Re: drugs are bad (Score:4, Insightful) by dave_mcmillen (250780) on Sunday June 01, @11:26AM (#6089934)

C'mon, he must be right, he's got equations and everything. Oh, but wait . . . The quantities in the equations are completely made up and meaningless. So, let me rephrase my earlier assessment: This is complete hookum. Because the number of hypothetical "ancestor simulations" is large compared to the number of actual developing civilizations, we are "almost certain" to be in a simulation rather than real? Huh? Let me present an alternative, equally plausible hypothesis: The entire universe is being run by tiny, invisible pixies, who implement all the laws of physics by grabbing things and moving them around in exactly the right way when we perturb our environment. (Why they do this is unknown.) Unfortunately, there is no empirical test that can distinguish between this situation and one in which the laws of physics arise just because of the way real particles interact. Let's all just agree to pretend that we're not living in pixie-world or The Matrix, OK? It makes no difference, anyway, and it's a whole lot simpler. And if you want to kill your neighbour or your boss, you can't console yourself that they were just simulated anyway.

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful) by Dylan Zimmerman (607218) <rgdtad@a o l . com> on Sunday June 01, @04:48AM (#6088781)

Well, you see, the funny thing is that you don't need to simulate the atoms at all. All that you need to simulate visually is the smallest object a person can resolve with his unadied eyes. Everything else is simply mapped on top of that. For touch, you just simulate the smallest texture difference that a human can feel. For sound, all you need to do is simulate the sounds that a human can hear. All of these would need to have a certain safely margin to account for people whose senses are better than others, but all that you really have to feed the brain is sense data. As long as it is input propperly, Now, you would need to physicaly simulate things, but you can reduce the complexity of a model arbitrarily if you are willing to sacrifice quality. The computer detects that we don't need high quality simulations of tables, so it only simulates where the corners would be and fills the rest in as a polygon. Of course, all of this assumes that you have a more-or-less sentient computer. It would have to be able to decide when we don't need obscenely high quality simulations in order to save its processor power. That wouldn't require true sentience, but it would take quite a bit of clever AI programming. All of this is a gross simplification. It would still be impossible with modern computing methods because it would require a computer larger than Jupiter, and that's not even with a power source.

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01, @05:32AM (#6088913)

Well, reality is what we perceive. A computer can only simulate worlds which are less complex than the world in which the computer exists, but if the simulation is closed, its inhabitants have no way of proving that it's a simulation. They simply have no way of knowing how things are in the real world. Even bugs in the simulation would appear as an empirically found law of physics to them. A laser in such a world would not exist except as a function of the basic elements that exist in the simulation. However, such a simulation would obviously need to either be seeded without science and develop it by itself or overthrow the science it was seeded with.

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Interesting) by Naikrovek (667) <jjohnson@nosPam.psg.com> on Sunday June 01, @05:46AM (#6088951) (http://psg.com/~jjohnson/)

High level emulation. If there is a microscope for you to look through, it is being emulated, then whatever has created the microscope can program it to rewrite everything you look at with it in a way that makes sense to your species. it would be mind-numbing to write (much less RUN) a program that would fully emulate every atom in the world at all times. all you have to do (ask anyone in movies) is emulate the minumum amount to look realistic on screen. if someone needs to look closer, emulate what they're examining properly, only while they are examining it. Otherwise you can very easily emulate a white box with bumpmaps, rather than the wood, the drywall, the paint, the electricity, and everything else that makes a wall. until someone examines the wall, you can get away with just a white box with paint-like bumpmapping.

