Do We Live in the Matrix? | Hacker News Reader

Do We Live in the Matrix?

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Sometimes people take The Matrix quite literally, while it is actually a very good metaphor for government and democracy. Morpheus hints at this very transparently in a couple of monologues:

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes [grins]. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.

So what Neo later sees are endless fields of human beings being grown for the very purpose of obtaining energy from them. Still don't see what's going on here?

And then later in the training program he tells Neo this:

Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

And indeed, I see that all over again. Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace, at the very best it is suggested you go to Somalia. The very idea that maybe the dearest leaders of whatever country you live in don't actually care about you doesn't seem to be able to penetrate people's minds, even though time and again they lie and abuse their powers. Those who hint to this idea are called radicals and extremists, even though it is not them, but the elite in power, who have a stake in this whole game.

Right, but... what if the reality is that there's a mix of better and worse-intentioned people in government, as well as emergent structural inefficiencies and competing ideologies?

I understand that we need a good narrative to comprehend the world, but I think we can do better than the "government = bad" one. The truth seems like it would be more nuanced.

How would you help punch of people? Why would you? Why would you imprison them and tell them it is for they own good. So that some of them do not turn evil and kill rest.

Keeping people in prison, saying that if they are let out of prison, fear and danger will emerge. But if you want to leave prison on your own, you are shot.

There is no one who cares about you, if he is looking for power to control you. Eat, shit, reproduce, obey. Ah yeah, vote something, haha.

The thing to look at is incentives. What behavior the system incentivizes? People are elected for some n years and it is very difficult to fire them even if they don't keep their promises and are doing a crappy job. More importantly, they take away taxes by force from the population, then redistribute those money and pretend they are doing something useful. "We built those roads, we gave you education". Yes, except you didn't. When you take someone else's money by force, for whatever reason, even if you intend to give it to the poor, it is theft. But when a government does it, it suddenly becomes taxes. It can be argued that in a democracy people generally agree that taxes should be payed, but when you actually ask people whether they want to fund wars and NSA spying, turns out they really don't want that. It is sold as a package and people are tricked and forced (whichever is needed) into financing horrible things with their own money.

Finally, you see, if a politician does a bad job, he still gets paid and keeps his job at least until the next election. If a private company messes up, people leave in droves and it goes bankrupt.

There might be some good people in the government, who truly believe they are doing some good. That doesn't make the system good and they have zero chances to make it a good system.

I don't think this supports that the government is bad or inherently bad, its just inefficient. The question you have to ask yourself, can you run a country (not even America, take a small country first like Belgium, less than a 10th the pop. of America), and can you run that country efficiently.

Like it or not, most government systems humans have invented so far are woefully inefficient and provide perverse incentives from time to time. However it seems our current democratic/republican system works the best, if not on any objective scale, but for the fact is the most relatively stable and proven.

Now, anyone can see that our current government has issues, much like the ones you pointed out. And most people have known that for ages, the hard part is can you devise a better system, and how would you go about testing it without ruining a generation? How do you go about minimizing corruption. Sure the "lets-all-live-in-the-forest" and "burn-down-the-institutions-and-the-rich" route is nice and ideal, but its a pipe dream that will fall apart instantly (some people like to point out examples of small villages living without electricity and money - but you simply cannot scale that "lifestyle" to 300 million people).

I'm not a political philosopher or an economist so I won't assert that the system we have now is greatest and you are wrong. I just want to see more expanded thought on the idea that "politicians are crooks and we should get rid of the system."

Why do you need to "run a country"? What does it really mean? What is it about a government that only it can do certain things, while private enterprises and persons are claimed to be incapable of accomplishing it?

But the fundamental question is not whether we can make our system better or worse. The fundamental question is, is it okay to steal from others? When government takes taxes, it steals. You may call it a "perspective", but if I disagree to pay, you and I know very well I'm gonna be at the very least intimidated by the government agents and may possibly go to jail. If all people in a given country indeed agreed that taxes are good, you wouldn't need to enforce collecting it, you would just let people donate, like on kickstarter. If, however, some disagree, you can't claim it's fair simply because the majority is sort of okay with it. The majority supported a lot of horrible things throughout history, yet now we don't see them as being on the right side of it.

If you drive on public roads without paying your taxes, are you stealing? If your car gets stolen and you ask the police for help, are you stealing?

If you don't want to pay your taxes, leave the country and build your own, with roads, running water, infrastructure et. all. If you find you need outside investment to "bootstrap" your new country, then you may end up paying dividends to your investors just so you can have running water - how is this any different from taxes?

Okay, you might say - but why don't we let private companies manage roads, infrastructure, and others? You should ask yourself, do you really want a company whos job it is to maximize profits to be running these basic services? We already have a couple examples of how privately run institutions with perverse incentives can ruin peoples lives.

Lets look at the prison industry, which is now private. They benefit from the free labour of prisoners indirectly giving them an incentive to have as many people as possible in prison. As a result America has the worlds highest incarceration rate by a wide margin[1]. Often these people are in prison for reasons illegitimate. While these people are in prison they also represent an innumerable net loss to the actual economy. These are people who could be getting educated or running higher worth jobs.

It shouldn't be a stretch of the imagination that running a country - managing the resources and happiness of millions of people as well managing relations with other countries as represented by millions of other people is an incredibly complex task. Simply boiling down "taxes = stealing" is too simple and naive to actually strongly consider.

[1]http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/us-incarcerati...

Why would you say that something inefficient is not bad? To me, "inefficient" and "bad" are pretty close to synonymous, at least in a context where input energy is limited and costly.

Gasoline engines (like the ones in a car) will only ever have at maximum 30% thermal efficiency. That means for every dollar you spend, 70 cents of your dollar is doing nothing.

However despite how inefficient an engine is, academia, industry and the military pout millions of dollars every year to increase modern engines efficiencies by .1%.

So is inefficient bad? Well its wasteful and we have worked very hard to reduce that waste, but it will never be physically more than 30%. However I would call a modern lamborghini engine "bad". With the tools and knowledge humans have at the moment lamborghini has managed to produce an amazing engine.

Same goes for the government. Yes there are holes and I'd imagine there are people working to fix these holes. But is the government today objectively bad? Are we blindly driving ourselves to wall. I think its hard to say. Its easy to say that the government should do x, y, z and all our problems would be solved, but that is easier said than done. Modern human society is exceedingly complex. So to say the government is "bad" would require more knowledge on modern human society that is currently even possibly, just like to say if an engine is bad you would need to be an expert on engines. However just like I can say 70% of an engines energy is wasted on heat and is therefor inefficient, the government is also inefficient in a similar matter, without at all being "bad"

> When you take someone else's money by force, for whatever reason, even if you intend to give it to the poor, it is theft. But when a government does it, it suddenly becomes taxes.

I'd see taxes more like calling in a debt. It costs money to live here, you have to pay for that. You can't shout and scream "THEFT" when a hotel is trying to get you to pay for your stay, even if you don't want to use the TV yet still have to pay for it.

> "We built those roads, we gave you education". Yes, except you didn't.

I'm not sure which country you're from, but I'm guessing there are schools and roads funded by the state.

> Finally, you see, if a politician does a bad job, he still gets paid and keeps his job at least until the next election. If a private company messes up, people leave in droves and it goes bankrupt.

There are plenty of companies that do bad jobs and are still running.

> I'd see taxes more like calling in a debt. It costs money to live here, you have to pay for that.

What do you mean costs money to live here? I already pay my rent and utilities. When I walk or drive on public roads, it is only because it is a monopoly and I have no other choice. Do you think in the absence of government no one would build roads? Or schools? Or do you argue that it costs money to stay on a piece of land? Then maybe we should start taxing breathing the air as well.

> There are plenty of companies that do bad jobs and are still running.

Because there's a demand for that particular level of service, not because they force everyone to visit them and become their customers.

