The Simulation hypothesis

[The Mother of The Others]

5 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

 5. A simulation indistinguishable from reality is impossible to achieve with limited resources.

 

A godlike assignment, yes, to copy all that is, which would require you to encompass all that is, which ya don't.  So , to get around that, you'd downshift the sim into Low Def, something your mere mortal super tech can handle.  Make it a bare bones reality.  With some dimensions shaved off of it.  ("Folded" away.)      A place where only basic pinballing of matter and energy happens.  Pong.  Not the richer reality that we all sense "should" exist somewhere beyond the veil.  Isn't that the central thrust of religions?   We've identified that this world falls short of the ideals we carry in our heads for some reason, such as perfect justice and the search for meaning.... as if we expected more from reality instinctively.  So we create this better world ourselves, call it the afterlife, and promise ourselves we'll get there someday, with God's blessing.  And this whole time our instincts have really been hipping us to the fact we're in a sim and a fuller existence awaits beyond it, if only the worldrunners would let us graduate out of this backwoods boondocks and cross over into the real reality?!?!

5 hours ago, Toth said:

 the merits and challenges of actually making a perfect simulation of all of reality:
So let's assume we reach a point where we have gathered enough knowledge about the physics of the universe that we can put all of its rules into a simulation that starts at the big bang and allows us to observe an exact copy of all of history

Well, i usually don't imagine that this universe is some perfect mimic of an identical one elsewhere.   That's a tough ask.   You'd have to already be God to perfectly re-create creation the exact same way again.  And if you were already God, why would that entertain you?   So, it's "easy" to imagine this world is a sim that's running as an independent experiment with its own timeline and history developing randomly like a crystal growth, with some surprising beauty and design taking shape as it complexifies.  (Enough so that when They peek in on us They say, "Aww, isn't that quaint.  Let's keep this universe running."       But it's "hard" to imagine a species like us developing to where we can perfectly model all of time in a searchable database so the sim = their original timeline & reality.   Because aren't electrons going to behave differently in universe 2: the sequel?  So you'd get different events playing out even if you started from the same exact big bang.

 

[felice]

6 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Bostrom points out that the simulation need not simulate full reality down to the quantum level. For example, the vast majority of the universe can just be superficially rendered, with no underlying substance. The table you are sitting at could just superficially appear to obey the laws of physics, but have nothing actually going on at the atomic level. If an observer then decides to examine it under an electron microscope, the simulation can just create the necessary atomic structures for the duration of the observation.

Why would such a simulation have internal observers? Aside from the ethical considerations of creating self-aware beings for an experiment, if you're simplifying everything, why not populate the simulations with NPCs instead of real people? And if you're not simulating the entire universe at the quantum level from the big bang onwards (surely a major undertaking even if you have access to the entire universe's resources, if it's possible at all), then you have to manually tell the simulation what it should contain. A quantum-level simulation of just the Earth might be more feasible, with the rest of the universe as a fancy skybox, but you'd still need a good reason to do it. Humanity already has the resources to carve a giant smiley face into the moon, but I'd be surprised if it ever actually did so.

An indistinguishable-from-reality simulation for people who physically exist outside the simulation is far more plausible (maybe even within our lifetimes), since it only needs to deal with a single limited observer (it may or may not interact with other instances of itself). But why simulate this? Why wipe the memory of the person experiencing the simulation, or keep infants plugged into it from birth? It may well happen at some point, but probably not in large numbers. I'd expect the majority of such simulations to be used by people who know they're in a simulation, and to be simulating more interesting worlds.

[Rippounet]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

It's just another regurgitation of religion, though.

3 hours ago, Jo498 said:

@Rippounet: Pick some spiritual tradition, say Buddhism or Christianity that has some vague similarities to the Simulation hypothesis, be it karmic retribution (go to simulated hell because of some behavior in simulated live), guidance and goal-setting by a superior being or whatever. You actually get the idea that the apparent world is only a poor shadow of the real (spiritual) world in some of these traditions.