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:4, Interesting) by znode (647753) on Sunday June 01, @09:07AM (#6089418) (http://znode.sytes.net:25080/)

all you have to do (ask anyone in movies) is emulate the minumum amount to look realistic on screen. On the Summer Reading List thread, many slashdotters mentioned The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Within Ch. 6 was a description of how Prime Intellect "rewrote" the Universe, as follows: "No, you wouldn't. Let me ask you something. If I leave here...if I go back to civilization...does this forest continue to exist?" "I can leave it running in your absence if you want." Caroline wanted to throw up. Now even the forest wasn't real. Nothing was real. "Don't bother. Get rid of it." Instantly, it disappeared. She was standing in an antiseptically white space so pure and seamless and bright that the eye balked at reporting it to the brain. She was standing on a hard, smooth surface, but it was not visible. There were no shadows. There was no horizon; the floor and the sky looked exactly the same, and there was no transition from one to the other. She might have been standing on the inside of some enormous white ball. Prime Intellect was still there. "What is this?" she asked. "Neutral reality," Prime Intellect said. "The minimum landscape which supports human existence. Actually, not quite the minimum. I could get rid of the floor. But that would have startled you." So basically, the visual portion of this world would just be like a raytracer running constantly. Whatever the eye can see it simulates and draws; out of the eye, nothing is (and need to be) simulated.

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful) by Dylan Zimmerman (607218) <rgdtad@a o l . com> on Sunday June 01, @05:57AM (#6088981)

Then you simulate what would be seen. Everything could be treated as a surface with a varying transparency and a texture mapped on top of it. You wouldn't have to visually simulate anything smaller than the eye could resolve, but if needed, the simulation could simulate portions in more detail. It would be easier from a programming standpoint to simulate all of the individual atoms, but that would be prohibitively slow. We're talking tens of thousands of years for less than a second of simulation time using conventional computers on anything less than a planetary scale. Quantum computers and chemical computers could speed it up greatly, but it would still take massive amounts of raw processing power to keep track of all of those atoms, let alone let anything interact with them. You can never see anything smaller than the smallest dot that your eye can perceive. However, you can design devices to enlarge objects (or increase the resolution of your eye, depending on how you look at it). One of the huge problems with The Matrix is the question of how people were actually put into it. If anyone had memories of the real world, then they would undoubtedly find a way to pass them on to their children. So, that implies that none of the first generation of Matrix denizens was ever outside the Matrix at any prior point in their lives. Yet they had parents. The programs in the Matrix aren't compassionate at all, so they certainly couldn't have raised the children. Perhaps they had been imprisoned for millennia, but if that were the case, I would have expected the robots to have wiped out the last of the independent humans. Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage. We can only stop new ones from forming. Perhaps the robots were able to create synthetic sets of memories for the first parents, but again, how? That would require someone in the Matrix in the first place so that his memories could be copied. Perhaps the first parents were willing subjects? I don't really see that as in The Animatrix, the general populace was destroying the robots in the streets. That would be like southern whites agreeing to be slaves to some blacks during the Civil War. Very few would. Perhaps enough did that they were the first generation.

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful) by spongman (182339) on Sunday June 01, @06:13AM (#6089033) (http://www.friskit.com/)

Surely the results of such experiments could be faked. For example, it could be simple to build a 'matrix' where the value of PI could be, say, 5, or where Newton was correct and light permeated space the instant it was emitted and mass had not effect on time. Hell, there are limits to our own understanding of both the extremely small and the extremely large. What if those limits are not that far from the limits of our "simulation"? How would you tell? Build bigger accelerators/telescopes? How big would they need to be? Our knowledge of "what should be" is based purely on obseravtion. We're always testing the boundaries of our knowledge. But who's to say that when we delve deeper into the depths of the cosmos we won't discover a message: "game over, insert coins to play again." or "Hi, this is God, I'm not in right now, please leave a message." Piers Haken http://www.myfriskit.com [myfriskit.com] : Not a web site

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful) by B'Trey (111263) on Sunday June 01, @07:48AM (#6089246)