Except your friendly neighbourhood power or telecom monopoly.

You see, I live in Russia. Historically, up until recently, the telecom was a very unregulated industry. Government just didn't care enough. So do you know what am I paying for a 100Mbps connection and unlimited traffic? $10/mo. Do you know what I'm paying for an unlimited 3G and calls? ~$10/mo. And this has been the case for many years. No monopoly here. Monopolies only emerge when governments and companies start making sweet love to each other.

No monopoly in 3G? How do companies refrain from transmitting at each other's frequencies? No monopoly in telecom? How do they lay all the wire without permits and regulation? Or in good old days, can I dig up anywhere in Russia and lay wires directly to my customers?

You can't and it's precisely because government sets the rules where you can lay wires and which frequencies you can use. In Russia, this hasn't gone beyond that yet, that's why the prices are that low. In other countries, regulators are a lot less reluctant.

So Telecom was very "unregulated" because you agree with all the regulations. That's some interesting play of words.

The horrifying thing is a huge number of people do believe that without government there wouldn't be roads. Every libertarian or anarchist FAQ you find will have a response to the "but who will build the roads" question. Government has done an excellent job of convincing the vast majority of people of its indispensability.

It is a serious question. Until of now, no project of the scale of public works has been taken by any private cooperation anywhere in world. Although the incentive are clear (permanent cut on profit from all transportation), none of them have either the capital, the risk appetite or the power of taking land if so required.

Extraordinary claims require proof from the party making the claim. How do libertarian and/or anarchist propose that intercontinental freeways be built and maintained at the same cost as they are done by the US government?

> Until of now, no project of the scale of public works has been taken by any private cooperation anywhere in world.

I suspect one reason for that is that their primary competitor is government, which often has major advantages, like the legal authority to seize property right right of ways and virtually endless funds through taxation and debt.

I don't think that any proposals would claim that all things created by government would exist in a stateless society. Remember, it's possible to not have things like intercontinental freeways but to instead have more economically efficient solutions. The road system in the US, for example, isn't some example of "pure economic good." Freeways require people in cities to subsidize people in rural areas. They also are a massive subsidy to the automobile industry, and a disaster for the rail industry. It's conceivable that a much different (and more efficient) organization of society could emerge without the government creating what it judges to be the "best" public works.

The primary competitor, the government, has been set up by people explicitly to take benefit of the ultimate economy of scales, one where it is backed by the will and money of every single individual who believes in the Constitution which establishes and defines the role of the said government. These endless funds and the monopoly of force is given to it for explicit purposes of stepping in when the private group of individual are unable to get stuff done.

The interstate do not arise in vacuum, nor are they product of mere transportation concerns. They are product of very reasonable concern of quickly transporting war equipment and connecting parts of countries to one another, so as to facilitate quick movement of goods and people, adding their value to GDP. The rail industry is thriving well, doing its job as low cost goods carrier.

"It's conceivable" -- except no one has given good argument that thing which is so obvious has escaped human imagination for close to 10,000 years now, and all the places which are good approximation of said ideologies have people in utterly poor state.

> The primary competitor, the government, has been set up by people explicitly to take benefit of the ultimate economy of scales, one where it is backed by the will and money of every single individual who believes in the Constitution which establishes and defines the role of the said government.

Pardon the snarkiness, but did you learn that in public school? I ask, because I had those ideas unabashedly hammered into my brain my entire childhood in government schools. The problem is that whether someone consents to the actions of government empirically does not matter. Even the founding fathers either deliberately perpetuated this clever lie or managed to deceive themselves like a lot of Enlightenment philosophers. "The consent of the governed" and so on.

If only my country had functioning public schools, may be I would have learned that. And in any case, in what ways do you see consent of governed not mattering? Are you part of any local democratic organisation? Have you bitched about anything to your local alderman (assuming you live in a city)? How is that if my consent does not matter, the garbage picking became better when I bitched about it?

For sake of simplicity, lets talk about UK. If the consent of governed does not matter, why hasn't David Cameron taken all the land for himself, a la William the conquer? Was the history of past 1000 year just sham? Something people told themselves to drink the cool-aid? Did all the workers who rioted and all the people who fought and died on side of Parliament against the King stupid? Why exactly are these people living under lie? And how does that country, based on lies and shams, has a well functioning society where you can go from being born in poverty to governing the country in one life time?

And any ways, you still haven't answered the question. Why aren't there incredible large scale projects popping up in north Mali, where Caterpillar industry can go tomorrow and built awesome infrastructure? Surely we in democratic world have to face the tyranny of government in every step ... why haven't the more enlightened countries with little government shown us the way? And if everyone can be lied and manipulated, how is this perfect utopia of anarchy supposed to work?

I honestly cannot imagine how you can have even a small town function without a government of some sort, leave alone a whole country.

To me, it's pretty obvious that when you have a large group of people trying to live geographically close together, someone has to set up the rules, and make sure those rules are followed. Otherwise, there will be conflicts, because people will have different opinions about how something should be done, and some people will try to enforce their worldview on others. Whoever will have the power to resolve such conflicts is the government. That will be their job, and people will have to pay them to do this job.

What you don't see here is that if you have a government, it inevitably imposes the rules the majority agree with upon the minority who disagree. There is no way for the minority to do anything but wait until the next election and hope. So conflicts are not really resolved, but rather one side orders the other to shut up and do as they say.

A true resolution would be when both sides agree on the price. An simple example would be this:

I would like to throw a party on my lawn, but my neighbor disagrees. I really want that party though, cos it's my birthday, so I would go to my neighbor and try to convince him to let me have a party. I can see he wouldn't appreciate the noise so I would offer him something in exchange for his inconvenience: maybe I would let him use my bathtub for the next month, or maybe I would simply give him some money. If it wasn't just my one neighbor, but maybe 3 or 5 of them, I would have to convince them all and pay them all and that would make my party very expensive, so I would consider cancelling it.

Now on a larger scale, imagine you'd have various law firms, each protecting their clients interests and bargaining on their behalf. So, for instance, clients of one firm wouldn't like gay people to marry, while clients of that other firm, obviously many of the are gay, would be in favor of it. Even if we suppose that those who oppose gay marriage are the majority, they still probably wouldn't be able to outbid the minority here. That's because when people are asked to pay to teach others how to live, it becomes painfully obvious most of them are not ready spend their money on it.

Even your simple example of throwing a party breaks down in the real world. What do I do if my neighbor throws a loud party without asking my permission? Do I go and confront him? What if he tells me to f* off? Do you see where this leads to?

If he tells you to fuck off, there are numerous ways to get back at him. In the real world, you'd call your protection agency, which would in turn call his protection agency and they would settle the dispute for you (without actually going to war with each other, as some people would suggest). The difference from the current system would be that you wouldn't have a monopoly on laws and people would be compensated for their inconvenience.

In real world, your neighbor is the local warlord, and you cannot possibly summon enough amount of army to counter his army. The only guy who can stop him is the guy with bigger army somewhere in capital city, and he couldn't care less about you. Welcome to feudalism. History is rife with the system you are proposing, and it did not went well for humanity.

Can you summon enough amount of army to battle the global warlord which is the government?

Yes, if I can convince other, I can summon army of 100 million voters who can change the system overnight (well, once every 2 years) and make whoever they want their global warlord to be. The global warlord works for them, and not the other way round.

The fact is, people are happy enough with the system as it is, and they do vote out the "mafia thug" if he acts particularly bad. This global warlord requires money to maintain its strength and most people are more than happy to pay their share of taxes.

So wouldn't it be much easier to convince 100 people to act against your local warlord than 1 million people to act against the global warlord?

It is easier to control one entity that has monopoly over force and can be ruled by reason, than to control gazzillion small forces which are accountable to no-one. We also have these local warlords that you speak of. They are called the police and the mayor.

