A video I watched not too long ago expressed something similar as "in some RPGs, society exists for you" (e.g. you, a random escaped prisoner, can just waltz up to the local lord in Skyrim and be taken at face value). "In others, you exist in a society" (and the guards will keep you from even entering the nobles' district unless you're in good standing, which takes a considerable amount of the game to get).
It's not quite the same thing, because that example is about how other people treat you, not whether they've got lives of their own; but in a broader perspective, it's still about how much the game seems to be a prop for the player's enjoyment vs. being a proper world that doesn't fall apart five days after the player wins.
This immediately echoes the points laid out in this video comparing Oblivion and Avowed. Avowed is a new 70 dollar game that just came out, in 2025. The interesting part is the design of the towns people in the new game.
Maybe it would be possible to create some kind of equilibrium/fixed-point based AI that, for everything it knows, it knows that it knows, knows that it knows that it knows, and so on.
Then again, perhaps not, because PPAD is much harder than P; so just getting the AI to maintain the perfect self-knowledge invariant as it learns more things could be intractable. There might also be halting problem reductions if the AI is sufficiently powerful, although I'm not sure.
If it knows that it knows, then surely can program by itself a sufficiently large program, debug it, extend it and so on. That is an NP-hard problem, as the name suggests, it is not easy, which is to say that it is infinitely hard, i.e. impossible.
Something that many people are surprised to realize, including me, is how much of our life can be be described by a context-free language. When we try to create a machine which knows-that-it-knows this is context-sensitive. Day and night comparison, Javascript vs CSS for example.
Machines are currently able to compare, contrast and mimic images and text,a thousand times better than a human. Maybe even million times better than a human. Very soon this will be billion and trillion.
This copying machine, copies only the context-free properties of the subject it analyzes. The moment it will try to copy context-sensitive properties, then the it hits the halting problem. No LLM currently has any problem terminating, so it analyzes only context-free properties of the subject.
A human song, a painting or a novel, maybe copies only the context-free properties from one other song, painting or novel. We humans for centuries and millennia described it as creativity. It turns out it was not creativity. Machines are creative only because we conflated context-free art creation, and context-sensitive art creation. When that distinction takes place, then machines will not be described as creative anymore!
I'm not sure. Suppose that someone magically woke up to find they had no subconscious, i.e. that they were now aware of everything going on in their mind, and aware of their awareness, etc. Then it doesn't seem like that would itself give them the power to create a direct neural interface and extend their mind.
In a wider sense, a system can have lots of equilibrium states without being able to move into any arbitrary state or make any arbitrary state an equilibrium. For instance, such a mind, if it were constrained by logic, could not sincerely doublethink. So on the face of it, it's only PPAD (determining fixed points), not NP (solving arbitrary polytime-verifiable puzzles).
But again, I don't know. Perhaps some types of hypothetical thinking could, for such a mind, lead to a kind of recursion that would bring NP-hardness or the halting problem back into the picture. Maybe a situation similar to AIXI: the perfect intelligence can only reason about a universe it itself doesn't exist in. I'm merely saying that I can't entirely see whether it would be impossible or not, so it's an interesting thought.
As for creativity, I guess so far, the only way we've found to make AIs be inventive in a nonhuman way is to use brute force or combine it with a generator that essentially produces its context for it (e.g. AlphaGo).
It's a warning if it isn't accompanied by great democratization, because the planned economy concentrates a lot of power in the hands of the planners.
Some proponents of planned economy (e.g. Cottrell) suggest that elected democracy should be replaced by sortition for just that reason. Or perhaps there are technical ways to make planning less centralized, say some kind of federated system with freely available real-time production data, where a new producer can decide what group of existing producers to join.
Democracy combined with local units significantly valuing their autonomy also seems to work, e.g. the International Typographical Union example from Union Democracy.
Even on a reptile-brain level, the article's use of wanting is sort of an equivocation. The brain has different systems for "wanting" and "liking". Cocaine affects the former, opioids the latter.
