Re: If God ever decided to destroy Silicon Valley unless one intelligent tech billionaire could be found there, it wouldn't stand a chance

1

To nitpick the OP, there's no reason the quantised simulation has to be a simulation of the continuous reality.


Posted by: Ginger Yellow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:06 AM
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I'm not sure I understand precisely what you're nitpicking, tbh.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:09 AM
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This is what happens when you don't believe in the afterlife but haven't given up hope that there's a way to get around the Church-Turing Thesis.

I suppose it's weird that the rules of the universe seem effectively computable, but whatever. Yay unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and all.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:13 AM
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I feel like somebody should wave their hands and mutter something about quantum physics and cats in boxes, but I'm too tired to wade into it.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:15 AM
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I suppose it's weird that the rules of the universe seem effectively computable, but whatever.

This seems backwards. The rules of the universe are whatever they are, and then everything else we observe has derived logically/mathematically/consistently from those basic premises.

Ok, it's still weird. Yay!


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:22 AM
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Neb, you've really gotten the hang of writing clearly, or I've become accustomed to a much more confusing and opaque style than I was ten years ago. Good job!


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:24 AM
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2: As in, I'm not sure it's a valid objection that a quantised simulation wouldn't be a good/possible simulation of a hypothesised continuous/non-tractable reality. The simulation just has to be of our observed reality, not the hypothesised one. Unless you're making a stronger point that a non-mathematically tractable universe would be so unstable/predictable that any sort of simulation-like activity would be impossible.


Posted by: Ginger Yellow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:24 AM
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From the article, which I made the mistake of going and finding: "there are two tech billionaires secretly engaging scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation."

I'm fully ok with that to the extent it keeps them out of more destructive tech billionaire nonsense. Sure, yes, good idea, try that!


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:24 AM
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They're basically trying to find the turtles that programmed the universe.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:25 AM
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I'm trying to imagine the first call between the tech billionaires and the secret scientists described in 8. Ugh god being one of those secret scientists sounds like such a good gig. You know it pays an idiot amount, and your main task is just fucking with a tech billionaire.


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:27 AM
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5: I meant "effectively computable" in the Church-Turing sense. It would be interesting if there were physically observable things that would imply that the universe is somehow dependent on the computation of functions that would not be computable (or computable with different resource bounds) with idealized machines. I suppose it could be seen as weird that it doesn't appear to be the case that that holds. It's perhaps unnecessarily parsimonious.

10: This. I don't think musing on the simulation question is inherently silly, but throwing money at it is. But I haven't read TMFNS. Maybe I should.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:33 AM
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4 is my understanding of the issue. Indeterminism of quantum physics akin to video game graphic only existing when viewed on screen (and otherwise being latent code). Like the cat in the box.


Posted by: urple | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:34 AM
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Unless you're making a stronger point that a non-mathematically tractable universe would be so unstable/predictable that any sort of simulation-like activity would be impossible.

More this one, yeah. If it's not mathematically tractable, how would its inhabitants have the level of scientific accomplishment necessary to create a simulation (of any sort)? Not necessarily "unstable", but what's their natural science like?


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:36 AM
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Right. It all comes down to the wave-particular duality and animal cruelty.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:36 AM
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I once read an sf novel with the premise that scientists had created a simulated universe that operated at higher speed than their native universe, they were able to watch civilizations rise and fall, etc. Somehow either the inhabitants broke out or the scientists went in. I want to say this was from a 50s-era Ace Double. Could be a little later, might not have been an Ace Double.

I wonder if the mystery billionaires read the same thing in their formative years and got a little stuck, like so many get hang-ups on The Fountainhead or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?


Posted by: Chopper | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:36 AM
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15: I think that was a South Park episode based on a Simpsons episode.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:40 AM
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I'm fixated on the thought that probably not a single one of these folks sweating The Simulation could even build me a bookshelf--the unit of measurement for usefulness.


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:40 AM
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Lisa required some sort of embiggifier, which was just ludicrous.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:41 AM
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I'll admit that I don't like the argument that we're with high probability in a simulation, since an advanced society will make simulations, which will make their own nested simulations, etc. A society that has the resources to make a simulation does not necessarily have the resources to make a simulation that allows nested simulations. That would still make simulations the more likely case, but it wouldn't have the turtles-all-the-way-down character that I often see in these arguments.

Simulations do make issues with philosophical-zombies easier, though. With respect to the simulated reality, you can have it be dualistic however you'd like, just about. (I do wonder how much of this is just avowed atheists really wanted to experience some kind of theism.)


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:42 AM
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I am fully ok with being in a simulation if it's a kids' computer game, I gain a real sense of purpose imagining that, there's my theism.


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:48 AM
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15: Sturgeon's Microcosmic God? Not a simulation, exactly -- tiny little sentient people that lived fast.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:49 AM
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20 would explain the gratuitous cruelty.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:50 AM
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22 exactly. "Why is there evil?" "Because God is 10."


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:51 AM
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And here it is. Weird how accurate my memory is after 30 years since last laying eyes on the book.


Posted by: Chopper | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:55 AM
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15/20: Brandon Sanderson had a novella that was on the Hugo short list this year that seems relevant, Perfect State. The idea is that there's a society that truly believes in utility maximization, and they found the best way to do that with their resources was to put almost everyone in a simulation (without their knowledge that it's a simulation; they only tell them after a few decades) where they're the only real person and they get to be awesome and special in a way that tickles their fancy.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:55 AM
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since an advanced society will make simulation

An unquestionable premise!


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:56 AM
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19 yeah the most incredible thing to me isn't the speculation about a simulation which, sure, whatever, but the fixation on the particular probability that we're in a simulation. I don't know why I find that especially repugnant.


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:57 AM
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Either we are or we aren't, so the probability is 50-50.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:59 AM
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I want a pie chart.


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:00 AM
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26: Their solution to that is to circularize it. If we can make simulations, we will. And probably some jackass will make the simulated people behave like us.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:02 AM
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50% chance turtles, no simulation, 30% chance simulation by turtles, 20% chance simulation by non-turtles (but with simulated turtles).


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:02 AM
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If we can make simulations, we will

Well, if they could make simulations, they would, because they're idiots, but I don't know if we would, if we could.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:03 AM
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Inclusive we. I am open to the possibility that Silicon Valley tech billionaires are in fact people, although I know that is an unpopular view.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:04 AM
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I mean I wouldn't sign on to the statement "if we could successfully seastead, we would". But sure, point taken, I guess. It still doesn't follow that any advanced society would do so, though. There might be something peculiarly pathological about this particular subset of an advanced society!


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:08 AM
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I have simulated
the turtles
that were in
the simulation

and which
you were probably
saving
to simulate inside another simulation

Forgive me,
they were nested
so recursive
and so stacked.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:09 AM
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36

Was that the one ogged made all creepy that one time?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:12 AM
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37

Just, why does math bother these folks so much?


