Yes. I literally lived with a nun for a year.

I try not to find anything pointless.

People wasting their time in different ways is why forums like this remain interesting.

Having understood the totality of belief systems operative within every single humanities subject and some arguments in human developmental biology, the brave keyboard warrior quickly diagnosed Cultural Marxism as the corrupt core of their tyrannical ideology and sought to dismantle it with critique. He knew this was an ideological war, and saw enemies in the margins of every argument. They were all brandishing abusive notions of charitable readings, historical critique, and alien forms of philosophical argument that must be dismissed as nonsense without study.

He first attacked The Enemy on the grounds of freedom of speech - noting that upon aggregation into the True Form of Cultural Marxism, they attempted to suppress free thinking scientifically rational thought and clear, intuitive philosophy through the organon of Political Correctness. They didn't even represent scientific progress in his field and the Elect Academics which were enshrined in his Worldview with charity and citation. The Enemy pretended to be kind, but was in reality an interposition on all thought because of its cancerous ideologies expressed in fey words incomprehensible to his image of the Modern Man.

He then attacked The Enemy in their infernal residence - the Tumbler. As soon as the Tumbler was cut open with his mighty e-peen of Enlightenment and Common Sense, the carrion shrieks of "TRIGGERED " resonated throughout the infernal bowels of The Tumbler. Upon destroying the Tumbler, the throat of The Corrupted Academy's voice in the world was silenced, and Cultural Marxism was no more

It's not really that difficult if you've done any research on the terms. Wheesht.

I know, you'll argue that Deleuze's rhizomatic machinic assemblages begin from difference, but if Protevi is any judge, we've seen how a gestalt can act for him via something like 'distributed cognition' as a structural whole whose meaning can be determined beyond particular cogntitions of its participants.

Rhizomatic is an adjective to describe, simultaneously, a way of thinking about composite objects and a way composite objects can be. It's essentially 'complex system without reduction to emergent whole'. It's contrasted to 'arboreal' composite objects and ways of thinking about them - which are essentially 'reduction to emergent whole conditioning complex system'.

As for Proveti, I don't know. But if you look at the context in the thread, they're talking about how soldiers act together in battle. To talk of 'distributed cognition' is probably something like 'how does the battle plan unfold in real time over all the participants', and the 'battle plan' is adapted to how the 'battle plan' has already unfolded and to whatever events are screwing it up. 'distributed cognition' makes sense as what is making the battle plan real is the composite of actions of soldiers, their goals, and over-arching strategic/tactical operational guidelines.

If difference really precedes identity, then a gestalt can never encompass its particulars via distributed cognition, but rather each particular is already its own gestalt.

This is just referencing that Deluze's ontology has 'difference' as a central concept, and differences generate identities (which are rhizomatically composed of differences) - think about how different rates of change of surface tension over a soap film can realise an individual soap bubble. We end up with 'the soap bubble' as an individual thing, but it's also a balance of composite water/soap molecules and their related rates of expansion/constraint by surface tension.

So a 'gestalt' is some sub-composite object of a big one, like a local tactical situation on the battlefield, but it isn't identical to all the nitty gritty of things the soldiers are doing in relation to their environment which generates the 'gestalt'.

Then SLX thread moved into a dissection of that claim, essentially criticising the poster apo quoted for treating 'gestalts' and 'distributed condition' in an arboreal manner - since the poster apo quoted was currently criticising a consequence of what 'rhizomatic' meant and how it was treated in the battlefield example.

As for the Heidegger/Derridean reference, I can't speak much to Derrida, but it is indeed similar to how language/social functions are interpreted. Social stuff - meaningful activity (that is all activity) works because of the whole - or a large chunk of - the context it's in. Say when you've got a broken string on a guitar and go to fix it, that requires socially conditioned preconceptions of how a guitar should work, strings, string material, tuning etc etc etc. So it isn't too much of a stretch to offer a very condensed description of 'social stuff' and 'social context' as a gestalt entity - coimplicated components - in Heidegger's phenomenology of language.

