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As the internet gets more and more advanced, streamlining many aspects of our daily lives, it seems that our virtual personas are becoming simmilarly important. For example, what we think of eachother in SFN is almost as important as what how others view us outside; mind you I could say what I wish about, say, faf, and he'd have a hard time beating me up through the monitor.. unless he fasioned some sort of virus that wiped out my HD, which would be tragic... but therein lies my point. As technology advances to the point of total immersion, so that entire vitual office buildings exist within the walls of a computer generated city, and the best sex you ever had was "online", do you think our real bodies will become obsolete, inferior to the perfect, sexy, self made representations of ourselves stored on our computers? Is there anything preventing this from happenning? Oh, and don't think it won't happen; internet two is a very convincing precursor. Give it a couple hundred years.

exactly, but what I don't understand is how everyone regards sight as so much more of a sense than feeling. Blind people cannot see, does that mean when a blind person turns his head in my general direction I cease to exist? No. What the hell? Besides, when the lights go out when you're with your loved one I should hope they still exist, or something very strange is going on in a good many bedrooms right now...

nuns with guns.

I meant like two big bangs happenning side by side. budcamp: I'm fairly certain there have been several observations of an expanding universe outside of 9 super novae.

Mr. Sexy

In Canada, Vancouver in particular, there is a plight in which available hospital beds are becoming spread thinner and thinner. My idea was, eliminate all of the useless government jobs, such as the middle floor beurocrats, and put that money into the ailing health care system. Good call eh? Hard solution to come by. This situation is avoidable and there is plenty of money still being sucked into the proverbial black void. Why doesn't the government actually work to improve the country and streamline the system?

What is? Bumble-bees?

For one, the fat in the soup is more liquid when it's warm. And isn't spicy food just acidy?

Wait, wait. But how can they collide without a time dimension? It seems to me that there would be underlying temporal dimensions. That is why I'm wondering if there indeed is a time dimension. Would two branes then have to corrospond along every dimension? They could be very large, could they not, and potentially make contact in several places at the same time? Could there possibly be another universe within our three dimensions created at another place on the branes?

The thing that Spock does. \\//_

Shouldn't spheres of air rising in liquid have a different name from "Bubbles?" Drops are anti bubbles as well in this case...

Si exactum. In which timeline does this all happen, if the big bang happens at the same moment as the brane collision. Is there an underlying timeline that we don't experience?

.daerht siht etah I

Did it work?

I am going to try and make this post as useless and asinine as the last two.

Who is the wisest of them all? Where are the older fellers with the life experience? Is anyone here a certified prof/researcher/engineer?

It is, thanks. Yah, 19 here in British Columbia, Canada. Too bad we can't get a real Guinness over in this part of the world. : S Oh yah, and bars suck for chicks... Better just stick to house parties.

How many dimensions were the branes proposed to have? And it is unclear for me as to how the branes can interact on a timeline. Suppose branes collided, causing some sort of catastrophic disturbance in our universe, when would it happen? Does our time line and that of the branes coincide? How so/not seeing as it is proposed that these branes are responsible for our universe and its dimensions and yet the one action begets the next? Would there not be an exact time at which the branes collide and we feel the effects?

Time to drink my problems away... not like I wasn't before! Only this time I'm meeting chicks at the same time

Hi. I like you.

"Eric Drexler has outlined a design for a system the size of a sugar cube (excluding cooling and power supply) that would perform 10^<SUP>21</SUP> instructions per second. Another author gives a rough estimate of 10^<SUP>42 </SUP>operations per second for a computer with a mass on order of a large planet....One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated <I>in silico</I>, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^<SUP>14</SUP> operations per second for the entire human brain." It has to do with the theoretical possibility that our species exists as a simulation, given that the computing power required to create such a simulation is likely to be developed by our species if we are given ample time. The paper does not intend to prove we indeed live in a simulation, merely that "there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation." I believe that was missed a few times.

OK... (4) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature are non-existant, (5) The ability to run a self-aware, reality-questioning simulation does not require mere technological maturity, it requires such advanced technology that none of this type can be found on any civilised world. Let's assume that your point (1) is correct. If this is true, it is more likely that any race at our stage of development is real and on the dawn of its own self-annihilation, than it is a simulation controlled and/or devised by another race. QED. [/b] First of all, these are not my points. This is not my idea. This is not my paper. If it was my paper, the website would look alot cooler ; ) . My question had to do with time travel from within said simulation. But to address this post: (4) is basically (1) and (5) was addressed in the paper; the requirements for such a simulation have been roughly calculated. (5) falls under (1) as well because the 3 options do not specify a time frame. I mention timeframe because the manner in which you wrote (5) implies that the level of technology needed to "run a self-aware, reality-questioning simulation" is impossibly high and will never be reached, when no time frame is given. Assuming we humans don't go extinct we will enevitably achieve the required technelogical advances unless there is some sort of universal computer speedcap (there enevitably are universal speedcaps when it comes to quantum computers etc, but it's doubtful that a planet sized quantum computer would be unable to simulate a single planet full of people, after all... we are the real thing and do not occupy that ammount of space!!! [at least within this reality.. but as the paper pointed out, who really knows?] ). It doesn't seem like you guys are reading the paper because these ideas have been addressed. And I know this idea has been kicked around plenty of times.. but so has every idea.

SORRY SAYO, I believe I know why you were confused. I will rephrase the original post.

1. Which flamer Matrix bashing site/thread/smarter person did you copy that from? 2. I didn't read the page because of the word Matrix, and whether you did or not, I don't know. 3. If you had any deductive abilities whatsoever you would have noticed that matrix.html was a synopses of a much longer paper which draws few parallels to the Matrix at all. 4. This subject is so much closer to the movie "The 13th Floor" (and in fact, that movie is based on this concept entirely, down to the nested realities) I am surprised anyone has even mentioned the Matrix at all. 5. By starting this thread I was promoting precisely shite and do not consider "but how will it benefit the gross profit of the makers of the matrix and other popular sci-fantasy flicks" before I say something. 6. The theory is as much a mathematical prediction as it is hypothesis. Go to the full paper and read through the equation. NOW, back to my original point... Would it be economic for a simulation to store time as a fourth dimension, and even if it did, how would it be possible at all to travel into the future, assuming that is possible on the root level? It probably is not, and therefor the simulations might not be accurate at all in terms of physics. Travelling into the future at the root level implies that reality takes a linear path...but doesn't your absense from the past change the future? Even down to the universe losing mass and gaining it again. Time cannot predict the future (ie predict your return to the past ), so wouldn't zapping through time change the timeline as a result, and end up changing the future for you but not for everyone else? You would never see the future in which you are born, live out your days and die... you would only see the future in which you dissapear into the future. So, for example, you will never be able to go into the future and see yourself when you are older, as you do not exist. Think grandfather paradox. I think there has to be an underlying problem with the way we view time as a dimension, and the simulation idea has chimes ringing all over.

I meant that either they will go extinct, develop the technology and not use it, or develop the technology and use it. The chances that every species goes extinct before they get to that developed a state are small and so are the chances that they have no interest in creating a simulation of themselves. The chances are then, there are tonnes of species who conduct experiments like this and will conduct more than one experiment throughout their existence... within those experiments may be nested further experiments, if the bottom level species so chose to let them get that far. The growth rate of such a nested system is exponential therein, and would yield many more simulated species than those that exist at the root level. Now if individuals had the power to conduct a simulation like the one the paper describes, there would be an expansive ammount of simulated realities, and moreso nested within simulations. Basically it's like dice throwing dice. Read the equation in the paper http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html .