Bank of America Analysts Say There's A 50% Chance We Live In The Matrix (independent.co.uk) 284
Bank of America analysts have suggested that there is a 20 to 50 percent chance that the world around us is a "Matrix-style virtual reality." The report stated, "It is conceivable that with advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and computing power, members of future civilizations could have decided to run a simulation of their ancestors." The idea is certainly nothing new, as many influential visionaries have come to similar theories. What some may find most unusual about the report is who issued it. According to Business Insider, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America's wealth management company, sent out a briefing to investors outlining their Matrix theory. In response, Slashdot reader marmot7 writes: Personally, I'd like to see all that brain power go toward a better and more stable banking system, not toward the promoting the nihilistic and self-indulgent idea that this might be the Matrix. Don't worry that banks behave in ways that create instability, it's not real. Just relax and enjoy the ones and zeroes. I have no doubt there are good, well meaning people there. I just don't really need my bank weighing in on the mystery of reality any more than I need them to come up with a unified theory of physics at long last. Well, unless it's in their spare time then by all means.
Well, that explains the nightmares (Score:2, Informative)
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream [wikipedia.org]
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I have a mouth. Stupid matrix could have left out morning breath. Grabs the tooth brush.
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"I have an ass and must pull stats out of"
Remember, you can't spell "analyst" without "anal".
But looking at the image from the presentation [twitter.com] cited by TFA, it looks just like a bit of noise thrown in to spice up a bunch of otherwise relatively mundane numbers about augmented/virtual reality as a business. Sort of like some pepper flakes put atop the chicken-and-rice dish.
Re:Looking at this I have a title: (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd love to know what they base it on. The typical argument is that, at a given point in its maturity, any technological civilisation will be able to produce simulations that are sufficiently real that the inhabitants can't tell that they are inside a simulation. At this point, they will do so at least once and there will be more simulated realities than real ones. Some of these simulations will be complex enough for recursive simulation, and so the number will grow. If we assume that the base reality is at least as big as ours appears to be, and has been around for as long as hours appears to have been, then there must be a great many technological civilisations (even if you assume an average of only one per galaxy, it's a huge number) that have reached the point of being able to build simulations. As such, the number of beings inside simulated realities vastly exceeds the number in the base reality and so there is a far greater probability that you are in a simulation (and probably in a recursive simulation) than that you are in the base reality.
A similar argument states that this probability is further increased because we can't yet build realistic simulations and you could significantly reduce the computational requirements of your simulation by not making its inhabitants sufficiently technologically advanced to require recursive simulation.
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We've never simulated anything with true knowledge, as we understand our use of the term. Thus, no simulation has ever had knowledge that it was in a simulation.
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So, do you just explode when you turn twenty-five?
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No ass, no dick, can't piss, can't shit.
He is dying and brings very bad news.
Dies irae
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Plus, they're cruel tormentors. Someone evil obviously gamed the program to give the US a choice between Donald and Hillary, just to see if the universe would collapse into black hole of existential angst.
You're looking at it wrong: it's a choice between their VPs, both of with are innocuous. Hillary's health is failing, and if Trump actually tries to change anything important against the interest of the billionaires (like restricting the immigration of low-cost workers), he'll go the way of James Garfield. Of course, if Trump is just a blow-hard who does nothing, then that's fine too - no harm done.
How did they come up with that number? (Score:2)
Why not e, or 12.44426268%? And haven't they something better to do? They are a bank, not a research institute, are they?
Re:How did they come up with that number? (Score:5, Funny)
Why not e, or 12.44426268%? And haven't they something better to do? They are a bank, not a research institute, are they?
Why do simulated people do anything? It's just the way the program's set up.
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percentile dice...
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percentile dice...
If you roll a compound fraction is that "percentile dysfunction"?
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Why not e, or 12.44426268%?
I agree, the numbers are super-extra bullshit. Plus, if this is a simulation, it may have been specifically diddled in such a way as to confuse people trying to determine what the chance is that it's a simulation.
And haven't they something better to do? They are a bank, not a research institute, are they?
They're just looking for the next scam. Having perverted the nature of banking, they're hoping to find some exploits in the VM and pervert the nature of reality... for profit.
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Why not e, or 12.44426268%? And haven't they something better to do? They are a bank, not a research institute, are they?
They are setting up a new spin for their lawyers. Once the bank has lost all your savings and needs to be bailed out with taxpayer money after the next bubble bursts, they'll be like: "Relax... it's not like we lost real money or anything"
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Although BofA is HQ'd in Charlotte... (Score:5, Funny)
Although BofA is HQ'd in Charlotte, NC it was historically a California company and has a large presence in Washington and Oregon--states where pot is either legal or decriminalized and widely used. Just sayin'.