Capital A Algorithms maximizing engagement are very much on the "wanting" side. Firing off an angry response to a political opponent's belittling post is rarely ever really /enjoyable/.
TikTok's algorithm is firmly on the "wanting" and not liking side. That's why it creates so much ragebait.
The moderation is very strict so the ragebait is limited to people ruining (cheap) wedding dresses with colored soap and screwing toilet-seats to the trunks of junked cars, or whatever. A vast flood of videos that only exist because anybody watching them will be disappointed and angry.
If the TikTok mod team slacked up for a second you'd see nothing but culture-war political ragebait and hate speech. It hovers on the edge even now.
> If we're in a simulation, you have no basis for drawing conclusions about any of our observations, whether those observations have taken place, whether anything outside of this moment exists, or anything outside your mind, or both.
But then simulation is unfalsifiable. Whatever you observe, the simulation could have paused an arbitrary number of times, or modified you or the environment to an arbitrary degree, hence it's compatible with simulation. Which makes simulation "a difference that makes no difference".
As macguillicuddy pointed out, the point was that the general concept of simulation is indeed unfalsifiable, and we can only ever hope to falsify very limited subsets. E.g. we can certainly say certain things about what features a simulation must have.
It does however not necessarily make a simulation a difference that makes no difference, because if we're in a simulation it is possible that we are in one where it is possible to falsify the theory that we're not in a simulation.
E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.
The problem of course being that you could well devote a lifetime to it and find nothing and it would tell you nothing about whether we're in a simulation or not, so unless you run into some anomaly that hints at it, it'd seem a rather wasteful pursuit.
In reality, of course, chances are none of us will ever see anything to give us reason to pursue that idea, but it's fun to think about. I write short stories about this subject, and I have a long document with headache-inducing scenarios to write up.
>It does however not necessarily make a simulation a difference that makes no difference, because if we're in a simulation it is possible that we are in one where it is possible to falsify the theory that we're not in a simulation.
Since, as you said, there are infinite possible unfalsifiable theories, it's a good idea to avoid them. It's better to deal with them when evidence does appear; otherwise you have an infinite number of them to go through.
> E.g. we could potentially find bugs that reveal telltale signs we're in a simulation, or outright vulnerabilities. It's even possible we could finds ways of "escaping" the simulation.
I'm not sure that's even decidable. Is, say, relativity a glitch in the Matrix or just the way the universe works? Or, to flip the question on its head: do simulations we can construct behave like the real world because the real world is simulated, or just because what we can construct is limited by the world we live in?
I think these outright flaws would have to be very obvious to unambiguously point to simulation. And I can't escape the feeling that the simulation idea is a modern version of Newton's clockwork universe: trying to explain the universe by the metaphors we have available today.
I think Bostrom’s core argument is likely valid - the more ancestor simulations you run, the greater the odds you are actually in one yourself. Now, right now that number is zero, and we don’t know if it will ever rise above zero, and even if one day it does, that day is likely many centuries away. But maybe in 500 or 5000 years time, ancestor simulations will be very numerous, and Bostrom’s argument may convince many people in such a scenario
Unfalsifiable propositions can be true, and it is even possible to have good reason-whether direct or indirect evidence-for believing one
“Somewhere and somewhen in this universe there exists an extremely controversial and very famous politician named Donald Trump” is an example of a proposition which is true, and we have very good reason to believe is true, but which is strictly speaking unfalsifiable, indeed almost inherently so. Even if we suppose our Donald Trump had never been born, we could not rule out the possibility of some very famous and controversial politician having that name (let’s say named by a very similar sequence of sounds) existing on a planet in a distant galaxy. If one accepts a B theory view of time, that proposition has always been true, and was just as true in 5000 BCE as it is today, but nobody back then could have possibly known it was true.
But it is worth also remembering that Bostroms Simulation Argument is an argument for simulation, not the only one possible.
To me the original point I made was simply that non-determinism can't falsify simulation.
