How will the world end

[mused01]

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OBV not global warming if eeveryone would just turn their AC's on high

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makes perfect sense to me.

[nath]

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if you're talking about figuring out all of that by doing computations on the subatomic level (instead of "the wind blows" it's "quark does this, neutrino does that"), that's way more computing power than just our brains. especially because you have to be able to do it with virutally no lag, or the physical universe would fall apart. i guess you could fudge a lot of stuff when humans aren't paying super close attention but that seems kind of like a cop out.

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If a tree falls in the forest...

[ilya]

If you guys find the NYT article interesting I urge you to read Nick Bostrom's original paper, which can be found on his personal website (linked to in my earlier post in this thread). I think the article has led some of you to misunderstand his argument somewhat.

[ilya]

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if you're talking about figuring out all of that by doing computations on the subatomic level (instead of "the wind blows" it's "quark does this, neutrino does that"), that's way more computing power than just our brains. especially because you have to be able to do it with virutally no lag, or the physical universe would fall apart. i guess you could fudge a lot of stuff when humans aren't paying super close attention but that seems kind of like a cop out.


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it may be a cop out, but it would be a very reasonable one. consider how modern graphics engines render the environment for video game players. rather than trying to construct the whole space at once and keep it all running constantly, they make smart predictions about which bits may be required soon based on the direction the player is facing, their speed of movement, etc, and then simply load that small subset of the total space into short-term memory.

in fact, until relatively recently, even a simulation that was keeping tabs on everything at once wouldn't have had to worry about all that much detail. in a world where people didn't even understand the laws of gravity or have microscopes, there would have been no need to model object interactions on anything but a rough rudimentary level.

you might say that the simulators would have still had to model physics properly to make sure that the laws would be there for us to discover, but you could just as readily speculate that these laws and thus our ability to "discover" them have been introduced as "upgrades" into the simulation as the computing power of those running it has increased -- much like contemporary games have moved towards more and more complex and accurate real-time physics modeling.

in fact i would say we're getting pretty close to the point of being able to simulate an unpopulated physical environment with enough accuracy that an average person would not be able to tell the difference.