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:12 AM
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You mean, 40% of all stacked teenage girls have simulated a turtle?


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:13 AM
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Yes but keep in mind 14 in future-human present-turtle-simulator years is like 98 of our years.


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:16 AM
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40

Somebody get a billionaire on the phone, I'm ready to be a secret scientist.


Posted by: Clytie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:17 AM
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34: That is fair. That pathology could easily infect societies downstream; that doesn't let us derive anything about hypothetical upstream or other non-downstream societies. So even if we did create a nested simulation tree rooted at us, so that we were only one reality among myriad simulations, that shouldn't even change our Bayesian probabilities for potential upstreams?

I dunno, though. It'd still be enough to tell you that the probability of SV billionaire pathologicalness is non-zero, and if you accept the arbitrary nesting of simulations (which I don't) then you should be able to finagle it so that most societies are virtual. But this is being clearer about the assumptions: ability to nest simulations, desire to simulate, and desire to pass down desire to simulate (either explicitly or because you're simulating your own history).


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:27 AM
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37: I think the excerpt from the Grauniad isn't a great argument; it's not being bothered by math. It's that the kinds of math that work in our universe are weirdly useful--which is probably truly universal--and weirdly specific and limited (Church-Turing Thesis), which there doesn't seem to be as strong of an argument for. Or maybe it isn't weird, but at least it shouldn't be taken just as is. Like, why is that the case? Are there other possibilities? Can there not be other possibilities, for some value of can? Or is there more about the nature of computability for us to discover? There are probably interesting metaphysics to consider, and I wish I actually knew about of them, instead of just being an internet out-of-ass-talker.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:34 AM
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Isn't this obviously and simply explained: if the world is a video game, these guys think they can hack into it and control it? It's that simple, right? Just go bloop bloop bloop program program program and presto new girlfriend and nice abs.


Posted by: R Tigre | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:37 AM
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There are probably interesting metaphysics to consider, and I wish I actually knew about of them, instead of just being an internet out-of-ass-talker.

The last clause is what separates you from the billionaires.

I dunno, if they were really interested in this stuff, they could read about it! They could read, for instance, The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science; it's not exactly the latest word but I hear good things.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:40 AM
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Dream a little bigger, darling. They're SV billionaires. This is about 1) directly going to the creator and then, if that goes well, 2) kicking the creator's ass.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:41 AM
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The last clause is what separates you from the billionaires.

Something else, too.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:41 AM
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It would be interesting if there were physically observable things that would imply that the universe is somehow dependent on the computation of functions that would not be computable (or computable with different resource bounds) with idealized machines.

Real question, how could a finite number of observations ever suggest this? Is that a stupid question, even? I don't know.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:42 AM
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If only someone had pressed F10 during the big bang.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:42 AM
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47: I'm in a meeting so I can't think too hard about this, but I think the first thing I would look for is something violating one of the standard complexity classes' valid runtimes. That doesn't mean something violating C-T, since quantum algorithms appear to do that, but it's a start.

Otherwise...something something oracle something.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:47 AM
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Donald Trump's candidacy proves that our universe is a simulation; there's no way the real universe is this fucked up.


Posted by: My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:57 AM
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Yes, when my teen started this discussion, because her texting buddies were discussing it, I had a mini-eruption in which I called the subject stupid and the people who waste time on it stupidies.

Since my general child-raising policy is that you're not allowed to call anyone stupid, I will never hear the end of this.


Posted by: zb | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:06 PM
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Sean Carroll had a good post about simulations recently. He doesn't buy the idea. His recent book "The Big Picture" is a very good read on Life, the Universe, and Everything. Spoiler: he's a thoroughgoing materialist and believes we know enough about the universe at our level of discourse that souls, telepathy, mind-body dualism, life after death and many more don't exist.


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:08 PM
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It's also worth considering the similarity (ha, wrote "simularity" at first) of the Doomsday argument.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:11 PM
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Simply put, it says that supposing that all humans are born in a random order,

Why in the world would I suppose that that supposition even makes sense.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:14 PM
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52: Oh, nice, he bases his contradiction on the same issue I had with regard to declining resources.

Admittedly, depending on the average fanout, the probability of being in the leaf simulation could be low. If each society only makes only one simulation, that's 1/n where n is the number of civilizations. If each makes two, it's 1/2+1/n. But it does approach unity as fanout increases, so responsible simulators would tweak things to keep fanout down.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:15 PM
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54: Yeah, that's the annoying bit. Sort of assumes a Guf's room.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:16 PM
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Doing simulations is not easy, and doing them is wrong if you base your argument, as Musk does, on the idea that you are just looking at increasingly tiny particles and eventually you get to the smallest. Well, yes, you might, but "particle" is a concept that is only one way of looking at things. Another is fields as in Schroedinger's Equation, or strings whose vibrations produce the waves that make the apparent "particles." Digital computers can't deal with real numbers very well and you can't avoid those if (e.g.) you are going to simulate fields and waves and suchlike.


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:20 PM
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57: Sure, but we have numerical analysis nowadays. $ADVANCED_CIVILIZATION will have that, but better. And then you throw in the "if they're not looking at it don't compute it" shortcuts: don't simulate something until you have to, use a cheap approximation when you can. In a sense it's even easier than a video game because (admittedly depending upon intentions) your observers are themselves simulated. If simulated people look at something in a way that reveals a shortcut, you just rewind as much as necessary to compute the correct value. That is, flow of time in the simulation doesn't have to be linear in the flow of time outside of it.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:29 PM
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||
heebie: did you get my email from last week? It's totally fine if you don't want to follow up, but just wanted to make sure.
|>


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:32 PM
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yep, emailed you back.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 12:35 PM
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I'll admit that I don't like the argument that we're with high probability in a simulation, since an advanced society will make simulations, which will make their own nested simulations, etc. A society that has the resources to make a simulation does not necessarily have the resources to make a simulation that allows nested simulations. That would still make simulations the more likely case, but it wouldn't have the turtles-all-the-way-down character that I often see in these arguments.

Huh? I've never seen it framed that way. (I also don't follow this conversation much, so the fact that I haven't seen it doesn't mean it's not common.)

I thought the argument was: if there exists an advanced society with the ability to run computer simulations, then they are likely running millions of such simulations (that would be the point), which makes the odds exceedingly likely that we are in one of those simulations. Therefore, if we think we'll ever develop the technology to run computer simulations of reality, then we're almost certainly already in one.

I'm not saying that's a solid argument, but that's how I've seen it framed.


Posted by: urple | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 1:13 PM
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I'm in a meeting so I can't think too hard about this, but I think the first thing I would look for is something violating one of the standard complexity classes' valid runtimes.

For some reason this strikes me as all being unfogged in the most unfogged of all possible simulations.

