MadScientist

I know, but by simulated universe it could be any scale, from one single brain with the rest of the universe provided as information or many simulated brains or right up to every particle in our universe simulated. Sorry, I don't get the point you're making...

LOL!!!! Don't worry I'm not going mental, I know it's sci-fi, I don't think we will do all that but you've got to admit, if we could all get along that way the human race would evolve into something new.

Yup, I've not read it but I've seen 13th Floor and The Matrix, maybe those are just inserted to reassure us that this universe being simulated is nothing but fantasy. It'd be the ideal way of convincing the AI's that they don't even need to think about any of this as they discover more about the universe.. According to every model of the universe we're all going to keep on evolving and develop new technology and migrate off this planet and... All the physically provable evidence points to that and all the fantasy evidence points to that. If I was growing AI minds in a "simulverse" and wanted them to evolve into nice minds for my androids. This universe would be absolutely perfect for the job.. They'd argue the toss over who or what created it but given enough diversionary information they'd get by. They'd ocassionally argue about whether the universe was simulated or not too but they would always end up saying the same thing "There's nothing we can do about it so we might as well get on with it." If one of them goes insane thinking about it and takes its own life, well it's only an object in a computer program isn't it?? But what if some of them didn't just argue about it but went further and found out the truth.. I think I'll watch 13th Floor and Matrix again later.

In other words I would have to alter the laws of physics in the universe I was simulating. I'd take away peripheral vision or reduce it by altering the way they evolved eyesight, so the computer didn't have to process as much data on vision leaving my program more CPU cycles for other things. One thing that does get me going about this is the way energy seems to be the key in this universe of ours.. Energy and matter are interchangeable, e = mc2, the way a photon can behave as a wave of energy or a particle, you can't destroy energy, etc.. I kinda wonder what AI simulants in a universe we simulated would think when they looked closely enough at everything in their universe and found energy everywhere. Because in a universe running on a computer, everything would be energy. And if I'm right we can never physically look at the smallest fundamental particle in the universe in a microscope of any kind. All we'll ever find is evidence that it was or is there. If I was writing this program that's one of the limitations I'd put in as a law of physics. So they would have a reason for that and carry on evolving instead seeing a fundamental and how it's just a piece of energy with variables and code attached to it (an OOProgramming object ) I would "inject" things into their development, I'd make a bush burn and vibrate so it gave off sound waves and give them guidelines to follow to evolve into a "nice" species. I might try an experiment with different types of religions and see which evolves into the best. Sorry if that offends but that's just what I'd do. Does that make any sense?? Try and get your head around this one. We are something that was created from nothing just like a simulated universe would be. And we are following the rules of a program. And if there's a chance we are just simulated beings doesn't that mean it's somethiing we should investigate?? Figuring out how black holes work and things like that, we're just figuring out how the program works. But they still need to be done in case they help uncover the truth.. Should we all look up and shout "We know we're simulated intelligences but please don't turn us off.. Talk to us.."?? I did think if we had telepathy we could disprove the theory but it wouldn't, it'd help disprove that I'm the only brain and you're all just data given to my brain. But not whether we're all simulated.. There MUST be some irrifutable evidence out there that proves we cannot be simulated intelligences. Otherwise it's pretty scary.. The scariest thing of all though is, if I'm the only really simulated intelligence in my universe none of you will be able to say "Yes, you are simulated." because as information providers for me you're not programmed to do that, you're programmed to keep me in doubt so I'll figure out something incredible on my own that the programmers want to use in their universe. So I have to carry on regardless, taking the information the universe (you) are providing me with and processing it, so I can be ready to process the more advanced information you give me later. The human mind improves with exercise so as I learn things my brain improves, that's something I'd make the simulated brain in my program do too. I just hope they don't turn me off. Of course things could be that way in a simulated universe with many properly simulated brains but it's scarier to be the only one, isn't it??

Yup, I know exactly what you mean. They could run the program at whatever speed they liked, just pause one simulated mind (or even part of the mind) wait for the others to catch up then unpause what you paused. But it doesn't go to prove whether or not we are in a simulated universe..