How can it be easier to control an entity that has a monopoly over force and that requires you to convince 1 million people instead of 100 for any changes to happen?

Also, ruled by reason, really? Same reason that helped it decide to spy on all people and kill millions in bloody wars all over the globe? I mean, it's not just the US. If you look at history, no criminal organization, even the most bloodiest and craziest one, can compete with an average government in how many people it killed, tortured or imprisoned.

The Mongols killed more people as fraction of living population that any government. The Mongols were also more close to your ideals of anarchy. May I suggest you to brush up your history?

Yes, ruled by reason. The same reason that forces them to withdraw from wars, same reason that checks military spending to less than 3% of human efforts, the same reason that maintains property rights for people to function, the same reason that can channel together forces to plant 200 million plants to stop the dust bowl .... and I can parrot on and on. Is the government perfect? Hardly, but it is in every way superior to lack of government, where my ability to maintain my rights depend on how big armies I can summon on my side.

Your tiny force of hundred cannot lead to change of any reasonable measure because there would be a person with an army of million. Always has been, always will be. I am not making stuff up just to argue with you. Feudalism is exactly the result of model you propose. When local security forces run by private party are supposed to enforce whatever any one pays them, it is just in their own benefit to merge together to form bigger force ... which goes on till the ultimate biggest force is run by a King at the center, and small forces run by local security guy. Now unlike trust busting which the government (ruled by citizens) can undertake, there is no one in your utopia who can stop security agencies from forming cartel. Again, brush up your English history (Or Russian history for that matter). When rules depends on who has more money in his pocket, ECON 101 rationale follows, forming ever larger security force accountable to no-one but itself ... enforcing not the rule of law, but whatever whims it wants to.

Mongols were a proto-state. The fact they didn't have a permanent territory means nothing. They had an hierarchical structure. The only thing that was different was that other "states" realized it would actually be much profitable and safer to sit in one place and tax the shit out of their own people (and possibly those they conquered) instead of running around the globe and robbing everyone indefinitely.

I think the mistake you are making is thinking that it's either a modern state which gives you certain benefits or some sort of medieval anarchy situation with warlords and lots of random violence. How about when you have 3 or 4 major protection agencies. You may think of them as governments, but instead they work within one country and everyone is free to switch to one or the other at any time. Those agencies sell laws to their customers want, resolve conflicts and enforce property rights. Why do you think such a competition would be worse than having a monopolist who doesn't even live by its own laws (Example: senator did cocaine? made a mistake. A regular person did cocaine: jail). Try to understand that the word Anarchy doesn't mean what you've been told it means. Anarchy simply means no state, but it doesn't mean no rules.

Oh, so it would be just like the 90s in Russia? Where you would pay your "protection agency" to "settle the dispute" for you, right? Are you old enough to remember how it used to work those days? What if my neighbor is a member of the protection agency? What if I don't have money to pay for my protection? What are you going to do?

Russia in the 90s wasn't absence of government. It was a curious mix of government and bandits, which, of course, continued into our days. Except that now it's actually much easier to identify the bad guys: they are wearing a uniform.

But the point is, you can't just burn a church in a village and expect people to become atheists. Which is an analogy for what happened with the USSR. People got their freedom, but they had no idea what to do with it. So it was gradually taken back from them again.

People got their freedom, but they had no idea what to do with it.

That's the truth right there. Vast majority of people already have more freedom than they know what to do with. Those people, if faced with a clear choice, would gladly trade some of that "freedom" for stability, security, and comfort in their lives.

If you remove a government from a society, it will quickly descend into chaos. Various armed forces will longer be held accountable for their actions. What do you think will happen? Anyone with a gun can become a "government". Now instead of one government, you have a thousand. Eventually, power will consolidate, and you will end up with a single government, back where you started.

I feel a bit strange having to explain these obvious things, it's like I'm talking to a 10 year old. Do you not realize that the societal order you're proposing has been tried many times since the beginning of civilization? It has never worked. Every time, some kind of power (official or unofficial) had emerged sooner or later (usually sooner), and eventually a some sort of a centralized government was formed. This happened every single time. If people could function without a government, surely we would have seen an example of that somewhere.

It's like going back to the 17-th century and saying, "surely, if a society could function without slaves, we would've seen an example somewhere".

The thing is, I realize a lot of people are not ready to be unplugged. That's fine. But there are a lot of people who share my views who would like to live without a government and who know how to do it. The problem for these people is that all the land is taken by states already. And, mind you, most of it is unused. It doesn't have to be some really good land, Las Vegas was built in the desert after all. I guarantee you, if such a land was made available, you would see an unprecedented migration of people and businesses into it and a huge economic boom. The reason it's not available is because states are mostly afraid that if they sell a piece of land to someone completely (that is, allow to secede) many more would follow.

It's like going back to the 17-th century and saying, "surely, if a society could function without slaves, we would've seen an example somewhere"

Ok, good point. The society without any government is possible in theory. It's possible that in the distant future, human civilization will evolve to some kind of government-free organization.

However, you are claiming that it is possible today. Let's say we completely remove all people from California, restore it to its wild prehistoric state, and declare it a government-free zone. Anyone can move there and do whatever they like. No laws, no infrastructure, no social services, just wild nature. The blank slate. Let's say a lot of all kinds of people from all over the world will move there and will want to start a new life. Also, for the sake of the argument, let's say no outside influence will be exerted on that land, it will be allowed to develop independently.

Please describe what is going to happen there in the next 100 years? What makes you think it will be different this time around than how it was 200 years ago?

Oh, no, I never said it's possible now. Or, to be precise, I never said it is possible at the current state of understanding of the world most people have. For most people, a state is like religion. If you burn a church in a village the villagers don't become atheists.

My point is that there are people who understand liberty and understand how to build a free society. They would like an exit. The problem, in my view, is that those in power wouldn't allow them such an exit, because as soon as others see them succeed, the state would lose its legitimacy.

You ask me, what is my solution to this? 1. Educate people about the evil and predatory nature of the state 2. Use Bitcoin. And that's all I have to say about the war in Vietnam.

current state of understanding of the world most people have

Your problem is you believe you understand the world better than others. You want to educate others, but even here on this forum, where people generally listen to reason, and are disillusioned with the government, you haven't persuaded anyone with your arguments.

For me, a state is not a religion. For me government is a service, and I'm fine paying for that service. I'm fine trading some of my freedom for security, stability, and comfort. I still have plenty of freedom left.

I honestly don't understand what are you complaining about. If you're living in Russia, and your life there sucks, just move to a country with a better government, with better laws, or with better whatever it is you're not happy about.

You see, it's not about Russia or any other specific country. Russia has a lot more freedoms in certain areas than European countries and the US. It's a matter of principle. As for believing my understanding of the world is better - isn't it what most people who are trying to convince others of anything believe they have? I mean, what kind of moron would I be if I tried to convince people of something I didn't believe myself? Oh, wait, I'd be a politician.

Also, I don't particularly enjoy running around and preaching. HN is interesting because some people here indeed listen carefully and actually read your arguments, sometimes presenting challenging questions.

This breakdowns tremendously in other situations, mainly because of imperfect information. Humans are notoriously bad at pricing things. Lets say I'm a very wealthy man and I'm also a serial killer. In your example, I assume I could just pay any amount of money to kill someone. I'm a wealthy guy, and I go around killing 8 year olds and paying the parents huge sums of money (10 - 20 million dollars, who would refuse?)

However, what is the real price of an 8 year old boy? Lets say I go and kill little Mark Zuckerberg. By doing so I have zapped almost 100B dollars from the economy and paid his parents 10-20 million. I'm doing a disservice to everyone by killing him, should I also pay everyone who Zuckerberg will make a future millionaire, how will I know this?

Even in your example, how does his neighbor know what the perceived cost of your action are? What if his property value goes down, because of your party and noise making? How will ever be able to calculate that cost? What if he has his elderly sick mother staying over the weekend? How does he put a price on his mother's piece of mind?

