That quickly boils down to “How do we know anything?” and the answer to that is “We don’t”. When you think hard enough about anything you can come up with an explanation why what we think to onow and believe is wrong. To get around that irl you can employ different tactics. For example, you can check how plausible sonething is. How many assumptions do you have to make for a theory? Usually, more assumptions means less plausible. And you can ask yourself " why does it matter? What would it change for me?" and the answer is most likely it doesn’t and nothing.
Well, we do know 1 thing without making at least one leap of faith, courtesy of Descartes:
If nothing existed, there wouldn’t be anything to have these thoughts. Therefore, since I’m thinking, there must be something that exists, and at least part of that is me. It might be an algorithm, a boltzman brain, some weird universe of thought, whatever. I might even be this singular thought and what I assume to be my memories and nothing else exists. But I know I exist in some kind of way.
Beyond that, you need to make assumptions, like whether reality is logical, whether your senses and and memories have any relation to reality, and so on and so forth. It makes sense to assume these assumptions are correct, but you can’t know or prove they are true without relying on other assumptions that you can’t know or prove independently either. Heck, without assuming that reality is logical, the concept of a proof doesn’t even exist. You can choose to reject those assumptions, but that’s a useless philosophical deadend.
Which is why someone answering “Believing is what you do in church, we’re in the business of knowing!” to a sentence like “I believe I’ve seen this before” annoys me a bit, since you can’t know anything useful without believing a bunch of stuff first. If someone’s going to be pedantic about that choice of words, so can I.
That’s a leap if I ever saw one. I could ask the same question and substitute AI with god or aliens and I’d be ridiculed by the tech community and with good reason.
And you don’t need to take it much further to fall into the holographic universe principle or the simulation hypothesis and for those there are big discussions to be had in science communities.
To be clear, nothing stops you or me, or anyone for that matter from assuming so, but down that road the only answer I can think of is that nothing matters and might as well lay down and die.
Yes I have thought this about Twitter and Reddit and other text based social media. I’m not 100% sure that the majority of traffic and posts have been “seeded” by AI.
My conspiracy theory is that these sites have a vested interest in driving traffic and appearing to have high engagement or participation rates for ad sales.
Text is easy to generate with AI and the sites have a ton existing posts to train models on. What do they have to lose?
It can be hard to tell if you’re talking to a bot online. Some bots are really good at mimicking human conversation, and they can even make spelling mistakes to seem more realistic. But there are some things you can look for to help you tell the difference between a bot and a human.
For example, bots often have very fast response times, even if you ask them a complicated question. They may also repeat themselves or give you the same answer to different questions. And their language may sound unnatural, or they may not be able to understand your jokes or sarcasm.
Of course, there’s no foolproof way to tell if you’re talking to a bot. But if you’re ever suspicious, it’s always a good idea to do some research or ask a friend for help.
Here are some additional tips for spotting bots online:
Check the profile. Bots often have very basic profiles with no personal information or photos.
Look for inconsistencies. Bots may make mistakes or contradict themselves.
Be suspicious of overly friendly or helpful users. Bots are often programmed to be very helpful, so they may come across as too good to be true.
If you’re still not sure if you’re talking to a bot, you can always ask them directly. Most bots will be honest about their identity, but if they refuse to answer, that’s a good sign that you’re dealing with a bot.
I’ve “played” plenty of simulations that are just things that run entirely on their own without a player input aside from the starting parameters. Chiefly being the one aptly named “The Game of Life.”
You said you “played” simulations. I pointed out that what you were playing can’t be compared to the complexity of our reality and therefore does not constitute a plausible argument.
Just for the sake of clarity: I’m not attacking you, it’s just that what we can simulate and observe can’t be used as an argument in discussion concerning our reality. It’s apples & oranges. We operate on entirely different level of complexity to whatever we may simulate.
If it’s a simulation your imagination and understanding of the world (simulation) is limited and you have no idea how resource intensive it would be to run, perhaps we’re a kids toy for some being
Again: the resources, the effort needed to create and sustain such a massive simulation just for fun, belong to civilization of so high advancement, that it renders the idea impossible.
Beings being able to do it would be able to bypass any stage of infancy or childhood, because it’d be obsolete and pointless for them.
You can’t simulate a massive environment so alien to your own that they have nothing in common.
You could answer “of course I can”, but all your arguments for that would be Russel’s Teapot.
We, human beings, can simulate worlds more complicated than the real one. It doesn’t have to be like The Matrix. It could be like Dwarf Fortress. We wouldn’t know if we are the simulation because it would always seem real and complex to us, even if all the creatures running the simulation see are numbers/text.
If someone is both capable and willing to spend such massive amount of effort for such an experiment, he already has all the answers the experiment might provide.
It’s like thinking NASA would create massive telescope and place it on an orbit, just to point it at Earth and record how cats hunt.
Same with fun. Whoever possesses enough resources to waste them on “fun” alone, already has the access to way more interesting pleasures.
It’s like thinking Jeff Bezos is going to buy a private island and buy a luxury bunker there, for the purpose of torturing cockroaches.