A reason why we might be evolving into a species with telepathy is.. A solar system is born, planets form, life forms on it, those cells evolve into higher beings, then again and again until you get a life form that can think "Why are we here, are there others on these other planets, can we communicate with them?? No, the distances are too great." "BUT WE WANT TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEM!!" "And we WANT to communicate more efficiently with our own species." The quickest way to relay some information from one brain to another over any distance would be telepathy. Once life on a planet evolves telepathy it can reach out to the other life forms in the universe and communicate. So then evolution is not a competition between different species on one planet it's on all planets.. So the way we evolved speech was only the first step in our evolutionary communication race. We evolve speech, we find it's not fast enough to communicate ideas so we when we evolve enough to a certain tech level we invent the phone, then the internet but that has limitations, it always will have. So we need to evolve something new. It might be something we biologically evolve or technologically evolve but instant mind to mind communications is something that would benefit evolution. And if you want something a bit deeper... Take a look at the world around us, there are people in many different groups/classes who look down on other groups/classes. So they eventually some of them clash and we get horrifying acts of violence, thousands or millions getting killed in stupid futile wars over which group own which piece of land or who follows the right god. If we were all telepathic anyone from one group would realise that one of their opponents from another group isn't actually a bad person after all, they think just like each other. Telepathy would help the human race that way. I believe that because, the groups who seem to think the western world is trying to destroy their way of life, we don't want to destroy their way of life but they want to fight us about it anyway so we have to retaliate. If they could see things from our perspective they'd understand that and just carry on with their lifestyles. Then they'd see the perspective of their neighbours... What better way of seeing another mans perspective than actually being able to see his very thoughts?? If we don't evolve telepathy in some way we're (as a species) going to find it difficult to put an end to fighting and start to get along.. I truly believe that once we do start to get along some amazing things will start to happen to the human race. If you were in a ship visiting an alien civilisation would you want to meet a species that behaved like ours does?? As a "higher being" looking at this primitive species you wouldn't think anything of abducting one, performing a few harmless experiments to see if they are evolving telepathy and therefore evolving into this species that got along, then putting them back on their planet to cause the least disturbance to their natural evolution. Sorry for the length and going off topic.

Now that was COOL!!! You should work that into a signature for yourself, "Help me become more ignorant by teaching me something new." or something like that.

I'm not certain if this is appropriate for these forums, I think it is though so... Say our universe, the one we're in right now, is a simulation. There are several levels it could being simulated: 1 - Just my brain and everything outside it is just information being provided to it. 2 - Several million brains being simulated on different computers with the ability to communicate as well as be provided information by the program. 3 - Everything in the universe is physically simulated. To simulate things perfectly on any level you would have to simulate every single fundamental particle and these laws of physics applied to each one of them then set off to simulate that level of the universe. Maybe there are more kinds but I'm sure you get the idea. Whatever level you pick the computers they're running on need to be far more powerful than the universe they're simulating, we couldn't simulate a universe bigger than our own. The computers would need to be unbelievably large. For us to simulate a human brain absolutely perfectly we would need to simulate every particle in a brain, our computers couldn't handle that so they would have to simplify things, instead of doing every single particle do every single cell, instead of our laws of physics (assuming we even knew them all) we would have to simplify those. Then from that simulated brains perspective the smallest particle would have to be a cell (much like a quark is in our universe) and the laws of phsysics would have to be simpler. To provide it with information and feedback, when it looked at something another part of the program or another computer would have to provide it a simple representation of that thing. You might have to look at my examples below to see what I'm getting at here. I was wondering what evidence there is out there to either prove or disprove that theory of the universe being simulated. There needs to be an explanation for lag/delays. Like the delay between looking at something and actually seeing it, if our brains or just my brain is being simulated, when I look at a car another part of the computer or another computer has to create that data and send it to my brain, there needs to be an explanation for the lag, which we call the speed of light. That has to remain constant so when we look at the sun it has to take 8 minutes to reach us. That ties in with travelling somewhere, obviously the simulated brain can't physically move anywhere, the position in the 3D map in this virtual reality needs to be updated, in a video game there is a slight lag between pressing the forwards key and the character moving forwards. So if our simulated brains invented space travel and we have to keep within the confines of information from light reaching our brains we have to travel slower too. Other things like field of vision, if I were writing the program for this simulated brain I would limit the amount of data I needed to provide it with so it would keep the program running fast enough to be useful to me. There would be no point running a program if it took 3 days just to build up the information for a full sphere of vision around it so I would just create rules (laws of physics) that prevented that. And to make the program run even more efficiently I would make rules to explain why the brain could only see things clearly in a narrow cone in that limited field of vision. So when the brain looked away from a tree towards a house beside the tree I would only need to show the brain that tree at a simpler level so I would have more processing time to provide it an accurate model of the house. See what I mean?? Speed of light again, if I was simulating many brains I wouldn't want them to be able to reach these other planets or make contact with them, I would still want the other planets because I want these brains to develop as close to the level of my own as possible. Distance sound travels, if I discovered I was limited to the number of brains I could have communicating at any one time, like if I could only have 1,000 brains being spoken to by another brain I would make it so sound could only ever travel 100 feet or something like that. I suppose the question I'm really asking is there anything in the universe that proves irrefutably that we (or even just myself) aren't being simulated in a similar manner to this?? Because everything seems to be explainable by this model. Even time dilation can be explained away, if one or more of these brains take off in a ship they're cut off from the rest, the computers their brains are running on can run more efficiently and outrun the other computer simulated brains. If I found that problem in the program I wrote I'd have to apply it to everything else, like an atomic clock flying on a plane, that would have to abide by the flaw too, so one of the brains would eventually figure it out as special relativity. Sorry for the length and sorry if it's not suitable for these forums, just delete it if it is and I'll try somewhere else.

