NEWS: All We Are Is Pixels in the Wind

Agreed.

Since this is my simulation, I have to congratulate all of you artificial shadow players for making it so interesting to me.

Yeah, as I was reading this article, I had a flashback of a scene from Animal House.

What if the ai sims, developed ai sims to entertain themselves?

Clones of clones? That would explain our seemingly limitless capacity for stupidity.

Pretty much the brain in a vat argument, with a slight difference: no actual brain. The typical brain in vat argument results in a scenario such as that in The Matrix. This argument results in more of a The Thirteenth Floor kind of thing.

Greatest sentence since Wil's Voltron metaphor.

Dr. Bostrom clearly loved the ending of Men in Black.

Well, when you go around universes and time-streams the only thing you can really expect is that a lot of people will be angry, and consider the whole thing a bad move.

the thing about this that weirds me out is the concept of back story, and how it would effect us all, in most games you don't experience every second of a persons life, so when did this sim start 2000 years ago or an hour ago and any recollection before that is just scripted back story, or just randomly created and assigned. so are all of my life experiences just some roll of the dice like a D&D character getting his stats made and class chosen... is a low roll why my charisma is so lackluster, were to many skill points assigned to... screw it if life isn't real does any one know where I can get a hold of any Acid?

Because the odds of that are infintesimal compared to the other options. If you suppose that mankind will reach that stage then suddenly the ratio of real universes to simulated ones becomes 1:millions/billions

It seems to me that it's somewhat similar to the ol' BiaV, but isn't really solipsic. In fact, the idea behind it presumes not just that there's a reality outside our own experience, but an even greater reality outside of that.
But maybe I just don't understand solipsism.
However, I do understand that this comic is hilarious.


I've heard about this quite a bit recently, and I wonder why. I heard of this "simulation hypothosis" in this exact form years ago. Could be that it's only recently that the good Dr has made it an equation.
It's always made me think of Intelligent Design. Who's to say we're not in a simulation that started, say, 6000 years ago

That fucking Doctor stole my idea. I was talking about this during a trip in the early 90s.

I'm not entirely sure why I just typed that?

George W. Bush.

there just doesn't happen to be a code to deal with public image, it seems.

Dinosaur bones were put in the ground by the developers to trick you into not believing!!!

If this is true, then why do i piss more when i drink beer than with anything else in the same amount?

The NYTimes link doesn't seem to work for me.

Shouldn't a scientist not abuse statistics like that?

The unstated underlying premise in this somewhat bland thought experiment is that there is someone or something actively operating, i.e. in charge of, the universe, an unmoved mover of some sort Hardly a new concept. Dressing that archaic construction up with an equation purporting to posit the likelihood of a future historical state doesn't render that underlying premise any more plausible--or useful.

So how would you explain myself sitting and losing myself in WoW, which could conceivably be its own little universe of people? Infinite recursion?

That's one geeky posthuman.

+1....I think....maybe the person playing my character is just trying to throw everyone off his scent?

Completely plausible, considering we have our sims check their email and play stupid games on their sim-computers.

I wish my WoW characters could check their email or play their own MMO games. That would be AWESOME.

A new and interesting approach to the old question "What is ?"

I'm not familiar with your modern computer science, but the idea that our so-called "reality" is nothing but an illusion is anything but new. Shakespeare wrote "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

The Bard was not the only one who had this idea. As young man I studied the oeuvre of Descartes (although I never met him, he died when I was 11), who invented the concept of the "Evil demon":

What's new in Bostrom's hypothesis is the idea that Descartes' evil demon is in fact a geek demon and that he uses something similar to 21th century thinking machines to create the illusion. (Which might explain why the fiscal system of my kingdom, despite the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Colbert to fix it, is still so buggy...)



P.S.: After informing myself on your century's computer games and simulations, there is one question that puzzles me: If the world as we know it is a simulation - is it a release or a beta test ?

I wish whoever was running my faction was better at it, because they suck.

If we either reach this state and already have better things to do, then why should anyone else reach that state and not have anything better to do?

Also, if posthumanism is the same as transhumanism, it's fucking retarded.