More broadly I believe simulation is unfalsifiable, because the impossibility of proving we have existence in time (our consciousness could exist for only a moment, and we can't tell, because we have access to the past only as memories which could be fake), or that a world outside ourselves exists (our sensory inputs could be fake) means we can say hardly anything about the scale or complexity of a theoretical simulation. Said another way: we don't know even how much of ourselves exists.
That opens the door to a vast set of possible simulation arguments, but also raises the question of whether there is a clear line between simulation and what reality is. E.g. you can imagine a similar set of possible conceptions of a physical reality. If physical reality is that our existence is mere fragmentary moments of parts of a mind, then that would mean any experience we might think we have one day of building simulations would themselves be illusory.
So it's not a given that we can meaningfully tell whether or not a simulation exists even if we one day believe we successfully build one, because the experience of building the simulation might well be the totality of the experience. There's no certainty said simulation ever exists.
Trying to nail down what we can actually infer about this is something we'll struggle with for a very long time.
Even defining in concrete terms what is simulation vs. simply an arrangement of physical reality is unclear (think Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where Earth was a computer)
> because the impossibility of proving we have existence in time (our consciousness could exist for only a moment, and we can't tell, because we have access to the past only as memories which could be fake), or that a world outside ourselves exists (our sensory inputs could be fake) means we can say hardly anything about the scale or complexity of a theoretical simulation. Said another way: we don't know even how much of ourselves exists.
Consider the following argument:
1] If P being true is a necessary precondition for rational thought to exist, we are rationally justified in believing that P is true
2] The general reliability of our memories is a necessary precondition for rational thought to exist
3] Therefore, we are rationally justified in believing that our memories are generally reliable
4] Therefore, our memories are generally reliable
From the general reliability of our memories, the substantial existence of the past trivially follows; does that count as "proving we have existence in time"? And replace the "general reliability of our memories" with "the existence of other minds" to turn the above argument into a proof of the later.
> but also raises the question of whether there is a clear line between simulation and what reality is.
I actually think the simulation hypothesis is a pretty good argument for idealism: if the simulation hypothesis is true, then either materialism is simply false (if one interprets "matter" to mean only the apparent physical matter of this universe), or else its truth is unknowable (if one interprets "matter" to mean the unknowable matter of the substrate universe.) If we cannot know whether the simulation hypothesis is true, how can we know that materialism is true? By contrast, if idealism is true, then minds and their experiences are the most fundamental constituents of reality; whether this universe is a simulation is simply a question about whether there exists another universe containing minds who have the experience of operating a computer simulation which appears to contain minds having particular experiences, where those particular experiences happen to be identical to the set of all experiences had by all minds in this universe. Idealism could be equally true no matter what the answer to that question may be. The ontological status of this universe is completely independent of whether that separate simulating universe happens to exist; in principle, our universe could even be simultaneously simulated by multiple distinct simulating universes.
To avoid hypotheses that are unfalsifiable is good practice absent evidence because you can construct an infinite number of such hypotheses. That does not mean that a given unfalsifiable hypothesis can not be true, however, just that pursuing it is generally likely to be a waste of effort.
Asserting that simulation is definitely true absent evidence would be unjustified, but very few people would make that claim, so it's not very relevant.
However the inverse - the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation - is falsifiable by proving that we are in a simulation. And any number of variations over the idea that we might be in a simulation can also be testable and falsifiable in various ways.
The original point of contention was that QM and non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation, however, and that is not a viable way to falsify the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation. The hypothesis that non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation is falsifiable by coming up with a way wherein non-determinism can be accommodated.
If the world the simulator runs in has access to non-determinism this is trivially done by simply forwarding non-determinism into the simulation (many other approaches to attack that hypothesis are possible, e.g. using a additional simulations as oracles to determine if supposedly non-deterministic events would be revealed as such, and use that to pick values that ensures a failure to simulate non-determinism never gets detected, so access to a source of non-determinism is not necessary to falsify that hypothesis either, though it would complicate matters). As such the hypothesis that non-determinism alone proves we're not in a simulation is false.
I have no idea what you're trying to say. Why would it be bad? It makes no sense. All it means is insisting it is true without evidence makes no sense. But nobody here is making that claim.