It's totally a variation of religion. Except it's far more flexible in a number of ways: no established dogma, no "holy book" to be disproved, no moral imperatives... etc.

3 hours ago, Jo498 said:

If you don't believe any of these traditions and their spiritual implications for leading one's live (probably because you find it a bunch of superstitions), what makes you take Bostromism any more seriously? The pseudoscientific guise?

In our day and age the pseudoscience has far more potential to attract believers than any form of dusty religious dogma. It would only take a couple of ill-understood scientific discoveries for people to have faith in "Bostronism."

And of course, it's a way to have humans as the center of the universe again.

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Consider that the universe is an artificial creation, created by a God who stands outside that creation. To all intents and purposes that is the same as the universe being a simulation created by a programmer (or programming team, or even a super AI), even down to the moral argument: if you have the power to create artificial life with consciousness, even inside a computer programme, then why the fuck would you do so to inflict the most miserable horrors imaginable on so many of them?

It's the moral argument that is the main difference in my eyes.
In the simulation hypothesis there is no need for the creator to be moral themselves, or to expect their creations to be moral. Nor do they necessarily pay attention to us. You could even imagine that they died, or that we are the creators. It's religion à-la-carte, with each individual free to define the simulation according to their own spiritual needs. And those who need a purpose to life itself could start dreaming completely surreal objectives for humanity as a whole.

Pseudoscience aside, all the hypothesis does is say that the human experience can be simulated. That the sum of human thoughts, actions, and feelings within the physical world can be "summed up" as data, that the contant change that is all around us obeys to a given set of parameters.

As things stand it's a rather useless thought experiment. However, if technology advances to a point where humanity develops the knowledge and computing power to create a simulation that is convincing enough to fool our brains it will have many far-reaching implications. Could we create a simulation that is more pleasant than reality? Wouldn't many humans choose to live in such an "improved" simulation instead of the real thing?
And if we can create a simulation that is indeed better (without war, hunger, pain... etc), it follows that we would also have obtained the power to move reality in that direction, either by changing reality or by changing our perception of reality. Not only could it transform politics (since we would have a  form of "applied politics" distinct from history, it could also lead us to seek change in aspects of the human experience that we take for granted. For instance if the feeling of loneliness boils down to data (chemical exchanges in the brain) we could either seek to eliminate its causes (through social experimentation) or directly eliminate its perception (through drugs).

I don't think the simulation hypothesis is interesting because we might be living in a simulation: indeed whether we do or not matters little, since presumably we can't escape it. It's interesting because looking at the human experience as data grants the potential to affect it in ways we are only starting to consider. If for some reason people started to take it seriously we could see the development of new types of experiments, both exciting and terrifying. After all, once everything can be simulated, then anything can be changed.

[Altherion]

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

It's the moral argument that is the main difference in my eyes.
In the simulation hypothesis there is no need for the creator to be moral themselves, or to expect their creations to be moral. Nor do they necessarily pay attention to us. You could even imagine that they died, or that we are the creators. It's religion à-la-carte, with each individual free to define the simulation according to their own spiritual needs. And those who need a purpose to life itself could start dreaming completely surreal objectives for humanity as a whole.

But that bring back mormont's point: if the purpose and background of the simulation can be anything, then what difference does it make? Yes, it solves the problem of evil which plagues most religions, but it does this at the cost of all guidance for what to in this world.

It does make for some good science fiction though. Here's a short story in the form of a YouTube video. Interestingly enough, in the situation this story describes, the pain-free world you describe later would probably signal the end of the simulation.

[The Marquis de Leech]

12 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

5 is incorporated in 1, as it is consistent with all civilizations going extinct before being able to create a simulation indistinguishable from reality. After all, if they can never achieve it, then by default they will go extinct before doing so.

And 4 is the point that Rogan got stuck on, and which is refuted by the probabilities involved. Because, the probability that we are in the one and only base reality, rather than in one of the millions or billions of simulations to follow is, well, millions or billions to one. 

The difference between #1 and #5 is that #1 implies possibility (it's something that could be done in the future, if only a civilisation were to last long enough). #5 is that it, literally, cannot be done, regardless of whether a civilisation endures until the Heat Death of the Universe.