I translate it as "I am procrastinating by talking not-out-of-my-ass on a subject of the utmost technical abstrusity, confident that someone will make the effort to follow me"


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 3:02 PM
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Frankly I still don't see how that could be observable. How would you have established that the observed phenomenon is in the one complexity class, but runs in another?


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 3:20 PM
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64

I like that Millgram paper.


Posted by: E. Messily | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 5:43 PM
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Yay!


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 5:51 PM
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64: It's not as good as the one with directions for how you can make people torture others.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 6:07 PM
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A simulated universe must be some combination of slower and simpler than the one in which it is embedded, so as more time passes we are less likely to be within a simulation.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 7:34 PM
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I'm trying to make the Simulation and Doomsday arguments fight.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 7:37 PM
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The Doomsday argument is a metaphysical version of the two envelopes paradox, and is dangerously close to the Anthropic Principle. All garbage that comes from making questionable assumptions you don't admit you're making.


Posted by: F | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 8:44 PM
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More logic fails: "That we might be in a simulation is, Terrile argues, a simpler explanation for our existence than the idea that we are the first generation to rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness."


Posted by: F | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 8:47 PM
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This whole thing seems so ridiculous that I have trouble believing anyone seriously cares about it, but apparently some people do, and they have enough money to make other people pretend to care too.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 8:48 PM
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62: the weakened argument I made is real and I can expound upon it if you'd like. I thought it was clear but I admit I'm not a great communicator. The stronger argument is harder and I believe it's possible but I suspect it's going to involve hours of work that I've only done a bit of.

I mean, that's the way it is: someone says something in alignment with their intuitions on the Internet. Proof is harder. Trying to do it while multitasking harder still.

71: compared to the amount of money spent on the usual theistic religions? Or is this based on a "they should know better" sort of argument?


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:03 PM
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72.3: I don't know how much money people are spending on trying to scientifically prove/disprove the validity of other religions (or to escape the confines of reality they define), so I guess I'll go with "they should know better."


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:08 PM
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63: Because we have lower bound on the complexity classes of many common problems, and could observe that the asymptotic complexity of the application of an algorithm, even in a finite number of observations, violates this. Its hard to come up with a plausible example of how this'd happen with the usual physical observable but since we're already wrll into the world of magic weirdness imagine an advanced civilization wants to show us their comparison-based sorting algorithms. Or something. That is; show to us you have an oracle. That can be done in finitely many observations.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:10 PM
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73: There is something bizarre in that we'd find it less objectionable if they spent an equivalent amount of money on the church of the holy universe simulation runner.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:12 PM
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71: To me they're sort of like Anselm's Ontological Argument. It's clear they're ridiculous but it's puzzlingly difficult to explain why.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:13 PM
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Well, depends on what that church actually does with the money. If they spend it on church operations and charity, okay, that's just a normal religion, more or less. If they spent it on trying to break out of the simulation or whatever, which is apparently what they're actually doing, then it's not necessarily exceptional but certainly bizarre. The Vatican isn't spending billions of dollars on rocket launches to send people to Heaven.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:16 PM
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76: But in either case, it's not like there's a way the truth of the theory can be established scientifically, at least according to usual way we do that.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:17 PM
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I suppose I see a weakness in the argument in 74 that an adversary who has e.g. a loglinear sorting algorithm with some absurd coefficient on it-- say, less than 1/(2^(2^100))--could simulate a sub-loglinear algorithm for longer than we'd be interested in investigating. Or more generally for any finite verification procedure an adversary who knows that procedure could defeat it by taking advantage of such coefficients. But such coefficients for "small" values would be miraculous in and of themselves. (Disclosure: drunk computer science is the worst computer science.)


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:18 PM
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I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see why computer science should intersect with metaphysics at all.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:20 PM
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54

But the next part is even worse: "supposing that all humans are born in a random order, chances are that any one human is born roughly in the middle."

The rest of the article then explains that the "simply put" version of the argument is completely wrong, but still based on inappropriate assumptions.


Posted by: F | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:24 PM
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Yes, why would a violation of complexity classes imply anything about the nature of reality as specific as the simulation hypothesis?


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:25 PM
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76: oh, definitely. But not entirely. And at least if you think hard enough about it you've done a bit of work in defining the boundary of philosophically annoying arguments.

78: in the bizarreness I mean I think I'd prefer a world where people spend money on kinda but not entirely idiotic metaphysical arguments--Nick Bostrom may annoy but he's a real philosopher, right?--over the usual low-utility "normal religion" spends. (Better yet would be neither.)


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:26 PM
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the usual low-utility "normal religion" spends

"Low-utility" is doing a lot of work there. Religious organizations do tons of for-real good work in the world. Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, refugee resettlement, that sort of thing. (All three of those are specific things Catholic Charities, and no one else, does in my own city.)


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:30 PM
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If Elon Musk starts doing that sort of thing, sure, I'll be more sympathetic to his attempts to break out of the Matrix or whatever.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:33 PM
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86

When this came up in the media, I thought people were talking about the Holographic Principle, not hand-wavey metaphysics.


Posted by: F | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:35 PM
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89: to me that'd odd. The set of functions computable in our universe, as compared to the ones describable, seems of inherent interest. Why would that *not* be interesting? There are things that are a way that seems arbitrary and not necessarily definable from physical or mathematical priors. We've been thinking about this a long time--what are we missing? (Yes, this makes the assumption that a mystery unsolved for a century with not much movement towards the truth must be deep.)

82: it would imply the existence of oracle machines, which is at least a violation of the church-turing thesis. Which I admit would merely be a complete revolution in our understanding of the universe. On, at our current understanding, the level of a miracle. I admit defeat: that wouldn't be proof but it'd be really curious if it showed up. I'd be pretty okay with that happening.

To be clear, I find the simulation argument intriguing but not convincing. Worth bantering about, anyway. I'm probably being too defensive of people who are foolish in ways I recognize in myself.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:35 PM
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80, not 89. (switched to a laptop.)

84: I put that in there so we could avoid talking for the things that aren't inherently religious. Yes: there are high-utility services that are provided by religions. If Catholic Charities didn't do those, would your city just devolve into a complete shithole where essential services aren't provided?

85: I don't get jokes.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:40 PM
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The set of functions computable in our universe, as compared to the ones describable, seems of inherent interest. Why would that *not* be interesting? There are things that are a way that seems arbitrary and not necessarily definable from physical or mathematical priors. We've been thinking about this a long time--what are we missing?

Well, if there are a bunch of universes, maybe we're just one of the weird ones. And if there aren't, maybe something in the formation of the universe arbitrarily made it weird in a way we'd notice. Physical phenomena don't have to have reasons behind them.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:42 PM
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89: "We're a weird case" is literally a reason to be metaphysics! Like, there's literally a principle named after that!


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:44 PM
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If Catholic Charities didn't do those, would your city just devolve into a complete shithole where essential services aren't provided?