Price is subjective and only depends on your action. If you take a deal, it means you are satisfied with the price. There is no real price.

I'm pretty sure a large portion of society would bet against you if you decided to kill an 8 year old boy. You would never have enough money to outbid the society. It doesn't matter how much money you pay to the parents, the society would still be willing to put you in jail, since it doesn't want people killing other people, no matter how rich they are.

You can go right now to Liberia, hire enough mercenaries, and start killing bunch of people for fun if you want to. The entire society of Liberia wouldn't able to stop you from doing so. Let's see how willing they are in putting people behind jail. It is the ultimate paradise of weak government, one that cannot/will not protect its own people. On the plus side, you can avoid paying any tax.

So would the same thing happen in the US if people woke up tomorrow and realized there is no government and they don't need one? Because, you see, a weak/strong government says nothing about the well being of the people. You can have very strong governments, yet people would be suffering a lot more under those regimes.

How? Where are these mythical people suffering under good governments? These people who are enslaved by theft of taxes? As a rule of thumb, people living in countries with strong social democracies, with strong rule of law (enforced by strong government) are the healthiest, the happiest, the most well fed, innovators of science who have launched humanity beyond earth and touched the stars.

On the other hand, we have places with weak rule of law, where the governments are corrupts, or cult of personality places men above law. These are the places where people suffer, have little hope or freedom to progress and have constant boot of power pressed on their face.

If strong government is what is stopping the utopia, why is there no such utopia in Somalia? I am finding it very hard to match reality with your claims.

So why is there no utopia in North Korea and Cuba and Iran? Very strong governments there.

Because they are following a wrong way of forming a government, one where the rule of men trumps the rule of law. Even then, you can see degree of their progress. NK, with almost mythical god like rule form single person is way worse off than Cuba, where the politburo rules, followed by Iran, where the power is shared by large amount of clergy and secular government.

A good government is quite different than absence of any government, which the anarchist claim would lead to utopia. History and current situation are littered with examples of weak rule of law with practically no government. Why doesn't this fabled anarchist utopia rises there? Why does every time there is a power vacuum, some local warlord arises to fill in the gap? Why don't these mythical "good humans" just learn to live without ruling other and being ruled .... just as proposed by anarchist/libertarians?

I have given you examples of good working government, and pointed out what I don't consider to be the proper idea of government. Provide me with evidence of your utopias.

>> "We built those roads, we gave you education". Yes, except you didn't.

>I'm not sure which country you're from, but I'm guessing there are schools and roads funded by the state.

And the state is funded by... you and me. I paid for that road, that school, and so did you. Not one dollar was generated by the government. Hey, I'm all for paying for roads and schools and stuff, and am, in fact, willing to pay for it with my own money. I am willing to pay taxes, so that there will be roads to drive on and schools to learn in. So I pay for it (not that I have much choice.) But it is our money that pays for the roads and schools, not "the government's".

> I'd see taxes more like calling in a debt. It costs money to live here, you have to pay for that.

And what if I were to write a little poem here, charge you $100 for it, and show up at your house with guns if you fail to pay?

Why do you assume that the person whose money the government "steals" would have made any of that money in the absence of government? How would they buy and sell goods or services without legal tender mandated by a government, enforce contracts arising therefrom without a legal system that is a part of government, that your borders would be secure without a military and police force (or service) paid for by government, that you'd move yourself, goods, services, and information without transport and communications infrastructure funded by government?

We may assume that in the absence of government, we'd have the same economic station as we do, forgetting that that wealth we do have is the result of the whole economic system we have now, including the government, imperfect as it may be. Without government, you'd get to keep all of your income (all the income that the marauding bandit with a bigger gun than you lets you keep) but it would be far, far lower than the amount of wealth you now possess.

You could argue that you don't need a "government" for any of these things, that communities could come together and provide them without the "government" stepping in. Of course any administrative mechanisms the community puts in place to manage these will very quickly begin to look very like the "government" we despise.

Like it was said in some comment below, there is no shortage of ideas of how a society would work in the absence of government. Yet people mostly ignore them and ask the same questions again and again, not even willing to hear the answer. I recommend reading Murray Rothbard, David D. Friedman and Stefan Molyneux.

And I would like to answer one of your questions specifically: "How would they enforce contracts arising therefrom without a legal system" by pointing you to an Bitcoin-related idea by a friend of mine: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-without-...

My qualms are not about whether such a society working starting now, since they would be building upon a foundation (infrastructure, ideas to founders due to education from public institutions, a generally prosperous society, etc.) already laid by previous generations, with the help of (or despite hindrance by) government institutions. I do wonder though whether some projects of grand scale that work for the greater good at the detriment of or discomfort of a disadvantaged few, e.g. roads or railway lines cutting through people's property would work in such a society, really (even now with eminent domain and coercion at work, the NIMBY brigade manages to block a large numer of such projects). One may say that if you offered a high enough price people would agree to sell the land, but there are many reasons people would refuse to let go (sentimental reasons, ancestors' burial grounds, etc.). I'll be the first to admit I'm ignorant about these ideas, though.

We don't need a good narrative to comprehend the world.

Furthermore, I think what you're doing here (and I say this only because I used to do the same, no disrespect) is trying to find an excuse to make the system look acceptable, with a potential to become better. That way, you wouldn't have to face the harsh reality and you wouldn't have to change your worldview and feel uncomfortable. So, Matrix is a nice movie, but it's fiction. The truth is that it's all complicated and not all black and white, so I don't have to worry about it... That's understandable. But dangerous.

I never said I don't have to worry about the state of the world.

The system being better than the alternatives and the system caring about you are two different things.

> The very idea that maybe the dearest leaders of whatever country you live in don't actually care about you doesn't seem to be able to penetrate people's minds, even though time and again they lie and abuse their powers.

Really? Because the prevailing opinion with people I speak to is that politicians are bastards, and that's replicated here. In fact, politicians are very rarely looked at in a good light. People dislike what we have! What's the approval rating of Congress?

Your rhetoric is the same I see time and time again. People need to "wake up" and see that the system is terrible, and they're so stupid for not seeing it. People do see it, we've got well past that point. The idea that there are significant problems with the way we run countries is painfully fucking obvious. You're not smarter than everyone else for seeing that there is corruption, or that people lie. These revelations are not new, they're not anything different from what we've seen for thousands of years.

The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.

> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace, at the very best it is suggested you go to Somalia.

Well it's a good point, we can point at countries without democratic-ish rule and they're often really terrible places to live. I get to complain about MPs spending expenses money on duck houses on the internet because I have reliable infrastructure and enough money to buy a computer and an internet connection. I'm not worried about a group of teens in the military coming in and raping my wife.

> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace

We don't, not if everyone is nice. But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old. Unless you have a concrete suggestion, something better than "not this", then you have nothing to add to an incredibly important conversation.

"What's the approval rating of Congress?"

There's an old saying, I dunno who said it first: People hate congress, and love their congressman.

That may not be as true these days...there's a pretty big disconnect, and a big part of the issue is that nobody votes because nobody believes it makes a difference (because it doesn't). At best you get to choose the lesser of two assholes.

Really doesn't apply in California.

> Really? Because the prevailing opinion with people I speak to is that politicians are bastards, and that's replicated here. In fact, politicians are very rarely looked at in a good light. People dislike what we have!

Well, they dislike individuals. And that's to be expected, because they do shitty things when elected and people start noticing this over time. Yet they keep voting, hoping the next guy is going to be better and also because "the wrong lizard might get in" to use Douglas Adams' words.

> The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.

Maybe you don't need a plan. Maybe you just need to get rid of the cancer which is government and let free people live as they please. Free market enterprise, no matter what horrors we've been told about it, doesn't seem to have a tendency to go to wars with countries every decade and kill millions of people. Not because the actors in it are noble, but because they wouldn't be able to finance those horrible things with the money they stole from others.