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Although BofA is HQ'd in Charlotte, NC it was historically a California company and has a large presence in Washington and Oregon--states where pot is either legal or decriminalized and widely used. Just sayin'.
It's not impossible to imagine that the universe is a simulation on weed, but LSD (which may have also produced BSD) seems more likely to have been responsible.
Re:Although BofA is HQ'd in Charlotte... (Score:4, Insightful)
The better I understand quantum mechanics, the more likely I think this is.
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Stop misunderstanding mathematics as physics.
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Off to the pot store!
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Why are bankers doing that research (Score:2, Insightful)
My impression is that banks are about the bottom line and profits. Why is someone at a bank doing that research?
A ploy (Score:2)
This is just a ploy to further reduce banking regulations. Who needs regulations when this shit is all just a computer simulation anyway?
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This is just a ploy to further reduce banking regulations. Who needs regulations when this shit is all just a computer simulation anyway?
They're getting you used to the idea that there's only a 50% chance they'll have your money when you need it.
False Idol. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:False Idol. (Score:4, Informative)
The problem in christianity is because GOD is both loving and powerful, but the admins of the matrix don't have to be loving. No problem there. The explanation probably is "its just numbers and nothing real" or something like that. I mean we run simulations ourselves already and there the same argument is valid.
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Does loving have to love all? I mean, it's possible to love people but not some who hurt others. Like whipping up a cake mix and loving what has been created while scooping out the bits you don't like.
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What people? They're just extremely crude simulations, not even enough detail to compare to the neural activity of a rat...
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You mean Charlotte, NC, of course. Nationsbank (nee' NCNB) took over BOA but kept the name and kept the national headquarters in Charlotte.
It is worrisome, though. The scariest thing about this is that it reveals that the BOA statisticians have no idea how to compute probabilities.
rgb
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Our descendants? We're probably the dinosaurs in this scenario.
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/sarcasm Let's keep blaming God for people mis-using their gift of Free-Will because absolving people of their responsibility makes _so_much more sense. NOT.
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God is Great!
At drowning toddlers and infants!
God Loves!
To kill humans in horrific and terrible ways when it had other options.
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You are making numerous assumptions.
You're like the person who commits suicide and then blames God for not saving them.
I've explained the fallacies of your thinking in this same thread in another post [slashdot.org]
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/sarcasm Let's keep blaming God for people mis-using their gift of Free-Will because absolving people of their responsibility makes _so_much more sense. NOT.
Yes, clearly a baby with brain cancer is responsible for its own condition.
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I think this is the new God for highly successful people. Life is so easy and fun, it can't be real - this easy to "win". Maybe it also assuages their guilt as they stomp all over peons on their way up the ladder of success. After all, if we're just simulations, then morality is rather pointless, right? Notice how dirt poor and miserable people are not flocking to this new religion, because they wouldn't believe someone would create such a cruel and painful simulation for them to exist in.
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It's true that some people do play The Sims to create paradises for their characters. But how many legions play to find new and horrific ways to torment them?
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If you were going to create a matrix wouldn't you make it a lot more pleasant, with quite a bit less suffering?
We have created them. They are called "video games", and they are not pleasant. Most contain plenty of simulated suffering.
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BofA deez nuts (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair, when the Bank of America analysts were asked this, they were all high on designer drugs after celebrating their record bonuses.
Re: BofA deez nuts (Score:2)
Stock market crashes are just glitches in the matrix. It happens when they change something.
Of course they would say that ... (Score:2)
So (Score:2)
So, what are we all running from?
Look on the bright side (Score:5, Insightful)
At least, now you know where you should NOT put your money.
Which analysts? It's important. (Score:2)
Is there any chance these were a bunch of analysts BOA picked up on the cheap from the 5300 people Wells Fargo fired recently for setting up phony bank accounts?
No they didn't (Score:2)
Actually, if you read TFA past all the sensationalist clickbait, what the report really said was:
Many scientists, philosophers, and business leaders believe that there is a 20-50 per cent probability that humans are already living in a computer-simulated virtual world.
Which is really not that jaw-dropping, since the summary says practically the same thing.
What narrow thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
How many billions could you make if you were able to predict glitches in the Matrix?
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The first one was perfect... (Score:3)
But the human minds kept rejecting it. Entire crops were lost.
So B-of-A was formed instead.
Nope (Score:3, Interesting)
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Sault's law says a thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself.