I think a lot of people would dispute "essential" there (and maybe "shithole"). Ship all the homeless people and refugees somewhere else (or let them die in the streets)? Yes, please! /trump


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:44 PM
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To be (slightly) less flippant, yes, I doubt any other non-religious entity would step up to provide those services if CC couldn't. Another religious one might, if we still had religions in this hypothetical.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:46 PM
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90: But is it a reason to think computer science will help solve the metaphysical problem?


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:47 PM
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92: You're right: I should not dispute the ability of religion to make assholes' money flow towards the needy in ways that are not necessarily possible in our current culture. But this is at least in theory measurable; perhaps it could be co-opted while reducing the non-charity part. It is disgusting that that packaging of goods is necessary.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:50 PM
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But this is at least in theory measurable; perhaps it could be co-opted while reducing the non-charity part. It is disgusting that that packaging of goods is necessary.

Eh, humans gonna human. I'm not really religious at all myself (although I did fast yesterday), but I don't see a problem with the mere existence of religious organizations who channel the charitable impulses of believers (not all of whom are assholes) toward obvious social goods. And again, if the simulation-obsessives were as charitably inclined as (other) religious types, I wouldn't begrudge them their weird obsessions, but I don't see any evidence that they are.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:54 PM
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93: Because science--or metaphysics, for that matter--is not merely about solving problems but also defining and measuring them. We have a way that things are weird now. Or at least we think they do; it's withstood a lot of inquiry. We could express ways that would violate that particular weirdness (as I've imperfectly tried to); if we were to discover those, that'd change our perceptions of our weirdness, and change the metaphysical puzzle. A bifurcation that doesn't seem to be mathematically or physically motivated (and keep in mind that part of the specialness is that it doesn't appear to derive from physical properties beyond finiteness) disappear, and surely that should matter.

What if we change the branding: do you think that mathematics/logic have anything to do with metaphysics?


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 9:59 PM
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96.2: No. I'm not a philosopher or mathematician, so I'm willing to defer to them on this, but I don't see any reason the disciplines would be commensurate. Different objectives and different tools.

96.1 is way above my head.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:03 PM
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I'm not really religious at all myself (although I did fast yesterday),

I'm as goy as they come, so the differences in priors amuse me. If you see an ex-Catholic fast on a Friday, get help.

So, fine: religions justify themselves via their non-directly-related-to-believing activities because we're collectively garbage otherwise. Surely some Roman cynic made exactly that argument twenty-two hundred years ago. This is the worst history. (Apart from the ones epsilon next door.) I've let myself be led into an uninteresting argument. The areligious don't have good institutional structures to help the needy in ways that would be better done by governments (who can largely rely on religious charities, justifying keeping governments ineffective). There's a local maximum problem that's difficult to surmount, in the status quo's favor.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:07 PM
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If you see an ex-Catholic fast on a Friday, get help.

Yes, well, Catholics didn't spend hundreds of years being randomly murdered by Jews, so.

I've let myself be led into an uninteresting argument.

See, the fact that you find this argument less interesting than the one about whether we're all in a simulation speaks volumes about priors.

The areligious don't have good institutional structures to help the needy in ways that would be better done by governments (who can largely rely on religious charities, justifying keeping governments ineffective). There's a local maximum problem that's difficult to surmount, in the status quo's favor.

Now to me this is the more interesting argument, and I'm not sure which side I end up on. But if you don't find it interesting, I'm not going to press the point.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:14 PM
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96.2 was just a lead into the worst sort of argument, that computer science, mathematics, and logic are all mutually reducible to each other so if you accept the relevance of any one of them the other ones should also apply. But I'd get back to the weird fact that math is useful at all is metaphysics and then work from there. Ginger Yellow's 7 and ensuring conversation is an argument for why but it's not complete, and the bounds of its effectiveness are interesting. There's math that in a real sense we can't do! Some of it is because of finiteness, but is that all that's going on? We can reason consistently about what it'd be like if we could do it, though.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:16 PM
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99.first: Sorry. That was uncalled for. I meant that in jest but I fucked up and didn't take the full context into account. I'll try to be more careful.

Yes, sorry, it's an interesting argument. It's not the one I was intending, expecting, or primed myself to have, nor is it one that I could have well; I certainly have thoughts on how to solve it, but they're unspecialized and in that sense mostly uninteresting. (There are a lot of conversations I stay out of here because while I'm interested in them and have opinions, I don't have anything interesting to add. But I'm sure that's true of us all.) I expect we wouldn't much disagree on the state of things, beyond perhaps the depth of the local extrema. We might disagree on how to get out of it.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:23 PM
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I suppose I see a weakness in the argument in 74 that an adversary who has e.g. a loglinear sorting algorithm

Wait, I don't see how this is at all relevant, or any of 74, once you get past the "physical observable". Isn't that the whole problem? (That's what I meant the whole question to be.) Like, surely no one thinks that the simulation hypothesis will be established by, basically, a miracle, right? The obtrusion into our reality of a representative of the simulators—your "adversary"—who can run comparison-based sorts in faster than log-linear time. (But wouldn't being able to do that require miraculous capabilities within the simulating civilization, too? Or what? Is the idea that they know in advance what numbers we'll put to them, and have already sorted them? I mean, ok, I guess, but I still don't think this is interesting: it's basically an argument about miracles, dressed up in complexity classes.)

You started off, after all, talking about "physically observable things"! But no process of observation could both convince us that it was carrying out an algorithm of such-and-such sort and that it was doing so faster than any algorithm of that sort could be carried out (whatever the carrying out of the algorithm might come to here). (I think Hume's argument concerning miracles boils down to something of this kidney. I'm also reminding myself of Davidson's arguments about the law-like nature of physical phenomena.)


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:24 PM
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100: Sure, I mean, most of that is still over my head, but I'm not saying it's not worth exploring some of these issues on a theoretical/academic level. But the tech billionaire enthusiasm for the simulation idea seems to carry with it an idea that the simulation is a problem that, with enough money and tech-dude know-how, we can fix, and achieve [something]. That to me seems totally delusional, on par with the un(dis)provable claims of traditional religions. If that's not why you're interested in the question, then sure, I have no problem with exploring it.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:25 PM
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What if we change the branding: do you think that mathematics/logic have anything to do with metaphysics?

If I ignorantly say negative things about Modal Logic as Metaphysics, J/son St/nley might show up again :(.

"Logic" of course can be quite broadly construed, and its deployment in the preface to, and first chapter of, Life and Action, which is a metaphysical text, is just fine by me.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:27 PM
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101.1: Yeah, no, don't worry about it. I don't actually bear any personal animus toward Catholics. Just a reminder that "religion" isn't a monolithic entity, and specific religions have particular histories with regard to each other, and that affects how their modern adherents/descendants view these issues.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:28 PM
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And now that nosflow is here I'll let him handle the philosophical aspects of this argument. (I'm pretty sure I agree with him, but again, not a philosopher myself.)