Unjustifiability means unfathomability; unfathomability suggests impossibility. And if simulation theory is impossible, its unfalsifiability is of no help.
This makes no sense to me whatsoever. You're using these words to means things entirely different from how I use them. Going by your use of them, simulation theory can not be proven unjustifiable, because that would make it falsifiable.
I don't have a rigorous proof that unfathomability implies impossibility, it's just a strong suggestion and demonstration that you incur a high risk of assuming an impossible thing into existence.
Without wanting to speak on their behalf, I think that's exactly vidarh's point. That simulation is indeed unfalsifiable and therefore mjburgess' conjecture that it's false doesn't hold.
A theory known to be unfalsifiable cannot be conclusively ruled "false." It can only be deemed outside of the realm of science. To make such a strong claim puts one back in the realm of faith in pseudoscience.
I like the word "bullshit." Bullshit isn't necessarily true, isn't necessarily false, it's simply not worth my time to wade into it.
The simulation theory rests on a hypothesis that there are certain conditions outside of simulation, but if external conditions are certain, then the simulation has limited flexibility and is thus falsifiable. For it to be unfalsifiable external conditions must be at least unfathomable, which takes away the premise of the simulation theory that it correctly guessed external conditions.
Is sounds like you're discussing a specific simulation hypothesis. I'm assuming you're referring to Bostrom's Simulation Argument, but that is only one possible variant of simulation. Bostrom's Simulation Argument posits that one of three propositions are likely to be true, of which only one posits that we're likely in a simulation. The "simulation proposition" of the argument could be falsified by e.g. humanity going extinct (proving the first proposition of the argument true, but the 3rd - the simulation one - to be false).
But falsifying that proposition would not falsify the notion of simulation.
> I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum.
Perhaps it's some material where replicators always add some noise to the atomic structure when replicating; and then the "value" is just how close it's to a perfect structure, by whatever measure of perfection. Then you'd have replicator farms just replicating them over and over until something of acceptable quality pops out - like a physical PoW.
It makes for a fun theory at least! And the post-scarcity societies can go "whatever would you want that for?"
If you want to do it yourself, you'd get a colorimeter or spectrometer and then software that lets you use them to adjust your screen, like ArgyllCMS and DispcalGUI: https://displaycal.net/
Is a Wikipedia author participating in a business when they update an article, thus contributing to the service of a better encyclopedia? Is an open-source programmer doing business when they post their GPLed source on the web? Is gift-giving (offering a good) business?
That definition seems to be a bit too broad. So maybe there needs to be compensation. But then the determinists would say that even gift-giving has compensation (in the form of reciprocity) and thus isn't much different from credit. So the compensation should be something closer to monetary compensation. But then barter economies have no businesses. Etc.
The problem with this, I think, is that it can always be used to justify volatility.
E.g. economic policy after the Great Depression has kept such an event from happening again at that scale. Was there too much volatility in the early half of the 20th century, or is the economic policy that moderated the cycles just setting us up for an extreme crash to come?
Any reduction of volatility could be argued to be a step away from antifragility, toward systems that can't survive on their own. But not all are; and even when they are, there may be other benefits that compensate for the loss.
> is the economic policy that moderated the cycles just setting us up for an extreme crash to come
It's actually not that complicated. All of the complexity of the economy ultimately boils down a very simple thing: it's a mechanism that allows people to exchange current wealth (i.e. stuff) for claims on future wealth (i.e. money). As long as everyone believes that their claims on future wealth will be redeemable at some rate they consider a fair trade, everything hums along. As soon as people stop believing this, everything falls apart.
What happened in 1929 was mainly a liquidity crisis, not an actual economic crisis, at least not at first. The underlying productivity of the American economy was unchanged before the crash and immediately after. But the inability of people to pay for things because of the Fed's unwillingness to loosen credit caused people to lose faith in the value of their claims on future wealth, and that caused an actual reduction in productivity over time. The same thing happened in reverse in the Weimar republic where the problem was effectively the exact opposite: inflation caused by government paying debts by (literally) printing money. (That was a little different because Weimar Germany wasn't very productive, having never really recovered from WWI, but that doesn't really change the basic conceptual simplicity of what happened in both cases.)
