The whole thing feels like encroachment of some kind of bizarre secular theology into physics. Grandiose and mostly non-falsifiable claims that can't be used to make any specific predictions. Thinking by analogy (with computers) rather then by deduction or induction. What makes this fundamentally different from, let's say, talks about the astral plane?
We don't have AI in GTA. We don't have strong AI at all. Our computing is running into all kinds of physical limitations right now. Moreover, the only thing that distinguishes GTA from accounting software is that we built it in such a way that it can be interpreted as a cruder version of the real world. There is no fundamental difference.
>The whole thing feels like encroachment of some kind of bizarre secular theology into physics. Grandiose and mostly non-falsifiable claims that can't be used to make any specific predictions.
Did you miss the part where they are doing just the opposite of that? The post's title is about scientists "looking for ways to put the hypothesis to the test...
The problem is that those experiments would invalidate only their assumption about the supposed structure of the supposed simulation, not the overall idea of the simulation. So the statement overall actually is non-falsifiable.
This is like saying "there are invisible elephants walking everywhere, let's try to see if they are made of neutrinos".
This is basically scientists re-discovering the "evil demon" / "brain in a vat" and not realizing it's kind of a tautological fallacy.
If life is a simulation, you can set an arbitrary boundary on how good you assume the simulation is, so any test you do would naturally be inadequate to confirm or deny the simulationness of life.
Couldn't it be the case that a lot of the scientists investigating this hypothesis are very philosophically-minded and are aware of all of these things and know it's probably non-falsifiable and futile? Even if you believe that, it still can't hurt to try. Science is all about testing things. If there are some things we can check, why not check them, just in case? And even if we don't get any closer to knowing whether or not we're in a simulation (which we probably won't), we could still learn other things in the process.
You can't disprove that you're in a simulation (e.g. "brain in a vat"). But it might be possible to prove (or at least provide strong evidence) that you're in one.
The thing humans seem to fear most is that our existence is just as ephemeral as that of the mayfly or some other being that is not troubled by self awareness. How far will we go in avoidance of that idea?
This is the point of Buddhism, the work of Alan Watts, etc. It's nothing new.
It's just a probability thought experiment. If there is only one real universe and there are (hypothetical) at least 2 simulations of universes (regardless of their fidelity) then the odds that you, an inhabitant of a universe, is in one of the simulated universes is 66%.
This can go wrong so fast. If there are only two kinds of people, winners of lotteries and losers of lotteries, it doesn't mean I have a 50% chance of winning the lottery.
The simulation has to be 'good enough' to make a thinking person (win the lottery); my mind has to be only smart enough to think of multiple universes but not perceive the obvious simulation artifacts; I have to be written (as a simulation myself) to be capable of accepting multiple universes.
Since we even ask ourselves "Are we a limited simulation artifact, or a real thinking person?" the answer is right there in the question.
An actual universe contains vastly more computational power than all simulated universes with that universe. Which means a thinking being is vastly more likely to be in the real universe.
The problem for me is the fidelity of the simulation. It’s like running a simulation of the hardware of a computer on the computer itself. eeven if you devote all of the computer’s resources, the simulation will run incredibly slowly. If you run the simulation in a fraction of the real hardware’s resources, the simulation will either have to be extremely crude and unrealistic, or equally extremely slowly. At which point, why would anyone do this?
A simulation like GTA is only useful because it is staggeringly crude, but the goals of the simulation are commensurately staggeringly modest. I just don’t see how running a simulation of our universe, in our universe, at high enough fidelity to appear real even under detailed scientific analysis, could be useful or worthwhile.
I’d like to see a more credible and compelling proposal than hand waved ‘history simulation’. What’s the point of a history simulation that runs many times slower than real time? If it’s low fidelity, it will also be low accuracy, so why simulating at the physics level at all? I don’t see how it would give useful results.
The whole thing feels like encroachment of some kind of bizarre secular theology into physics.
Yeah, people really really want to believe that they’re not just an accident, that hasn’t changed. “Simulation” is the new creation myth, and no more rigorous or convincing. It doesn’t even pretend to answer fundamental questions, it just puts them off by one level. It literally does nothing except make people rephrase the question slightly, a la “Ok then, how did the simulators’ universe come to exist?”
It’s as boring and inconclusive as religion, without the self-awareness in many of its adherents of it being explicitly religious. It has all of the characteristics of a religious belief, from the lack of falsifiability, to the existence of potentially interventionist powers beyond our reality, creators, a higher purpose, etc.
>The whole thing feels like encroachment of some kind of bizarre secular theology into physics. Grandiose and mostly non-falsifiable claims that can't be used to make any specific predictions.