It only makes sense if 'you' is an every-person. Why would whether Cartesian skepticism works the same for know-how as know-that turn on my analysis of it? It doesn't. In case it isn't clear, I don't mean that you personally are borderline schizophrenic, I mean that the way 'the skeptic' functions in discourse gives off that vibe for the reasons I stated.

Wouldn't any a priori investigation do the same?

Also, doesn't any investigation bring along conceptual or contextual baggage? There are, after all, only so many words to use. And philosophy has a long history.

Every analysis has contextual baggage, what matters for the analysis in the long run is whether that baggage is enlightening or occlusive for its subject matter. Constraining knowledge to knowledge that through the lens of radical skepticism sheds no light on what knowledge is for humans. If philosophy is the process of conceptual window-cleaning, this is spraying de-icer on the walls.

The levelling of lived life to a network of propositions, entailments and mere possibilities which operates in every radical skeptical hypothesis is so destructive to actually learning about the function of knowledge (what it does, how it works, why it can come to be) that learning, know-how, any 'externalities' such as biology, pedagogy and psychology of knowledge are deemed irrelevant. All that matters is the fact that X and our belief that X and that never the twain shall meet.

The skeptic can never be answered sufficiently because purely by assuming their role for the purposes of discourse - presumably learning about knowledge - any strategy of undermining them can be dismissed without reason - the mere logical possibility of incorrectness. We may as well lay everything humans have found out about anything, including the rest of philosophy, down at the skeptic's wrathful altar and hope not to meet their eyes. Even though their eyes are always, really, our own.

I think many, if not all, philosophical puzzles are like this. There is no point to them -- they are fully and completely useless. But engaging in them is a good exercise of the intellect, and formulating responses are the same. And often what is useful is what comes out of such inquiries -- but the inquiries aren't bounded by the terms of use or purpose.

Then it's odd to give sufficient enough power to a skeptical hypothesis as to sophisticatedly entertain paranoid delusional fantasies to the tune of literally the whole of reality being out to get you. The only things you get out of skeptical inquiries are the philosophical equivalent of getting off on a technicality in court or the destruction of all knowledge.

Of course, attempting to treat the skeptic as a threat is something the discursive role of 'the skeptic' doesn't allow, it is to be ironically entertained then disavowed when venturing out of its native philosophical context. In ecological terms, radical skepticism is a sink bog - carcasses of dead ideas, no entry without real danger, no escape on its terms.

To give other examples, what is the point of of formulating the question of the meaning of being such that it becomes meaningful again? What is the point to formulating a general theory of justice? What's the point of understanding knowledge historically, as opposed to a-historically?

I think you're misreading me as a quietist, this isn't my intention. I'm interested in 'the skeptic' as a discursive role here. Hence all the references to the character of the skeptic and describing how the transformation between 'normal philosopher' and 'skeptic' is inherent in 'the skeptic' (and hence radical skepticism) as a philosophical construct. Still doing philosophy here.

Heh. I can see it doing so for some people. I suppose it would have to sting in the first place, though. :D I don't feel that sting as much precisely because I'm not a skeptic, and have formulated thoughts and responses to the scenario that were sufficient for myself.

It seems you agree that the only escape is to ironically disavow the judgemental whispers of our angry God.

It's a good question. I think it may depend upon whether or not you'd consider riding a bike in the vat is the same as riding a bike outside of the vat. I wouldn't change the scenario (especially since I consider the radical scenario pretty much the same, rationally, just with different dressings). I just wonder if we could count these as competences or not. — Moliere

It's funny that you're using 'you' and 'I' there to refer to precisely the same person; yourself viewed as the modifier of skeptical scenarios (the skeptic); which implicates yourself as the impersonal arbiter of philosophical sense; and then yourself viewed as a practician of philosophy with specific opinions on skepticism and its relation to its opposites.

