SXSW
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2020–2023
55:59 · 573K views · Mar 9, 2019
George Hotz gives a SXSW 2019 talk on the idea that we live in a simulation and asks what actions would be available from inside it. He takes a hacker's view of whether it could be escaped.
Shared in simulation-argument threads as an entertaining, hacker-minded take, though some commenters criticize Hotz himself.
6 comments from Hacker News
Exactly. This is the topic of this entertaining talk by geohot (of iPhone and PlayStation jailbreak fame) : this video That's why this subject is not just theoretical/philosophical, but has potentially actionable ramifications with universe level consequences.
George Hotz was the first to jailbreak the iPhone, and also gave a presentation called "Jailbreaking the Simulation" [0] which is as wild and thought-provoking of an idea as it sounds. It's worth a watch. [0] this video
Not complete without linking to Georg Hotz (geohot) talk at SXSW: "Jailbreaking the Simulation" He's taking the hacker's perspective and exploring if the simulation would be hackable from inside. this video
It's also contradictory to the answer Feyneman gave in his "Aunt Minnie is in the hospital" story in response to being asked "If you get hold of two magnets, and you push them, you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them around the other way, and they slam together. Now, what is it, the feeling between those two magnets?": [LINK] A somewhat similar approach can be taken to the simulation question itself - rather than the default response of pondering the likelihood of it being true or how it might be implemented, I much prefer the ~"Is there any utility in the question itself?" approach taken by George Hotz starting at the 2:30 point in this interview on the Lex Fridman podcast: [LINK] [Hotz] ...it wasn't a very practical talk about how to actually escape a simulation, it was more about a way of restructuring an us-versus-them narrative. If we continue on the path we're going with technology, I think we're in big trouble - like, as a species, and not just as a species but even me as an individual member of the species. So if we could change rhetoric to be more like...to think upwards...like, to think about that we're in a simulation and how we could get out...already we'd be on the right path. What you actually do once you do that, well, I assume I would have acquired way more intelligence in the process of doing that, so I'll just ask that. [Fridman] So the the thinking upwards, what kind of ideas, what kind of breakthrough ideas do you think thinking in that way could
>I’d suggest some strong psychedelics to crack the ego and take a look at what’s inside. I'd submit that his use of psychedelics is precisely the issue. There was a really odd "/r/Im14AndThisIsDeep" talk he did a few years ago: this video It's been a pretty steady decline into run of the mill schizo "demons and angels" talk from him since then.