Good, I'm catching up slowly. Thanks for reminding me about the soup, I'd forgotten to take that into consideration. It was shown quite clearly in the documentary I watched just a few days ago too. :-/ So the actual photons of light/energy created by the big bang have all been absorbed and emitted many times since their creation, recycling the energy and the process is still ongoing, right?? When you say we have to wait for the matter in the universe to become transparent to light, I assume that includes other forms of wave energy too, is that correct?? Got that, also mentioned in the same documentary I watched and seen references to in other places. Out of curiosity - is the inflation theory already established as being correct or are people finding holes in it?? Ahhhh... A new piece I can put into my jigsaw puzzle. The universe would act like a huge black hole, enough mass to generate enough gravity to pull even light and everything else in. Its event horizon would be the edge of the universe, right?? Sorry about mentioning the cube, I meant it as an example of another shape the universe could be. I realise my mistake now, energy would be thrown out in all directions with the same amount of force. Whoops, things just got foggy again... In my visualisation of how things happened the big bang threw out energy in all directions at the same time, something like the outer casing of a grenade, I see that outer casing of energy as being space. As that energy wave travels outwards it pushes out the boundaries of our space. Or is space-time just something else the BB threw out along with everything else?? That would seem to make more sense to me now. Because space-time grows outwards, the fundamental particles form the soup and the electromagnetic energy is trapped in the soup bouncing around. As that matter is spread out the gaps between each particle lessens the amount of heat transference from particle to particle - the matter cools. Another contributing factor to the cooling is the EM waves can escape through the now wider gaps in the particles. Basically the energy in the particles is lowered because it's now allowed to roam freely between the gaps, there is more energy travelling through space than stored in particles... I had this vision that if you could magically escape the universe and look at it you would see a large sphere of EM wave energy from the big bang, I'll cross my fingers and say "That's nonsense." isn't it?? If any of that's correct and space-time isn't EM energy pushing the universe outwards, does that mean ST can be travelling at a different speed?? It would have to have a variable speed to allow for inflation wouldn't it?? Perhaps I should have done some more scouting about on the net to see how the new jigsaw piece fits in with things I didn't understand before. Let's find out... The microwaves WMAP is picking up aren't the ones from the big bang. Each microwave WMAP receives has been travelling towards us for a very long time without being absorbed and emitted again. The dark patches (if those are the denser areas of matter) they're the areas where the microwaves were absorbed by matter, right?? The lighter areas would obviously be the microwaves travelling unimpeded. Yet there are other bodies within that sphere of WMAPS visibilty that emit microwaves, the way I'd have to explain why those aren't on the map is that the older microwaves from further away would have more energy stored in them, WMAP then filters out microwaves from the sun by ignoring low energy microwaves. Would that be correct?? BTW thanks for taking the time to explain all this, much appreciated. I sometimes feel like a caveman looking at the stars when I read some of this stuff on the net.