Incorrect. All that needs to be simulated is what you actually perceive. In modern games, the engine calculates what can and can't be seen and doesn't draw the things that can't be seen. A simulation would use a much more sophisticated version of that algorithm. If you're looking through a microscope, microbes are individual simulated. If you aren't looking through the microscope, then they aren't simulated, or are simulated in the aggregate to calculate gross effects that might be perceivable (such as tainted meat causing food poisoning.) Remember, the simulation has to know exactly what you're doing and what you're perceiving in order to feed the information to your brain. If you turn your head, that isn't a physical motion. The simulation detects the impulses that indicate you desire to turn your head, and adjusts your visual and physical feeds to simulate that motion. So it's certainly capable of determining that you are peering through a microscope and adjusting the level of detail accordingly. How detailed is the simulation? Precisely as detailed as it needs to be, but no more. One interesting result of this is that observation would affect the behavior of the universe. Also, changes in the environment, such as the presence of a second slit in a screen, might alter the algorithm used to calculate the behavior of, oh, I don't know, maybe photons. Never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

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Quantum Mechanics could be simulation artifact. (Score:5, Interesting) by goombah99 (560566) on Sunday June 01, @11:39AM (#6089987)

I think a lot of people are missing a key points. Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms. suppose for a moment that this is a simulation with a finite amount of memory to parameterize the "world". the state of this system is propgated from time slice to time slice by some set of finite difference equations. well this means that everything is perfectly self-consistent. if you devise any experiment within the simulation itself to measure any observable then you will discover it is self consistent. The laws of nature a person living there would formulate would in fact be the correct ones for that system. you would never be able to discover an inconsistency. consider for example QM. basically in a quantum world there ARE limits on resolution. indeed the limits are surprisingly like how one creates a simulation. for example, in any practical 3-D game the voxels of distant objects have larger volumes than the close by ones that you can see more clearly. likewise fast moving objects in the background are less precisely placed from frame to frame while maintaining on average an accurate speed. its as though someone gridded the game in such a way as to have hyper cubes of constant delta-P time delta-X. hey wadda ya know that's the heisenberg uncertainty principle. Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the approximate distribution. Thus one does not have to memo-ize everthing the game player has looked at carefully, you can recreate it on the fly each time something is inspected at high resolution simply by drawing an approximate sample from the distribution. The fact that two looks never quite agree is written off as the "hiesenberg uncertainty principle", or to the QM notion that inspecting an object can change its state. Another hiesenberg principle is the energy-time uncertaintly (to measure the energy of something precisely takes increasing amounts of time). Again this is in keeping with a simulation. to compute the simulation to increacing levels of precision will take more time. and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time! Finally to digress a bit. Just suppose for moment the supposition that this is simulation is true. then might it might also be possible that the people doing the simulation are also simulations. and so on ad infinitum. the interesting thing is that at each layer of this onion it seems to me that the plausibility that you live in a simulation increases. this is because with each subsequent layer the plausibility of sufficient computer power prior to extinction improves. I know this because Nigel Tufnel knows this.

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01, @04:50AM (#6088791)

You're missing the point. The idea is that you don't need to simulate the world, but just the part that YOU percieve. For example, I don't need to simulate the tree in the forest (it does NOT make a sound when nobody is there to hear it). If you only simulate things that humans can actually see at any moment in time (ie: feeding impulses into your brain – and making your brain think its reality) then the computation involved isn't that great (well, huge, but isn't impossible). Just consider current generation of 3D games. Some games can make your heart beat faster, or make you jumpy, etc. The point being that eventhough at a concious level you know it's only a game, your brain is still fooled subconciously into thinking the game might be real, and thus, makes your heart go faster and pumps up the adrenaline (as if you're gonna be running away from that monster for real). Now, imagine that game with 3D goggles, perfect sound, etc, where YOU are not conciously awear that it is a game... This is the future, and I think we'll see it far sooner than most people realize (20 years tops).

