Read and Discuss

[TallahasseeGrannie]

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/10/30/top-scientist-asks-is-life-all-just-a-dream/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.timesonline.co.uk%2Farticle%2F0%2C%2C2087-1358588%2C00.html&frame=true

[bigbrother05]

1. Now I need a joint

[halobeam]

2. Great reading!

I understand poster #1's response, completely. Or was it REALLY poster #1 and not some hippie dude inflicting his design on this poster? hmmmm. Makes me wanna make "outloud" requests, like..."hey, can ya make me earn better money already?!"

[GeorgeGist]

3. A figment of God's imagination...

why not? Now try imagining absolute nothingness.






















Impossible isn't it.

[Igel]

4. They posit a trivial distinction.

If we believe consciousness is the key to being human, it doesn't matter if it's in a silicon (or other) matrix or if it's "real".

It's a hypothesis that is, ultimately, unfalsifiable; no experiment can be constructed to distinguish between the two possibilities.

Moreover, the hypothesis, even if true, has no implications for our behavior or actions.

[Jim__]

5. I agree. I think, therefore I am.

Whether I am thinking in the ultimate "outermost" universe, or some inner universe, doesn't really matter.

[Random_Australian]

29. I almost agree.

If the hypothesis that was bieng tested predicted that limits of computing power would have observable effects under certain conditions, then ot would be much closer to falsifiable.


(And would in fact be falsifiable if it were possible to draw from those limits an inability of those outside to interfere with our seeing the results of such a test)

But that's the only condition I can think of which would be falsifiable, but that alone would have little impact on our behaviour itself. (Other than trying to look outward from curiosity).

But yes, I agree with the main points.

[NMMNG]

6. No, don't mess with me like that!

However, many scientists have always been dismissive, saying the universe was far too complex and consistent to be a simulation.

Scientists that sound like ID apologists. Say it isn't so. :cry:

[cyborg_jim]

9. That doesn't make any sense

Why wouldn't a simulation be consistent?

[NMMNG]

12. I have no idea

:shrug:

[Random_Australian]

27. It's hard to explain, but basically bieng able to describe as much as we can

in terms of very few things takes enormous amounts of processing power if you want to keep our predictions accurate. Which they are, dead accurate.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

10. Frankly, my head exploded

somewhere in the second paragraph. I'm speechless. Scientists believe this????

And you know, it still doesn't solve the "is there God" problem. It just means we're way lower on the food chain than we thought.

[NMMNG]

13. The only reason we're as high as we are

Is because we developed weapons.

[Realityhack]

14. Sure they do...

in the same way they beleive in biblical creationism and a flat earth. That is they do not but a handfull of people who claim to be scientists do.

[Random_Australian]

28. I strongly suspect that the people in the article are pursuing such a thing not

from belief in it but just out of interest. Seeing if it is possible and such.

[Random_Australian]

26. Not THAT kind of complex.

They mean the amount of stars they can see plus the amount of running brains, and finally the freaking unbelievable amount of chemistry that happens all the damn time that we are forced to describe in probablistic terms means there is just too much STUFF for it to be a simulation.

The ID apologists are later in the article.

[TheBaldyMan]

7. While I am a great admirer of Professor Rees, I think he has bitten off

more than he can chew. We can all come up with a notion that can neither be substantiated nor proved. Idle musings just generate more meaningless hot air.

Call me a positive realist if you will but I am not someone else's dream, just as the rest of the universe is not a figment of my imagination. For instance, how could someone who was blind since birth dream up a world that had such a strong visual component, or a deaf person dream up music.

Too many holes in that hypothesis for me, I'm afraid.

[Realityhack]

8. Ug. What a completely idiotic article.

The universe quite firmly existed within Adams books the earth just happened to be designed as a giant computer. Contrary to this idiotic authors retarded opinion the existence of a planet sized computer does not in fact make the universe a simulation. And humans weren't even part of the computer.

The idea that the universe could be a simulation/dream/whatever is NOT a theory it’s not even a hypothesis. It makes no testable predictions. And its complete bullshit to say this is being ‘increasingly discussed by physicists’.

The ‘fine tuning’ shows ‘intelligent design’ bullshit has been around for quite some time as well. It’s been clearly shown to be mathematically/logically bogus.

The only thing this article does is provide further evidence that many ‘reporters’ are complete fucktards that have no business doing something that could influence mass public opinion.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

11. Oh come on, now

tell us how you really feel!

ha... quite concise, I'd say.

[Evoman]

17. You beat me to it.

I immediatly jumped on the word "theory" and told myself "BULLSHIT". The hypothesis is ultimately untestable.

"Science" writers should really learn how to write about science.

[jokerman93]

15. good idea for a money maker

someone should take this far out concept
and construct a post-modern psychology cult around it
one could make millions contriving insight
out of nothing at all

the mirror of life isn't the same
as the mirror of your tiny mind
cobbled together in santa's workshop

your breath your heartbeat
your karma bubble gum
choke on it

:smoke:

[Odin2005]

16. Sir Rees has really gone off the deep end.

His "theory" is unfalsifiable and is therefore just mental mastubation.