I think I just realised something you all take for granted. Electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light and EM waves were/are the energy given out by the big bang, so the universe must be expanding at the speed of light. Matter can't travel at the speed of light so no matter will ever reach the edge of the universe, so that's my previous idea of tachyons being matter bouncing off the edge of the univere with more energy than the speed of light out the window, faster than the speed of light. Is that why we'll never be able to see the edge of the universe, because there can never be anything that far out for us to see??

This "no centre of the universe" used to do my head in, there was a big bang, all explosions have a central point. BUT I think I've cleared it up in my mind now... For the time before the big bang the universe was compressed into it's miniscule size so the big bang happened all over the universe at the same time. Is that the right way to look at it?? I watched a documentary recently that mentioned WMAP and showed the photo/map... I don't understand which microwaves it's picking up. The m/waves that went out from the sphere (radius = distance we can see) in that miniscule universe have travelled away now so the m/waves WMAP's picking up must be the ones still travelling from other spots in that miniscule universe, is that right?? How can it be right because with the universe being so small in its early days it wouldn't have taken EM waves long to travel right across the universe. Was the speed of light slower then?? And I think that's what yourdadonapogo meant by us being at the centre of this sphere, distance we can see. So if all we can see is that sphere of microwaves that haven't reached our part of the universe yet how does it tell us the shape of it?? If it was a cube, we'd still only be able to see X lightyears away in any direction, wouldn't we?? The other thing was the dark patches represented areas where matter must have been denser, so gravity could take effect and build up bigger masses. But how do they get to that conclusion? If these microwaves are travelling from X lightyears away wouldn't they be absorbed by other bodies in the universe before they reached us leaving darker regions?? http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/mr_whatsthat.html To use their own analogy of light passing through clouds, the clouds absorb some of the light waves.

I don't know if this is of any use: http://www.rit.edu/~jmwsma/calculators/ti92/ti92links/ti92links.html

LOL!! Personally I think the question should be "Should we even want to go back in time??" AFAIK The only way we can actually find out if it's safe to go back in time and alter things is to actually do it. And when you think that just standing on a twig and breaking it could not only cause you to cease to exist but everyone you know, it's a bit of a gamble. Even just materalising in the past will have catastrophic effects on the original timeline. All those molecules you're going to displace are going to cause more of a breeze than a butterfly flapping its wings, just think of the storm you'll kick up on the other side of the planet. And how would those molecules be moved out of the way to make room?? And most people seem to miss the point that we don't know if our future selves already have gone to our current past to change things. We could be living in a time line where they messed something up and Hitler and his gang of merry men went rampaging throughout the world on a killing spree. If they/we did mess things up like that we have to wait until we discover time travel again and go back to fix it. Because when they messed things up they wiped themselves out and couldn't go back to the future or send someone else back. If the two world wars hadn't happened the world and the people alive in it would be very different today and even more different tomorrow. And if we do go back and fix that mess we might wipe ourselves out, we'd save most of the people from suffering in concentration camps in the past, which would be nice but at what price?? I'd rather no one went back in time, if any of you do and you wipe me from existence I'll be pretty damned cross with you!! I don't believe in parallel universes BTW.

A comet smashes into our planet and wipes all of humanity out. When the dinosaurs got wiped out small mammals survived which we evolved from. So the same thing happens again and a new intelligent species evolves on Earth. I was just wondering what are the chances of that happening?? Because I was thinking of the implications. Our archeologists get exited about finding a new species of dinosaur or something like that. Imagine what the archeologists of the new intelligent life will be digging up. It'll be millions of years into the future but surely some evidence of us will survive, won't it?? Our descendants might get off this rock and their descendants come back saying "We used to live here." Or will the sun or some similar catastrophy have destroyed the Earth before then?? And just for a laugh... We'd better make sure KFC don't branch out into space research and become so succesful they buy out NASA and other agencies cos if the next intelligent life to evolve on Earth after a comet hitting it are chicken people, they're gonna be well screwed.