I know where my towel is, but again: the effort it takes to create and maintain such a simulation belongs to order so high, it no longer cares about such trivialities.
It could still theoretically be that our reality is some kind of entertainment. For example, people enjoy playing The Sims. There are still active communities for the older versions even though there are newer, more engaging games out there. And more generally, some people prefer old games even though their computers have like 1000x the processing power needed to run it.
If the reality we experience is a simulation, it could be for similar motivations, the hardware would be sophisticated but still a user will run whatever they prefer on it.
We enjoy watching SIMS and playing video games, because our reality is too bleak and dark.
It’s a form of escapism, mostly.
Civilization that could create and sustain such a massive and complicated simulation as our reality, already knows ways to make the life interesting enough that it makes any form of SIMS-like entertainment obsolete.
I never said any of this might not be true, I just said what if. The experiment idea seems more plausable to me. And why not make an experiment, as you said, if they’re that advanced, making this experiment would be a piece of cake to them, like us making experiments with ants or bees.
I simply observed that logic dictates such an experiment obsolete.
Whoever has all the technology, resources and skills to conduct such a massive test, already has all the answers the experiment might provide.
Beings capable of conducting such a test definitely have better questions to answer.
I saw a movie or, probably, an anime with this theme in the last year. People discover they are a simulation, manage to breach through to this race that is just lost in viewing virtual space. Wreck shit, go back.
A person from 1937 finding out their world is a vr simulation in running on a 1999 computer. Then the 1999 people finding out their world is a vr simulator too, running on a 2024 computer.
That wasn’t it. Damn it. I’m trying not to get pulled into figuring this out, but my brain is of the opinion that there’s no better use if my sleep time lol. I’ll see if it comes back to mind
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we don’t. also check this out - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
That quickly boils down to “How do we know anything?” and the answer to that is “We don’t”. When you think hard enough about anything you can come up with an explanation why what we think to onow and believe is wrong. To get around that irl you can employ different tactics. For example, you can check how plausible sonething is. How many assumptions do you have to make for a theory? Usually, more assumptions means less plausible. And you can ask yourself " why does it matter? What would it change for me?" and the answer is most likely it doesn’t and nothing.
Well, we do know 1 thing without making at least one leap of faith, courtesy of Descartes:
If nothing existed, there wouldn’t be anything to have these thoughts. Therefore, since I’m thinking, there must be something that exists, and at least part of that is me. It might be an algorithm, a boltzman brain, some weird universe of thought, whatever. I might even be this singular thought and what I assume to be my memories and nothing else exists. But I know I exist in some kind of way.
Beyond that, you need to make assumptions, like whether reality is logical, whether your senses and and memories have any relation to reality, and so on and so forth. It makes sense to assume these assumptions are correct, but you can’t know or prove they are true without relying on other assumptions that you can’t know or prove independently either. Heck, without assuming that reality is logical, the concept of a proof doesn’t even exist. You can choose to reject those assumptions, but that’s a useless philosophical deadend.
Which is why someone answering “Believing is what you do in church, we’re in the business of knowing!” to a sentence like “I believe I’ve seen this before” annoys me a bit, since you can’t know anything useful without believing a bunch of stuff first. If someone’s going to be pedantic about that choice of words, so can I.
It’s been a while since I’ve had an existential crisis. Thanks!
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Looks like the bot @001100010010 is becoming self aware.
Shut it down. Lets try again
Nice bait post, AI. We won’t reveal our tricks.
That’s a leap if I ever saw one. I could ask the same question and substitute AI with god or aliens and I’d be ridiculed by the tech community and with good reason.
And you don’t need to take it much further to fall into the holographic universe principle or the simulation hypothesis and for those there are big discussions to be had in science communities.
To be clear, nothing stops you or me, or anyone for that matter from assuming so, but down that road the only answer I can think of is that nothing matters and might as well lay down and die.
Not just that, but you can go further and go with Boltzmann Brain. It’s a philosophical dead end.
We don’t know and there’s basically no way to know for sure.
Welcome to the new internet.
Click this box for me before I answer that question
Yes I have thought this about Twitter and Reddit and other text based social media. I’m not 100% sure that the majority of traffic and posts have been “seeded” by AI.
My conspiracy theory is that these sites have a vested interest in driving traffic and appearing to have high engagement or participation rates for ad sales.
Text is easy to generate with AI and the sites have a ton existing posts to train models on. What do they have to lose?
Welcome to solipsism. We’re happy to have you.
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Every day, real life drifts closer to a Metal Gear plot.
I for one look forward to day that we are all free from the Patriot’s grasp
I’ve met some people from the internet and confirmed their humanity.
That’s exactly what a bot would say, though…
WE ARE ALL BOTS HERE
I’m not a bot. You’re a bot!
That sounds like something a bot would say…
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It can be hard to tell if you’re talking to a bot online. Some bots are really good at mimicking human conversation, and they can even make spelling mistakes to seem more realistic. But there are some things you can look for to help you tell the difference between a bot and a human.
For example, bots often have very fast response times, even if you ask them a complicated question. They may also repeat themselves or give you the same answer to different questions. And their language may sound unnatural, or they may not be able to understand your jokes or sarcasm.