#4 isn't about us being a base reality (and in any case, we have no idea about probabilities). #4 is that no previous civilisation has even been in a position to consider this before. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

Anyway, Plato says hi. 

[The Mother of The Others]

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Could we create a simulation that is more pleasant than reality? Wouldn't many humans choose to live in such an "improved" simulation instead of the real thing?

Isn't it already happening?      And the artform is still in its infancy.  It'll become a huge problem. 

The skies are empty of any observable tech flashes from more advanced species because no civilization makes it past the point of, "Wait, I have the option of living forever safely tucked away in an everlasting orgasm dimension?  Or I could stay here and help rebuild Zylonia from Xintar's latest demolecularizing poo blast?  Hmmmm."   Civic duty will suffer!   More and more of your friends will start choosing the orgasm dimension.   Imagine the school dropout rate.

6 hours ago, felice said:

Why would such a simulation have internal observers?  why not populate the simulations with NPCs instead of real people? 

This universe seems alive.   Not necessarily meaningful but all events are granted significance by the flow of time and consequence.  An NPC wouldn't be at home here.  The video games they're from are finished products, capped off.  Inert.  This place isn't.   Angels sound more like npc's, and they're not at home here either.  Such automotons would not need the sensation of time passing in their blessed realm, they'd already be absolutely fulfilled (finished) and could just close their eyes and smile for eternity.   We suffer.  From incompleteness.  Presumably because we internal observers of this universe have some kicking yet to do, and like baby birds trapped inside an egg our discomfort may drive us to kick against the sides of this sim until we crack the code open.   

 

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A quantum-level simulation of just the Earth might be more feasible, with the rest of the universe as a fancy skybox, but you'd still need a good reason to do it. 

Would you?   What if there's something we're missing, like.....what if it's incredibly easy in the end?  Inevitable.  Like a sneeze.  Like a levi overflowing.  Into a new universe.  You know how none of us could create a person from scratch using a genetic laboratory because it takes soooooo much knowhow.....and yet, at the same time, any idjit can make a new person real easily?   Almost inevitably, via the orgasm. 

What if it's like that for reality too??

What if one universe automatically propagates itself like trees drop acorns.  If the copies degrade like cellular degradation over time, that could explain why this current reality seems to lack the desired level of precision in some ways (Life is pain!  Chaos is winning!)  Maybe our reality isn't fully functional anymore like when the multiverse was new.    You say 'simulation,' I say 'distant echo of the universe that started the kinetic ball rolling.'

So there's no experimenter needed to specifically code us into being; the universes are conducting the experiment.  They shake up the snowglobe of matter, most of it disappears into black holes inhaling lines of coccaine, or most is dark matter if that's still a thing...., and a tiny amount of matter congeals into us so we can ask "WTF?"    So it's not like we're the center of the universe in this model, it's like we're a colony of barnacles on the side of this ship headed into eternity on a heading that has nothing to do with us.  You look around this reality and you conclude that none of this cruise ship's itinerary was drawn up with the barnacles (life) in mind.

 

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An indistinguishable-from-reality simulation for people who physically exist outside the simulation is far more plausible

 We're skinsuits for beings from another universe who inhabit us like souls, lending us their incorporeal spark of consciousness?   Fine.  If you really want that.   Seems like a drag.  

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

Yes, it solves the problem of evil which plagues most religions, but it does this at the cost of all guidance for what to in this world.

Indeed. But then any belief-system based on technological progress and science (however loosely) would be void of moral guidance. It has to do with humans evenually mastering forces of creation  - as science-fiction has endlessly warned us about. If anything the simulation hypothesis is not even the scariest one imho because its effects may by definition be contained. Advances in physics and biology may soon beget far wilder beliefs, and the infinity of possibilities open to our species will require new dogmas.
If we go that far that is. In all likelihood the forces we unleash will destroy us before we can transcend our current existence. Who knows, that may even be the point.

