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[Reelya]

It's easy to define "higher intelligence" but not possible to comprehend it, since we aren't the higher intelligence.

I'd define a higher intelligence (higher relative to humans) as a being who's thoughts are to ours as ours are to a cat or a dog.

For example, it's not just a smarter version of a very smart human. Imagine if the smartest human was like the smartest dog, and how we'd view that animal. Clever, but it's still a dog.

[Trekkin]

So what does an intelligence that regards us as dogs do that an intelligence that regards us as amoeba doesn't? Do we bring it a tennis ball in our mouths and see if it wants to play fetch with us? The problem with monodimensional spectra of relative intelligence is that no two tests put the same panel of species in the same relative order.

Also, if just seeing humans as cute but ultimately stupid animals is the hallmark of a higher intelligence, arguably Bay12 hosts the highest concentration of post-singularity minds in the known universe.

[TamerVirus]

The Sims is a pretty well selling franchise.

The number of suspicious pool drownings would be much higher if we were in The Sims

[Egan_BW]

It's easy to define "higher intelligence" but not possible to comprehend it, since we aren't the higher intelligence.

I'd define a higher intelligence (higher relative to humans) as a being who's thoughts are to ours as ours are to a cat or a dog.

For example, it's not just a smarter version of a very smart human. Imagine if the smartest human was like the smartest dog, and how we'd view that animal. Clever, but it's still a dog.

The problem is, you haven't actually defined what it is that makes us a "higher intelligence" than dogs.

[Trekkin]

It's easy to define "higher intelligence" but not possible to comprehend it, since we aren't the higher intelligence.

I'd define a higher intelligence (higher relative to humans) as a being who's thoughts are to ours as ours are to a cat or a dog.

For example, it's not just a smarter version of a very smart human. Imagine if the smartest human was like the smartest dog, and how we'd view that animal. Clever, but it's still a dog.

The problem is, you haven't actually defined what it is that makes us a "higher intelligence" than dogs.

Arguably he did: if we automatically assume that we're not only smarter than but a categorically more intelligent type of mind than them, we must be a higher intelligence.

You might recognize this argument from Rick & Morty "high-IQ individuals" copypasta.

[Egan_BW]

Actually if anything the way I'd define it is on level of communication. Humans and doggos can communicate, but only pretty much on the level that dogs communicate with each other. We can basically understand dog language, but dogs aren't equipped to deal with our own language. So a "higher intelligence" would be anything that you can talk to, but that  can't feel like it's talking back to you on the highest possible level. That there are things it could try to teach you, but you're not physically equipped to understand.

[ChairmanPoo]

Actually if anything the way I'd define it is on level of communication. Humans and doggos can communicate, but only pretty much on the level that dogs communicate with each other.

You sniff your dog's anus?

[Reelya]

Yeah, one of the arguments I've heard against the simulation theory is that the thing itself is more efficient than a simulation of the thing, therefore any power who wanted to do the simulation just wouldn't bother. While this is true if you have a real-world with identical physics to what you're trying to simulate, the objection relies on the idea that the external physics are the same as the simulation physics, which is not a necessary condition.

Sure, that doesn't mean that it's not a simulation, it's just not a good argument.

Some of the weirder quantum stuff could in fact be pieced together to make an argument in favor of simulation. For example, the uncertainty principle links pairs of information together. You could hypothesize that the external simulation has memory constraints so that a single memory amount is shared between two values, as needed, sort of akin to our computer's floating point numbers (which can model large numbers but at the cost of precision for small numbers). And you could argue that the Schrodinger probabilities plus super-position collapse is a byproduct of lazy simulation - if something isn't being used then you just guesstimate what happened to it between the ticks when you were looking at it. What this would mean is that the external universe had more fine-grained physics, but they're simulating things in a fuzzy way using lookup tables, lazy computing and probabilities to account for the small variations that their model chooses not to account for.

[Max™]

How would you define a "higher intelligence"?

I can casually run a model of what my cat Reggie is thinking about, he can exert a bit of effort and emulate enough of a mole brain to work out when they should come out of their little hole so he can feed us.

Reggie can not imagine a mind capable of emulating his own mind, he kinda struggles when it comes to assuming others don't think just like he does. He can think better than a mole, I can think better than he can, indeed I can pursue different sorts of ideas which he can't even comprehend existing. What does a cat know of history, quantum chromodynamics, sociopolitical manipulation via media, or something as banal as woodworking?

I can imagine a mind capable of emulating mine, at least conceptually, I could even work towards producing one, but if I can fully understand it, it isn't a higher class of intelligence than I am. Trying to understand a mind which is qualitatively more powerful than your own is like getting your dog comfortable with lorentz transforms and spacetime intervals, insufficient hardware.

Iain M. Banks did a wonderful job exploring this idea btw.


As for a conspiracy theory, I just remembered one from before we figured out what asperger's was and why it made much more sense than my prior explanation for weird behavior people were exhibiting: body language is a mass cultural lie, everyone claims they can see it and use it, but the emperor has no clothes.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[x2yzh9]

anyone read into r/conspiracy or r/greatawakening ?

[Bumber]

After all, duality is common in mathematics, and those pairs of linked information are nothing more than fourier transforms of the same wave equation. There's a fun characteristic of mathematics- it is invariant across all possible universes. While we might know absolutely nothing about a hypothetical universe in which our own universe is hypothetically being simulated within, we do know that their math is the same as our math.

How can we know this? What if our math only works in our simplified universe?

[Max™]

If a universe can have self-aware observers then it should be be possible to define any of our mathematical systems.

Hell, from what I saw recently you can teach bees to pick the smaller number of elements between two images and then show them an image with a couple of dots and a blank image, at which point they will choose the one with no dots, indicating at least a basic grasp that zero is smaller than even a small number.

From there you can build off of the empty set to the rest of mathematics, which raises the question: who the hell thought it was a good idea to teach bees math?

[Bumber]

But those mathematics might not return a useful result outside of the artificial environment.

How do you count the dots when they sometimes don't exist, merge, or are in 3+ places at once? You might be able to model their existence, but you can't really add them together in a meaningful way.

And that's only a situation that we can conceive of.

[Max™]

If the laws of physics in said universe are so unstable I must question how self-aware observers would come to exist in the first place.