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:29 PM
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I'm not here for much longer.

I have to admit I wasn't much impressed by the paper about philosophy and complexity classes by the guy who writes Shtetl Fabulous (and I know that's not its real name).


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:31 PM
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If there isn't really something called "Shtetl Fabulous" there totally should be.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:34 PM
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But wouldn't being able to do that require miraculous capabilities within the simulating civilization, too?

Nah, just pause the simulation, do the computation, then report back the result. You could also as you say do this via running time backwards to appear know things in advance.

Hey, you asked for finitely many observations. I'm giving you a description of what they'd look like. (Modulo the coefficient issue I mentioned which mostly just reflects what theorems I know.)

103: No, I don't think there's anything to "achieve," which is something I find largely meaningless in this context. A simulator that does not want to be seen will not be seen; a simulator that is okay with being seen is not someone I want to piss off. (There's some theistic thinking for you.) I would not throw money at this. I was being too flippant when I made what was fundamentally an aesthetic judgement on the relative worth of this to the non-charitable, non-cultural parts of conventional religion, which obviously is a complex mass that cannot be torn apart from the purely metaphysical aspects (but, as an asshole atheist, I'll pretend it can be until called on it.)


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:34 PM
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I do think that philosophers should have a greater appreciation of the resources of modern logic [not saying I have anything remotely approaching a solid grasp of these resources]. I once read a paper by Brian Weatherson containing the following argument, concerning Whistler's quip "You will, Oscar, you will":

Now let's think of how someone could have come up with this response. Even before we start researching the neural patterns behind quips like this, we can be pretty sure the following is not what happened in Whistler's brain. He first made an exhaustive list of all possible responses, from "Green ideas sleep furiously" to what he actually said, then figured out which would be best, then produced the best one. On this wildly implausible model, the reply would be intelligent because it would reflect the speaker's ability to properly evaluate this list of responses. That's implausible because the list is simply too big. Indeed, it is in principle infinitely large. The list is too big to survey not just consciously, but subconsciously.

Coming up with a response like this requires first coming up with a narrower
list of possible responses, and then evaluating which is best from that list. There's a romantic model of intellect where the list in question consists of just the reply actually issued …

This basically implies that Weatherson thinks that the elements of a list are antecedent to the list. But there's no reason to think this and it would seem (via the jumping-through of various hoops) to commit him to a view about the nature of conjunction which he may well hold but is certainly not obviously in play in the relevant passage. The potentially infinite list can just be generated one by one as needed (and then we can say that the person who comes up with a clever quip has a better (sub-personal) method of coming up with entries); it doesn't need to be an actual infinity realized all at once. (Obviously one needn't arrive there via Bob Harper's blog but it did help me.)


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:39 PM
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Nah, just pause the simulation, do the computation, then report back the result.

Ah, fair enough. This still seems like not really the spirit of your original remark, though. And I'm not convinced it wouldn't cause us to, instead, wonder about the foundations of mathematics. They've been shown to be flawed before!


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:41 PM
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If there isn't really something called "Shtetl Fabulous" there totally should be.

There's a blogspot blog that hasn't been updated since 2010.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:42 PM
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104: This disappoints me because you're saying things above my pay grade that I wish I could say something to beyond "oh, that is a book I should perhaps read. Or not?"

105: Comity. I was trying to do the same thing: that "not really religious at all" is so heavily culturally (religiously) dependent (And that is interesting me, back to priors.). I was trying to think of a cultural practice that I hold over from religion; beyond some vague sense of shame and disgust (that really isn't as Catholic-specific as is often claimed) I can't think of anything obvious.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:42 PM
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113.1: fair! it's late and I should go to bed! It is an interesting book, though. Maybe I can say something intelligent about all this in the morning.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:43 PM
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No, I don't think there's anything to "achieve," which is something I find largely meaningless in this context. A simulator that does not want to be seen will not be seen; a simulator that is okay with being seen is not someone I want to piss off.

Okay, but doesn't that mean you're just conceding that you're investigating this outside the confines of science as commonly understood? If you can (or want to) neither prove nor disprove that there is a simulator, how can you prove or disprove that there is a simulation?

I was being too flippant when I made what was fundamentally an aesthetic judgement on the relative worth of this to the non-charitable, non-cultural parts of conventional religion, which obviously is a complex mass that cannot be torn apart from the purely metaphysical aspects (but, as an asshole atheist, I'll pretend it can be until called on it.)

Yeah, okay, fair enough. I'm very much an atheist myself, but as mentioned upthread I still find value in the traditions that have developed through my own "conventional" religion, which has spawned a vast scholarly tradition exploring issues of how to live in the world from which many useful insights can be extracted with some effort. I don't begrudge anyone who isn't willing to put that effort into their own or another religion, but I do object to the idea that there's no value in traditional religion even for the irreligious. But of course I said that before and I don't want to belabor the point.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:48 PM
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And I'm not convinced it wouldn't cause us to, instead, wonder about the foundations of mathematics

Or, of course, doubt that it's really doing a comparison-based sort. I mean obviously the making of the comparisons can't be apparent to us in the first place, since then it wouldn't be able to cheat in the way described.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:53 PM
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I was trying to think of a cultural practice that I hold over from religion; beyond some vague sense of shame and disgust (that really isn't as Catholic-specific as is often claimed) I can't think of anything obvious.

Now this I find very interesting, especially in relation to the difference between "lapsed Catholic" and "lapsed Jew" (not actually a thing; "once a Jew, always a Jew" is much more of a thing). Jews aren't devoid of shame, by any means, but this specific type seems foreign. There's a long tradition of Jews picking and choosing the elements of traditional Judaism that they are willing to follow regularly. If enough Jews choose a specific set and disregard others that becomes a new denomination, but if it's just an individual it's really between that person and God, and no one else cares. So there's a lot of latitude to be somewhere in between completely accepting and completely rejecting the faith, which doesn't seem to be the case in most forms of Christianity.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 10:59 PM
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111: C-T is metamathematics, not mathematics. We don't really have a good explanation for it, right? I'd say that's still in the spirit but perhaps I overstated it: I was imagining that you would still need to take a number of observations with increasingly long input and observe the algorithmic complexity of the result.

But I think that's still interesting in that it shows that apparently inviolable rules of time complexity can be ignored since the simulators don't rely on the same time. Same with space complexity. Yes, pure computability is harder.

I guess it depends on what you mean of foundations of mathematics but they haven't been invalidated much recently. I admit I'm excited for anything that been taken as fact (with many attempts at contradiction) for almost a century to be overturn. If that's where it went, that would also be okay. Yes, to a degree this is leaping towards a less parsimonious but more exciting explanation, aided by a dubious statistical argument.

