Quotes About Simulation

The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster.

Science-fiction authors, such as Daniel F. Galouye in Counterfeit World, have even suggested (and I cannot think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some vastly superior civilization.

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error.

A brain that is good at simulating models in imagination is also, almost inevitably, in danger of self-delusion.

The Good Book is the result of massive simulations of whole societies—what happens when billions of individual people follow various codes of conduct. It's simple: if most people use the rules in the Book most of the time, a pretty much utopian society emerges spontaneously on the macro level.

What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate

The computer-simulated dreamworld of the Matrix trilogy is a technological version of Descartes's evil demon. In essence it represents the idea of a mind (the Architect) more powerful than our own that is intent on deceiving us whenever, and however, it sees fit.

we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation.

Simulations are not illusions. Virtual worlds are real. Virtual objects really exist.

across the table from her doing his best impression of

But even if such a prediction were true, our inability to distinguish between a virtual reality simulation and the real world will have less to do with the increasing fidelity of simulation than the decreasing perceptual abilities of us humans.

In the media, waterboarding is called 'simulated drowning,' but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.

All simulators are going to be different compared to reality, that's how I see it.

Disability simulation fails to capture the nuance and complexity of living in a disabled body. And it certainly fails to give a deep understanding of systemic discrimination and abuse faced by disabled people.

Frank stared at her. But you throw Ding Dongs at monsters. Iris looked horrified. Oh, they're not Ding Dongs. She rummaged under the counter and brought out a package of chocolate covered cakes that looked exactly like Ding Dongs. These are gluten-free, no-sugar-added, vitamin-enriched, soy-free, goat-milk-and-seaweed-based cupcake simulations. All natural! Fleecy chimed in. I stand corrected. Frank suddenly felt as queasy as Percy.

minorities granted a crumb of political autonomy in exchange for providing an optical simulation of cultural diversity in their country of residence

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum ... an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

You can't simulate a brain without first understanding what it does.

I am in a waiting room without end, without location, without time or place. If I go outside, I die before I get any answers. I exist only in a theoretical way, like a point on a coordinate plane. I am the simulation.

Literature is the equivalent of the climate scientist's computer simulations: set up some new starting conditions, run the whole complicated process and see what happens.

I wrote a piece of software in 1998 that created fictional weather.