and inhabitants are not autonomous but rather behaving as puppets of the single owner of the POV. The difference being that in one case the creator/inhabitant is outside, in the other case inside.
"He's forming a hypothesis based on observed evidence."
No, he isn't. He is just making a reasoned inference.
"The only thing missing is the ability to replicate the results..."
Because there're no results to come with.
Hint: keyword here is INFINITE.
But don't forget you can always specify boundary conditions. Construct the sim with a built-in history and set of effects from things which should be outside the limits of your actual sim, but don't really exist.
Like the argument that the universe really is only 6,000 years old, but was created with a fossil record and astronomical phenomena, etc. to exactly mimic it being 13 billion years old. Or the argument that while you were asleep, somebody stole everything you own and replaced it with a perfect replica.
He's forming a hypothesis based on observed evidence. That's literally what science is.
The only thing missing is the ability to replicate the results... but that's a tall order in this case.
Despite the high school definition (which itself is more than what most people understand) repeatability and comparisons with controls are far from required for all forms of "science"; witness the current hoopla regarding climate, or the entire field of cosmology.
Yes. To the entities inside the simulation you are, to all intents and purposes, their God.
* You created their universe
* You created them, or you initiated the processes that resulted in them being created
* You know everything about their universe
* You know how and why their universe was created
* You know how and when their universe will end
* If you choose to, you can change the course of the simulation to benefit them in some specific way
* If you choose to, you can change the course of the simulation to terminate their participation
That pretty much fits the job title of "Omnipotent entity that caused and controls everything", aka God.
Ah; but modern theology, since Abraham at least, contains a strong moral component; God is the absolute and always correct authority regarding morality and ethics, by definition. (Not necessarily in literalist readings of the text, these days, but by attempting to reason out what He wants). Just plain omnipotence and omniscience are parts of a more polytheistic philosophy; the Greeks and Romans and whoever were always getting into fights with their gods for one thing or another.
>If you're inside a simulation, then you can't run any tests to find out, now can you?
Why not. There are certain characteristics a simulated universe is likely to have - you can test for their presence. And quite a few of them are present in our universe. What we haven't figured out how to do is prove that a real universe wouldn't have the same characteristics.
It's definitely a testable hypotheses. The fact that we don't know exactly HOW to do do the test yet doesn't mean it can't be tested. The mechanics of testing have nothing to do with the definition of testable. When Einstein predicted gravitational lensing we had no idea how we may test that - after all, how can you tell if the light you're looking at has been bent by gravity in the past ? Nothing on earth has enough gravity to bend light enough to measure with 1901 technology. We figured it out some ten years later - we can look at an eclipse from Jupiter which is just far enough that light is measurably delayed, and that means if there's gravitational lensing the delay should be slightly different than if the light had travelled straight. The test was done and confirmed the hypotheses* - but it was testable when first announced.
Testable meant: "If you can show that light has bent in the presence of gravity, you can test the theory" it didn't have to mean "and here is how you determine that". It's perfectly fine to leave the HOW of testing to the reader, or future scientists who will have access to technology you don't have.
If anything this is more testable than a lot of theoretical physics. We still have no idea how to test any of the variants of string theory. We can show they are logically consistent and the maths work - but much of it we have no idea how to test.
Dark matter when first proposed seemed to fall clearly in the "untestable" category - how do you know something is there that doesn't interact with anything, doesn't give of any energy and cannot apparently be found ? Many scientists declared it "theory saving". Eventually though, somebody realized that if dark matter exists and has mass (and it has to have mass because it was proposed as an answer for missing mass in the first place) - then it would bend light (as per the aforementioned gravitational lensing) - and we've observed that - light being bent by a gravity source where no objects can be detected.... so it must be getting bent by objects we can not detect.
*Ironically that test was terribly flawed, and later entirely discredited, but other more accurate tests subsequently done did confirm the hypotheses again. That too is part of science, sometimes the wrong tests can give the right answers. This is one reason we retest things and re-examine old data and old experiments. Because the test was flawed, it could have been that the hypotheses had been wrong all along, retesting with more advanced technology and avoiding the mistakes made last time would let us find out if that had been the case.
This is one of those "proving a negative" things. You could look for some specific signs of simulation, but in their absence you'd have to then prove that any/all simulations would have to have those characteristics or else you'd just have proved that it's not a particular kind of simulation.
The problem with this argument is that it contains several wrong assumptions. First we don't have an infinite timeline because our universe has a finite lifetime and will eventually end in one of a variety of different scenarios e.g. heat death and the "big rip". Next you cannot simulate a universe as complex as ours inside our universe since such a system must have as many possible states as our universe. This would require all the energy and matter in our universe leaving nothing with which to construct the simulator.