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Re:and this my friends is why (Score:5, Insightful) by Aglassis (10161) on Sunday June 01, @05:07AM (#6088840) (http://127.0.0.1/)

There's no way processor speed can continue at its current pace to that point. It would have to be nearly infinately fast to simulate all the 10000000000000000000000000000000000's of atoms i can see right now They don't necessarily have to be that fast. Its not like there is a time limit since they are defining time. Even if they took 10000 sec to simulate 1 sec, it would not alter our perception since it is only based on the past. It will still be 1 sec to us. And why not assume that they did some simplifications? Why should we assume that the universe that we exist in the the one that the simulators run? It could be much different and the laws of physics different as well. It may be able to run simulations of huge amounts of atoms because that may be a trivial amount of processing time to a much more complex universe. "I have become rather like King Midas, except that everything turns not into gold but into a circus." - A. Einstein

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Re:woooah (Score:5, Funny) by evilviper (135110) on Sunday June 01, @04:08AM (#6088665) (Last Journal: Monday April 28, @10:15AM)

The /. has you... Follow the white rabbit... ------ "I'm glad I don't put much basis on yammerings on slashdot"... "In fact, I'm real glad." --Theo de Raadt

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Obligatory matrix bastardisation (Score:5, Funny) by comet_11 (611321) on Sunday June 01, @05:44AM (#6088948)

Trinity: Morpheus, the post was modded down, I don't know how. Morpheus: I know, they used the overrated exploit. There's no time, you're going to have to get to another post. Trinity: Are there any trolls? Morpheus: Yes. Trinity: Goddammit. Morpheus: You have to focus, Trinity. There are mod points at Wells and Lake. You can make it. Trinity: All right. Morpheus: Go. Content filter encountered for sig Reason: Your subject looks too much like ascii art.

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Re:woooah (Score:4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01, @04:13AM (#6088682)

I don't see how it's truth would change anything (from your mind's perspective, at least), so I'm not sure why you would find it "too scary." Consciousness built on neurons made of atoms is no more real than consciousness built on simulationed neurons made of simulationed atoms. Consciousness is as consciousness does.

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Re:woooah (Score:5, Funny) by MainframeKiller (105858) <keegan@mx.qcPARIS.ca minus city> on Sunday June 01, @04:58AM (#6088820) (http://localhost:80/cgi-bin/phf.cgi)

I don't see how it's truth would change anything (from your mind's perspective, at least), so I'm not sure why you would find it "too scary." Consciousness built on neurons made of atoms is no more real than consciousness built on simulationed neurons made of simulationed atoms. Consciousness is as consciousness does. My Momma always said life is like a box with a cat in it, you never know if it is alive or dead... What do you expect, it's 5 am and I'm stuck at work! MainframeKiller

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Old philosophy (Score:5, Insightful) by Aceticon (140883) on Sunday June 01, @06:24AM (#6089059)

Cogito ergo sun (I think therefore i am.) Descartes, ( Born March 1596, died Feb 1650) This all goes down to the old questions: Do I really exist? Does the world around me exists? Is the world as i percieve it to be? Descartes tried to answer the first question. While trying to explain the other two, don't forget that the only proof that you have that the world out there exists comes through your senses. For all you know, there are no other people out there - maybe your senses are being mislead: by a complex computer simulation by a powerfull telephatic entity by a drug by yourself - you've suffered psychological trauma this is all a dream ... According to Descartes, the only thing you can be sure about is that you exist.

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Re:Old philosophy (Score:5, Informative) by blancolioni (147353) on Sunday June 01, @07:22AM (#6089204)

Descartes tried to answer the first question. Descartes tried to answer all three. We get to self-existence. Since everything has a cause, there must be a root cause, and this must be God. God, as we all know, created the world, therefore that exists too. And since God is good, he wouldn't lie, therefore the senses must provide an accurate picture. Thre's a reason everybody stops after Cogito ergo sum, and that's because the rest of the reasoning was a bit, well, dodgy. I'm sure I've misprepresented it a bit, but Rene can always speak up if he feels slighted. No? Well, then.