That's the bizarre conceptual (decisional) form of radical philosophical skepticism in motion. The disavowal of the skeptic takes a positive form in terms of the impersonalisation of their (your) claims, which retroactively constitutes the philosophical manoeuvres the skeptic will make and has already made. A negative form accompanies in terms of the presupposed repudiation of their (the skeptic's) claims which, it is posited, has already happened - as logically required for further engagement with the role (and its problems). The skeptic is a philosophising person disavowing their own methods of interlocution and the consequences their borderline schizophrenic beliefs should have on themselves.

More later.

@StreetlightX (for shared interest in Laruelle)

I don't disagree that the skeptical scenario has real consequences for one's epistemology. But I don't think dismissal is the exact right response, either. While we have no need to address the skeptic, while we can investigate knowledge otherwise I would also say that one is not devoted to JTB forms of knowledge just by way of responding to the skeptical scenario. Like, at all.

Holding or studying JTB is neither necessary nor sufficient for responding to skepticism, the point I'm making is that skeptical scenarios are close conceptually to accounts of propositional knowledge, especially necessary/sufficient conditions for it. Propositions are the target of justifications, justifications are undermined through skeptical scenarios (can say the same about Gettier cases). You can vary what counts as an adequate justification, and in doing so attack the skeptic: eg. fallibilist justification sweeps the rug from under their feet, foundationalist justification under the guise of hinge propositions attempts to do the same; but it's still the same highly constrained and a-historical account of knowledge that makes sense as something for the skeptic to attack. Can radical doubts be formulated in the same way against, say, knowing how to ride a bike? Specifically, sufficient conditions for knowing how to ride a bike are competences - which don't always have propositional equivalents.

Conceptual/contextual baggage of radical skeptical inquiry destroys the context in which knowledge arises, taking it to a bizarre intellectual limit in which paranoid delusions become respectable avenues of thought, lived life is condensed into a logical network of linked propositions; engaged with merely through assent and disbelief, and anything within the bounds of possibility masquerades as justified belief.

Surely the only people who espouse the Cartesian scenario as something which "destroys" knowledge are students of philosophy, and worth engaging for pedagogical purposes only. While that may be the case, I don't think it makes sense to just dismiss the scenario. There are reasonable responses to it.

Then what's the point in pretending to be the skeptic? Do we really carry a copy of a rebuttal for every skeptical scenario to allow knowledge to take place?

To wonder how, not to adopt the method as actual and forget the solution. Or, as I think most do, passing over isn't all bad. But it does strike me as being a-philosophical.

Maybe it's a non-philosophical approach to skepticism. The skeptic and propositional knowledge are inseparably joined through the unilateral need for philosophically rigorous dismissal of the skeptic; the philosopher is pretending to be the skeptic through interlocution and the distinction between them dissolves in the process; only to be re-contextualised as an imagined enemy. The enemy only makes sense in the context of the theatre of skeptical arguments.

Seeing it as a philosopher's dramatisation of an imagined struggle - when reason reconciles itself with paranoid delusion - takes the sting out of it, no?

I'd say that the same would happen in the universe we actually inhabit.

If memory serves, actually, that did happen with several supposed radical skeptics on this forum :D. (or perhaps the last iteration?)

I remember it happening too. Is why I brought it up.

That the skeptic is wrong isn't the interesting part of the thought experiment, I'd say. Aren't many philosophers wrong, after all? But they can still be of philosophical interest to read. Here what's interesting is why the radical skeptic is wrong -- where is the error? -- and also, supposing these conditions of skepticism, is there some way to persuade the skeptic?

The most interesting part of the thought experiment is that it's ok for 'the skeptic' to do but not for anyone real. Why on earth would we need to persuade the skeptic away from their infantile delusions and performative contradictions? The deck is stacked in their favour, they will destroy all knowledge (hypothetically) if you let them.

The skeptic isn't a real person, no one acts as if knowledge is impossible, no one thinks that way either. The skeptic is a philosophical construct aligned with the mere possibilities of erroneous justification, and the mere possibilities of error in every belief. We should stop giving into this alternate personality every student of philosophy can adopt, salivating in response to improbable, unjustifiable fear of error which implicates all of reality in a personal conspiracy against them.

