And here I was waiting to get unplugged, or maybe finding a Nokia phone that received a call.

  • survirtual@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    This paper is shit.

    https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488_8e072972f66d1fb748b47244c4813c86.pdf

    They proved absolutely nothing.

    For instance, they treat physics as a formal axiomatic system, which is fine for a human model of the physical world, but not for the physical world itself.

    You can’t say something is “unprovable” and make a logical leap to saying it is “physically undecidable.” Gödel-incompleteness produces unprovable sentences inside a formal system, it doesn’t imply that physical observables correspond to those sentences.

    I could go on but the paper is 12 short pages of non-sequiturs and logical leaps, with references to invoke formality, it’s a joke that an article like this is being passed around and taken as reality.

    • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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      23 hours ago

      You don’t even need to reject the applicability of Gödel, because there’s no proof that our universe doesn’t include a bunch of undecidable things tucked away in the margins. Jupiter could be filled with complete nonsense for all we know.

    • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I mean, simulation theory is kind of a joke itself. It’s a fun thought experiment, but ultimately it’s just solipsism repackaged.

      In reality there’s no more evidence for it than there is for you being a butterfly dreaming it’s a man. And it seems to me that the only reason people take it at all seriously in the modern age is because Elon Musk said he believed it back when he had a good enough PR team that people thought he was worth listening to.

      • survirtual@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        Simulation theory is actually an inevitability. Look up ancestor simulators for a brief on why.

        Eventually when civilization reaches a certain computationally threshold it will be possible to simulate an entire planet. The inputs and outputs within the computational space will be known with some minor infinite unknowns that are trivial to compensate for given a higher infinite.

        Either we are already in one or we will inevitably create one in the future.

        • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          There’s a few wild leaps in logic, here.

          Firstly, we know of life evolving once. Just one planet. In the entire universe. We can postulate that with such a vast universe (and possibly multiverse) that it’s probable that other life exists elsewhere, but we don’t know that. It could be a unique event or an incredibly rare event. We can’t say, because 1 is way too small a sample size to extrapolate from.

          But you’re not even extrapolating from 1 datapoint. You’re extrapolating from something that you think might be true at some point in the future.

          • survirtual@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            I am skipping steps because this topic demands thought, research, and exploration, but ultimately the conclusion is, in my view, inevitable.

            We are already building advanced simulators. Video games grow in realism and complexity. With realtime generative AI, these games will become increasingly indistinguishable to a mind. There are already countless humans simultaneously building the thing.

            And actually, the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial life is support of the idea. Once a civilization grows large enough, they may simply build Dyson sphere scale computation devices, Matrioshka brains. Made efficient, they would emit little to no EM radiation and appear as dark gravitational anomalies. With that device, what reason would beings have to endanger themselves in the universe?

            But I agree, the hard evidence isn’t there. So I propose human society band together and build interstellar ships to search for the evidence.

            • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
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              6 hours ago

              None of what you’ve said ameliorates the faulty logic I highlighted. You have instead just added more assumptions.

              • survirtual@lemmy.world
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                5 hours ago

                The logic is not faulty, it is predicated upon conditional statements. It is actually a synthesis of Bostrom’s trilemma, Zuse/Fredkin digital ontology, Dyson/Fermi cosmological reasoning, and extrapolation from current computational capabilities.

                The “holes” are epistemic, not logical.

                • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
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                  4 hours ago

                  Okay, if you prefer to frame the flaws in your reasoning like that, then I’m happy to do so. That doesn’t make the conclusion less flawed. The conversation isn’t about the hows and whyfores of formal logic, it’s about whether the conclusion is likely to be true.

                  • survirtual@lemmy.world
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                    3 hours ago

                    From my perspective it is 100% true as I have seen the other side. Having the conclusion known gives a small advantage in forming the logic to get there.

      • kromem@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        Have you bothered looking for evidence?

        What makes you so sure that there’s no evidence for it?

        For example, a common trope we see in the simulated worlds we create are Easter eggs. Are you sure nothing like that exists in our own universe?

        • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          If we’re in a simulation then we’d have no idea what’s outside that simulation, so we’d have no idea what an easter egg would look like.

          But it’s not my job to find evidence to prove other people’s claims. It’s their job to provide evidence for those claims. That’s true regardless of whether the claim is that we live in a simulation, that we’re ruled over by a benevolent omnipotent god, or whether there’s a teapot orbiting between Mars and the sun.