Of course, there’s no foolproof way to tell if you’re talking to a bot. But if you’re ever suspicious, it’s always a good idea to do some research or ask a friend for help.
Here are some additional tips for spotting bots online:
I hope this helps!
This reads exactly like a chatgpt answer ;-)
Ahah you got me, I used ChatGPT to generate the answers. As of now it is pretty easy to spot a bot.
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I think you just caught one ;)
How do you know everyone IRL isn’t an NPC because this is just a simulation?
Because such a massive simulation without players serves no purpose that’d justify the waste of the resources needed to run it.
I’ve “played” plenty of simulations that are just things that run entirely on their own without a player input aside from the starting parameters. Chiefly being the one aptly named “The Game of Life.”
These are highly primitive and limited simulations, that follow basic patterns and can’t evolve much.
Ours is a reality complicated, vast and chaotic. They can’t be compared.
I wasn’t comparing them… I was pointing out how simulations don’t need “players.” 🙄
You said you “played” simulations. I pointed out that what you were playing can’t be compared to the complexity of our reality and therefore does not constitute a plausible argument.
Just for the sake of clarity: I’m not attacking you, it’s just that what we can simulate and observe can’t be used as an argument in discussion concerning our reality. It’s apples & oranges. We operate on entirely different level of complexity to whatever we may simulate.
If it’s a simulation your imagination and understanding of the world (simulation) is limited and you have no idea how resource intensive it would be to run, perhaps we’re a kids toy for some being
Again: the resources, the effort needed to create and sustain such a massive simulation just for fun, belong to civilization of so high advancement, that it renders the idea impossible.
Beings being able to do it would be able to bypass any stage of infancy or childhood, because it’d be obsolete and pointless for them.
how do you know the motives of something like that enough to know what’s pointless?
Because that’s how evolution works in intelligent species, or at least should - it leaves behind everything that’s no longer needed.
…?
If it’s a simulation all the laws of physics and so on that you’re basing these theories on might not even exist outside the simulation.
You can’t simulate a massive environment so alien to your own that they have nothing in common. You could answer “of course I can”, but all your arguments for that would be Russel’s Teapot.
We, human beings, can simulate worlds more complicated than the real one. It doesn’t have to be like The Matrix. It could be like Dwarf Fortress. We wouldn’t know if we are the simulation because it would always seem real and complex to us, even if all the creatures running the simulation see are numbers/text.
No, we can’t.
We can’t even simulate less complicated worlds, but so alien that they follow entirely different “natural laws” to our own.
Dwarf Fortress is ridiculously primitive in comparison to our reality.
Maybe it’s someone’s sick fun… or an experiment.
If someone is both capable and willing to spend such massive amount of effort for such an experiment, he already has all the answers the experiment might provide. It’s like thinking NASA would create massive telescope and place it on an orbit, just to point it at Earth and record how cats hunt.
Same with fun. Whoever possesses enough resources to waste them on “fun” alone, already has the access to way more interesting pleasures. It’s like thinking Jeff Bezos is going to buy a private island and buy a luxury bunker there, for the purpose of torturing cockroaches.
Maybe they’re just mice trying to find the question to life the universe and everything.
I know where my towel is, but again: the effort it takes to create and maintain such a simulation belongs to order so high, it no longer cares about such trivialities.
It could still theoretically be that our reality is some kind of entertainment. For example, people enjoy playing The Sims. There are still active communities for the older versions even though there are newer, more engaging games out there. And more generally, some people prefer old games even though their computers have like 1000x the processing power needed to run it.
If the reality we experience is a simulation, it could be for similar motivations, the hardware would be sophisticated but still a user will run whatever they prefer on it.
We enjoy watching SIMS and playing video games, because our reality is too bleak and dark. It’s a form of escapism, mostly.
Civilization that could create and sustain such a massive and complicated simulation as our reality, already knows ways to make the life interesting enough that it makes any form of SIMS-like entertainment obsolete.
I never said any of this might not be true, I just said what if. The experiment idea seems more plausable to me. And why not make an experiment, as you said, if they’re that advanced, making this experiment would be a piece of cake to them, like us making experiments with ants or bees.
I simply observed that logic dictates such an experiment obsolete.
Whoever has all the technology, resources and skills to conduct such a massive test, already has all the answers the experiment might provide. Beings capable of conducting such a test definitely have better questions to answer.
I saw a movie or, probably, an anime with this theme in the last year. People discover they are a simulation, manage to breach through to this race that is just lost in viewing virtual space. Wreck shit, go back.
I prefer The Thirteenth Floor. 1999 scifi noir.
spoiler
A person from 1937 finding out their world is a vr simulation in running on a 1999 computer. Then the 1999 people finding out their world is a vr simulator too, running on a 2024 computer.
@speck
Expelled from Paradise?
That wasn’t it. Damn it. I’m trying not to get pulled into figuring this out, but my brain is of the opinion that there’s no better use if my sleep time lol. I’ll see if it comes back to mind
In a way, this is also how Sausage Party ends.
Take the blue pill and find out!
The last time I took the blue pill I didn’t care if it was a bot or not, I wanted to fuck it.