Even though we have disproved many of the fundamental axioms which serve as basis for many religions, the human tendency towards religious thought remains. It's just currently in vogue to portray such tendencies as '(unfalsifiable) science' instead of 'divine word'.
I don't think it's quite that simple. The human brain is constantly building stories to explain context. A lot of studies have shown numerous ways in which the brain diverts from objective reality to make it fit whatever subjective reality fits its story best.
Such studies range from simple recall exercise to analyses of witness reliability.
Juicy bits like:
"Bias creeps into memory without our knowledge, without our awareness. While confidence and accuracy are generally correlated, when misleading information is given, witness confidence is often higher for the incorrect information than for the correct information. This leads many to question the competence of the average person to determine credibility issues." [1]
"R.T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate." [2]
Now imagine that story-telling reality-justifying part of the brain as intersubjective phenomenon in a large network of humans. What do you get? Concepts like "the nation", corporations and the kingdom of God.
A lot of these experiments start from a premise that the simulating universe has similar physics to the one being simulated and thus any short cuts might be noticed, but the outer universe could be be more have more complex (or just different) physics so the fact that ours doesn't match up with theirs doesn't mean ours isn't self consistent.
Sort of like how in Permutation City they create a simulated universe via cellular automata and then when they tell the residents of that universe they are simulated they don't believe them.
Yea. I don't see how it isn't a reductio ad absurdum either. If we're in a simulation then we know nothing about the physics or structure of 'the real world', including whether things like galaxies, planets, and evolution of advanced civilizations even exist or can exist.
Everyone is not making that assumption. Asking if photona behaves more predictably while not one is watching doesn't assume there is light in the parent universe. Similarly the article opens up the question that the root universe might have infinite computing power! That would be a very different universe indeed.
The simulation has probably a purpose like solving (or understanding) issues in the outer universe. It would be reasonnable to build the simulated universe as similar as possible to the outer universe.
How do you know our universe is not a child's toy for a race of deity-like beings? Or an art project?
Maybe the outer universe is populated by immortal godlike entities and has the equivalent of the guys who made Dwarf Fortress saying, "hmm, I wonder what would happen if there were a race of pseudo-intelligent creatures that just arbitrarily died after just a few million seconds?" Or, "I wonder what would happen if the fundamental building blocks of the universe did not behave predictably, but instead made a random choice to determine the outcome of every interaction?"
And maybe that programmer is just about to come back from his coffee break, look at what happened, and say, "hmm, that was boring", kill the process, and move on to other things.
When you're talking about something that could be powerful enough to simulate our entire universe, assuming that our sense of scale matters at all to it is pretty much the definition of hubris.
> It would be reasonnable to build the simulated universe as similar as possible to the outer universe.
... said one Tetris block to the other.
I would say the world is full of simulations, and while many will try to simulate aspects of the real world, there are just as many simulating completely or at least hugely different things from our world.
At some point a simulation may have the goal to understand the existing world. But once that field has been harvested enough and simulations on that scale have become a commodity people would probably move on from the things "that are", to the things that "could be", or are even impossible.
It would be reasonnable to build the simulated universe as similar as possible to the outer universe.
Even if that was the case we still could not tell the difference between a real universe and a simulated universe. We look at our universe and observe X, then what? Are we in a simulated universe and in the real universe something slightly different X' is true? Or is X simply true in the real universe in which we live? [And in a galaxy far away some aliens are running simulated universes in which something slightly different X' is true and observed by the simulated aliens?]
Whenever the simulation hypothesis comes up, there's always the questions like: Who is simulating us? Where is the power coming from? What happens if they pull the plug?
But why would any of that matter? In the end it's just a blob of data, modified by some algorithm with every tick. That's not much different than computing 2+2=4. Does it matter whose computer calculated that? Will the answer be different if they pull the plug? None of that matters: maybe multiple beings are simulating the exact same universe, or maybe none of them are. Why would anything need to be computed "physically" to make the simulation happen?
This take on the simulation hypothesis is the main plot point of "Permutation City" by Greg Egan, which to this day, is (IMHO) the most reasonable variant of the hypothesis I have read.
> Whenever the simulation hypothesis comes up, there's always the questions like: Who is simulating us? Where is the power coming from? What happens if they pull the plug? But why would any of that matter?
Reminds me of one of, in my opinion, the more underrated quotes from The Matrix:
Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist.
I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is
telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
After nine years, you know what I realize?
[Takes a bite of steak]
Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.
No matter how far back you go in any creation theory, something has to come from nothing. Multiverse and simulation theories kick the can down the road but don't answer the question "why is there something instead of nothing?".
I think that's why it's important to know where this "computer" came from that's simulating us if it's true. We can't just get one answer and give up, we have to keep following the trail.