This means that each simulation must be simpler than the universe it runs in and so there will be a finite limit on how long the chain can be before the most complex simulation possible resembles Pacman. Hence the assumption that there is an infinite chain running for an infinite time is simply not logically consistent.
I believe that not only are we living in a simulation, but that funding has run out and CPUs and memory are being serially disconnected for use elsewhere in more promising projects.
did you poo-poo the existence of an intelligent creator?
That's kind of insulting to God. There are obvious and severe limits to the abilities of intelligence. If you attempted to populate the ecology of the earth by intelligent design, for instance, it would be much less interesting; evolution through random mindless variation, "natural selection", and a lot of random chance does a much better job of exploring every possible niche.
These celebrity scientists are annoying. More proof that just because someone calls themselves a "scientist" doesn't mean they know jack shit about anything.
Ah yes, Neil-Degrasse Tyson, the man who said "There are more stars in our galaxy than there are atoms in the universe!"
Is there any evidence of this other than an amateurish meme?
Plato's theory of forms predates Descartes by nearly 2000 years. And is a form of sim theory, but like Descartes, falls down because the concepts and langage didn't exist to describe it in modern terms.
Or, as in the Copenhagen Interpretation, there really is no "real world" outside the cave and those shadows on the wall are all that exist, following their own laws.
This *is* a simulation. Except that the computing substrate is atoms and molecules rather than electrons and transistors. The only remaining questions are, who is running the simulation, and why are we inside of it?
Well, we know that the whole particle/wave matter/energy thing is an imperfect mental construct of a reality which may be unknowable if you hold to the Copenhagen interpretation; and we only really experience the world we have constructed in our minds; so we live in a simulation, no matter what.
And what does life do? It replicates, creates entropy - and gathers information. That's why I found this article from a few months ago so interesting:
"To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as 'the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance,' and he says we should think of the human genome — or the genome of any organism — as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate."
The seeds of life - and thus the drive to gather information - is embedded in the fabric of the universe. Why is that?
Nice. I came to the conclusion a while back that nervous systems are similarly an attempt to make useful predictions, from the original neural net, which basically was able to predict that something would eat you from the detection of something biting you on one side and was hardwired to remove yourself from the vicinity of said bite. Which is a subset of your model.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I posit the opposite is true. That there ARE more small-government democrats than small-government republicans.
But the key difference between a small government republican and a small government democrat, is that where the democrat simply wants enough government to do the jobs given it and acknowledges that government has legitimacy to do those jobs and that the list may grow since government is a reflection of society..the republican simply wants no government at all, and denies that government has any legitimacy whatsoever.
No democrats actually want to instate totalitarian or authoritarian government with 100% control over everything. More of us think like Bill Maher and are closer to left-libertarianism (aka real libertarianism, not the RW abomination that worships Ayn Rand and co-opted the name), than they are to Lenin, regardless of what conservatives like to tell us we think. --
As to the 2nd half and naming it a "child's view of freedom"...the word for that is projection, because forcing one person to endure slavery in the name of another's freedom (specifically another that isn't actually a person, a separate entity, and will not be until born) is not a grown up view of freedom. Nor is forcing a child to be born, but refusing to help or enable that childs freedom following birth. Rather like allowing discrimination against a group in order to accommodate the religious freedom practices of another group.
The grown up view of freedom is that if your outward freedom of action should not affect the intrinsic or inward freedom of another. IE, my right to not be punched in the nose trumps your right to punch me in the nose.
As for the bathroom, no freedom is being threatened here, other than your prudish 17th century mindset that makes you scared of peoples naughty bits.
It's just a matter of how much you want to think about things. "Government bad!" is a lot easier than "Government shouldn't intrude on people except where people are themselves making problems for other people, and also when small intrusions bring about large overall improvements like building sewers, or similar times, but at the same time we must always be on guard because humans and their institutions tend to follow the same patterns, whether government or private".
The "small government" folks are the ones spending state money to declare official state firearms, for example
Except when women exchange the terms as a matter of convenience. Assault? Baby. Abortion? Fetus. Pregnant Women Assistance programs? Baby
If women can't even make up their own minds about the status, you can hardly blame anyone else for being confused.
Not confused; if the woman wants to abort the fetus, Just Say No. And if the woman wants prenatal medical assistance, like just vitamins that she can't afford so the kid is born healthy and undamaged, Just Say No to that also.