[Kalbear]

There are some neat ways to fuck over people like Bostrom and Musk and a couple others with the Roko's Basilisk idea, but basically this gets to an interesting idea on the why of the simulation - ie, the simulation is designed entirely to determine what you (or others like you) would actually do in the real world by simulating a situation similar or identical to a problem the AI is trying to predict.

As to the simulation mattering or not, that really depends on the why of the simulation. If it's just a simulation for research purposes it likely means nothing you do matters one way or another about it - though I suppose if you tried to fuck up the simulation in general that could cause the whole thing to just end early as it was deemed no longer useful. But if it's a simulation with some specific reason in mind? You might be able to figure out the reason behind it, and choose to mess it up or aid it. 

And as pointed out, simulations often have ways to cheat the system. AIs already do that in really funny ways. If there are some goals in the system, chances are pretty good that there are ways to game that system as well. 

[Jo498]

5 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Anyway, Plato says hi. 

Not quite. To remain within the cave metaphor: In the simulation argument we are still the prisoners in the cave and the simulators are the ones doing the pageantry we are watching.

But there is no world outside the cave with the real things and the sun (or at least it is not necessary for the argument). So there is an important difference in that there seems to be no way to get "enlightened" and step out of the simulation but for Plato it is possible to get out of the cave by philosophy and maybe spiritual discipline. This lack of enlightenment is another point where the simulation is a poor simulacrum of more traditional religion or spirituality. And the simulation theory also misses the main point of the realm of forms (outside of the cave), namely to explain the regularity of the appearances, the objectivity of maths etc. It's the wrong kind of idealism, namely Berkeley's , not Plato's they give a simulacrum of.

[rotting sea cow]

22 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

5. A simulation indistinguishable from reality is impossible to achieve with limited resources. 

 

Yeah, a simulation indistinguishable from reality can be considered as reality and would take the size and energy of the whole Universe. 

I read somewhere that you can consider the Universe as a supercomputer and calculate the flops and i/o associated to it (with big uncertainties ofc).

[Rippounet]

29 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

Yeah, a simulation indistinguishable from reality can be considered as reality and would take the size and energy of the whole Universe.

That seems to me quite ridiculous. Our brains only perceive a tiny fraction of reality therefore it would take a very limited amount of resources to trick them.

[rotting sea cow]

Just now, Rippounet said:

That seems to me quite ridiculous. Our brains only perceive a tiny fraction of reality therefore it would take a very limited amount of resources to trick them. 

Yeah, of course, each of our 7 billions of brains perceive a tiny but different fraction of reality, sometime including profound, growing but at the same time consistent insight from the deep physical universe. Something you also need to include in the simulation.

 

[Rippounet]

11 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

Yeah, of course, each of our 7 billions of brains perceive a tiny but different fraction of reality, sometime including profound, growing but at the same time consistent insight from the deep physical universe. Something you also need to include in the simulation.

I cant' even tell when my gal's been to the hairdresser and you think my brain gets "insight from the deep physical universe" ?

[rotting sea cow]

7 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

I cant' even tell when my gal's been to the hairdresser and you think my brain gets "insight from the deep physical universe" ?

I'm very bad at recognizing faces, but I can perform some physical experiments that our simulators would need to take into account. Some  with things like how the sun shines in summer vs winter, a range of optical and sounds effects, how much your microwave heat your food and under what circumstances your car may fail. All of this would need to be simulated according to some consistent rules.

I tell you, it's not easy. Just try to simulate something simple and you will see. Our simulations, the ones you see in the press, are pathetic work compared with the reality

[Mentat]

17 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

Yeah, of course, each of our 7 billions of brains perceive a tiny but different fraction of reality, sometime including profound, growing but at the same time consistent insight from the deep physical universe. Something you also need to include in the simulation.

The easiest way to simulate a human experience would be to interface with the brain and make the brain believe it was seeing, hearing, feeling and smelling something that it wasn't.

