# So, there is a 20% chance we are Sims

1. Aug 15, 2007

### G01

2. Aug 15, 2007

### Gza

He's a philosopher; I wouldn't give him much credit for understanding the nature of his misapplication of bayesian inference (but then again, i don't give philosophers credit for much )

3. Aug 15, 2007

### dontdisturbmycircles

Well lets just hope they have installed good surge protectors ;-). I want to finish our game of chess before our computer simulation shuts down Go1. :-(

Last edited: Aug 15, 2007
4. Aug 15, 2007

### G01

Hehe, alright, it's chess time!

5. Aug 15, 2007

### Staff: Mentor

I saw this movie - it's called The Thirteenth Floor and it is pretty good.

So if the odds would have it that our decendents would make simulations, what are the odds they'd screw with the simulation?

6. Aug 15, 2007

### G01

This is only a gut feeling, but I'd say 113.867% (See I can make up numbers too...)

7. Aug 15, 2007

### rocomath

i think i would have been deleted by now ...

8. Aug 16, 2007

### Chi Meson

My gut feeling is that philosophy is 98% crap. I took a class on Hegel once, and I found that it reminded me of Jazz. A lot of talent, and plenty of logical tricks, puzzles, insight, and even lots of interesting long passages. But on the whole, it is just rambling about desks and trees.

You don't like the current philosophical trends? Just wait a minute...

9. Aug 16, 2007

### ranger

When I read it in the Science section of the New York Times the first thought that came to me was that these people are really in need of some real science news. The funny part of the article (IIRC) was that TIERNEY speculates that these posthumans would reply entirely on silicon (but later redeems himself by pleading ignorance). Nevertheless, this crackpot actually has website:http://www.simulation-argument.com/
And the paper: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

:yuck:

10. Aug 16, 2007

### ranger

According to the article, they already are:

11. Aug 16, 2007

### daveb

That was an amazingly cool movie. Even though The Matrix was more popular, Thirteenth Floor was a better "OMG we all live in acomputer" movie.

12. Aug 16, 2007

### Aether

Estimates have been made for the computing power necessary to fully emulate the human brain...a real-time emulation of one human brain is said to require between $$10^{16}$$ and $$10^{19}$$ calculations per second (see Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 2005). Today's supercomputers do approach the low-end of this capability, and within forty years from now it is estimated that a \$1,000 PC will have the raw capability to fully emulate all human brains that have ever existed at a rate of 10,000 X real-time.

13. Aug 16, 2007

### George Jones

Staff Emeritus
Can we force a reboot?

Can we hang the computer?

Force it into the blue screen of death?

14. Aug 16, 2007

### Aether

The "ultimate laptop" would have enough raw computing capacity to simultaneously emulate the brains of every human being who ever lived at a rate that is $$10^{21}$$ X real-time. At that rate, an emulation could fully reproduce the last 10,000 years of human history in just over 17 nanoseconds using a 1kg laptop computer. The ultimate laptop runs very hot though, so a cold version might be more practical which would do the same job in microseconds to milliseconds.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6799/fig_tab/4061047a0_F1.html

Hmmm...that may depend on whether we are running on: A) a Windows machine in Bill Gates' closet; B) a Macintosh in Steve Jobs' closet; C) a Linux machine in Linus Torvalds' closet; or D) none of the above, we have "first mover" advantage.

Last edited: Aug 16, 2007
15. Aug 16, 2007

### Chi Meson

For Mac users, it's the "spinning pizza cutter of death."

16. Aug 16, 2007

### G01

I'm sure someone who would go out of his way to make a simulation of the universe would do it on a LINUX machine.