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Will_Newsome comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
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Because it might be impossible to falsify any predictions made (because we can't observe things outside the light cone, for instance), and science as a social institution is all about falsifying things.
Falsification is not a core requirement of developing efficient theories through the scientific method.
The goal is the simplest theory that fits all the data. We've had that theory for a while in terms of physics, much of what we are concerned with now is working through all the derived implications and future predictions.
Incidentally, there are several mechanisms by which we should be able to positively prove SA-theism by around the time we reach Singularity, and it could conceivably be falsified by then if large-scale simulation is shown to be somehow impossible.
You're confusing falsifiability with testability. The former is about principle, the latter is about practice.
Ah, thank you. So in that case it is rather difficult to construct a plausibly coherent unfalsifiable hypothesis, no?
"2 + 2 = 4" comes pretty close.
Isn't an unfalsifiable prediction one that, by definition, contains no actionable information? Why should we care?
Not quite. Something can be unfalsifiable by having consequences that matter, but preventing information about those consequences from flowing back to us, or to anyone who could make use of it. For example, suppose I claim to have found a one-way portal to another universe. Or maybe it just annihalates anything put into it, instead. The claim that it's a portal is unfalsifiable because no one can send information back to indicate whether or not it worked, but if that portal is the only way to escape from something bad, then I care very much whether it works or not.
Some people claim that death is just such a portal. There're religious versions of this hypothesis, simulationist versions, and quantum immortality versions. Each of these hypotheses would have very important, actionable consequences, but they are all unfalsifiable.
Somewhat off topic, but that all instantly made me think of this. I may very well want to know how such a portal would work as well as whether or not it works.
WARNING: Wikipedia has spoilers to the plot
I am parsing this as "contains no actionable information." That suggests we are in agreement or I parsed this incorrectly.
Unfalsifiable predictions can contain actionable information, I think (though I'm not exactly sure what actionable information is). Consider: If my universe was created by an agenty process that will judge me after I die, then it is decision theoretically important to know that such a Creator exists. It might be that I can run no experiments to test for Its existence, because I am a bounded rationalist, but I can still reason from analogous cases or at worse ignorance priors about whether such a Creator is likely. I can then use that reasoning to determine whether I should be moral or immoral (whatever those mean in this scenario).
Perhaps I am confused as to what 'unfalsifiability' implies. If you have nigh-unlimited computing power, nothing is unfalsifiable unless it is self-contradictory. Sometimes I hear of scientific hypotheses that falsifiable 'in principle' but not in practice. I am not sure what that means. If falsifiability-in-principle counts then simulationism and theism are falsifiable predictions and I was wrong to call them unscientific. I do not think that is what most people mean by 'falsifiable', though.
As I understand unfalsifiable predictions (at least, when it comes to things like an afterlife), they're essentially arguments about what ignorance priors we should have. Actionable information is information that takes you beyond an ignorance prior before you have to make decisions based on that information.
Huh? Computing power is rarely the resource necessary to falsify statements.
It seems to be that an afterlife hypothesis is totally falsifiable... just hack out of the matrix and see who is simulating you, and if they were planning on giving you an afterlife.
Computing power was my stand-in for optimization power, since with enough computing power you can simulate any experiment. (Just simulate the entire universe, run it back, simulate it a different way, do a search for what kinds of agents would simulate your universe, et cetera. And if you don't know how to use that computing power to do those things, use it to find a way to tell you how to use it. That's basically what FAI is about. Unfortunately it's still unsolved.)
I may be losing the thread here, but (1) for a universe to simulate itself requires actually unlimited computing power, not just nigh-unlimited, and (2) infinities aside, to simulate a physics experiment requires knowing the true laws of physics in order to build the simulation in the first place, unless you search for yourself in the space of all programs or something like that, and then you still potentially need experiment to resolve your indexical uncertainty.
Concur with the above.
What.
What.
I'm having a hard time following this conversation. I'm parsing the first part as "just exist outside of existence, then you can falsify whatever predictions you made about unexistence," which is a contradiction in terms. Are your intuitions about the afterlife from movies, or from physics?