I don't disagree with this. As I said to Marchsk, I think that looking at the meaning of knowledge is what's fruitful. And the fact that the skeptical scenario plays off of intuitions is also what's fruitful -- because those commonly held intuitions are fallible and often mistaken.

Attempting to find necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge outside of the contexts knowledge arises in is a pointless exercise. If the examination of intuitions is the goal and sole reason to entertain 'the skeptic', why not look at how people come to knowledge in the real world? Believing in the utility of skeptic thought experiments actually has real consequences for epistemology: for one, the skeptic (and the JTB enterprise it is coupled with) are entirely concerned with propositional knowledge. Secondly, they don't allow any incorporation of learning skills or learning facts to resultant knowledge-how and knowledge-that. And for three-the skeptical hypothesis is indifferent to how beliefs and competences form networks that allow people to act skilfully in the real world.

Far from analysing how people actually obtain knowledge; the corner of philosophical discourse devoted to the skeptic isn't even examining the conditions of possibility for knowledge - it's far too constrained for that. Dealing solely with propositions, hypothetical justifications and the mere possibility of error in belief.

It is even an impoverished form of skepticism, the pyrrhonists at least espoused skepticism for a practical reason, and prescribe ataraxia as an appropriate response to the real lack of 'ultimate justifications'. What is the character of someone who really believes in Cartesian skepticism? They are paralytically obsessed with the impossibility of knowledge while constantly embodying its use.

Do you think Descartes was mad?

I don't think entertaining doubt, even of the radical sort, is madness -- whether it be a Great Philosopher, or someone before Descartes who had similar thoughts

It isn't madness if you're currently doing philosophy, it's absolutely madness if you allow skeptical hypotheticals to effect you in any other way. Cartesian skepticism only makes sense on the background of propositional knowledge and obsession with sufficient justification's adequacy for truth.

You may not find skeptical doubts persuasive, but that doesn't seem enough to make a charge of madness against said doubt. Especially as Descartes lays out his arguments -- obviously there was no tradition of Descartes prior to Descartes, but madness isn't what I'd say is where his thinking comes from.

Of course he wasn't mad, he quickly dismissed his skeptical hypothesis.

Well, there is Nick Bostrom's simulation argument. Sounds like he and quite a few others took it somewhat seriously.

Nick Bostrom's simulation argument isn't seeking to undermine all claims to knowledge, though. We have to know stuff about the universe and be able to assess probabilities of events for it to get going. Something 'the skeptic' could easily disallow.

Allowing the skeptic their innocent imaginings is already giving them enough rope to hang you. We do have knowledge; so the skeptic is wrong in any case. It's probably true that what makes demon-like scenarios so enduring is that they play on the intuition that doubt is set against knowledge. They also invite their reader to imagine knowledge devoid of the contexts it arises in, so it's not surprising knowledge seems unattainable in this light: the deck is stacked.

But it's also true that dealing with the skeptic is something every student taking an introductory epistemology module, or someone with an interest in philosophy reading an introductory text, will be acquainted with. At least Cartesian skepticism. Without that context, it's madness to believe it; and deferred madness - to the hypothetical everyman 'the skeptic'- to give it much weight.

In a parallel universe where Cartesian skepticism was never developed, someone who turns up here writing: "I have a proof that knowledge is impossible, what if there is a demon tricking all our intuitions and knowledge and all we know is the demon's machinations? How can we truly know anything now? The only answer is God.' would have their thread scoured from the forum almost as quickly as an objectivist Holocaust denier.

If it wasn't part of the established tradition of philosophy, it would be given the credit it's worth: nothing. No one seriously entertains the idea, the entire premise of this and like ideas are if this is believed; how do we 'access' truth? If this is possible, what can be justified?

'The skeptic' is a bogeyman in philosophy discussions, nothing more.

That's a lot more words to say the same thing. It's a more plausible delusion to think that a mad scientist has made us into a brain in a vat than one of those unsophisticated, backwards medieval demons is tricking all our perceptions and memories using the thoroughly irrational and unscientific black magic.