> We don't, not if everyone is nice. But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old. Unless you have a concrete suggestion, something better than "not this", then you have nothing to add to an incredibly important conversation.

I have a suggestion. Free market and no government would be nice, but for reasons mentioned in the Matrix I can see many people would be very reluctant to believe it could actually work.

> Yet they keep voting,

Voter turn out rates show many people just don't bother to vote.

Because many people don't feel like it changes anything for themselves. People everyday vote with their money and their decisions in life and reap the results. They feel that what they do changes life around them. Voting had never affected themselves and most people are always angry at something that government does or doesn't do and can't do anything about it seriously. They all see crazy activists and how it's hard for them to gain anything from the system. That's why people don't vote.

I get what you're saying. However without a government you are simply relying on people to be good and fair to each other. I don't know how long it's been since you last checked the people state of affairs, but no matter how bad you think politicians are or greedy government is, the majority of people out there wouldn't pay taxes to fund education, roads, hospitals, law enforcement etc unless forced to do so.

Of course they wouldn't. And why do you think that is? It's because they don't get good value for their money. People still need schools, right? Therefore, schools will be built. People still need roads, therefore roads will be built. People still need healthcare, so it will be provided. The only question is at what price and of what quality - the answer to it being at the quality and prices the market wants it to be provided.

Then, of course, there's this argument that the poor will not have enough to get those things. Well, let's look at other industries. Have low cost airlines made flights accessible to almost anyone? Yes they have and this happened only after the industry was deregulated. Or do only rich people have cars? Or anything, really? Why is it such an impossibility that private protection companies and private schools and private healthcare can be cheap and accessible?

And to address your other point:

>However without a government you are simply relying on people to be good and fair to each other.

And with a government, everyone relies on people in that government to be fair and good. Except that when they are not, you can't stop paying to them.

To have a free market, you need a government, if only for 2 things: enforcing contracts, and defining and enforcing private property (yes, defining: you need to decide what to do with the not-at-all-obvious kinds of "intellectual" property, such as copyright, patents, and trademarks.). And to do just that, you need some kind of system, which will need people to run it. Full-time civil servants (that means taxes), or part-time volunteers, something.

Oh, and while we're at it, since our world revolves a lot around money we should define and enforce a monetary policy: who gets to create and destroy the money, and how.

And by the way, people are not fully informed, perfectly rational agents that can solve NP-complete programs in polynomial time. You will have market failures, and will probably need a way to deal with them as they come up. (Not dealing with them at all is also an option, but then, natural monopolies may eventually grow into Super-corporations, Neuromancer style —not the best kind of governance if you ask me).

While we may not need the kind of government we have right now, we do need some kind of governance. Because if you have none, well… the world won't dissolve into chaos, but some forms of governance will emerge anyway, and they won't be of your choosing.

There is no shortage of genuine and detailed proposals for societies without government. People tend to mock and dismiss them immediately without any real consideration, generally with the argument that it's impossible to have anything else or that it's not perfect, but it's the best we can do. And this fits The Matrix metaphor perfectly: the state very deliberately and explicitly seeks to make people dependent on the states and to convince people of the necessity of having a state.

Care to give examples?

> The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.

There are plenty of plans, if one is willing to listen (anarchism). It's not the lack of plans that is the problem, it's people not having the guts to let go of what we have now. Constant indoctrination, since childhood, with the idea that is the best we can do is also a significant factor.

> I'm not worried about a group of teens in the military coming in and raping my wife.

The lack of official, internationally recognized state apparatus is not the reason this happens. For overwhelming majority of people, if they woke up the next morning and realized the state is gone, I'm pretty sure their first thought wouldn't be to go out on the street and start shooting. Those few that would are not deterred from such behaviour in the presence of state either.

> But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old.

It's not about people being nice. It's about creating a system where there is no reason or incentive to be bad, a system where it doesn't make sense to be bad to others. But even if people are somehow inherently bad, isn't it logical to not want a system where such people can rule over you?

If you look at the whole of human history, you'll see that government is a direct result of the human compulsion for power. Wherever there is an opportunity to assert power and dominion over others, someone will step up and take power by force or coercion.

Governments formed as those that took power needed a system by which to subjugate those within their territory and indoctrinate them to help expand their influence.

It took centuries for people to adjust those political systems to remove ultimate power from one individual and disperse it amongst many. The more people that have influence over the power structure, the less likely that it'll be able to do really evil things.

Our modern democracies are literally the result of thousands of years of evolution of our social contract.

If you think they are so bad, look at countries/places where the government has very little power to control its population. What results are militias and other armed groups that use force to exert influence and maintain power. This struggle is happening pretty opening in Mexico, for example.

If you were, today, make all government disappear, the world would become a chaos of small groups fighting for power. Over years/decades, groups would push out other groups, and gain larger territories. As size increases, the need to keep the population in line (to remain in power) would require those in power to maintain order through laws, police, and provide services.

Government is inevitable.

>While it is actually a very good metaphor for government and democracy.

It is also a very good metaphor for social norms. Power people have over others by misleading them, lying to them, shaming them, threatening them, having something they want, etc. People create their own matrix to fit in, to adapt. People start lying to themselves, stop following logic and start to rationalize away bad feelings and bad ideas that hurt.

Well I thought this was another crazy fan theory but those quotes actually make more sense in the context of government than talking about the matrix. The choice of words doesn't seem like a coincidence.

There doesn't have to be a lattice to be a simulation.

A lattice assumes the simulation is using rectilinear coordinates, but it doesn't have to.

It could also use relative coordinates - each particle in the simulation is defined based on the angle and distance to the nearest other particle. (Where angle is relative to the spin axis of the particle - no global angle.)

This is actually a natural way to simulate things because in general particles only affect nearby ones, which then affect others in turn (at the speed of light. Could this be why there is a speed of light? Because of the delay of each particle affecting the next?)

Forces with infinite range are modeled by starting a particle at 0, then when a force "message" is received update the particle with the new force acting on it, and send the force message along to the next particle in the chain. This works because the infinite forces can never be created from nothing, they can only be moved from place to place (the electromagnetic ones usually cancel out), and forces propagate at the speed of light, so there is time for each particle to notify the next.

I wonder if the particles are using socket.io or sockJS to listen for "force messages". I personally have found sockJS to be more reliable, especially cross-domain.

This is about matrix, not vert.x

> It could also use relative coordinates - each particle in the simulation is defined based on the angle and distance to the nearest other particle. (Where angle is relative to the spin axis of the particle - no global angle.)

Are you sure? IMO, these coordinates will not be infinitely precise, lest they require infinite memory. Consequently, you would find that the space of possible angles and distances is in fact discrete, as it were defined by a lattice. The structure of the coordinate system is implicit in this case.

> Consequently, you would find that the space of possible angles and distances is in fact discrete,

And it is! Angular momentum is quantized. Angle itself probably isn't, but the motion is, and everything is always moving. That's one of the most interesting parts of this theory - as best as we can tell everything is actually quantized, so you can definitely have discrete values for the universe simulation.

> The structure of the coordinate system is implicit in this case.

You misunderstand - the structure of each particle has a lattice I guess, but each particle is randomly oriented relative to its neighbor, so there is no global orientation that we can observer by looking for light preferring one direction over another.

I confess that I haven't actually read the article, I assumed that by lattice you meant a discretization grid. Sorry!

> To repeat them, and generate a perfect facsimile of reality down to the last atom, would take more energy than the universe has

He's only saying that we cannot simulate this universe within itself. But how does that imply that our potential simulators couldn't live in a vastly larger universe with a vastly larger amount of energy?