> But the inability of people to pay for things because of the Fed's unwillingness to loosen credit caused people to lose faith in the value of their claims on future wealth, and that caused an actual reduction in productivity over time.
It wasn't the claims on future wealth (i.e. money) that they lost faith in, it was their job security.
You see the stock market crash so you tighten your belt in anticipation of potentially losing your job. So does everyone else. So people don't buy things which means companies don't need workers to make them and people lose their jobs. Then people who lose their jobs don't spend money, and people see people losing their jobs and tighten their belts even more for fear they're next, and you get a deflationary spiral.
You can lay this on the Fed for not providing enough liquidity, but the real reason this happens is that the Fed is the only one allowed to do it.
Suppose you're a candlemaker in the US during a deflationary spiral. Nobody will give you dollars for your candles. However, someone might give you euros or pesos or something like that. But now you have to pay your rent. If you can pay it in pesos, you're all set. If you can't, you have to buy dollars with pesos, which bids up the price of dollars and accelerates the deflationary spiral.
The problem comes when the government privileges its own currency. If you can't easily get a bank account denominated in another currency without converting it to dollars, if you can't pay your taxes in pesos even when that was what you received from the buyer, then people still have to convert the other currency into dollars and continue the deflationary spiral.
Whereas without that government restriction, a shortage of dollars would be resolved by using something more available as the medium of exchange.
At the time of the great depression, every important currency was on a gold standard. So in an important sense there was only one currency: gold. The impossibility of increasing currency supply because of the gold standard is recognized as a major contributor to the depression.
Even when countries were on the gold standard, they still had fractional reserve banking. If a troy ounce of gold was $100 , the bank had one ounce of gold and three separate people had a $100 bill, any one of them could go to the bank and get the gold, as long as not all of them did.
It's also possible to have a gold standard without holding your reserves in gold. The bank could hold them in anything -- other metals, bonds, real estate -- and then exchange that thing for gold in the market in the event that the customer comes for it, which they only do if they lack confidence that the bank will be able to make good, which doesn't happen when the bank is holding valuable assets. And then you can create as much "money" as you need by, for example, making mortgage loans backed by real estate.
You can still get into trouble there if the value of the assets declines (see 2008 housing crash), but that's a different kind of problem than the original one with separate methods to avoid it.
> Even when countries were on the gold standard, they still had fractional reserve banking. If a troy ounce of gold was $100 , the bank had one ounce of gold and three separate people had a $100 bill, any one of them could go to the bank and get the gold, as long as not all of them did.
Fractional Reserve is easier to understand as debt than as an asset. A bank is given $1000 from a central bank. The bank can now loan that $1000 with interest for a total of $1100. The bank is allowed to loan that debt promise at a fraction reserve rate of 7-1 or 5-1 as loans to other customers. The $1100 promise can be loaned as $800 plus interest for the total loan value of $880. That can then be loaned out as $660 including interest. Then $440 can be loaned out. Then $220.
So the original $1000 from the central bank was used to create $3300 worth of debt.
Interesting ideas - any place one could learn more on how to think like this? Ie books or ? Basically How did you manage to get it to this simple statement, which seems intuitively correct when so much macro economics I’ve tried to read seem like obvious nonsense
Start from first principles and look at the economic data directly (understanding game theory is a crucial piece of this). Make sure to ignore the narratives as these tend to obscure the understanding of the fundamentals (since most people pushing various narratives about the market are driven by vested interests rather than educational interests).
Seriously though, I am actually in the process of writing a book/blog about this sort of thing (and a whole lot more). In the meantime, you can check out my old blog. See my profile for a link. When the new blog launches I'll post an announcement on the old one, so subscribe there if you want to be notified.
It already helps A LOT if you decouple your thinking from "money". If you realize that "stuff" (tangible but also tangible) is not directly impacted, and that a crash that "destroys billons of wealth" in fact does no such thing, you can start looking at the world sans "money". You will get a much better grip on reality. Of course financials impact stuff - but why? It's all the ideas and assumptions in our heads - and they can change. In fact, they changed a lot over time, and the meaning of "money" is many things.