I thought things worked like this... Stars that go supernova form a few basic elements which go on to form more stable stars like our own which form all the elements, like carbon, etc.. Do we know enough to say the elements we know of today are the only ones that could exist anywhere?? I don't see what importance microbes arriving on comets makes to anything. On day one all life in the universe was part of the same soup anyway. If you trace evolution further back than the first amino acids, all life really is is just something that gets made by stars, stars just get made in star factories which just get made by something else.. And aliens then are really just really distant ancestors of ours. Something that interests me about ET's though is how we might act as ET's ourselves when approaching a new planet with intelligent life on it. Things like.. We wouldn't want to get to know them if they were hostile because we wouldn't want them flying around the universe in ships like ours but with hostile intentions. If they were more primitive than us we wouldn't want to disturb their development too much. Leaving clues like zipping down to the atmosphere might be an idea though. I won't mention genetically engineering a human to become like one of them and performing spectacular feats using advanced technology like walking on water or anything like that. If the universe is 13.7 billion years old or even older and life on Earth's only been evolving for the past 5 billion there could be species out there a good few million years further ahead than we are. If in 1 million years time we come across a planet with intelligent life equal to our own as it is now, from our perspective then they'll seem like apes to us now. Abducting a few of those to examine them then putting them back wouldn't bother us much. We'd know from our own history that no one would believe them anyway. In actual fact we'd be doing them a favour, think of all the great films they could start making about these so called aliens. And because of all that I don't think aliens will introduce themselves properly until the whole planet sorts itself out. We need to stop fighting and start helping each other out. Instead of spending billions on warfare develop technology for turning sea water into drinkable water. Or bung it all into medical research or the space program. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as English, French, African, Chinese, American, etc.. or black, white, yellow etc... and start thinking of ourselves as humans. But that means some extremely radical changes like throwing all the religions out and creating a new one. Rascism will only die out when all the races have interbred so much that there's only one race left. I don't expect ET to come knocking any day soon. Unless they can monitor our internet and pick all us good guys up.

The way I see things... The universe is now aged at 13.7 billion years isn't it now?? But the universe is too big to have grown this much in that time, then they introduced this "inflation stage" of development and everything fitted into place again. Back then it could expand quicker than it does now. What's outside the universe?? I LOVE this one!! You can't say there is a void or just nothing outside our universe. Because even nothing not even a void could exist outside it. So to be accurate you've got to say, there's nothing at all not even nothing outside out universe, haven't you?? What if there was a galaxy right on the edge of the universe?? I think if I was on a planet in that galaxy I'd be packing my bags and legging it as far away as possible. So maybe we'll find out about the edge of the universe when the fleet of alien ships come whizzing by, stopping to tell us we're going the wrong way. Another theory I have is that any particles trying to become a part of this nothing that's not even nothing, will be repelled with more force than it went in with. But I mentioned that in another thread about tachyons.

Why should it be limited by distance?? As for us evolving esoteric abilities. I was reading a very little about quantum conscioussnes, where the brain works at the quantum level. Which makes sense to me (ATM anyway) since we used to perceive ourselves as just the human body, then a brain in the human body, then since part of the brain is for memory, part is for sight etc, we become the part/s of the brain that does the thinking. Then it goes down to the cellular level so why can't it continue down to the atomic level and onto the quantum level?? My theory is that at the atomic level the behaviour of the atoms influence our thoughts. QC working in the same way at the lowest level. What other things like entangled particles are we going to discover in the future?? What role do neutrinos, tachyons (don't shoot me!! ) and these dark matters and negative energies I've heard talk of play in our brains?? And if the string theorists are right.. Could the strings do even more incredible things like talk to each other or influence each other in other ways, allowing them to pass information or making them move. And wasn't it Einstein who said energy and matter are interchangable?? Why can't we, as a collection of strings that can talk to each other, tell our strings to all convert to energy but maintain the quantum consciossnes and ascend into energy beings?? Maybe that's getting a little too crazy though.