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Re:screw it. (Score:4, Interesting) by Matthias Wiesmann (221411) on Sunday June 01, @05:03AM (#6088834) (http://lsewww.epfl.ch/wiesmann/)

I agree, the most annoying thing about the article "How to live in a simulation" is that it makes the classical IMHO erronous assumption that the simulator (the entity that controls the simulation) is basically like us. This text roughtly assumes that the simulator is basically an american guy and the main reason for simulating a universe is to go to a party. Very deep philosophy. The simulator might well be a zen poet two centuries in the future interested in the pattern of human emotions, or some alien student trying to build the most absurd form of life. There is simply no way to know. So trying to please this simulator is completely absurd. The talk about seeing the weaknesses in the simulation because certain parts are not simulated also takes the wrong perspective. Assuming you build a simulation that is not homogenous, you will make sure that the where there are simplifications they will have little influence (i.e they are not noticable). As for the hypothesis that certain people are not true, I don't like when people start talking about true/chosen/über/whatever people. This is just some guy projecting his own bias on some theoretical entity and using this to justify his own (egoistic I might add) approach to live as being "logical". I agree that this is not what american society needs, but I fear it is what it wants. Of course, this has been the stuff of religions for centuries, replace simulator by god and voilà!

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Re:Episode of Star Trek (Score:5, Insightful) by mati (114154) on Sunday June 01, @04:04AM (#6088652)

Thank you for reminding me how good Star Trek used to be :)

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Re:Episode of Star Trek (Score:5, Funny) by Treskin (555947) on Sunday June 01, @04:22AM (#6088714)

Taking bets on how many people actually say "Computer, end program" out loud while reading this post.

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Re:Episode of Star Trek (Score:5, Funny) by MyHair (589485) on Sunday June 01, @05:11AM (#6088856) (Last Journal: Tuesday May 20, @11:33PM)

No, silly. That's passe. People will be sshnuke'ing the whole internet looking for backdoors (and wearing tight leather). That's the current hip thing.

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Re:why ohh why.. (Score:4, Insightful) by KrispyKringle (672903) on Sunday June 01, @04:02AM (#6088648) (http://slicedbread.dnsalias.net/)

Better than suggesting alternative power, why doesn't anyone ever point out the laws of thermodynamics? This is always what got me about The Matrix. There is even a comment somewhere along in the first movie about how the living are fed the waste of the dead. Well, great, but what about conservation of energy? Where is this energy actually coming from? In our normal ecosystem, it comes from the sun via photosynthesis. Here, no sun, no plants, people eating people...sounds like perpetual motion. And even if we do accept that animals can somehow power these machines, why don't they just use pigs or cows or something? Or give lobotomies on birth? Eh? But as you said, quit thinking about it all seriously, and just enjoy the movie. It's a vehicle, and not every aspect should be taken at face value or should be expected to make perfect sense.

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Re:why ohh why Does the Matrix need People? (Score:4, Interesting) by crulx (3223) on Sunday June 01, @08:51AM (#6089373)

