So you couldn't trust your experiments because the simulation owner can manipulate the results. Fair enough. So it is unprovable. How about we prove that WE could make a simulation in which the inhabitants considered themselves sentient, and were unaware of how they were created, or that their measure of time and cause and effect was arbitrary? You know a neural net here, males and females, life and death, evolution etc... Geez - sounds like we'd be creating something in our own image! Wait - someone else was supposed to have done that already - oh yeah - GOD! Well hey we are not worthy and all of that, lets avoid creating a simulation based on our reality... oh... umm... are they like sentient worms, that have a hivemind or something? WTF? We don't know how to do that! Lets just make these things like bees... Damn it! Stealing shit from our own reality again... crap, lets face it, we WOULDN'T BE ABLE to rig up a simulation that wasn't in our own image. Seems to me if you go for the whole endless onion explanation, then if we were a simulation, then the creator is going to be hanging around in a place pretty much like ours. Probably wouldn't take much more than 7 days to spin up, what given the capacity of grid computers these days. Could even just chill out on the last day. Then realise it wasn't working out, shut it down and try again. Probably have a few hundred of these things going around, release the code as an OSS project so everyone else can start up their own. Or maybe we are the perfect simulation, the one that will never be shut down. Or maybe we were shutdown for billions of years, and some futuristic archaeologists found us and started us up, and just don't know how to stop us - maybe God is dead? Maybe that just happened while I typed this sentence. This idea is way more fun than the boring God one (btw guys, evolution doesn't count here - its like saying 'I don't need God - I have trigonometry!'). Hey maybe the last simulation created is actually the first one - a circularity of Tralfamadorian proportions, where time and cause and effect are not as we perceive it Jim. Draw that onion on a Wacom! You know, the tech age really NEEDS acid.
Slashdot Mirror
So you couldn't trust your experiments because the simulation owner can manipulate the results. Fair enough. So it is unprovable. How about we prove that WE could make a simulation in which the inhabitants considered themselves sentient, and were unaware of how they were created, or that their measure of time and cause and effect was arbitrary? You know a neural net here, males and females, life and death, evolution etc... Geez - sounds like we'd be creating something in our own image! Wait - someone else was supposed to have done that already - oh yeah - GOD! Well hey we are not worthy and all of that, lets avoid creating a simulation based on our reality... oh... umm... are they like sentient worms, that have a hivemind or something? WTF? We don't know how to do that! Lets just make these things like bees... Damn it! Stealing shit from our own reality again... crap, lets face it, we WOULDN'T BE ABLE to rig up a simulation that wasn't in our own image. Seems to me if you go for the whole endless onion explanation, then if we were a simulation, then the creator is going to be hanging around in a place pretty much like ours. Probably wouldn't take much more than 7 days to spin up, what given the capacity of grid computers these days. Could even just chill out on the last day. Then realise it wasn't working out, shut it down and try again. Probably have a few hundred of these things going around, release the code as an OSS project so everyone else can start up their own. Or maybe we are the perfect simulation, the one that will never be shut down. Or maybe we were shutdown for billions of years, and some futuristic archaeologists found us and started us up, and just don't know how to stop us - maybe God is dead? Maybe that just happened while I typed this sentence. This idea is way more fun than the boring God one (btw guys, evolution doesn't count here - its like saying 'I don't need God - I have trigonometry!'). Hey maybe the last simulation created is actually the first one - a circularity of Tralfamadorian proportions, where time and cause and effect are not as we perceive it Jim. Draw that onion on a Wacom! You know, the tech age really NEEDS acid.