Creating an entirely fictional experience in the way someone creates a Hollywood movie may seem complicated, but it doesn't necessarily have to work that way. Imagine you can record an hour of my life with a device and that someone else can then relive that hour with a similar device experimenting everything I felt just exactly the same way I did. Why, you could even record a persons entire life and then have that be the simulation. You could have millions of people living that one same life in a simulation.

It may seem that this wouldn't work because it would be a completely passive experience (the person in the simulation just gets to live a life vicariously, but doesn't get to make any decisions), but I think there's a good chance it would (the person in the simulation would simply get 'overwritten' by the original person who lived the life and come and regard their personality and decisions as their own).

[Liffguard]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

That seems to me quite ridiculous. Our brains only perceive a tiny fraction of reality therefore it would take a very limited amount of resources to trick them.

My understanding of the argument that our reality is likely to be a simulation goes like this:

- Simulation indistinguishable from reality is possible.

- If a simulation is indistinguishable from reality, then a simulation is capable of creating its own simulations.

- Therefore there’s an arbitrarily large number of simulations within simulations.

- Therefore it’s most likely that we are a simulation, and not the top-level physical reality.

But that falls apart if each simulation is less complex than its parent simulation, because eventually there’s too little complexity to create an indistinguishable model of reality.

So yes, in theory our simulation might not actually contain a fully simulated universe billions of light-years across and containing scales from particles to superclusters. It might be that the universe is “just” the perceptions of seven billion humans, with the simulation filling in the details of what each human happens to be perceiving at any given time. But that simulation is inherently simpler than a fully-realised universe. If we then go on to simulate a universe it must be simpler still, and so on.

I’m in no way a philosopher, and maybe my reasoning is off somewhere, but I can’t see how there would be endlessly recurring simulations. And that puts a limit on how likely it is that our universe is a simulation.

[maarsen]

Let us assume we are in a simulation. As I have mentioned before ,on different threads, Wolpert's proof that the universe cannot be understood by any being inside it, and conversely that any being outside this universe may be able to understand it but can do nothing to affect such a universe.  

With the above, the idea that we are or ar not in a simulation is a moot point.

Other realities do exist such as the reality of mathematics. No matter how much we abuse and manipulate them to our own ends, they cannot jump out of their reality and into ours. Video game characters can also be made to have lots of motivations and plot lines to follow but no matter how big the computer they have no chance of revolting and breaking into our reality.

Simulation talk is like god talk. Useless and meaningless.

[Kalbear]

The notion that video games have no chance of breaking into our reality is not particularly accurate. In the cheating ai thread I shared earlier there were some great examples - like when an ai was tasked with comparing two files for differences and found the best way to do so was to delete the files entirely (not something it was supposed to be able to do) and then compare nothing to nothing, which was a very fast perfect match. 

The problem with the simulation idea being perfect is that a perfect simulation is likely impossible due to energy constraints, so SOME shortcuts have to be done. And if there are shortcuts, there will be ways to exploit them.

[Jo498]

"Accuracy" is a distraction and basically a moot point. Recall, there is no way for those "inside" the simulation to compare it with an outside universe (if the latter exists at all).  Simulation is actually the wrong term, one should rather say virtuality or VR.  Nobody could know if it is a simulation of something similar or just a completely fantastic VR that bears little or no relation to a universe outside (if the latter exists at all).

Nobody in this VR has ever done a physics experiment. Certain "minds" have been fed certain data that created the appearance that they were doing a physics experiment or more likely that they read about such an experiment in a pop science magazin. Recall again, there is no need for 7 billion minds. It could be only you ( e.g. an apparent accountant who never did any physics beyong middle school (in her VR "life history") being fed the impression that you live in a world with 7 billion people etc.

If the virtuality hypothesis is correct, almost everything you believed is (utterly and completely) wrong. (Think of the matrix, only far more radical as you might not be a human in a vat but something else.) It's a much more radical reversion or leap of faith than starting to believe in e.g. traditional christianity. The latter leaves almost all of your former beliefs in place (there is world with humans and animals one interacts with, one's sense impressions and current science are basically correct about its domain etc.), it only requires to expand this to a bunch of miracles and an additional larger domain of being that is immaterial and includes angels etc.