Of course, the notion that the Matrix uses people to gain real energy disobeys Thermodynamics. Someone above made a comment about using humans as "processors", which would have made a much more plausible technical reason for the AI keeping the humans around. But I think this discussion misses the real reason that they went with the power rational with The Matrix. I feel that they wanted to make a metaphorical statement about how people fuel "the Matrix" in reality. Given the heavy Gnostical and Buddhist themes in the movie, we can understand that they mean to show that when we make the choice to believe in reality, we reinforce its power, not only over us, but over others as well. The more we believe that what we see and discern has meaning and substance, the more we get locked into the cycle of arising desires and beliefs. This, in Buddhist terminology, turns the wheel of life by forming a duality between that which we want and that which we do not want, which generates karma and hence causes reality to appear right before our eyes. Thus the power metaphor seems appropriate. Those “plugged into the Matrix”, i.e. those who continue to believe in reality, “power the Matrix”, i.e. cause the wheel of rebirth to turn. Honestly, I would feel surprised if the W bros didn’t heavily debate using a flawed physical representation (“power plants”) over using a much more profound, but subtler, idea of humans adding processing power as a reason for imprisonment. They must have decided that the computer metaphor would get lost on most of the audience and thus dumbed it down. You notice that the “power plant” idea does not appear in the 2nd movie at all except for an oblique reference to “you need us”. They merely used it as a crutch to help people suspend disbelief while watching the movie. By understanding the Message of The Matrix, you will come to understand many of the logical inconsistencies in the film. Everything in that movie got put there for a reason and the W bros felt no shame altering some of the content so more people would understand the Message. So while it may ire geeks, it makes the movie easier to swallow for people new to these sorts of ideas. I personally just pretend that Morphius said, “Humans can perform up to 10^5 Teraflops (or whatever) of complex operations that the robots steal to add to their available processing power.” I think you can see how this would require a much longer dialog between Neo and Morphius to inform the average viewer of what that means. What do you think? --- Crulx

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However, if everyone is a digital projection controlled by a computer program, then how is it the humans inside the matrix are capable of independent thought? Why isn't it like "Big Brother" in George Orwell's 1984, where the Thought Police were always watching for crimethink? Even if the computers' super-advanced AI engine could simulate thoughts *for* the human, and trick them into thinking they came up with it themselves, then why would the system allow a human to discover what is outside the Matrix? Is there a certain amount of "tolerance" built into the system? I guess that would explain the need for "agents."

...But if no one was allowed to think a "wrong" thought...there would be no law enforcement, but no one would care because they wouldn't need to be taught about obeying the rules because no one would ever think about breaking them (The Pre-Crime Division would take care of that) ;)

Soo...this goes back to my initial inquiry -- where does the independent thought come from? Is it somehow hardwired to the person's brain through the matrix? If so, they need subconscious experiences (daydreams, nightmares, etc.) in order to have independent thought. So the Matrix must have had a certain level of tolerance built in.

But.... if the Matrix *was* built by a race of cruel machines designed to control humans, then why was the Matrix programmed the way it is? Are they torturing humans with a life they once knew, before AI came into play and destroyed that which they had?

All this makes me want to see "Revolutions." I hope they answer all these questions, like "Who Created The Matrix?" It's too human, too sympathetic to be built by cold, heartless machines. There is religion in the matrix, so someone had to program that in.

Re:Can the Matrix simulate independent thought? (Score:5, Interesting) by malloci (467466) on Sunday June 01, @04:21AM (#6088709)

...But if no one was allowed to think a "wrong" thought...there would be no law enforcement, but no one would care because they wouldn't need to be taught about obeying the rules because no one would ever think about breaking them (The Pre-Crime Division would take care of that) ;) Wasn't that the premise of the original matrix (the one built prior to the trilogy)? It was a paradise, but the problem was that no one believed it and so massive amounts of people would wake from it. Hence the reason why the second matrix was built (going back to Agent Smith's description in the first movie). I always thought the matrix was more a playground for individual minds to play in. If you set up an environment that is engineered to look like our world, place the minds in the system with some initial parameters (e.g. you are a programmer looking for work and like potato chips and coffee, etc) and then let those objects loose in the system, things should flow fairly smoothly. The matrix was more like a drug to keep the minds of their batteries happy basically, and the reason they chose this section of our history is that it was "the height of our civilization". But even Neo has a choice by the architect in the second movie. I would say that control came by limiting choices. This comes from the societal structure that is put in place, something which most people are more than happy to live within. The few that refused to accept that were shown a different reality (i.e. unplugged from the matrix). However, the one wrench that Matrix:Reloaded tossed into the mix was Neo's ability to sense the machines on the other side. This would indicate that the true architects of the matrix built a buffer zone in which those minds that didn't believe the first matrix would wake up into the second thus saving them as a power source for a while longer and ensuring that every once and awhile you could flush those who would attempt to destroy your creation. By controlling the resistance you have complete control as Orwell showed us in 1984.