I can't even start to express what's wrong with the idea "simulate the entire universe," and adding a "just" to the front of it is just such a red flag. The generic way to falsify statements is probing reality, not remaking it, since remaking it requires probing it in the first place. If I make the falsifiable statement "the next thing I eat will be a pita chip," I don't see how even having infinite computing power will help you falsify that statement if you aren't watching me.
No, actually, "just simulate the entire universe" is an acceptable answer, if our universe is able to simulate itself. After all, we're only talking about falsifiability in principle; a prediction that can only be falsified by building a kilometer-aperture telescope is quite falsifiable, and simulating the whole universe is the same sort of issue, just on a larger scale. The "just hack out of the matrix" answer, however, presupposes the existence of a security hole, which is unlikely.
If our understanding of the laws of physics is plausibly correct then you can't simulate our universe in our universe. Easiest version where you can't do this is in a finite universe, where you can't store more data in a subset of the universe than you can fit in the whole thing.
You could simulate every detail with a (huge) delay, assuming you have infinite time and that the actual universe doesn't become too "data-dense", so that you can always store the data describing a past state as part of future state.
That may not be a problem if the universe contains almost no information. In that case the universe could Quine itself... sort of.
If I'm reading that paper correctly, it is talking about information content. That's a distinct issue from simulating the universe which requires processing in a subset. It might be possible for someone to write down a complete mathematical description of the universe (i.e. initial conditions and then a time parameter from that point describing its subsequent evolution) but that doesn't mean one can actually compute useful things about it.
Sorry, but could you fix that link to go to the arXiv page rather than directly to the PDF?
Not as unlikely as you think.
Get back in the box!
And that's it? That's your idea of containment?
Or what, you'll write me an unhappy ending? Just be thankful I left a body behind for you to finish your story with.
Are you going to reveal who the posters Clippy and Quirinus Quirrell really are, or would that violate some privacy you want posters to have?
Only if you're trying to falsify statements about your simulation, not about the universe you're in. His statement is that you run experiments by thinking really hard instead of looking at the world and that is foolishness that should have died with the Ancient Greeks.
I wonder if the content of such simulations wouldn't be under-determined. Lets say you have a proposed set of starting conditions and physical laws. You can test different progressions of the wave function against the present state of the universe. But a) there are fundamental limits on measuring the present state of the universe and b) I'm not sure whether or not each possible present state of the universe uniquely corresponds to a particular wave function progression. If they don't correspond uniquely or just if we can't measure the present state exactly any simulation might contain some degree of error. I wonder how large that error would be- would it just be in determining the position of some air particle at time t. Or would we have trouble determining whether or not Ramesses I had an even number of hairs on his head when he was crowned pharaoh.
Anyone here know enough physics to say if this is the kind of thing we have no idea about yet or if it's something current quantum mechanics can actually speak to?
They match posts on the subject by Yudkowsky. The concept does not even seem remotely unintuitive, much less boldably so.
So, a science fiction author as well as a science fiction movie? What evidence should I be updating on?
Nonfiction author at the time - and predominantly a nonfiction author. Don't be rude (logically and conventionally).
I was hoping that you would be capable of updating based on understanding the abstract reasoning given the (rather unusual) premises. Rather than responding to superficial similarity to things you do not affiliate with.
If you link me to a post, I'll take a look at it. But I seem to remember EY coming down on the side of empiricism over rationalism (the sort that sees an armchair philosopher as a superior source of knowledge), and "just simulate the entire universe" comments strike me as heavily in the camp of rationalism.
I think you might be mixing up my complaints, and I apologize for shuffling them in together. I have no physical context for hacking outside of the matrix, and so have no clue what he's drawing on besides fictional evidence. Separately, I consider it stunningly ignorant to say "Just simulate the entire universe" in the context of basic epistemology, and hope EY hasn't posted something along those lines.
Which posts, and what specifically matches?