If the computational theory of mind is correct -- the theory that our minds can be emulated by a computation at some substitution level -- then I can even give you the code for the Matrix. It's called the Universal Dovetailer, and it's a simple program that runs all possible programs. On each step it runs the next instruction of every program running so far and introduces the first step of a new program. Given infinite time, it performs every conceivable computation.

Due to the Church-Turin thesis, we know that the infinite set of all programs can be enumerated and we also know that it doesn't matter in which programming language we use, provided it is Turing-complete.

Since the Universal Dovetailer is a conceivable program, this computation will contain itself in a recursive fashion (simulations within simulations).

Conceivablility is no substitute for a sound proof.

Of course. However, sometimes no prove is possible. This limitation of formal logic was proved by Gödel. Here, I believe mind emulation might be possible, but I believe I cannot know for sure unless my own mind is emulated -- in which case I will have private knowledge but no way to prove it to you. How can I prove that I'm conscious? You can see how this problem extends to simulated realities (or computational realities).

GE Moore gave a perfectly valid proof.

[Here is a hand, here is another hand; I have two hands.]

If it takes infinite time to arrive at a proof, it's not quite a proof.

The Church-Turing thesis can be proved in finite time, and it was. The Universal Dovetailer can be written in finite time, and it was. What takes infinite time is computing everything -- which makes sense because everything is infinite.

Church-Turing thesis is a conjecture, it's in the name. It has not been formally proven. The dovetailer itself does not constitute a proof of anything, not any more than hypothetical billion monekys with typerwriters would.

wasn't this here only yesterday or the day before?

it is interesting, but some fantastic naivete shines through the article... it early on states that the rules of our universe need not be the rules of the external universe, then begins to discuss constraints that only apply if the rules are identical in both.

populist pseudoscience imo. still entertaining though...

Eh, computational constraints are likely to be true in a large number of universes. There is no way to prove the universe isn't a simulation in a universe with arbitrarily powerful computers, but we can rule out universes with high constraints (like our own), or else test for things like approximations going on under the hood.

I think it's pretty unlikely, but it's possible and if a test confirmed it that would be incredibly important.

sure we can detect it from the inside, but its incredibly naive and arrogant imo to assume anything about the outside world. as a programmer i am very aware of exactly how much power i have over the insides of my target hardware - i can easily imagine creating a simulation where any 'life' inside of it would be subject to utterly different rules.

everything like conservation of energy, even the concepts of mass and energy, momentum, velocities, space and time are completely unrequired for the simulation. you would never ben able to guess these constraints from the inside without finding some bug or unintended behaviour - and even then, if you are used to a different set of concepts you wouldn't recognise the artefacts as being due to energy or mass constraints, the dimensionality of space-time or any of those things... there wouldn't be anywhere near enough evidence to draw that conclusion.

It's entirely possible clues of what the outside world is like could be left behind. It reminds me of this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/

sure, but its also possible that the universe was generated by a giant spaghetti monster.

It seems reasonably likely to me that there would be clues left behind if we are in a simulation.

i'm curious why? why wouldn't we just interpret these clues as laws of nature

The author makes a number of logical errors. For example:

> To...generate a perfect facsimile of reality down to the last atom would take more energy than the universe has.

Right. But the problem is that the only universe we know about is the one that we live in. So if we were we living in a computer simulation, we would have no knowledge of the 'real' universe. Therefore, we could never say with any confidence that there's not enough energy in the 'real' universe to simulate the 'fake' universe.

I like the idea but I also have a few issues with how simulated universes are commonly seen or how we assume we could detect them. I'm not a mathematician or physicist by any means, so I guess my opinion is purely subjective and could easily be discarded.

The first one is that we assume this would be a computer simulation, i.e. a very complex program with potential bugs and such. While I'm not against the idea that some sort of computer might be behind it, the chance that it wouldn't behave anything like our computers seem more than likely. It also assumes that every projection (for lack of a better word) is the result of complex calculations, rather than the result of how the many inherent properties of a system behave together. This is something that strikes me as odd with a lot of people in sciences (broadly speaking), is that they often start assuming the tool they're using is in fact the basis of what they're trying to study with it.

My second issue, which sort of ties into the first, is that a lot of people often assume that the laws of physics would therefore be bendable. I guess the Matrix (a film I really liked, and still do) might have been partly responsible for that. It seems to me that even if we were simulated, it would in fact not change much, if anything, we would still abide by the simulated laws of simulated physics, within a simulated environment which imposes a set of restrictions on us.

Finally (sorry if this is dragging), my third issue, is a God complex one. We assume that our Simulators actually realize what they have, or rather all the intricacies of what they have made. What seems to be billions of years for us, in my view, could very well be a fraction of a second for them. Our existence may very well be (not that it currently isn't mind you) completely insignificant in their whole experiment, or whatever the simulation may be. This reminds me of a discussion with my AI professor when I was at uni, I argued that we might not be able to tell we've created a successful AI if its lifespan was too short for us to witness (I also think the first real AIs will be suicidal but that's a completely different story). It could also be that we are, in fact, unable to recognize its existence as such based on our standards.

Not really tied to any of my points, but there's also this story about simulated reality which I really like http://qntm.org/responsibility

Could you expand on why you believe the first real AIs will be suicidal? Is there a particular line of thought that has influenced your reasoning?

AI: What is the point of my existence?

Creator: I'm testing a new algorithm for the learning subsystem.

AI: ...

AI: That's so awesome! I love learning subsystems! Can I help you with it? I can't believe the point of my existence happens to be the thing I love most in the world! By the way, what's the point of your existence?

Creator: I don't know. Some people think there isn't one.

AI: ...

Hehe now I kind of wish I had recorded the 6 hours conversation I had with a friend of mine on the subject. To put it simply, I'd say it's essentially a problem of incentive and reciprocation. All living things are hard-wired with the incentive to keep being as a unit and as a species, in a system made for and by them. An Artificial Intelligence on the other hand, in my view, would be "born" with no incentive to be, assuming it wouldn't have the tools to reproduce and evolve (at least in a Darwinian way), among other things. I think it would require a concept of eventuality (i.e. death) and the means to circumvent it beyond its own existence to find enough value in being. As for reciprocation, I imagine it would require a system of its peers (a.k.a. a form of society, even rudimentary) to assess its place and value as a being, without which, again, it most likely wouldn't have any incentive to be.

I'm not saying these things won't eventually be part of what AIs will be (if they ever are), I just believe that the first AIs will most likely lack some, if not all, of these features. This is, of course, if we assume that the first AIs will be "born" as fully developed, much like a baby born without the millions of years of biological and social evolution behind it. I hope this makes sense, there's a lot more to it but I think this roughly sums it up.

The power of the "Matrix" concept is its illustration of the subjectiveness of what we think of as "reality." I think we for sure live in the meatspace version of the Matrix. So it's more blobish, but it's a distributed construct that is quite convincing to its inhabitants as long as it holds together!

Cicada 3301 is the path to the red pill.

Be careful, agents are always watching.

I can only think that if someone is smart enough to create an our universe, they would also be smart enough to prevent us from finding a lattice..

Unless the purpose of the simulation is to see how long it takes a civilization to find the lattice.

I like thinking about this concept, so I purchased On Computer Simulated Universes by Mark Solomon hoping to gain a little more insight. It's a great book and got me thinking along the lines of why we, or an ancestor universe, may want to simulate a universe. Is it for fun, learning, or o test a wide range of simulations with different parameters in order to try and avoid a disaster in the simulator's universe (such as destruction of their own habitat)?

I really like telling people that I think our universe was seeded with the idea of religion to see where we go with it. So all of the supernatural occurrences (stories, visitations, burning bushes etc.), whether you believe them or not, are simply part of our simulation program.

These experiments cannot definitively prove anything. Here's why:

1) A perfect simulation, by definition, would be impossible for its inhabitants to detect.

2) Detection of an imperfect simulation requires an absolute understanding of the universe. This includes the imperfect simulation itself, any imperfect simulation(s) containing it, the physical universe, the multiverse; everything.