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(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours

(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation."

...So if you think that (1) and (2) are both false, you should accept (3).

Obviously this last sentence is meant more to play up the conclusion that we are in a simulation. (2) is the most plausible; it is incomprehensible to me (though admitedly I may be of a lesser mind that those running the simulation) why greater beings would waste CPU time on mere humans.

In all seriousness, though, if we assume 2 to be true and 1 to be false, we can most certainly dismiss 3. And if we assume 1 to be true, where does that leave us?

"Let us consider the options in a little more detail. Possibility (1) is relatively straightforward. For example, maybe there is some highly dangerous technology that every sufficiently advanced civilization develops, and which then destroys them. Let us hope that this is not the case."

Of course most mutations die out. This is how evolution works. Obiously, we can assume that if evolution has gotten us this far, it is likely that it will have created similar intelligent beings and perhaps even more advanced than us (or we ourselves will acheive such a level of mental greatness).

This is a fun intellectual debate (and clearly meant to gain the limelight) but its a bit overblown, too, I think.

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- you consider the world to be composed of things with surfaces and textures, yet in fact most of everything is interatomic space. Matter is a simulation.
- you consider yourself to be a being, complete and individual, yet you are built from trillions of cells each with a lifecycle, not to mention hosts of other organisms that cohabit your body, even your gene pool. Individuality is a simulation.
- you think you are reading this text, and yet it is just a sprinkling of letters and dots and random ideas. Language is a simulation, the Internet also.
- you believe you exist, and yet we are truly just temporary assemblages of matter acting as hosts for the multilevel game of life. Existence is a simulation.

But none of this means much: as in the Matrix, if I stab your simulated heart with a simulated knife, your simulated body will simulate death. And your simulated consciousness will try very, very hard to avoid that. Welcome to the Real World.

iMatix GSL - the code generator that changes the way you think.

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Advantages: We will be able to communicate with the people who run our world from the "real" world. I can already see people on IRC asking all kinds of favors, like "I want to be rich. Someone important. Like an actor."

Disadvantages: Script kiddies will get into the machines of the "real" world and they'll perform a DOS attack. Next thing you know, you're just walking down the street minding your own business when suddenly the street you were on turns into a toxic waste dump and a couple of identical cats walk by.

But anyway, if we ever do build a simulation, we should definitely connect our Internet into the world we make. That way, people who figure it out will be able to communicate with us. We'll tell 'em we're God... Screw the Prime Directive.
In otin ihuan in tonáltin nican tzonquíca.

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Re:Where do I submit patches (Score:5, Funny) by Soko (17987) on Sunday June 01, @04:37AM (#6088749) (http://slashdot.org/)

And the output: Warning: Use of undeclared variables on line 1   Compiler error at line 2, missing ";"   Compilation aborted. If you're going to program life, you'd better be a damned good coder. Soko Be a better bastard. - Josh Brandt ...and the world will beat a luser to death at your door. - Carl Jacobs

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This is a common misapplication of the anthropic principle. All the weak anthropic principle (which is the only one appropriate) states is this: For you to be here now, conditions in the Universe must be right to allow you to be here. In probabilistic form, it simply states: The probability of your existence being made possible by the history of the Universe is 1.

Most people with something to prove use this to make probabilistic arguments based on the probability of life, or the number of existent civilizations, but these are misguided. The anthropic principle tells you nothing about how many civilizations are out there, or how likely other similar creatures are, it simply says that for you to be here, the Universe must allow your existence.

Arguments such as the ones made in this article are based on a faulty understanding the anthropic principle. They are assuming a probability distribution that they not only have no reason to believe is true, but which the anthropic principle says nothing about.

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