It amuses me that it's OK to entertain the possibility and the concurrent belief that entertaining the possibility destroys all knowledge, but it's not OK to sincerely believe it.

It's a daemon's power fantasies playing out in a holodeck in which he creates BIVs impregnated with the idea that they're all in the Matrix.

Conditional: brain in vats and memory editing. Should be believed? Nah. Kind of thing people can get therapy for.

I think that's a difference between BIV and the daemon. The daemon has a malicious streak and doesn't even grant us the capacity to think or feel as normal. Being a BIV does, that's what makes it interesting. Regardless, though, there are proofs that Pi is transcendental - do you think that these are fabricated memories or we're forced into believing them?

The value of pi is defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. That is sufficient to construct actual circles that approach the ideal circle or to approximately calculate pi.

The computer simulation can have the same mathematical definition of a circle and pi as us. But in both cases they are mathematical idealizations and can only be actualized approximately.

I agree. Talking about drawing circles is a bit of a red herring. What matters is whether someone could square a circle in the simulation.

Whatever you want to call it -real, ideal, virtual, a platonic object, other things-, our mathematics has a specific value of Pi. A computer simulating our mathematical capabilities would also have to simulate their associated ideational structures, irrelevant of their ontological status in the final analysis. It may be that Pi isn't 'real' in the same sense as the ideal circles (and other things) it concerns; nevertheless it must be simulated.

Assume someone has drawn a circle in the real world, and there's a circle in the simulated world. Both have the same diameter. Do they have the same circumference? No, because Pi is different in each context. They're both circles, but they have a different circumference.

Can you please explain why you think drawn circles in the simulated reality and the real one somehow undermine what I'm saying? And also why this eschews the computer's responsibility to have a value for Pi? The algorithmically drawn circle in the computer will still have an implicit Pi in it. To the extent that raster circles are real circles anyway.

Reality does. It's Pi here, it's an approximation of Pi in simulated universes with finite memory. We could go round in circles playing the 'frame what the other person is saying as incorrect but do nothing to address their arguments' game, but I'd rather not.

How would a computer get around needing a specific value for Pi? How would a computer get around needing to know whether a digit is correct or incorrect? Without committing the whole thing to memory, in either case. Or, why is this an irrelevant or misguided question? Why doesn't the computer need a value for Pi when it would have circles with circumferences and diameters like ours? Ones which would presumably have a constant ratio.

Yes. Since they have different values for Pi.

I really don't understand how this is relevant. Why do you think the ability to draw a circle in general is relevant to the computer's capacity to square a circle? The computer would be able to draw a very special square for lots of circles such that the square has the same area as the given circle.

Such a computer could not be simulating our universe. Our circles cannot be squared.

I don't see the relevance of this. The computer could have a value for Pi so accurate that its error is below the Plank length for a circle with the diameter of the observable universe and there would still be no valid proof that it is transcendental - since it would be an approximation.

How would the computer deal with Pi without committing it to memory? It needs to know whether any digit is correct or not. See no way around it.

But I suppose if you were to measure circle diameters and circumferences, you would observe a different value for Pi than the one we get. Edit: with sufficient measurement precision, anyway.

Modality man. Modality. The computer COULD do it, 'our' computer COULDN'T.

It's the computer's ability to draw a square which has the same area as a given circle using compass and straight edge which is the problem in the first place. Anyway, how would the computer deal with Pi? There's one correct number for each digit, computer has to be able to access all of them for Pi to work. as it does in our reality. How can it do this without committing the whole of Pi to memory?

In our thoughts and mathematical operations, proofs: the whole ideational system of mathematics must be something the simulating computer does. This means it must devote a finite amount of computational resources - memory and processing - to doing any particular part of our mathematics.

When an algorithm is used to compute Pi, it will converge towards the value of Pi in the simulated universe. When a circle is thought, its area will be equal to its universe's Pi times the radius squared. This simulated Pi cannot be our Pi, since our Pi requires an infinite amount of memory to store. Moreover, the simulated Pi will be a fraction. Rest of argument goes from there.

