Tag Archives: Philosophy

The Simulation Hypothesis

Posted on by
Reply

I was twiddling the simulation hypothesis, and it raised questions I wanted to explore. The following is entirely for fun and by no means conclusive.

A few days ago, I was thinking of Cantor’s Diagonal Argument (a proof of different sizes of infinity) and connected it to Shannon’s Information Theory (in particular about encoding information and efficient storage), and the Simulation Hypothesis (that our world is a simulation).

The question that came to mind is: What are the limits for simulations?

I find the question interesting having worked on games, trying to create real-time experiences for players, and the scope and challenges we face. There are constraints on building the assets for games, rendering the environment, audio, streaming data since it can’t be in memory all the time, computing the next frame from the previous, etc.

Simulations are bounded by what substrate (what is doing the simulation) is capable of processing. For example, if we are in a simulation, and our substrate is finite, we are necessarily finite.

This is where real numbers come to mind. If space is continuous instead of discrete, then encoding could require infinite storage to store position. If time is continuous, computing change is similarly non-trivial. An alternative is relying on a proxy representation of the simulating substrate itself (in which case that could be reflected in the simulation).

Continue reading →

Thoughts on Knowledge

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking a lot about knowledge as justified true belief, the Gettier problems, and the various proposals to resolve them.

I have some dissonance with all of ‘justified,’ ‘true,’ and ‘belief.’

Justified

There are two parts to my struggle with this as a component of knowledge:

  • The first is that someone may believe something true with invalid justification; they may be able to exercise that truth in a manner that establishes justification.
  • The second is perhaps a little more peculiar, and I’m unsure of its validity. As I understand Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, you can have true statements you cannot arrive at (axiomatically) or justify.

Belief

‘Belief’ seems to imply a thinking agent. This excludes inanimate sources as containing knowledge, which seems a peculiar constraint.

True

In abstract or constructed circumstances, like mathematics, you can talk about a statement being true. However, outside of that, the truth is almost never known with certainty; this is Descartes’s evil demon argument.

My Conception of Knowledge

When thinking about knowledge, I lean more toward Isaac Asimov’s Relativity of Wrong. Here is how I conceive knowledge:

  1. How demonstrably close is the claim to the truth to be effective?
  2. What are the error bars on your claim?

While this leans utilitarian, that is what gives knowledge its value.

This information (claim and corresponding supporting information) can be stored in static resources and is independent of belief.

The degree of knowledge can be described in terms of these parameters, these epsilons of accuracy and precision.

In short, you can measure knowledge by its truth-ε-ness.

Super Naturalism

Posted on by
Reply

I sometimes get stuck on words. Ever use a word over and over and then someone asks you to define what it means and you discover that maybe you weren’t so clear on the meaning of the word to begin with? (This has become painfully more frequent with children.)

The one I’m thinking of at present is ‘supernatural’.

The definition I see is ‘attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature’.

Well science is the rigorous study of nature.

But what is ‘nature’? How do you know what is ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’? Should that depend on what we know from science so far or is there a more rigorous way to define these terms so we could easily say one thing is natural and another supernatural?

Continue reading →