God, I can't believe I'm answering this whilst sober. Obviously they'd hitch rides on ships and birds. It's the thinking part that I can't grasp, we know giant insects couldn't exist and to outsmart us they'd need better brains bigger than they have right now. So they'd have to be telepathic and have a hive type mind where every single ant not only knew what the others were thinking but could influence them. So instead of having the brain in one ant it would be in them all. Perhaps then they could all work together and invent helicopters, fighter jets, aircraft carriers or just raid our military bases and steal all our tackle. "Lot of ants tonight John.." "Yeah, I just hope it's not another bloody invasion force. Those ant sized machine guns don't half sting the morning afterwards."

Up until recently I believed that photons were charged electrons but as I now understand things.. Photons are those packets of energy emitted by atoms when an electron is thrown from one to another, the atom can't contain the new electrons energy so it throws the energy out, is that correct?? What happens to the electron though?? Surely it can't just disappear, it must also be thrown out or absorbed mustn't it?? And if that's right, another thing I believed was that the photon (charged electron) was passed from one atom to another, like a chain reaction. I assume "real" photons don't travel in this way at all, correct?? All I can find on the web is that photons travel as waves, that's great but means nothing to me. I can understand an atom absorbing a photon, the atom takes that packet of energy and absorbs it in some way transforming it to heat. Does the electron gather more speed causing the atom to vibrate more violently which then spreads to neighbouring atoms, allowing the original atom to slow down slightly. Eventually leaving the original body and entering the air the atoms of which in turn vibrate more violently... A reflected photon would be flung out some way. How does that work, all I can picture is the electron catching it but that kind of atom doesn't like that kind of energy so it throws it back out. What happens when a photon passes through an atom that doesn't absorb it or reflect it?? Does it get absorbed and thrown out or is it more like reflection and instead of being held onto for a full orbit of the electron it's only held onto for half an orbit?? And what happens when photons collide?? I assume they absorb each other and form a new photon with more energy. I'm pretty certain that photons of different wavelengths just pass straight through each other, correct?? If I'm understanding things, photons don't have to be light we see, this one's confusing me.. Radiation given of by uranium or something like that is just photons of a kind we can't see, correct?? Does that mean that a radio transmitter is emitting photons we can't see but a radio receiver can "see" them?? Radio telescopes are just gathering photons from distant bodies, right?? And photons travel in straight line. And to focus on a distant body the telescope has to concentrate on the photons it's emitting, in other words filter out all the photons coming into the telescope from other sources, right?? If so, why are they so wide? Wouldn't it be better to have a really long tube radio telescope instead of a dish and point that at the object Taken to the extreme a tubular telescope only a photon wide would only collect the photons coming directly from the body it was pointed at, wouldn't it?? And while I'm on the subject of photons, I was reading something more on entangled photons. From what I read they're created by passing light through a certain kind of crystal. That sent my mind racing and I came up with a theoretical invention... Fire the beam of light through the crystal to constantly create entangled photons, for each pair send one off to a distant star and keep the other one trapped between two mirrors. I suppose their surfaces would have to be made from extremely reflective atoms, otherwise over the next 50 to 200 years the photon that stayed at home would dissipate in some way. Perhaps a long fibre optic cable of some kind so you could have a stream of photons constantly travelling in a loop... I was thinking "they" could have been sending photons out and keeping the others to monitor them. An elaborate way of sending a message. And if the receiver trapped these photons some way a direct link to the sender would be achieved. But it would mean having to overcome the link breaking when interacting with those photons. Could that ever be overcome?? I'm sorry for all the questions but whenever I look at these kind of things on the web, they seem to be assuming I know things about other things, like the "photons travel as waves" as an example I used above. Anyone know of any sites that can take you through the learning process from start to finish?? I'm 36 years old and don't remember Einstein or photons or most of this stuff being mentioned once in school by the teachers, maybe I was off that day.