That's dumb, though. It can even make an artifact more complex than itself. We're not that far off from having machines that can mine, smelt ores, and replicate themselves. If you gave the machine plans for both itself and a more complex machine, it could then clearly make a more complex machine.
And it is unlikely any civilization would get even close to simulating the universe it lives in.
On one hand, that's probably true. On the other hand, you might be able to simulate enough of it to be useful. And on the gripping hand, what if you could access other universes, and utilize their resources for your
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Who's to say our universe isn't very simple compared to the host universe? Certainly some of the rules of our universe, like relativity, seem carefully contrived to make us easier to simulate.
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"Certainly"? You do understand that mathematics is man's "contrived" creation...well, a lot of women helped as well. In case you haven't gotten the memo, the GUT has not yet been realized.
You make the same mistake many make: mathematics is not physics. Physics is written in the language of mathematics and as such, not everything is properly expressible. Hell, it isn't even clear the mathematics has the right concepts to express all of physics. Quantum mechanics should give anyone pause that it does. BTW, qu
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Googling "Sault's Law" turns up no obvious references to this "law". This actually sounds a lot like Creationist propaganda, which frequently claims that evolution cannot create greater complexity, when in fact evolution - including artificial genetic algorithms - have no problem doing this.
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Sault's law says a thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself.
I've never heard of this law, but in a sense it sounds legitimate. It misses one rather significant point though...
I am not alone. Two people working together can achieve more than two people working alone, and, moreover, by working together they can achieve things that are simply not possible by two people working alone. And this scales, i.e. three people working together can achieve more that two people, and so on. The same applies to the machines that we make - in essence it only takes two machines worki
50/50 (Score:2)
About the same odds as BoA foreclosing on your house and sending the sheriff to physically remove you despite the fact that you don't have a fucking mortgage.
When the fuck are people who suggest this.... (Score:2)
If we live in a simulation, then some intelligent being designed that simulation. Period.
ID may get touted a lot as some sort of pseudo-scientific camouflage for creationism, but in the end, it's still just about an alternative origin to our beginnings than just evolution. Suggesting we are living in a simulation is not only compatible with the notion that we were created, but it would seem to imply it.
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It's just a way to look at reality from the "outside" and see if anything new stands out.
File it with not actually killing cats in boxes.
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Are you arguing that it's not possible for our universe to be a simulation? Or rather, that it's not worth seriously considering the possibility that it could be? Because I can't see the basis for that. We've made our own physics simulations, and they do tend to be small-scale and don't incorporate every physical law, but that's basically just a limitation of our knowledge and computing power. Nothing I've seen suggests that it'd be fundamentally impossible to produce a simulation that, from the inside, loo
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The latter, because it implies intelligent design, which is supposedly not worth serious consideration.
Because one directly implies the other, either ID is at least as worthy of serious scientific consideration as the notion that the universe is a simulation seems to be or else the notion that the universe is a simulation should be discounted as
Bullshit (Score:2)
While it is a possible world-model, there is absolutely no basis for a probability estimation with a reasonable error margin. These people do not understand what they are doing or, alternately, they are lying in order to get publicity. Oh, and look, it worked!
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While it is a possible world-model, there is absolutely no basis for a probability estimation with a reasonable error margin. These people do not understand what they are doing or, alternately, they are lying in order to get publicity. Oh, and look, it worked!
No you see, it is easy. Either it is or it isn't; so it's 50/50.
Doesn't really make me confident of BoA, and I will try to steer clear of their mathematical expertice in the future.
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That may indeed have been what they did. Junk-statistics at its finest. And in some sense it would even be correct: If you know absolutely nothing, assuming uniform distribution of the cases you know is a valid approach. Of course, what you do not get with this assumption is any error estimation, and hence the reliability of the statement is essentially be "none at all".
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No you see, it is easy. Either it is or it isn't; so it's 50/50.
I've got the same combination on my luggage! ...er, i mean that's the exact same assumption i make about either/or questions as a person with very little knowledge of statistics who knows nothing about the underlying factors!
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And on the other hand, as soon as a civilization is living in a simulation, it cannot create a simulation of equal complexity anymore, so as soon as it has happened, the complexity of the possible simulations drop (for simplicity, assume below 0.5 of the surrounding simulation), so withing a small number of steps (simulation-in-simulation-in-simulation...), we have that any simulated world will have a simulation complexity very close to zero. As our world clearly has a complexity significantly above zero, t
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This isn't actually clear. Even the post you responded to points this out: this isn't a call you can make without knowing what the parent universes look like (or without theoretically ruling out the possibility of much more complex universes than our own).
