Episode 2755 CWSA 02/19/25 — Scott Adams Philosophy

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uckerberg is trying to make big. So he's been working on this for a number of years. He's got $60 billion into it so far. And it's been working since 2020. So $60 billion. I think it might be the major, possibly the major thing that Meta is working on. And they released their first advertisement and it was so pathetic that they had to pull the advertisement. It was just on Instagram. And it showed…

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nk oh there's a low resolution character that must be created by a computer? Or would it say there's a high resolution character that looks normal just like I am? Well the answer is it depends how you code it. So it might be one line of code to say each character imagines that everything they see is high fidelity. That's it. The character just has to think it's seeing high fidelity. You just program it so it does. It doesn't have to see high fidelity. It only has to think it does and then it will argue to its death that it can see detail and it would never know the difference.

So if we were a simulation and we were also low fidelity, is it possible that we wouldn't know it because we're programmed to think it's high fidelity? Well let me take it to the next level. Everything in my room right now is high fidelity as far as I know. But I can't see it. The only thing I know is high fidelity is maybe a few words that I'm looking at on the comments as they go by. Everything else is sort of imagined high fidelity. You see what I mean? I imagine it's high fidelity but I'm not even looking at it. It's not registering in any way in my brain. But my brain is programmed to think that I sort of do see it. It's so easy to program a character to think it's high fidelity. But the only high fidelity is what they're really really focusing on in this narrow little cone because that's the only part your brain is dealing with. So it could be if we were a simulation the only high fidelity is this narrow cone of whatever we're really focusing on at the moment and everything else is low fidelity. We wouldn't know the difference.

I know you love that simulation talk.

Well Elon Musk said he's gonna talk to Trump about the idea of refunding at the rate of $5,000 a piece to taxpayers some of the DOGE savings. So they saved $55 billion so far. And if they only gave a portion of that back to taxpayers, it would be for somebody says $5,000 a piece. I'm looking at an article in Tech Times by Isaiah Richard. But here's the obvious question that people in the comments were saying and I said immediately. I thought the point of DOGE w

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as to reduce our deficit. I didn't think it was creating a piggy bank that could be doled out. Now I like the fact that people could get $5,000. I mean that would make a really big difference to a lot of people. It's a big deal. But I feel like it might create a precedent where everybody thinks that the DOGE savings are a new piggy bank. I'm already worried Congress looks at the DOGE savings as o…

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Wisdom from this episode

"It doesn't have to see high fidelity. It only has to think it does and then it will argue to its death that it can see detail and it would never know the difference."

A simulated entity doesn't require actual high-resolution perception; believing it has high fidelity is enough for it to defend that belief to the end, never suspecting otherwise.

"Everything in my room right now is high fidelity as far as I know. But I can't see it. Everything else is sort of imagined high fidelity. The only high fidelity is what you're really really focusing on in this narrow little cone because that's the only part your brain is dealing with. So if we were a simulation the only high fidelity is this narrow cone of whatever we're really focusing on at the moment and everything else is low fidelity. We wouldn't know the difference."

We assume our whole environment is perceived in high detail, but most of it is an imagined construct. Only the narrow focus of our attention gets real high-fidelity processing; the brain fills in the rest, so we'd never notice if we lived in a low-resolution simulation.