Let's put it this way:

In the simulated universe, the area of a circle is yR^2, in our universe, the area of a circle is xR^2. They literally have different values for Pi since the value of Pi for our universe would have to be stored in a finite computer. In the simulated universe, y=a/b and so there is a counter example to the proof: bz-a has y as a root. So the proof is either valid and proves a false result, or it is invalid. We know it's not the former, so it's the latter. Therefore no one in a simulated universe could (modal, necessarily not) see a valid proof that Pi is transcendental. So, no one in a simulated universe could see the squaring of a circle (modal, necessarily not). Conversely, someone in a simulated universe could (modal, possible) see the squaring of a circle.

It isn't that they wouldn't be able to read the proof. The strings could be arranged on the page in the same manner. It's just that that proof would no longer be valid since its result is false! So they wouldn't be seeing a valid proof.

So, there are two Pis. Let's call our Pi x and a simulated Pi y. Let's also assume that y is equal to the first 3 decimal places of x. IE y=3.141

y is an approximation of x. This means that the decimal expansion of y stops at some point. Since the decimal expansion stops at some point, y is a fraction. In this case, y=3141/1000.

Now, that means* there can't be a proof that y is a transcendental number. IE, it cannot be shown that y is a solution to some polynomial equation with integer coefficients. This means there couldn't be any expression like:

(z-a1)(z-a2)(z-a3)...(z-aN) = 0
which has Pi as one of the solutions. A familiar polynomial might be z^2 - 1, others are z^3+2z+z, z^n + 3 where n is an arbitrary member of {0,1,2,3,...}. That kind of thing. x can't be a solution to one of those.

But y can. In fact, y is, 3141z - 1000 has y as a root (set it equal to 0 and solve it). This means y is not transcendental, since it is a root of a polynomial with integer coefficients. More generally, if y is a fraction a/b, then bz-a has y as a root. Thus, every approximation of y will not be transcendental.

If we are in a simulation, then y isn't equal to x, since the simulation can't be of infinite size (no infinite memory, infinite memory required to specify Pi exactly). But the reality has to be quite similar to the one with y=x, so y would be an approximation of x. And we're in the situation I described above.

This gives us a means of distinguishing simulated and non-simulated universes while we're in them. A sufficient condition for not being in a simulated universe is: there is a proof that Pi is transcendental. In our universe, there is such a proof.

I appreciate the attempt to frame the proof as being equivalent to some bundle of sense data, but it really isn't a bundle of sense data or a representational artifact. It's a fact, in our universe Pi is transcendental. The 'sense-data' of the proof isn't equivalent to the proof as a demonstration of a fact.

So proof isn't just a bundle of sense data, it's a demonstration that something is true about our universe. If 'pi being transcendental' isn't sufficient for this, surely 'no one can square a circle using a straightedge and compass' is, since it's well within the bounds of a simulation to allow people to play about with axiomatic systems in mathematics and for them to draw with compass and straightedge.

If you want to frame it in terms of visual sense data, it's still possible: in a simulated universe, no one could see a valid proof of Pi is transcendental. And conversely someone could see a construction in the simulated universe that allows squaring the circle. This still allows discrimination between simulated and non-simulated universes based off of the incapacity for anyone in a simulated universe to see a valid proof that Pi is transcendental, since such a proof couldn't exist*.

*unless the axioms of geometry were inconsistent, which they aren't.

This is what it means to be unable to square a circle: it is impossible to construct a square with exactly the same area as a given circle using only a ruler and compass. The 'impossibility' isn't something which is derived from perceiving squares, circles or generalising from how they look. The impossibility is derived through the way ('drawing using a ruler and compass' 'circles' 'squares', 'pi' and 'transcendental') relate to each-other as a mathematical composite; the first of which is something which can be done in a universe whenever those concepts make sense. The theorem states that there is no procedure - real, constructible - to make a square with exactly the same area as a given circle using only a ruler and compass.