Very true. The problem comes from people who use the term 'baby' to describe a zygote or fetus.
So when does it quit becoming a "zygote or fetus" and become a "baby"?
that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes
Shouldn't that be a woman, her doctor, and the father? You're making it out like he has no say-so in the matter, until she decides to have the kid and he's stuck paying child support for the next 18 years. I guess some people are more equal than others.
Somebody's got to pay for the kid, if you plan on keeping it alive, whether in or out of the uterus. That could be the mother, the father, society, or the doctor I suppose, or some combination of the above. I suggest that limiting it to the mother is neither fair nor practical.
In a vacuum, yes this is true, a powerful government can take everything from you. Keep in mind, though, that the alternative is to allow powerful individuals to control everything instead; in that case, a state which humanity has languished in for thousands of years, those powerful individuals will take everything from you.
You appear to believe this is an either/or situation. I would suggest that, as significantly smaller governments HAVE existed, would prove that we do not have a binary solution set, but that there is an entire range of solutions. Some of which would be acceptable to the vast majority of the population. . .
However, for good or bad, our society/civilization/economy has become significantly more complex and interdependent as time marches on; the days of the Founding Fathers when a family could feed itself if the economy collapsed and income stopped coming in are long gone. And, just as with biological organisms, bigger and more complex with a lot of more specialized parts working together, like a mammal, requires a lot more information processing and organization than just a bunch of semi-autonomous entities that happen to be attached to each other, like a sponge or a jelly fish.
A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.
Your reaction is a common "poison pill" fallacy committed by government agencies ordered to cut their bloated budgets. They immediately cut the things that will hurt while keeping the fat safe. Small government conservatives don't want to get rid of the fire departments or the police departments (but a lot of leftists want this one) nor the environmental departments (admittedly this one has become a nest of far-left hate). They want an out-of-control federal government to be reined in, and the best way to do that is the same way you get rid of a cancer, i.e. stop its blood flow.
"Small government" types believe the functions of the government should be limited to hurting people, preferably killing them, whether foreign or domestic. The government has no place helping people. The government may not be competent to collect your taxes and spend them on schools or keeping children from eating lead paint chips, but by God they can certainly decide whether you should get the electric chair or whether we need to invade Iraq. Because after all, individuals are so good with their charity, that's why there never was any poverty or hunger until the government got involved. Even Jesus had to remind the masses to slow down on the charity before they went broke themselves.
It's certainly true there are a lot of Republicans that would like to see a smaller government. There just aren't enough to control the party. There are, however, far more small-government Republicans than there are small-government Democrats.
Yeah, this is a load of horse shit. A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her. As to the bathroom thing, again, there are two freedoms at odds. I don't have any interest in sharing a public restroom with women regardless of how they view themselves.
You have a child's view of freedom.
Yeah, even though they may have a beard and masculine clothing and all, if they have 2 X chromosomes they should use the ladies' room. Similarly, those folks with the dresses and makeup and nicely coiffed hair and silicone boobs should be sharing the public restroom with you, because they have a Y chromosome. That would certainly be best to keep the public comfortable.
Tell us more about the adult's view, daddy.
But don't you remember, how good life was in those older days? Think back of the 1950s and 1960s. Everything was better then. Ok, if you weren't a woman. Or black. Or gay. Or pretty much anything but a white protestant male. But if you were, life was better. You had a house, a chicken in the pot and two cars in every garage! And even if you were just a normal worker! You had a job that you could feed your family on, your wife didn't go to work (the mere idea alone, a working woman! Can't get a husband, eh?).
This all changed for the worse, and Republicans want those glory days back! Is that really so bad? Ok, granted, it's not so great for non-white, non-hetero, non-religious non-men, but for us it's going to be great again! Ok, maybe not all of it because we sure as fuck aren't going to get working wages that can sustain a family again from Republicans, but at least we'll get that those black atheist fags will have it worse!
Now ain't that something?
And..... things didn't change, the people who think they need to "take their country back" did. "Our parents worked and saved all their lives and moved up, but we can't because all the immigrants took everything from us". Really? Because it's not the immigrants I see parking luxury SUVs at the malls and loading them up with expensive crap that's currently fashionable and will be landfill next year, then stopping off at whatever overpriced food outlet is current because God forbid that any event in life does not include some sort of purchase of food and drink, then packing all those new vacation clothes to head off to their annual trip to Disney World. I look at those folks at the Trump rallies on TV, and they all seem to be quite comfy in their fashionable outfits and shiny new boots.
You havn't studied much history have you..
Or perhaps you think the Chinese cultural revolution and Stalinist Russia were right wing?