But it doesn't even matter if the vast majority of simulated worlds are too simple to support our human life. The important part is whether the majority of worlds that do support human life are
Does this mean .... (Score:2)
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No, there is a 50% of the cash in your checking and savings account is fictitious! All of your debt is all too real!
And the next question is obviously.. (Score:2)
"How we profit on that?" given the fact its a bank.
What They Are Really Hinting At (Score:2)
There is a 50% chance that the money that appears in your BOA account balance does not really exist...
Good News Everyone... (Score:2)
Fuck Slashdot (Score:2)
Is this what Slashdot has become? How long before we get a daily update about the Kardashians?
Who? (Score:2)
It's just freaky when a bank states this. Ranks up there with Microsoft Lingerie.
When philosophers and physicists do this (Score:2)
In this case it just sounds like these bankers are taking those thought experiments far too seriously and not seeing them for what they are.
It's like assuming that a smooth massless elephant is real instead of just a way to model a great big hairy and heavy thing.
Here's how the discussion went (Score:2)
Bob: "I don't know. We're so screwed, man! Any ideas, Jill?"
Jill: "Huh? Sorry I wasn't listening. I was watching the iPhone 7 keynote. Did you know they are dropping the headphone jack?".
Bob: "How can you be not paying attention at a time like this! We're screwed! We need to find a way to distract people from
Jill: "They're removing the headphone jack from the iPhone.
Better Motives (Score:2)
This idea seems to be hip right now ... (Score:2)
This idea seems to be hip right now, although it is just a variant of Kants critical idealism or the arbrahamic revelation psycho-cults (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) idea of a god from which all things come.
It's really weird when you see institutions that have so much power perpetrate such nonsense. And goes to show that 'civilized' society isn't to far from societies who think they have god on their side when they blow themselves and innocent bystanders up. Or think it's a brilliant idea to gas 11 million
Same old shit (Score:2)
Oh FFS! (Score:2)
On the one hand we have bible thumpers shoving bullshit at us, on the other hand "wake up sheeple - we all live in the Matrix!!!" Anyone wanna cook up more fairy stories about why we exist? We're here (and we're fucking up the planet we live on - we need to stop doing that as it's the only home we've got at the moment), the universe is before us and that's all that really matters.
Is there some reason I care about marmot7? (Score:2)
Just curious - should I care what marmot7 has to say about BOA? Any other random people want to chime in?
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Not quite yet. It needs to be peer reviewed by people who are equally unqualified to make predictions like this. Round up a scientologist, a flat-earther and a couple of anti-vaccination parents and you should be set.
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Only if the scientologist flat-earther is having twins. And even still, they're not parents yet.
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If The Matrix were able to simulate chemical reactions, such as we are seeing in abrupt climate change, then there would be no need for humans to be used as batteries. Just because a banker in the necrocene can't accept that his precious capitalism is causing our immanent extinction, in no way should he be allowed to speak for the algorithm that controls his mind. Come to think of it, why can't we have an algorithm, crowd sourced by mathematical truths and overseen by humanity, to run for President?
The Matrix (movie) had it wrong -we're not batteries, we're processors... and maybe by overheating us, it's like overclocking. Read Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons http://www.librarything.com/wo... [librarything.com]
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The Matrix (movie) had it wrong
The people in the movie had incomplete knowledge of many things. That was their guess and should not be accepted as the truth. (I actually prefer this explanation)
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The best explanation for the events the the movie is that the whole thing is just the robots taking care of humans as best they're able. Most humans are happy enough in the matrix, and for the few who aren't, there's this other simulated world where they can fight the power. There are a lot of hints of this in the Animatrix - just made the terrible sequels even more disappointing.
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Aliens putting people though a lot of simulations so they could get an idea of how those strange human beings thought.
That actually made sense instead of looking like a weak excuse, such as the battery thing, or your better idea of processors.
Some years everyone was making an asteroid movie, that year it was artificial reality movies.
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What is a life worth if it's just simulation?
No more and no less than if it's "real". Who gives a squashed shit? If it feels real to me, I'm going to behave as if it's real. And I'm going to get quite cross if you piss on my Wheaties, whether you think it's real or not. Indeed, if you should do such a thing, you will find out rapidly how real I think it is. Which is not to get all internet brave or anything, it's all to make a point; there is only one reason why it would be interesting if the universe were a simulation, and that's that we could then p
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It might be a simple as standing in the right place and yelling "Computer! Arch!" in a commanding tone.
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Remember that time... (Score:2)
Remember that time...Neo got his butt whipped?
Yeah, he told the Tick there was no spoon. That didn't turn out so well.