Having just read 110, I'm glad to see Harper's blog evoked. But having puzzled over it I'm too tired to see exactly how the formulations of conjunction are relevant to Weatherson's assumptions.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:15 PM
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115: Oh, I think there's value, too. I was getting defensive and took an aesthetic argument too far. (There are arguments I shouldn't make after drinking before a long weekend, as I'm taking tomorrow off.) And we could just as well apply "humans gonna human" to not just the negative, I've-got-mine aspects that religions curtail but also the positive aspects of community, introspection, what have you. And on second thought I'm not sure I even find it that aesthetically pleasing, as it can be seen as a reformulation of old gnostic thought. (I think there are Jewish traditions that go pretty far in this direction with fairly active mysticism? I have only Wikipedia-level knowledge there.)

116: Let's fudge it some more and make it a sub-linear sorting oracle. We accept that any actually existing sorting algorithm must be a function of its input, right? At that point you can replace sorting with almost any other algorithmically non-trivial task.

I really did just dress up "miracles prove god exists" in more precise terms, didn't I? That's disappointing. I'm running out of space to defend these guys at all. Can't be any worse than spending money on super-yachts, I guess?

117: There's definitely more latitude--I take it as a truism that a disproportionate number of the best atheists are good Jews--but especially in the big tent of Protestantism you can go pretty far, at least on comparatively "minor" issues like predestination if you accept some core statements about Jesus. If Christendom hadn't been the majority religion of a single dominant state for so long during its formative period perhaps it would have maintained the greater diversity of the early centuries, but outside a deep persecution phase I don't see how it could attain such flexible character. (Then again, Hinduism is almost as flexible.)


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:37 PM
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119.1: Eh, I really don't mean to make you feel bad. I do really understand where the "New Atheist" types are coming from. It's just that the idea that (what I, a non-programmer, consider to be) self-evidently non-disprovable postulates like "our reality is all a simulation created by superior beings" can be treated as more plausible than other non-disprovable postulates such as those advanced by traditional religions does seem annoying. If the tech-bro community is going to reject traditional religion entirely, the least they can do is own their atheism.

119.4: One of the interesting takeaways for me from The Inheritance of Rome was the extent to which even western Christianity wasn't standardized and hierarchical until the Gregorian Reforms at the earliest. That makes its history a lot of more similar to that of western Judaism up to that point than I would have thought. They ended up diverging from that point on, but it's still interesting how contingent it all was. I'm less familiar with other religious traditions but I'm sure there are parallels lots of places.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-13-16 11:55 PM
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119.4 I think you underestimate by a lot the diversity of actually existing Christianities. The stuff that people appear to agree on is only possible to agree on because it's meaning is totally opaque. What possible disproof could there be of the Nicene creed? Whether we decide we agree to it or not send to me an entirely political question: one about which alliance we want to belong to.

Even reading back through history, Christianity had been fantastically diverse over time in the same places and cultures. Joel Osteen's church has almost nothing in common with the cathedral down the road from me.


Posted by: Nw | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 12:12 AM
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/send/seems/

/Had/has/


Posted by: Nw | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 12:13 AM
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re: 110.last

List comprehension versus generators, on a Python programming model.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 12:56 AM
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Everybody should read "Send her Victorious" by Brian Aldiss.

As a non-mathematician and non-philosopher, it seems to me that this stuff fails at the outset, because it's an exercise in massively anthropocentric arrogance to suppose that some software superstar in California has anything useful to say about what might be the priorities of a super-civilisation. Or anybody else for that matter. Humanity is a long way short of becoming a Kardashev Type I civilisation; we haven't a clue what the denizens of a type II+ might get up to. If we were to encounter such denizens and ask them about complex simulations of the universe, they might very well reply along the lines of "What? Why?"

Also, if this is a simulation and somebody succeeded in escaping it, they would very likely crash it. And there's no reason to suppose that they would continue to have any existence beyond it, a consummation devoutly to be wished.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 4:40 AM
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 "I doubt any other non-religious entity would step up to provide those services if CC couldn't. Another religious one might"

This is an extraordinary statement. Not only have you never seen or heard of any non religious or even non Catholic charity running a soup kitchen, homeless shelter or refugee shelter, you confidently state that you don't think any such charity could conceivably exist! (They do: I worked for one.)


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 5:08 AM
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Suggested name: Beans and Nothingness.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 5:23 AM
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Doctors Without Eschatology?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 5:35 AM
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Nah, just pause the simulation, do the computation, then report back the result.
We'd better not ask this oracle too hard a question.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 5:52 AM
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The existence of such an oracle would really be evidence that we aren't living in a simulation run in a reality with similar logic to our own. And since we don't see such an oracle our confidence that we are can only increase!


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 5:57 AM
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The International Red Blob and Differently-Shaped Other Red Blob Movement.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 6:01 AM
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124

It is as plausible that the simulation-running civilizations would create simulations that are interesting and comprehensible to themselves, right? Sure, there might be simulations where everything is totally strange and weird from their point of view, or built to explore different physics models or whatever but I would (anthropocentrically...) guess that most of them would in major ways be like the sim-runners' universes.

So, if we are in a simulation it is probably being run by meta-Musks and meta-Thiels and meta-Gateses. Terrifying thought.

Also, it is backwards to think the idea we are simulated is a search for a religion substitute. Guys like Musk don't want to look for the meta-cosmic gods, they want to be one.


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 6:01 AM
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United Why?


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 6:43 AM
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No-one mentioned Ken MacLeod's 'Restoration Game' yet?


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 6:46 AM
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Having just read 110, I'm glad to see Harper's blog evoked. But having puzzled over it I'm too tired to see exactly how the formulations of conjunction are relevant to Weatherson's assumptions.

My cod-understanding is that the different formulations of conjunction differ in whether one takes the conjuncts to be logically prior to the conjunction (which is defined by its introduction rule), or to be (as Harper puts it) "anything that behaves conjunctively, which means that it supports the two elimination rules given in the definition. There is no commitment to the internal structure of a proof, nor to the details of how projection operates; …"; i.e., no commitment to the idea that first you have the conjuncts and then you have the conjunction. Weatherson's treatment of a list of candidates maps onto the first of these (explicitly if a list is treated as nested pairs).


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 6:58 AM
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Faulty parallelism there, it should have been something like "takes the conjunction (which is defined by its introduction rule) to be logically posterior to the conjuncts, or to be" etc.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 6:59 AM
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133

Or Iain Banks' "Surface Detail."


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 7:34 AM
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OT: At work, they want me to participate in something called the "Healthy Movement Brown Bag" program. I'm afraid to open to attachment.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 7:38 AM
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125: I think teofilo was talking only about charities in his own city.


Posted by: Todd | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 7:39 AM
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138 is right, but 125 was such obvious trolling I'm not sure it merits a response.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 8:06 AM
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At least it wasn't the Healthy Brown Movement Bag.


Posted by: One of Many | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 8:13 AM
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It's not easy pooping green.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 8:15 AM
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We beg to differ.