The reason you are dead wrong of course is the neither left not right is the enemy. Totalitarianism is.. And that can be either..
And the world is rushing to become more totalitarian year by year at present.. In the name of making us safe from ourselves.
The opposite of totalitarian is freedom.. Just remember that.
Indeed. At some point both left and right circle around and meet at totalitarianism.
It's no different here. Outside of who you screw, whatever "gender identity" you imagine yourself to be, and your wife's/girlfriend's/mistress's options if you get her knocked up (assuming for the sake of argument that you swing that way), Democrats are all about micromanaging your life.
Forcing you to stop spewing mercury into the air, or stop selling drugs that kill you rather than cure you, or stop slavery, or not require your employees to do things that kill them isn't quite the same as regulating allowable sexual positions.
I was about to comment this, but you beat me to it.
Republicans have Fox News. Democrats have, well, everything else. I'm not even a Republican and I can see the clear projection happening here. Whenever either side gains power politically or socially, they flex their power in an authoritarian way. You just don't mind it so much when it's the "right" person controlling you.
Leaving aside the question of whether the Democrats have all nonFox media, nobody's made this a law. The liberal nanny state isn't supporting CNN with your taxes. The cable police don't come around to make sure people are watching liberal media. We don't even have a fairness doctrine any more. What's the suggested solution; that the small government free market folks pressure the government to require more rightwing media outlets?
the Hugo tendency to reward works that leaders of the movement deem "niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun."
Works collectively known as "science fiction".
more space opera! stuff that makes syfy network movies. that's what we need. a good sf piece should be soothing and not at all challenging.
Hush Puppies.
He didn't form anything. It's a very old philosophical argument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality) and was made into a major motion trilogy 15 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_%28franchise%29). Also known as the simulation argument, there ave been a few philosophical papers written on it in the last few years, notably one that says odds are we are likely in a simulation that came out about ten years ago (along with he proof).
If we're all characters in a sim, then we might as well all be characters in a solipsistic dream. In either case there is only one reality/POV and inhabitants are not autonomous but rather behaving as puppets of the single owner of the POV. The difference being that in one case the creator/inhabitant is outside, in the other case inside.
"He's forming a hypothesis based on observed evidence."
No, he isn't. He is just making a reasoned inference.
"The only thing missing is the ability to replicate the results..."
Because there're no results to come with.
Hint: keyword here is INFINITE.
But don't forget you can always specify boundary conditions. Construct the sim with a built-in history and set of effects from things which should be outside the limits of your actual sim, but don't really exist.
Like the argument that the universe really is only 6,000 years old, but was created with a fossil record and astronomical phenomena, etc. to exactly mimic it being 13 billion years old. Or the argument that while you were asleep, somebody stole everything you own and replaced it with a perfect replica.
This *IS* science.
He's forming a hypothesis based on observed evidence. That's literally what science is.
The only thing missing is the ability to replicate the results... but that's a tall order in this case.
Despite the high school definition (which itself is more than what most people understand) repeatability and comparisons with controls are far from required for all forms of "science"; witness the current hoopla regarding climate, or the entire field of cosmology.
So, you're God every time you run a simulation?
Yes. To the entities inside the simulation you are, to all intents and purposes, their God.
That pretty much fits the job title of "Omnipotent entity that caused and controls everything", aka God.
Ah; but modern theology, since Abraham at least, contains a strong moral component; God is the absolute and always correct authority regarding morality and ethics, by definition. (Not necessarily in literalist readings of the text, these days, but by attempting to reason out what He wants).
Just plain omnipotence and omniscience are parts of a more polytheistic philosophy; the Greeks and Romans and whoever were always getting into fights with their gods for one thing or another.
>If you're inside a simulation, then you can't run any tests to find out, now can you?
Why not. There are certain characteristics a simulated universe is likely to have - you can test for their presence. And quite a few of them are present in our universe. What we haven't figured out how to do is prove that a real universe wouldn't have the same characteristics.
It's definitely a testable hypotheses. The fact that we don't know exactly HOW to do do the test yet doesn't mean it can't be tested. The mechanics of testing have nothing to do with the definition of testable. When Einstein predicted gravitational lensing we had no idea how we may test that - after all, how can you tell if the light you're looking at has been bent by gravity in the past ? Nothing on earth has enough gravity to bend light enough to measure with 1901 technology. We figured it out some ten years later - we can look at an eclipse from Jupiter which is just far enough that light is measurably delayed, and that means if there's gravitational lensing the delay should be slightly different than if the light had travelled straight. The test was done and confirmed the hypotheses* - but it was testable when first announced. Testable meant: "If you can show that light has bent in the presence of gravity, you can test the theory" it didn't have to mean "and here is how you determine that". It's perfectly fine to leave the HOW of testing to the reader, or future scientists who will have access to technology you don't have.
