That will never be settled if you think about it. All we know about the real world comes through our senses, so there is no way anyone can prove the real world actually exists outside our minds. It may very well be I’m the only thing that exists. However, I find it very unlikely my mind is capable of conceiving all this complexity and that I’m just hurting myself when I have a toothache.
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I guess that’s how conspiracy theories work. If people believe something is true, it doesn’t really matter if it’s not. The problem arises when those people try to impose their makeshift reality on others.
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It’s all gone philosophical. One could argue that the above quote pretty much sums up life, and it’s problematic 
…
You’re right, it’s highly unlikely that this will ever be settled. What Chalmers shows, though, and I find that disturbing/ fascinating, is that the probability of us living in a simulation is higher than the probability that we are not.
You are referring to the solipsism hypothesis, which is not the same as the simulation hypothesis. In the latter case, it’s not your mind that is doing the imagining, it’s a super-computer, and thus solipsism doesn’t enter the equation. (If you want to go philosophical, what is the difference between a reality based on quarks and one based on bits? There’s also the it-from-bit-theory.)
(As usual) Sabine Hossenfelder has some thought-provoking comments about the simulation hypothesis: The Simulation Hypothesis is Pseudoscience - YouTube
I think this is getting seriously off-topic, but I do feel the need to relativise Sabine Hossenfelder’s remarks on the simulation hypothesis (SH).
- SH is NOT a scientific theory in a strict empirical sense, nor is it meant to be – it’s a philosophical theory, a thought experiment.
- SH is a faith (according to Hossenfelder) – she seems to forget that general relativity, quantum mechanics (her own field of specialisation), the Higgs-boson, etc were all considered unscientific in their time, more akin to a faith than anything else. Which shows that a hypothesis can very well become scientific in time.
- Hossenfelder seems to be unaware of the fact that the very foundation of the empirical sciences is based on faith, namely that sense data give us access to objective reality.
- She says that fine-tuning a simulation to an extent that we come to take it as reality is extraordinarily difficult. Many things were considered to be extraordinarily difficult, but turned out to be doable. Moreover, in the case of the SH, that point is moot, as what we take to be realistic is entirely up to the simulators.
I hope that Hossenfelder’s books are less of a philosophical muddle than this short video clip.
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I’ve really enjoyed this thread and most of the stuff I’d have said was already said, but I feel there’s just one more aspect that is worth mentioning:
I guess it’s ok if some people listen with their wallets. It’s their money in the end. The thing that really ticks my nerves usually is how the evangelize the product(s) to other audiophiles, many of which can be highly impressionable. I feel this is a very dangerous practice, especially on the internet where we’re all just a username on a screen and he/she who screams louder (or types more in this case) usually wins an argument through exposure (I see this person commenting on a lot of posts like he knows his ■■■■■ so he must be). It’s your choice to spend your money on some gizmo that both tests and engineers in the field prove it doesn’t do anything, just don’t drag others down with you.
That was my pet peeve. 
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To steer the conversation a bit away from its somewhat abstract philosophical nature (I blame myself for starting it, though I have been enjoying reading all the comments), I think it’s important to keep in mind that neither a pure “objectivist,” nor a pure “subjectivist” approach to evaluating the sound of our hi-fi equipment is particularly productive, though both have their place in this type of discourse.
The typical argument often used by objectivists is that we have sufficient diagnostic methodologies and equipment to measure a piece of equipment’s electrical performance and, thus, determine its acoustic characteristics. The subjectivists, on the other hand, claim that we can hear a lot more than we can measure, and, therefore, measurements cannot possibly tell the whole story.
There is really no easy way to settle this debate, and I am not even going to try. I am not saying that we should completely change the way we use measurements in evaluating hi-fi equipment. What I am saying, though, is that we might gain more insight into acoustic performance but adjusting our methodology and expanding our inventory of useful tests.Therefore, perhaps it is more reasonable to conclude that there are certain acoustic characteristics of sound reproduced by our equipment (and important to our enjoyment of such equipment) that we routinely do not measure, instead of saying (and I hear this a lot) that we reject measurements simply because we cannot measure what we hear.