Posted by: Opinionated Ducks | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 8:25 AM
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Did others also perceive heavy intimations in the later Culture novels that Subliming was basically escaping the simulation that is our universe into whatever lies beyond?


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 9:42 AM
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143: Yes. I agree with DaveLMA that it's amazing we hadn't mentioned Surface Detail yet.

Teo, I kind of ignored your mentions of provability/non-provability and relative plausibility last night. Sorry. Ranking plausibility of different semi-decidable problems (which this is: it can be proven but not disproven) isn't new to atheism; it goes back at least to Russell's teapot. The simulation argument has a few things in favor of it being more plausible--at least to tech bros--than any given standard theistic hypothesis (but not necessarily more plausible than standard theism in general): it's a fairly vague system that doesn't make many constraints on the simulation creators or runners, not even assuming competence of the latter. (All else being equal, parameterized systems should be more plausible than those systems with the parameters filled in. Yes, that's a weak argument, but it isn't nothing.) More compellingly, it provides a direct model of what a simulation would look like in that it's very plausible that we could make a simulation some day, and it's easy to imagine ourselves as residents of that simulation--although that gets into interesting questions about philosophical zombies. Given that, I don't think it's a stretch to question whether it could go the other way around.

Parallels to that are fairly uncommon in regular religion (or at least aren't mentioned much), and would mostly fall under apotheosis-like scenarios. Like going to Kolob. In the light of day, I'm on team these-jerks-want-to-be-gods and that is squicky.

Actual investigations are going to be silly because you have to bound the parameters and make assumptions about the form of the simulation. From that you either you need to appeal to the simulation runners (doubtful, very theistic), or you need to exploit bugs and hope that the simulation runner isn't good at keeping you from doing that. Like breaking out of a virtualization sandbox. Trying to describe what those bugs could look like is where the snake oil salesmen secret scientists come in. Good work if you can get it, as Clytie said.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:05 AM
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What exactly does it mean to escape a simulation? If all this speculation is based on a (banned) analogy to our building of simulations, how exactly does our video game character learn to perceive the real world and manipulate it so that they can escape. Magic, I suppose.


Posted by: F | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:23 AM
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What exactly does it mean to escape a simulation?

Agreed. AFAICS if you're in a simulation and leave it, you're returned to the heap as a bunch of meaningless 1s ans 0s.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:27 AM
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AFAICS if you're in a simulation and leave it, you're returned to the heap as a bunch of meaningless 1s ans 0s.

I believe the Buddhists refer to that state as Nirvana.


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:30 AM
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147 was me, and no, Moby, I'm not referring to the grunge band.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:31 AM
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138: even that is pretty bizarre. What sort of place is so socially impoverished that there are no charities aiding the poor apart from the Catholic Church, and if you somehow got rid of the Catholic Church no other charities would step up? No other churches of any kind doing charity work now, no civic groups, no Rotary, nothing?


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:53 AM
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138: even that is pretty bizarre. What sort of place is so socially impoverished that there are no charities aiding the poor apart from the Catholic Church, and if you somehow got rid of the Catholic Church no other charities would step up? No other churches of any kind doing charity work now, no civic groups, no Rotary, nothing?


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:53 AM
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138: even that is pretty bizarre. What sort of place is so socially impoverished that there are no charities aiding the poor apart from the Catholic Church, and if you somehow got rid of the Catholic Church no other charities would step up? No other churches of any kind doing charity work now, no civic groups, no Rotary, nothing?


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:53 AM
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Have you been to America?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:55 AM
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149-151: I get the feeling ajay is truly distraught at the lack of civic engagement in Alaska.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:55 AM
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146: I dunno. Think like an evil AI or a genie. Convince a being in the higher reality that your consciousness deserved to be put in a robot body. Then enact your revenge: "I'll show you the best of all possible worlds."


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 10:56 AM
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I don't think even Hollywood would greenlight that nonsense. And I just watched Tron.


Posted by: F | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 12:44 PM
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No other churches of any kind doing charity work now, no civic groups, no Rotary, nothing?

What? I didn't say anything remotely like that. I mentioned three specific charitable functions, each of which is in this city currently done by exactly one organization, all of which are affiliated with the Catholic Church. Of course there are other charities doing other things, some religious and some not.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 2:57 PM
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And after checking it turns out I was actually wrong about the soup kitchen, which is an independent nonprofit with no religious affiliation AFAICT. It's right next to the homeless shelter so I had thought they were affiliated, but apparently not. Point to the techbros.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 3:03 PM
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131 last. Yeah it made me immediately think of the tower of Babel. Just another update/remake. I guess the major difference is how obvious it is that it will end badly.


Posted by: Roger the cabin boy | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 4:47 PM
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158

In one of Michael Swanwick's stories, "Urdumheim," (related to his "Iron Dragon's Daughter" series) the collapse of the Tower of Babel is done on purpose because demons (or at least bad magical beings) are defeating the good guys (good gods?) by destroying language, so if there are thousands/millions of languages they can't win.


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 5:10 PM
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Were I to acquire great wealth, you guys wouldn't judge me too harshly if the bulk of my philanthropy went to a grant for zoos to breed sociability into large, predatory mammals, would you?


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 5:25 PM
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132 was pretty good.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 5:26 PM
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Thanks.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 6:20 PM
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160: YES. I thought you really cared about the red pandas!


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 6:31 PM
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which must have all the physicists groaning

Don't get me started.


Posted by: essear | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 7:06 PM
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You've already been started.


Posted by: Opinionated Alien Programmer | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 7:11 PM
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Like are we talking sociable wolves or what. They seem pretty sociable. Are you saying you want to lame up some wolves? Because opinionated Neolithic man got there first.


Posted by: R Tigre | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 7:26 PM
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Mostly bears and tigers. I was thinking red pandas for a starter grant.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-14-16 7:35 PM
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159- Yeah there have actually been several science fiction adaptations of the story. Fun stuff


Posted by: roger the cabin boy | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 2:50 AM
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I'm still a bit puzzled by 110 because I don't really see Harper as making any claim about the logical priority of conjuncts or conjunctions. In either case you're still getting those conjunctions only by the same introduction rule. Method 1 only makes no commitment to how it was proved in that there's no way to reuse any part of the proof of A and B in the elimination rule. Method 2 allows but does not require using anything learned in the proof of A and B in the proof of C; it's sufficient that you have A and that you have B. And of course these rules imply each other. I sadly don't remember this system well enough; is there a way to get around using the introduction rule to show that a term holds?

I guess I should be focusing on how having two elimination rules allows for laziness; we don't have to worry about computing B if we only care about A, since B doesn't even appear in the first elimination rule. So if we have a conjunction, we don't have to consider all the conjuncts. But I'm hung up on how we got the conjunction before the conjunct in the first place. I think my fault there is that I'm being inconsistent whether I think I'm dealing with a proof or a computation, but we could prove the result of an infinite list has a type and then evaluate its values later so that's probably a false dichotomy.