If anything this is more testable than a lot of theoretical physics. We still have no idea how to test any of the variants of string theory. We can show they are logically consistent and the maths work - but much of it we have no idea how to test. Dark matter when first proposed seemed to fall clearly in the "untestable" category - how do you know something is there that doesn't interact with anything, doesn't give of any energy and cannot apparently be found ? Many scientists declared it "theory saving". Eventually though, somebody realized that if dark matter exists and has mass (and it has to have mass because it was proposed as an answer for missing mass in the first place) - then it would bend light (as per the aforementioned gravitational lensing) - and we've observed that - light being bent by a gravity source where no objects can be detected.... so it must be getting bent by objects we can not detect.
*Ironically that test was terribly flawed, and later entirely discredited, but other more accurate tests subsequently done did confirm the hypotheses again. That too is part of science, sometimes the wrong tests can give the right answers. This is one reason we retest things and re-examine old data and old experiments. Because the test was flawed, it could have been that the hypotheses had been wrong all along, retesting with more advanced technology and avoiding the mistakes made last time would let us find out if that had been the case.
This is one of those "proving a negative" things. You could look for some specific signs of simulation, but in their absence you'd have to then prove that any/all simulations would have to have those characteristics or else you'd just have proved that it's not a particular kind of simulation.
Can't speak for many others, but according to the Christian religion, we were created in the likeness of the big cheese himself.
Hmmm...... The Flying Parmesan Monster.....
The problem with this argument is that it contains several wrong assumptions. First we don't have an infinite timeline because our universe has a finite lifetime and will eventually end in one of a variety of different scenarios e.g. heat death and the "big rip". Next you cannot simulate a universe as complex as ours inside our universe since such a system must have as many possible states as our universe. This would require all the energy and matter in our universe leaving nothing with which to construct the simulator. This means that each simulation must be simpler than the universe it runs in and so there will be a finite limit on how long the chain can be before the most complex simulation possible resembles Pacman. Hence the assumption that there is an infinite chain running for an infinite time is simply not logically consistent.
I believe that not only are we living in a simulation, but that funding has run out and CPUs and memory are being serially disconnected for use elsewhere in more promising projects.
did you poo-poo the existence of an intelligent creator?
That's kind of insulting to God. There are obvious and severe limits to the abilities of intelligence. If you attempted to populate the ecology of the earth by intelligent design, for instance, it would be much less interesting; evolution through random mindless variation, "natural selection", and a lot of random chance does a much better job of exploring every possible niche.
Can't speak for many others, but according to the Christian religion, we were created in the likeness of the big cheese himself.
Well sure. We botch stuff up too. Especially the stuff we create on Saturday so's we can just get it finished and take Sunday off.
These celebrity scientists are annoying. More proof that just because someone calls themselves a "scientist" doesn't mean they know jack shit about anything.
Ah yes, Neil-Degrasse Tyson, the man who said "There are more stars in our galaxy than there are atoms in the universe!"
Is there any evidence of this other than an amateurish meme?
Plato's theory of forms predates Descartes by nearly 2000 years. And is a form of sim theory, but like Descartes, falls down because the concepts and langage didn't exist to describe it in modern terms.
Or, as in the Copenhagen Interpretation, there really is no "real world" outside the cave and those shadows on the wall are all that exist, following their own laws.
This *is* a simulation. Except that the computing substrate is atoms and molecules rather than electrons and transistors. The only remaining questions are, who is running the simulation, and why are we inside of it?
Well, we know that the whole particle/wave matter/energy thing is an imperfect mental construct of a reality which may be unknowable if you hold to the Copenhagen interpretation; and we only really experience the world we have constructed in our minds; so we live in a simulation, no matter what.
And what does life do? It replicates, creates entropy - and gathers information. That's why I found this article from a few months ago so interesting:
"To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as 'the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance,' and he says we should think of the human genome — or the genome of any organism — as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate."
The seeds of life - and thus the drive to gather information - is embedded in the fabric of the universe. Why is that?
Nice. I came to the conclusion a while back that nervous systems are similarly an attempt to make useful predictions, from the original neural net, which basically was able to predict that something would eat you from the detection of something biting you on one side and was hardwired to remove yourself from the vicinity of said bite. Which is a subset of your model.