Do you think any aliens exist in the universe?

[bilby]

Do you believe that one day it will be possible to make a simulation that is indistinguishable from reality?

No.

And if it were possible, it wouldn't follow that it would happen billions of times. Once you simulate all of reality, why do it again?

 

[excreationist]

Do you believe that one day it will be possible to make a simulation that is indistinguishable from reality?

No.

And if it were possible, it wouldn't follow that it would happen billions of times. Once you simulate all of reality, why do it again?

If the latest consoles could play games that are indistinguishable from reality, how many times would people collectively run those games over the coming centuries? Once? There are already over a billion people playing games and they'd play multiple games...

Also it isn't about faithfully simulating all of reality (like the 10^57 atoms in the Sun) - it just needs to be realistic enough from the point of view of a player - I think it would resemble reality but a lot of the specifics might be different.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Do you believe that one day it will be possible to make a simulation that is indistinguishable from reality?

No.

What about making videos with automatic voices that are indistinguishable from reality? If not now, what about in a century?

I think representations in a way are simulations. So a video of a real event is a simulation of the real event and a video of a fake event is a simulation of a representation or simulation of a simulation. So what you seem to be asking is since layman using ordinary senses through a computer interface have a hard time distinguishing between a simulation and a simulation of a simulation, wouldn't that imply your original thesis: one day it will be possible to make a simulation that is indistinguishable from reality.

Let me try to define some things here. First, a simulation to me is a representation of a thing in some way, it's a thing that mimics some features of another thing or category of things and in order to do that it is either incomplete as there are things that it does not possess, at a minimum it could be the true process or true location, or it is inconsistent with the real thing or category of things, meaning a feature(s) does not fit. Second, "distinguishable" to me means that it is logically possible for an appropriately trained or skilled person utilizing the right technology to ascertain such difference (incomplete mapping or inconsistent mapping) between thing A and thing B (or set of things C). Thirdly, I will now posit that the technology to create simulations cannot surpass the technology of the same era that is used to detect either the incompleteness or inconsistency between a simulation and a real thing. Though particular experts from time to time may have difficulties--perhaps not all information is available to them for example--it remains logically possible at all times to distinguish one from the other.

Now when you write about indistinguishability you seem to be using it in a less academic manner--like say socially by laymen and expert fraudsters. So, for example, suppose a hundred years from now a person is drugged and a future-technology VR head set is placed on them so that when they become semi-conscious they experience a simulated environment. They then behold themselves in the VR murdering a person and in the VR eventually they go to sleep while in reality they are drugged more to go unconscious. They wake up and some people dressed up as police take them to the station to question them and yell at them. Would they _believe_ they were in a real event? Probably.

To me, that is a very different thing from a blanket statement saying that a simulation is indistinguishable from reality.

Finally, I will just add that I don't think this idea of a simulation is new, except for the terminology makes it sound scifi. It really is more of a vestigial artifact of religion. The way religions function is to offer something to people and get something back (usually money, sex or power). The thing offered is unreality--usually the fake existence of something beyond life such as an afterlife or an enlightened state. There's no waking up and taking off the VR headset in another dimension when we die. When we die, we die. There's no interesting cool Matrix. There's just life while we are here.

 

[excreationist]

Finally, I will just add that I don't think this idea of a simulation is new, except for the terminology makes it sound scifi.

I think that is an advantage - for it not to just be a new idea. I am a fan of this dream thought experiment - apparently it is related to Hinduism:

1.2.3. - Mythology of Hinduism - Pt. 1

I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night, any dream you wanted to dream. And you would of course be able to alter your time-sense and slip, say seventy-five years of subjective time into eight hours of sleep. You would, I suppose, start out by []

web.archive.org

I see each session of dreaming as being relevant to a simulation/game. It begins in God mode, etc.

It really is more of a vestigial artifact of religion. The way religions function is to offer something to people and get something back (usually money, sex or power). The thing offered is unreality--usually the fake existence of something beyond life such as an afterlife or an enlightened state. There's no waking up and taking off the VR headset in another dimension when we die. When we die, we die. There's no interesting cool Matrix. There's just life while we are here.

In that previous link you "wake up" after you die, also in this scenario:

If I still believed there was definitely no afterlife I'd be more likely to try and commit suicide again. The last time I was gassing myself in my car I thought I'd listen to the radio and heard Ben Lee's "Gamble Everything for Love" and the start of New Radicals' "You Get What You Give". After I heard the lyrics of "you've got a reason to live" from that song I stopped things but I was pretty disorientated. There are also quite a few other stories. I'm not saying there would definitely be an afterlife but I now believe I might be penalised in some way if I killed myself at this point in my life (and also I don't want to negatively impact my wife, etc).
Being "indistinguishable from reality" is from the player's point of view. Nick Bostrom also says that people's memories could be modified if they came across some problem with the simulation.
To go back to what you said earlier, even though it happens in Black Mirror a lot, you think that people will never hook up a mind or brain up to a simulation? Even in 10,000 years time?
On the other hand it's good that most people don't believe we're in a simulation because that would make things less immersive - that first link says:

And after you’ve done that for some time you’d think up a new wrinkle. To forget that you were dreaming so that you would think it was all for real. And to be anxious about it. Because it’d be so great when you wake up. And then you say well like children who dare each other on things, how far out could you get? Or could you take what dimension of being lost, of abandonment, of your power, what dimension of that could you stand you could ask yourself this because you know you would eventually wake up