The World According to Trapper

by **Trapper Gus** 2014-05-15, 19:42

The Chop House has Great Steak!

Pricy though...

It amuses me to use this thread, created shortly after I first joined this board, as a jumping off point for "The World According to Trapper"

As long as I just edit it, without a second post, it will remain buried on the board.

To start with here is a much later post, discussing reality in one form.

Trapper Gus wrote:
DWags wrote:i mean, there are some pretty smart people who seem to believe this. I'm not going down the worm hole of belief, but it's been an interesting read the last couple of days. Nick Bostroms Ancestor simulation is interesting. Are we real? forget the birds.

Nick Bostrom: If we live in a computer simulation, then who is the programmer? Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom contends in his 2003 paper that future generations might have mega-computers that can run numerous and detailed simulations of their forebears, in which simulated beings are imbued with a sort of artificial consciousness. Odds are, we are products of that simulation, and we may not be the original species of humans.

Oh no, not Neil Degrasse too

My thoughts? "Trouble with the snap". Somebody was playing a u of m loving asshole and boom! Fuck you. Perfect deflection. Perfect landing in JWJ arms, perfect foil to the hateful friend who's team is in ann Arbor Michigan. Years later, his hateful friend fights back with a championship that is questionable.

I'm waiting for the payback. Go Green!

The idea that this world is a simulation. aka The Matrix, is one which appeals to the systemic philosophers.

After all a systemic philosopher is trying to define a set of rules which can be used to predict the behavior of the universe and thus a simulation of the universe is the case of a hammer finding something that looks like a nail.

A systemic philosopher will then use the idea to put together an argument that seems to be airtight, thus the 50/50 argument.

However, as Robert Pirsig said in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when attacking one of the all-time great systemic philosophers and his followers, using the philosopher's own ideas, paraphrased, "systemic philosophy is always an analogy for reality, not reality itself", thus the idea that reality is a simulation is just that, an analogy for reality, which starts with certain underlying assumptions. Socrates noted this, in passing, in his "Analogy of the Cave."

When examining any particular philosophical system in the end the underlying assumptions are the weakest part of the arguments it makes.

We are also, for those who remember, back in Descartes thought, where he tried to find a sceptic assumption to set reality on top of, with the idea there could be "a demon" creating everything around himself (simulation), and thus he settled on "I think, therefore I am", a very idealist point of view. This also shows that the "simulation" idea is not a new one, and there are certainly tons of further classical philosophy written about Descartes' thought.

So, could our reality all be a simulation in some computer in some sort of NASA?

What assumptions would need to be 100% true for this to be the case?

One such assumption is that there is some sort of computer, and some sort of "pimply faced teenaged entity" to program it and turn it on. It must be said, here, it is relatively obvious we do not have the knowledge to create such as simulation, ourselves, in fact we have nothing at all near to that level of knowledge, so in a sense this "pimply faced teenaged entity" would be so far advanced as to be considered God.

One argument against this is the old Occam's Razor, which in a sense is a misapplication of it, still holds some weight. If we need to postulate a "pimply faced teenaged entity" God with a computer & a program who has created this reality, then we really don't need the computer or the simulation program, a God can do all that without the computer or software, and a God is a much simpler analogy thus by Occam's Razor a much more likely explanation.

Not that I am personally stating a belief in this God, as I am more with Stephen Hawkings in that our current understanding of reality does not require a God to cause it. There could be a God, forsure, it is just modern physic explanations of reality not required that there is one.

Which then moves this thought process to the problems with computers as we know them in terms of simulating the reality we see around us.

In one word, indeterminacy.

Computers, even the quantum computers being developed, are in the heart of their technology, determinate machines. It is a requirement for any computer to operate that this is the case. The computer must do the same thing with the same set of instructions every time.

If it computers results are something different then there was something different in its inputs.

However, our reality is indeterminate. There are many examples, however Schrodinger's Cat is the most famous. A simulation by a determinate, as it must be, computer, has no place for Schrodinger's Cat.

Another argument in everyday reality is that there are almost uncountable indeterminate events and actions which occur every second of every minute or every hour of every day...

Again, Occam's Razor points to a computer simulation as being one of the least likely ways this could happen, and thus the occurrence of reality as a computer simulation is highly unlikely.

Now, with that post as a background;

I could go on, in eye glazing over depth, about different schools of thought regarding reality and how we know it.

And I don't think that would be productive.

My belief is that reality exists, outside of human conciseness, in a philosophical school word, I am an empiricist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism

However, this does not mean that the reality we understand through a combination of our senses & reasoning about it is the reality that truly exists. We understand enough about reality to survive within it, which is an unknown amount of knowledge about reality in its totality, if it even has a totality.

If, as a mind experiment, that idea is run backward, where we ask if our senses are telling us everything about reality, it can be realized, by an individual, that the reality we know is only some subset of reality at best.

Then questions which appear insane within our common understanding of reality can be asked, as insane, at least to our common understanding, answers appear.

Here is a simple one; can we move from place to place without moving in-between those places?
-- Our common answer is no.
-- However, if there are aspects of reality that we do not understand, as there are, the answer more clearly has to be, not that we know of, but if we "let go" of our common understanding, as in individual we can convince ourselves it is possible to move from one place to another, instantaneously. BTW, as a true mind exercise, when one truly believes we don't understand reality at all and that we can chose to believe in instantaneous transportation we are at the edge of a choice regarding believing what everyone else believes or insanity, as least as defined by common though. I strongly reccomend that not one of you choses to step off that cliff, however, I am trying to show you that the cliff exists in this reality.