TheKingOfSheep
Member
I just started reading Rizwan Virk, The Simulation Hypothesis: An Mit Computer Scientist Shows Why Ai, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game , 2019. Has anyone else dipped their toes in this book?
I am not terribly impressed with his convoluted and often incoherent claims that religions too are a description of the simulation theory. And his rather far fetched explanations for again and again debunked paranormal phenomena don't do the credibility of this book any favors. He writes stuff like: "(...) beings that are not in the rendered world but are watching and influencing us is a good description of what (...) religions call angels and demons. Recordings of deeds, evaluation of scores, even replaying of specific events are common in video games. In video games, we have autonomous processes (sometimes called daemons) whose job it is to watch us and AI that is available to respond to requests that players make to the unseen servers."
What I do like and haven't, up until this point, seen written down as coherently as in this book, is the idea that if video games continue to become more and more sophisticated it is entirely believable we will reach a point where a video game world will become indistinguishable from the 'real world' we are living in right now. And if that is the case, maybe such a game already exist and we are actually part of it. I know, basically what Nick Bostrom said, albeit less lay person friendly, and without the pop culture and video game references; but with a more realistic and better theorized perspective on what would be required in terms of computer power to realize, what he, Bostrom, called, a fully fledged 'ancestor simulation'.
I think Virk is way too optimistic, though, in terms of what human beings can and will achieve science- and technology wise. I doubt if mankind can survive long enough, considering with what we are doing to our environment, to reach the level of technological and scientific sophistication necessary to run a simulation of evolution, well, of basically everything, starting at the moment of the big bang. And the idea that we are actually living in a sim right now is a bit of a stretch, I think. But I do believe nature may behave very much like a very very complex computer program.
As far as the simulation hypothesis goes, it is just a sign of the times we live in, I think. It synthesized what science knows, or thinks it knows, about reality right now, and how our culture looks like today. With cyber space being such prominent part of the human experience, the simulation theory may very well be a sort of synthesis between cyber culture, science and religion: in that it tries to answer, in a wholly original way perhaps, the same age old existential questions mankind has always struggled with and that first myth, then religion, then philosophy and then science has tried to answer.
Anyway, what are your thoughts about the simulation hypothesis and Virk's book (for those we read it) Gaf?
I am not terribly impressed with his convoluted and often incoherent claims that religions too are a description of the simulation theory. And his rather far fetched explanations for again and again debunked paranormal phenomena don't do the credibility of this book any favors. He writes stuff like: "(...) beings that are not in the rendered world but are watching and influencing us is a good description of what (...) religions call angels and demons. Recordings of deeds, evaluation of scores, even replaying of specific events are common in video games. In video games, we have autonomous processes (sometimes called daemons) whose job it is to watch us and AI that is available to respond to requests that players make to the unseen servers."
What I do like and haven't, up until this point, seen written down as coherently as in this book, is the idea that if video games continue to become more and more sophisticated it is entirely believable we will reach a point where a video game world will become indistinguishable from the 'real world' we are living in right now. And if that is the case, maybe such a game already exist and we are actually part of it. I know, basically what Nick Bostrom said, albeit less lay person friendly, and without the pop culture and video game references; but with a more realistic and better theorized perspective on what would be required in terms of computer power to realize, what he, Bostrom, called, a fully fledged 'ancestor simulation'.
I think Virk is way too optimistic, though, in terms of what human beings can and will achieve science- and technology wise. I doubt if mankind can survive long enough, considering with what we are doing to our environment, to reach the level of technological and scientific sophistication necessary to run a simulation of evolution, well, of basically everything, starting at the moment of the big bang. And the idea that we are actually living in a sim right now is a bit of a stretch, I think. But I do believe nature may behave very much like a very very complex computer program.
As far as the simulation hypothesis goes, it is just a sign of the times we live in, I think. It synthesized what science knows, or thinks it knows, about reality right now, and how our culture looks like today. With cyber space being such prominent part of the human experience, the simulation theory may very well be a sort of synthesis between cyber culture, science and religion: in that it tries to answer, in a wholly original way perhaps, the same age old existential questions mankind has always struggled with and that first myth, then religion, then philosophy and then science has tried to answer.
Anyway, what are your thoughts about the simulation hypothesis and Virk's book (for those we read it) Gaf?