[rug]

18. It's a premise for a comic book.

[Random_Australian]

19. Alternate headlines: - Top Scientists Forget Falsifiability Rules!

- Top Scientist Uses The Word "Theory" in the Colloquial Sense, Doesn't Say So

ie. "Rees will emphasise that this is just a theory"

- Top Scientists Think Up Something That Everyone Has Thought Up Before

- Some Dumbass Journalist Consults a Mathematician About The Origins Of The Universe

ie. "Such fine tuning, he has said, could be taken as evidence for some kind of intelligent designer being at work"


- R_A thinks it was a nice enough article anyway, when those things are put aside.

- R_A then sees the Advertisement At The Bottom And Remarks to self That Stupid Pseudoscientific Fucks Are Trying To Claim Science Is Something It Isn't For Money Again, And If That Idiot Manages To Get Enough Anti-Science Wierdos To Hold Back The Advance Of Medicine And Safety Then He's A Fucking Self Centred Asshole. (In reference to that "The Final Theory" foreskin-brain)

[muriel_volestrangler]

20. What advertisement? "The Final Theory"?

Maybe it just comes up for you. :shrug:

Things to remember:
"just a theory" were the newspaper writer's words, not Rees's

This was for a programme called "What We Still Don’t Know" - he wasn't exactly claiming much for the idea (website for the programme, if anyone's interested)

Barrow isn't just a mathematician - he has a DPhil in astrophysics from Oxford, and has held astrophysics or astronomy positions at Oxford, Berkeley and Sussex before becoming the Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge.


Here's Rees in his own words, from 2003 (a year before the programme):

One thing which struck me recently, and I found it a really disconcerting concept, was that once we accept all that, we get into a very deep set of questions about the nature of physical reality. That's because even in our universe, and certainly in some of the others, there'd be the potential for life to develop far beyond the level it's reached on earth today. We are probably not the culmination of evolution on earth; the time lying ahead for the earth is as long as the time it's elapsed to get from single-celled organisms to us, and so life could spread in a post-human phase far beyond the earth. In other universes there may be an even richer potentiality for life and complexity.

Now life and complexity means information-processing power; the most complex conceivable entities may not be organic life, but some sort of hyper-computers. But once you accept that our universe, or even other universes, may allow the emergence within them of immense complexity, far beyond our human brains, far beyond the kind of computers we can conceive, perhaps almost at the level of the limits that Seth Lloyd discusses for computers—then you get a rather extraordinary conclusion. These super or hyper-computers would have the capacity to simulate not just a simple part of reality, but a large fraction of an entire universe.

And then of course the question arises: if these simulations exist in far larger numbers than the universe themselves, could we be in one of them? Could we ourselves not be part of what we think of as bedrock physical reality? Could we be ideas in the mind of some supreme being, as it were, who's running a simulation? Indeed, if the simulations outnumber the universes, as they would if one universe contained many computers making many simulations, then the likelihood is that we are 'artificial life' in this sense. This concept opens up the possibility of a new kind of 'virtual time travel', because the advanced beings creating the simulation can, in effect, rerun the past. It's not a time-loop in a traditional sense: it's a reconstruction of the past, allowing advanced beings to explore their history.

All these multiverse ideas lead to a remarkable synthesis between cosmology and physics, giving substance to ideas that some of us had ten or 20 years ago. But they also lead to the extraordinary consequence that we may not be the deepest reality, we may be a simulation. The possibility that we are creations of some supreme, or super-being, blurs the boundary between physics and idealist philosophy, between the natural and the supernatural, and between the relation of mind and multiverse and the possibility that we're in the matrix rather than the physics itself. Once you accept the idea of the multiverse, and that some universes will have immense potentiality for complexity, it's a logical consequence that in some of those universes there will be the potential to simulate parts of themselves, and you may get sort of infinite regress, so we don't know where reality stops and where the minds and ideas take over, and we don't know what our place is in this grand ensemble of universes and simulated universes.

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge116.html

[Random_Australian]

24. *smacks forehead* I gotta remember the target audience invovled.

Been reading tooooooo many academic things.

And as for the advertisement, yes I was talking about "The Final Theory" because from what I have read of his work, he's a woo-woo in a lab coat. Making things sound scientific, using pseudoscientific reasoning.... just take a look at what he says about 'work' if you don't believe me.

[muriel_volestrangler]

30. Ah, I'm getting no advertisement like that at all

I presume it's for the woo-woo that turned up in this thread a couple of months ago? That's turning up in DU adverts, is it? Unfortunate.

[Random_Australian]

33. That's the conjob in question, alright. I don't see DU adverts, this was

on the bottom of the article in the OP.

[charles22]

21. Life is not a dream, dreams are dreams.

If you are awake, you are not dreaming.

[Danger Mouse]

22. Wow, that's SO...

the plot from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. Our creators were bored layabouts who had nothing better to do but play video games all day.
Sounds kinda like me...sigh.

[Danger Mouse]

23. Descartes said...

'I think therefore I am,' yet, humans no longer have a monopoly on thinking...

[Random_Australian]

25. ??? I don't make the connection between those two statements.

The latter certainly does not invalidate the former...

Here's what invalidates the former though - following his reasoning he says it is uncertain whether other people and such exist because his brain could merely be fooled into thinking they were there.

But if you apply the same logic to his conclusion, you get "I think, therefore either I am...... or some mechanism exists whereby I can think without existing"

[charles22]

31. No. And that is really his point(Descartes)

He knows he is thinking...that is evidence, or by definition, existence.

[charles22]

32. Nor did Descartes imply they did.