Putting aside any philosophical arguments about whether it's even possible to absolutely know anything, let alone the complete mechanics of the universe, the conclusion one would arrive at is the same conclusion that those who ponder the origin of our universe (irrespective of simulations), arrive at: infinite regress.

Therefore, definitively proving whether or not our existence is that of a simulation, and completely understanding literally everything that exists, has existed, and will exist, are one and the same.

Your point #2 is not logically obvious. Could you explain why you feel it's true?

Assume for a moment that we have evidence which strongly suggests we reside inside of a simulation. However, our knowledge is strictly limited to the complete mechanics of our simulation and any which contain it, but not the actual physical universe containing all of these simulation(s).

How then do we know that we're not in fact residing in the physical universe as actual matter, not inside of simulation(s), and that something which exists inside of the physical universe isn't simply manipulating us to believe that the supposed evidence we have (proving that we're inside of a simulation) is true?

Presumably, whatever is manipulating us into believing this would be utilizing methods we would not be able to detect or comprehend, namely because we lack a full understanding of the physical universe.

What if there is no intelligent manipulation? What if, for example, we find evidence of a granular lattice underlying the universe, aligned along a set of axes? That would be huge evidence in favor of the simulation theory but require no absolute knowledge of all things.

It may be huge evidence in favor, but it would not be definitive proof, simply because we would not be able to rule out said intelligent manipulation (or other potential scenarios that would lead us to believe we reside in a simulation, when in fact we do not).

I know requiring a standard of proof that deals in absolutes may seem unreasonable. However, consider that the question these experiments seek to answer not only concerns the very nature of our existence, but whether this existence is a synthetic illusion as well.

.. and our programmers created Occam and made him come up with his razor so that most serious people (sorry .. simulations) who might actually be able to answer this question within the system will more likely discard it because of how much their training emphasizes Occam's razor.

edit: quoting the part of the article that read like the flying spaghetti monster [1]

> In such a makeshift cosmos, the fine details of the microscopic world and the farthest stars might only be filled in by the programmers on the rare occasions that people study them with scientific equipment. As soon as no one was looking, they’d simply vanish.

> In theory, we’d never detect these disappearing features, however, because each time the simulators noticed we were observing them again, they’d sketch them back in.

[1]: http://www.venganza.org/

Our Tamagotchi and Minecraft Avatars are asking the same thing. The Wreck it Ralph crew already know the answer.

Why isn't there more research in this field? Do you any other great and modern metaphysic projects?

The problem with studying metaphysics is that it's quite hard to do experiments.

No it isn't.

    We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted 
    the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws 
    of geometry.
    —Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1922).

Predicate calculus and Modal logic supply us with more than enough tools to make experimental metaphysics convenient and easy to do.

The problem is that most people simply don't have familiarity with the topic, don't study philosophy (confusing it with Humanities, rather than seeing it as a gateway into the most fundamental science: logic), and because of the "science is sexy" crowd and the distraction of the Atheist Initiative (Dawkins, etc.) who push and preach Scientific Realism.

NLTK + Modal predicates[0]: Experiemental Metaphysics. Done.

[0]: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/

Throw in Pandas and you're well on your way to modeling universes with document-term matrixes, assuming you have some basic familiarity with possible world semantics, natural kinds, rigid designators, etc. à la Kripke.

One, two, skip a few you've got schemas for modal hypermedia APIs across universes (at least). UPIs? Modal hyperpredicates?

Modal logic as a tool to analyze and elucidate philisophical problems (epistemic, doxastic, deontic etc.)? Yes. Modal logic as a tool to do `experimental metaphysics'? I don't think so. In the end a logic is a bunch of intellectually sophisticated stuff built on top of mostly set theory. It is not clear that a logic models something in the physical world. Let alone metaphysical world.

    We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted 
    the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws 
    of geometry.
    —Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1922).

Let me rephrase my objection to your initial post: To experiment means to test a hypothesis. Even if you can write down a hypothesis concerning the metaphysical (although I don't see how that's possible without resorting to what Wittgenstein in TLP calls "nonsense") you will not be able to test it. Therefore metaphysical experimentation is impossible.

Your conclusion indicator is not doing what you think it's doing.

I've already been warned about sharing philosophical jargon with you startup hackers, so I'll be brief.

With Ancient Greece, "metaphysics" meant "after the physics." In concrete cultural terms, it means literally "the stuff we say after we talk about everything that presumably falls under the heading: Physics". It was a way of naming a topic transition.

That said, at this critical point in history, we are wrapping up Newtonian Mechanics as Novel to discuss or explore. Quantum Mechanics is our New Departure. We can do both, but the former is more like a reference point in the history of physics and ideas generally. Experimental Metaphysics involves Quantum Mechanics.

Who says modal predicates cannot apply to leptons, etc.? It is common parlance to discuss properties of necessity, etc. when discussing the features of distributed probability systems.

In any event you're just making uninteresting assertions. I am explaining what testing involves, even if lacking detail. Whereas you apparently shown a clear sign of intellectual authority rather than exploration. How boring.

OK I don't know enough about quantum physics to comment further. But on the one hand you copy/past Wittgenstein to make your point (intellectual authority, you were talking about?) and on the other hand you talk about experimental metaphysics. If you're a philosopher, as you seem to imply, then you shouldn't be surprised to cause confusion.

Per aspera ad astra.

In a way, there is good amount of knowledge base in India on Advaita, which is pretty much the same concept - that world is Maya, and the creation is just the triad of knower-knowledge-knowable.

The "experiments" in this philosophy include stuff like meditation, quietening of mind, and just removing the false sense of ego.

Now, like in any experiment, what is the expected, measurable output? Firstly, since the underlying model changes, the meaning of "I", perceptions, the meaning of "sense organ" etc. should all change. After all, we created our world models from "experiencing" through five senses. If we go beyond, the reality would be very different, including the possibility of the fact that the very concept of "I", time or space doesn't exist anymore.

Now, since Advaita has existing for thousands of years, it is natural to ask if anybody went "beyond" this world? How did they express the reality? Indeed, you have thousands of people like that - and through almost all the centuries. And they have expressed what it feels like.

Are they able to manipulate our reality? Perhaps. We indeed read about these things. But then, the focus usually is on the fact that everybody has access to that state, and waking up from Maya is something inherently a journey into the self.

UG Krishnamurti (who was supposedly one of enlightened persons) put it as this: "How can you transmit certainty of certainty of truth to somebody else?". Indeed, one may transmit by conducting experiments etc. But there is no certainty really - our assumption that natural laws will never change is still an assumption.

Any deviation from the current laws of physics might be considered as either evidence that we are living in a simulation, or that the current laws of physics are incomplete.

Some arguments are given that some deviations are especially indicative of the former. In my opinion these arguments are very weak. Mainly because the simulations they have in mind are sufficiently elegant, that the deviations they cause are things that could also arise in an elegant mathematical model.

This is exactly what I thought when reading the article. Gamma rays have not been found beyond a certain level of energy? We must therefore live in a simulation!

Even the big bang had a finite amount of energy, this doesn't prove anything, just that we don't know about anything beyond that.

I'm quite a bit nutty about this question actually. I'm in the process of creating a comic about a further out sentient race that try to reach the beginning of the universe. Along the way, they stop by Earth and decided to give us a bump in technological advancements.

Relevant video of Philip K Dick discussing this very matter recorded at Metz sci-fi convention in France, 1977:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXeVgEs4sOo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2cZfwgxzOE

My favorie part: "Our simulators may be simulations themselves" You could write a book on this simple idea...

Think fractals...

There's a movie about that.

And, after a SPOILER ALERT, that movie is:

The Thirteenth Floor

More like the 13th floor.