But that puzzlement probably just reflects that I'm coming from the original problem from a different perspective from you (which, as you said, there are many ways to get to this conclusion). Laziness works. I like how you phrased it as the measure of skill/wittiness is in terms of which entities you choose to focus on first; your generation function can short-circuit infinitely many comparisons. (Trivially, if you asked me to find the smallest positive integer I could determine this by considering the list [1,2,...] and I know enough to do it in that order.) In the limit a particularly witty person would in fact both satisfy his derided "romantic model of intellect" in terms of actual evaluation but still be considering it a member of the infinite list of all responses.

(This is surely not a useful cognitive model of wit, but I think that's besides the point.)


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 10:33 AM
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Red pandas are bastards.


Posted by: foolishmortal | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 11:18 AM
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Oh, I was thinking of remarks like this: "We may consider that the elimination rules define the connective, and that the introduction rule is derived from that requirement." They both share an introduction rule, but in one conception the introduction rule is what defines "conjunction": a conjunction just is something that you get by having two things and conjoining them. Then, given that you have that, you can eliminate it in such-and-such a way. The other one starts by saying: a conjunction is something where, if you have it, you can get two other things out of it. Where did they come from? Who cares! Well, in practice we might well care, so we supply ourselves with an introduction rule (which is the same as the other one), but that isn't, like, what conjunction is. Conjunction is (logically!) prior to the conjuncts: we get the introduction rule from conjunction (which we get from the elimination rules, whose top halves we can (IMO) treat as opaque even though as written they have two conjuncts on either side of a symbol). On the other method, we get conjunction from the introduction rule.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 11:19 AM
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70 - finally. Most overrated animal by a mile.


Posted by: R Tigre | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 11:20 AM
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Anyway, now that you're here again/I'm here again and slightly alert, maybe I can try to expand on 104 for which you rightly took me to task. (The introduction to this book, which I think I don't own (I mean I know I don't own the translation and I think I don't own the original), is very good about the turns the term "logic" has taken, btw.)

Thompson starts off the first chapter mentioned above pointing out that Hegel is taken to task for including "life" as a logical category and proceeds:

…the objection Hegel is contemplating can be expounded in a series of apparent truisms. For logic, if tradition can be trusted, relates to the form of thought—a form of inference, for example, or the 'logical form' of a judgment. 'Form' here is of course opposed to to content, a distinction that begins to become explicit for us when we learn to use schematic letters of different types [N.B.!] and to substitute other expressions for them. How the distinction is to be further elaborated … are admittedly matters for dispute. But let them be resolved as one likes: how can anyone pretend that thought about living things differes in any such respect from, say, thought about planets?"

And then he goes on to try to convince us that thought about living things actually is distinct, formally, from thought about planets, that "living things" form a category whose members enter into combinations with each other and with members of other categories in distinctive ways (or not at all), that to think of something as living is (if you like) to ascribe a type of being to it, and further things fall out as a matter of logic, or maybe you'd want to say meta-logic maybe. Compare (as Thompson does in his introduction) Fregean "objects" and "concepts"; when we write (not in a literal different type, but with at least different capitalization) aFb and bGc, we understand that it would be nonsense, and not merely false, to write FGF even if the relation or concept-term G is reflexive, because concepts/relations don't fall under concepts/relations, only objects/relata do that. Calling something an "object" bzw. "concept" implicitly ascribes to it the possibility of being joined with other terms in only certain distinctive ways. And (per Thompson) there's no reason to think that our thought might not be concerned with scads other such categories, which can be described/delimited and whose investigation would constitute, on at least one reasonable construal of the term, logic. And who knows but that the resources of mathematical logic or the various x-theories popular in CS depts might not be useful in fleshing them out.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 11:42 AM
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"you" in 173 is dalriata, obvi.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 11:42 AM
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No, that's aurochs. They coast on a reputation borrowed from truly badass Pleistocene megafauna but they're just large, unsuccessful cows.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 11:42 AM
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whose top halves we can (IMO) treat as opaque even though as written they have two conjuncts on either side of a symbol

I was going back and forth as to whether I think this is true. Philosophically, I agree, but I'm not sure if that applies to this specific system in practice. I haven't thought about these in a while, but I thought that notations were prior to rules: if we have something named this, we can act on it this way, not that things that could be acted upon in this way may be named as such.

But I see what you're saying now. Method 2 requires proofs from A and B to something (possibly "A and B" itself) before you can get anything out of it. Method 1 doesn't care; whatever path you got there, you can project out A and B from it. It wouldn't matter if you didn't have proofs/computations of their form while in 2 it's necessary; that means method 2 must be eager while 1 can be lazy (and thus allows the conjunction to be prior).

That is a little astounding to me; method 1 is the more straightforward way to derive conjunction; method 2 on the face of it looks more powerful--and it does lead to shorter proofs--but is in that sense more restrictive.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 11:43 AM
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I should have said "define conjunction," not "derive conjunction."


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 11:48 AM
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Most overrated animal by a mile

Totally. Brown bamboo-eating raccoons, basically.


Posted by: Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 12:05 PM
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173: I agree, or at least presume, there are scads (a unit impenetrable to mathematical logic) such categories. But if the study of concepts isn't useful to all (not to say that it is all that is useful), then "concept" is at best a misnomer. So while it might not apply to the scads of categories it should apply to the scads of concepts about categories. And that should be useful but again not the limit of investigation.

In a classic philosophical failure mode, we're probably not using terms the same way. "Logic" (or "mathematical logic") isn't to me just something done in formal systems but also in using similar methods, or doing meta-analyses of those systems. I don't see what you're doing in 173 as something alien to what I'd see in a math/CS context.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 12:06 PM
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I don't see what you're doing in 173 as something alien to what I'd see in a math/CS context.

Well, great!

I think in philosophy "logic" is behind the times in a lot of ways. (A guy I follow on twitter, Jon Sterling, is definitely of this opinion, unless it was actually stated by Darin Morrison; anyway, one of the two, in conversation with the other.)


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 12:11 PM
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I was going to say:

I wonder if this is partially institutional difference. At CMU the math and philosophy departments, and large parts of the CS school, are fairly inbred.

But then I realized you know that.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 12:19 PM
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Thompson, incidentally, is also a Haskell programmer (and the README there is an excellent example of his general writing style) and maintains a github repository of papers by Martin-Löf. Interesting guy.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 1:02 PM
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Hm, he seems to have condensed the README from what I remember.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-15-16 1:04 PM
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Dalriata, maybe Ed Kmett and Fritz Henglein are proof that we live in a simulation.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 10-21-16 4:34 PM
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The American flag sort is all about discriminators! And you say computer science teaches us nothing about other fields.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 10-21-16 6:44 PM
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