The second big thing is to understand that ideas for individuals (firms or people), for example "costs are bad because I lose something", have a completely different meaning for the economy. Because cost is income. Cutting costs may make sense for a company, but if you cut costs in the economy people lose jobs. You will actually have to trouble yourself and look away from the money to see what the flow of money actually achieves in the real world to make a judgement. Just looking at the money is meaningless.
The third big thing is about "pensions". While putting back money into some account makes sense individually, again it has no meaning for the economy. Because "saving money" has no useful meaning on the economy scale. Everything is produced and consumed NOW. Nobody puts back stuff into warehouses to be used decades later for the retired, especially not services. So relax when there is talk about "pension crisis" on an economic scale. Sure, who gets what is important and for any one individual the financial stuff really matters because they are bound into the system, but for the economy all that matters is what people in the future will produce.
Money "saved" for pensions does not send any products or services into the future, nor is it needed for "investment" (our finance system does not need that, money can be and is created on demand for debt). It sends information into the future, which future generations may or may not use to determine how much of what they produce then they will give to you (in retirement). However, what is available overall and what the then-society will be willing to use for pensions will be up to them. It does not matter one bit (overall!) what irrelevant virtual numbers are written in some "accounts".
Another thing is debt: For an individual it's bad unless it's debt used to produce cash flow. For an economy - it does not matter (of course the details matter, if done bad it can reduce confidence and have a big bad ripple impact). "Debt is money" is not just some phrase. Debt creates money (yes yes money is very complex - much like a quantum particle, it depends on what you look at and context). The best simple example I saw was a story where a kid wrote a promise to mow a lawn (any lawn), and that promise was handed around in the neighborhood to "pay" for neighborhood favor things. If the debt - having to mow the lawn - was actually repaid by the kid this piece of "currency" would just be gone.
I'll leave it up to the reader to think about what "saving" on the economic scale really achieves, it's a fun little exercise. Again it works best if you ignore "money", or treat is as secondary - looking at its effects instead of at it.
TL;DR I recommend not going too technical. The deeper you look the less you see of the big picture. Just start thinking about stuff - ignoring money completely or see it as the completely virtual made-up control-carrot that it is - while doing walks in the park or forest.
Debt is a very specific word. Yes you can get capital by going into debt. But just "capital" can also mean it was yours to begin with. Debt means you created an obligation to somebody else, which is additional information. You have X amount of money - capital - but there is a difference if you get it by borrowing or if it was already yours.
what i meant was, that if people dont use debt as a form of capital (investment in something to get a larger return) then it is basically bad as you say because you will be under water when paying the interest..
basically, people who go into debt need to think like a capitalist, and invest it in something (thier skills, a car to get a better job somewhere, etc)
> What happened in 1929 was mainly a liquidity crisis, not an actual economic crisis, at least not at first. The underlying productivity of the American economy was unchanged before the crash and immediately a
apologies for a potentially ignorant question, but werent most economic crisis in the past (and near recent) caused by liquidity issues?
> inflation caused by government paying debts by (literally) printing money.
My understanding is that it was paying debts by buying the thing the debt was denominated in (gold?) by printing money. Which meant that as the early money printed caused some level of inflation, they then needed to print that much more to make the next payment.
> Promoting antifragility doesn’t mean that government institutions should avoid intervention altogether. In fact, a key problem with overzealous intervention is that, by depleting resources, it often results in a failure to intervene in more urgent situations, like natural disasters. So in complex systems, we should limit government (and other) interventions to important matters: The state should be there for emergency-room surgery, not nanny-style maintenance and overmedication of the patient—and it should get better at the former.
It's not quite the same thing, because that example is about how other people treat you, not whether they've got lives of their own; but in a broader perspective, it's still about how much the game seems to be a prop for the player's enjoyment vs. being a proper world that doesn't fall apart five days after the player wins.