Is it really that confusing to think that concepts (compass+straightedge construction and Pi being a transcendental number) relating to an activity can demarcate what is possible (the circle cannot be squared) within that activity? I think this is a pretty commonplace occurrence, and isn't confined to a-priori constructions either:

A rock could not become alive. (synthetic a-priori, probably)
A state in which no votes are ever cast could not be called democratic. (analytic)
A bachelor cannot currently be married. (analytic)
Radon is not chemically reactive at standard temperature and pressure [IE, no radon dioxide] (synthetic,empirical).

Did you read the Wiki page on squaring the circle?

It isn't a perceptual difference. It's akin to a law of nature.
Argument goes as follows:
Assume (A) we are in a simulation, then consider the following argument:

(1)Pi is transcendental.
(2) Transcendental numbers require an infinite amount of information to specify fully.
(3) If a transcendental number is not specified fully, it is approximated. (2)
(4) Approximations to transcendental numbers have terminating or repeating decimal expansions. (this is the definition of an approximation)
(5) Approximations to transcendental numbers are rational. (4)
(6) If Pi were rational, we could square the circle.

Supporting (6) from the Wiki page:

It is possible to construct a square with an area arbitrarily close to that of a given circle. If a rational number is used as an approximation of pi, then squaring the circle becomes possible, depending on the values chosen. However, this is only an approximation and does not meet the constraints of the ancient rules for solving the problem. Several mathematicians have demonstrated workable procedures based on a variety of approximations.

(7) The computer running the simulation would have infinite memory if Pi were transcendental. (2)
(8) Computer memory must have non-zero size.
(9) The computer running the simulation would be infinitely large to contain infinite memory. (7, 8)
(10) The computer could not be infinitely large.
(11) The computer must use a finite approximation of Pi. (10,5)
(12) We could square the circle (6,11)

(13) We cannot square the circle.

Now we gotta follow the contradiction back:

(12) is false, so (11) is false since (6) has been proved independently, so (10) is false since (5) has been proved independently. So either the computer is infinitely large, or (8) is false, if (8) is false then either Pi is equal to an approximation (5) and then (1 or 2) is false. We know (1) and (2) and (5) are true, so either (A) is false or the computer is infinitely large.

The computer isn't infinitely large, so (A) is false.

It would need to be able to generate any set of surroundings. This goes beyond being a procedurally generated universe, as it would have to generate this one.

Wiki has a decent article on it..

I've watched NGE and Deep Space Nine. I still can't imagine a holodeck the size of the universe.

@Marchesk

That might be so for BIVs, but it won't be so for holodecks. Imagine the ST universe where a whole civilization lives inside a large holodeck. And that leads to another possible answer to the Fermi Paradox.

I literally can't imagine what that would be like in any coherent way. I suppose these arguments aren't very good at convincing the unimaginative.

@Michael

I don't understand why this would be a problem for the simulation. If our computers can calculate Pi without ever repeating digits then the simulation can calculate Pi without ever repeating digits.

The computer could produce an arbitrarily accurate approximation of Pi, given sufficient computing time. The computer would not have infinite memory however - that makes it inconceivable, it would have infinite size -, and it requires infinite memory to store all of Pi. Our reality doesn't have an arbitrarily accurate approximation of Pi - this would be a rational number, a fraction - it has Pi in all its delicious transcendental infinite glory. And because Pi is transcendental, people in the real world cannot square a circle. The latter being a physical process.

A finitely sized computer could only store finitely many digits of Pi. This would make Pi rational, so the circle would be square-able; it isn't, so we're not in one of those.

Well, the brain isn't very fast compared to computers. It takes a quarter of a second or so to think a thought or recognize an object. Responding to a startling sound is much faster (50 milliseconds), but it's still slow compared to computers which can operate on nanosecond time frames.

The speed we think and act probably puts some bounds on their informational content. But the speed alone tells us nothing about how hard it would be to simulate human experience, or to provide real-time equivalent stimulations to a brain (assuming the brain can indeed be stimulated to produce these things without sensorimotor constraints and the nervous system at large... which is unlikely).