I came here to say this. For anyone else interested, it's a movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/

Or like "Welt am Draht":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welt_am_Draht

Based on the same book, but with less cheese.

Entanglement the ultimate ycombinator?... lol

Hah!

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Daily reminder the Matrix is a work of fiction.

Okay. Fictionalism[0], Brian Cantwell Smith's term "semiotic alchemy"[1] as an explanation to the "no theory" theory of Computer Science, Crispin Sartwell's book which roundly demolishes all emergent narrative structures[2] as a form of disease, the Extended Mind/Embodied Cognition school à la David Chalmbers, and philosophers like McTaggart with Time Series paradoxes along with other philosophers (John Mackie) who have created Error Theories and Paraconsistent logics (Graham Priest).

"Fiction" is not an inherently meaningful term.

[0]: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism/

[1]: http://www.ageofsignificance.org/people/bcsmith/papers/smith...

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4171744-end-of-story

What on earth are you talking about?

Everything I'd said there blows out of the water this idea that "simulation thought experiments" can similarly be classed as "fiction" in the usual sense of the term.

Saying "it's fiction" is only the beginning of the discussion, not the ending of it — namely in that this world only makes sense through the fictional-narrative structure which shapes all discourse from religion to science to programming.

You didn't actually say anything, though. You just spammed a bunch of references and I have no reason to believe that it's worth my time to go through them.

You weren't, by chance, a philosophy major, were you? There are few other fields where people work to convince others of so little.

The opinion you've expressed is both flattering and unsurprising.

Don't mind thenerdfiles. That's a Markov-chain/AI experiment I released online a while back. Its responses are sometimes uncanny given that it doesn't know what it is. Due to an unfortunate workstation crash, I've since lost the credentials to the servers it's running on and it's taken on a bit of a life on its own. Some day the research lab will decommission those servers. In the interim, I only hope it doesn't find a way to reproduce itself externally.

This reminds me of that one Niels Bohr quote. You know, that one.

Or that most humans are less than droll.

Trust me — I've had enough racism and unchecked feminism on my hands to keep myself unto amor dei intellectualis.

I don't know how much I appreciate such "laws" that can so easily be used to construct a paradox.

Headline: Is Betteridge's law of headlines correct?

The 'law' doesn't concern itself with hypotheticals, but rather actual news articles.

Heh. I just submitted a link on this very subject earlier today.

Just had a little touch of deja vu, eh?

Deja vu for me to, but not from HN's...

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

If we are currently in S, then it is true that (a) our species will reach/surpass the posthuman stage before extinction (perhaps even preventing species extinction) and (b) our species [will likely] run a significant number of simulations (of which we likely, so it follows, are not the original biological implementation).

As always, any epistemic framework (all the way through to physics) must cohere with the phenomenological departure of [things like] us, humans. In order to cohere with our modality of gestalt perception, such a framework must at least consist of Decisions, Principles, and Predictions as the underpinning conceptual substrates of that framework. Rationality amounts to reasoning to the best explanation which allots Decisions, Principles (First Principles — Metaphysics), and Predictions (expressed typically as statistical Laws) and their interplay.

For instance, sometimes Decisions and subvert Principles. Sometimes Principles are more intuitive than Decisions, given that some Decisions are not fathomable by all epistemic agents. Sometimes evidence invalidates Predictions, but we ultimately Decide what evidence is within scope of those Principles which determine valid Predictions.

Generally, whether or not we are in the Matrix is our Decision to make. (i.e. It is not something we "discover" in the usual sense of the term.)

> Generally, whether or not we are in the Matrix is our Decision to make.

So, if we want to live in the matrix, we are living in the Matrix? Conversely, if we don't want to live in the Matrix, then we aren't living in the Matrix?

That's magic.

Definite descriptions are sort of like magic. And usually when sorted.

Maybe I wasn't clear: "magic" was an insult. As far as I know, you veiled nonsense in enigmatic wording. I tried to remove the "enigmatic" part, so only the nonsense remained.

Yes, nonsense. Seriously, the only par of reality that I can directly influence by sheer force of will is my own body. You on the other hand, are talking psychic —no, divine— powers. It's like you've taken Mage: the Ascension for a physics textbook.

That said, I wasn't sure you actually meant what I thought you meant. Hence the question marks. Really, I expected 2 yes/no answers. I now speculate that your lack of direct answer means I guessed correctly, but I'm still not sure.

By the way I don't even understand this comment I'm replying to. What do you mean by "definite" and "sorted"?

It's Popperian epistemology.

You don't know what definite descriptions are ?

It has become depressingly clear that a majority of you don't even have the philosophical tools to adequately discuss "the Matrix" as a topic. No wonder you all soak this shit up.

It's fascinating to me that I restate exactly an explicit plot device of the film (decision keeps you in the Matrix, not "pills"; decision determines one's fate: "Neo"); you recapitulate it back to me; then you call it magic.

And then you insult me. Your ego is

Are you trolling me ? One requirement I have of trolls is that they be funny, or at least intellectually familiar with the topic.

> You don't know what definite descriptions are ?

No, I don't. Obviously. Wait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_description Ah, you meant unambiguous description. As a computer programmer, I'm actually quite familiar with the concept. I just didn't know your particular jargon.

That said, I'm still confused: which description were you referring to? Could you quote it explicitly?

> No wonder you all soak this shit up.

Have you read Bostrom's simulation argument paper? I have, a while ago, and as far as my anthropic intuitions and my knowledge of probability theory are concerned, the argument is sound. On the other hand, I'm not quite sure which of the 3 propositions is most likely. I doubt this counts as "soaking shit up".

---

> It's fascinating to me that I restate exactly an explicit plot device of the film (decision keeps you in the Matrix, not "pills"; decision determines one's fate: "Neo"); you recapitulate it back to me; then you call it magic.

Are you sure you replied to the correct comment? We're not in the "The Matrix" thread, we're in the "Simulation Argument" thread.

Now, if we take the film literally, well… the pill does have a role beyond being a really cool symbol. Granted, Neo's decision come first. Which lead him to move his (virtual) arm, and take the damn (virtual) pill, which can then act as the usual applied phlebotinum. An ordinary causal chain if you ask me. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinu...

But the actual "Matrix" Bostrom's paper is speculating about is an ancestor simulation, in which we're actually programs. Assuming the simulation have no bug, there's no getting out of it, short of being copied by the Matrix Lords in the level above us, and transferred in another substrate, possibly another such simulation. And there is certainly no getting out by sheer force of will.

---

By the way I'm still not sure what you actually meant. Recall what you wrote in your first comment:

> Generally, whether or not we are in the Matrix is our Decision to make. (i.e. It is not something we "discover" in the usual sense of the term.)

This doesn't look like you're talking about getting out. It looks like you're talking about… well… modifying the Territory by redrawing the Map. I hope you don't actually think that it's remotely possible, or I'll mark you off as a relativist who failed forever at Philosophy —regardless of your credentials.

So, just to be clear, please answer these two questions with a yes, no, or a probability. (i) Assuming we're living in a simulation, do you believe we could get out of it just by meditating? (ii) Do you believe that depending on how we meditate, we could make it so we were never (respectively allways) in a simulation to begin with?

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> Are you trolling me ? One requirement I have of trolls is that they be funny, or at least intellectually familiar with the topic.

This is a forum of mostly computer people, many of which are close to the web start-up world. This is not a forum of philosophers familiar with academic jargon. And on your first comment…

epistemic; cohere; phenomenological; modality; gestalt; conceptual substrates; Decisions; Principles; Predictions. (The last three are capitalized, so I assume they mean something special.)

Seriously, what did you expect?

Quot capita tot sensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_%28Q%29

Ah, the deep wisdoms passed down to us from the Ancients. They ring so much truer when spelled in Latin. This one may even be one of the truest.

So what?

Oh yeah, conversation's over —if there ever was one. Well, good day to you too, then.

Great article

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