What we do know, following several decades of research into auditory perception, is that the human auditory system (both peripheral and central) has evolved to be particularly sensitive to a number of fairly well-understood acoustic cues that just happen to have been important to our survival. Some of these cues are subtle and can be significantly affected by poorly designed transducers, unwanted noise, user error, etc, and yet, they are very rarely accounted for in equipment reviews. For the sake of brevity, I am going to mention just three of them.
First, we are sensitive to very specific frequency masking effects. Reviewers often mention “the resolution of fine detail”, “hearing into the recording,” “placing instruments or voices in the sound stage,” “hearing the room,” etc. It’s possible that at least some of these effects can be explained by varying degrees to which frequency masking is affected by the way a DAC, a speaker, or turntable cartridge reproduces these types of subtle acoustic cues.
Another frequent comment I hear is how a piece of equipment reproduces a specific kind of timbre - realistically or unrealistically - of, say, a saxophone, or a piano. We know that humans are particularly sensitive to the relative amplitudes and bandwidths of resonant frequencies. They account for a number of well-understood acoustic cues (esp. in music perception and speech perception). Yet, we never measure how a piece of equipment affects the bandwidths and relative amplitudes of the fundamental frequency, resonant frequencies, or their harmonics of, say, the human voice, the clarinet, or the french horn.
Finally, reviewers often talk about how a piece of equipment reproduces “the leading edge” of certain percussive sounds, or the “decay” of guitar strings or cymbals. Again, we are sensitive to very specific spectral and temporal cues related to these types of sounds, such as the relationship between onset and offset, between transient and sustained, between periodic and aperiodic components, etc. We can model such cues mathematically and study their effect on auditory perception, and yet they are never measured when evaluating a DAC or a pair of headphones.
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Smacks of intellectual plagiarism.
A physics professor at Tulane was there 25 years ago, even before ‘The Matrix’.
Also -
Not to mention the B-movies -
Guilty, as charged. 
Chalmers references many of the examples you have given. Of course he doesn’t claim to be the first one to deal with the SH – but, as far as I know, this is the first book that deals with it from the perspective of analytical philosophy.
(By the way, if you liked The Thirteenth Floor, you might want to watch Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht (1973) – a far superior movie, well it’s Fassbinder – both movies are based on Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3 (1964).)
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It would indeed be interesting to have a clear understanding what measurements cannot tell us about sound impressions. I agree with the basic premise that measurements don’t tell the full story. (The problem is of course that sound impressions are by their very nature subjective, so two people may never agree on what exactly they hear.) This has led me to the conviction that ultimately I must trust MY ears. But, and here the objectivist/ psychologically knowledgeable side in me speaks, your ears can’t be fully trusted, so better trust measurements. But …
It’s a never-ending debate I’m having with myself. (And no, anticipating helpful advice – ABX testing doesn’t solve everything either.)
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That’s interesting, because it led me to the opposite conviction - that I shouldn’t trust my ears. In principle, I agree that there may be something we haven’t measured yet, that may have some sort of effect, but I really don’t think it’s likely because there’s absolutely no evidence from any other discipline to support any of these audiophile claims.
And I think that’s important.
If sound engineers, or any other professional involved in the recording or reproduction of audio had noticed any similar issues I’d be more inclined to go with the ‘we haven’t measured it yet’ argument. But there’s no evidence (objective or subjective) from anyone other than the audiophiles who have bought into these ‘golden ears’, ‘highly resolving system’ type explanations. Explanations that nobody else takes seriously.
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But they can agree on what they can’t hear. ABX testing is designed to determine whether differences are distinguishable.
I got neurons, I got music
I got my ears, who can ask for anything more?
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Spoken like Nina Simone (and the writers of Hair), who am I to argue 
I’m sure I have hair on vinyl somewhere.
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For all I have left I wish mine had been made of vinyl, or something similarly hard wearing…
Haha. I could do with a thicker top!
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killdozer,
I was referencing a classic jazz standard by George and Ira Gershwin from 1930.
You are thinking about the musical Hair, from 1967, where lyrics of the song “I got life” celebrate various counter-culture attributes (including “I got my ass”).
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I stand corrected and a little more educated, interesting read as well thanks