You're projecting our experience of time onto what is a timeless mathematical essence. The idea that OP is referring to is that the universe "exists" simply because it is internally consistent.
>No matter how far back you go in any creation theory, something has to come from nothing. Multiverse and simulation theories kick the can down the road but don't answer the question "why is there something instead of nothing?".
The expectation that it's impossible for something to come out of nothing is just a superstition.
Literally nothing matters until a human stands up and proclaims it matters to them. This show boating about "why does it matter? It doesn't matter to me!" Is antithetical to where things get "meaning" in the first place, i.e. subjectively.
Maybe I worded it wrongly, sorry. I didn't mean "why does it matter?" as if people shouldn't care about those questions. It was rather a rhetorical question, to show that the "simulation" might not depend on anything "outside the simulation", so the questions would simply make no sense.
Then again, this was just one of many variants of the simulation hypothesis, just something unfalsifiable that shouldn't be taken too seriously. :-)
it begs the "Boltzmann brain" hypothesis - it's astronomically more likely that the neurons of my brain will spontaneous configure to make me see a tree rather than a tree spontaneously forming from a collections of atom.
The timeline for a BB is about 10E(10E50) years, quite a bit of time. But this gets me thinking as well: What kind of mess would that BB be?
Imagine you could actually survive that long, floating out in the black vacuum. In a flash, a BB appears in front of you, spun out of the electrons and dark energy. Over the eons you've figured out how to plug these BBs in and chat with them. But they are mostly just random fictions of physics. Sure, some astronomically small number of these BBs are the Kings of France, but nearly all of them are just gibbering lunatics of random thoughts and memories. I guess, in this manner, all possible versions of us are reincarnated as BBs in the void. The quantum chance of an entire universe winking into being is ~10E(10E(10E56)), so there's a bit of time to expect these things to happen. But God! How boring!
why not both? Why can't we be a Boltzmann brain that happens to spontaneously configure in such a way that we make measurements confirming our existence to be the result of a simulation?
Is that really any different/less likely than a Boltzmann brain with any other "understanding" on a topic? It seems just as likely to me as a Boltzmann brain spontaneously forming that understands our existence to be the result of religion or any other origin story.
And ultimately I think Boltzmann brain doesn't get talked about all that much because it's unfalsifiable by its very definition (as some might argue this hypothesis is), but it doesn't have all that much to talk about other than "yeah, I guess that can happen".
Similarly if it were "proven" true in any instant that a Boltzmann brain were to exist it would be inconsequential because the brain would cease to exist in the very "next" moment, there would be no purpose for the observation.
I've heard this argument a lot, but I'm not sure it stands up to scrutiny. Since this is HN, I'll put my counterargument in the context of computer code complexity.
How much effort is required to build an entirely new 'modern' operating system from scratch?
How much effort can be saved in that effort of producing obscene amount of complexity if you start with a small idea that is fairly generic and is able to be incrementally grown?
The Boltzmann brains specifically relies on an argument of statistical mechanics, which is really a statement about the average energy costs. But brain neurons forming spontaneously to the hallucination-in-isolation kind require extreme amounts of hidden Joule fees in creating that structure compared to a slow ramp up of complexity lowering the next set of energy barrier costs at an increasing rate.
This just scratches the surface of the idea of _catalysts_, that there are huge barriers between highly structured states arising from the chaotic, and even if the absolute energy cost is smaller it's still very possible to be more unlikely to spontaneous form if the physical dynamics of the universe itself have caveats as to how the successive tiers of compounding catalysts are constrained in ability to form, rate of formation, and bottlenecking supply of input reagants and the expedient utilization of outputs.
That’s nonsensical. Could a character in a computer game do that, even if they realized they were a character in a game? Their existence would be completely dependent on the hardware and software they ran on, and their existence would be unsupportable in the “real world” beyond. This is taking an already empty sci-if/religious speculation to a ridiculous conclusion.
Whenever this debate comes up, I find it interesting that it's rarely discussed the theological ramifications of this.
God is generally described as a being who is outside the plane of our existence, and created our existence.
It's intriguing to me that those who argue we're in a simulation have much less trouble having faith in that premise despite the difficulty in proving it being exactly the same as proving the existence of God.
If you think about it, the vast majority of the world which believes in a God essentially believes we're in a simulation.
The simulation hypothesis is pretty much a materialist's way of postponing the "hard problem of consciousness".
It's like Neo when he escaped the Matrix only to find himself in the subterranean world. What if THAT world was also a simulation? In fact it's hilarious because in the movie he would have far more ground to believe that he still wasn't free, seeing as he just escaped a simulation. Of course it's a movie...
I really think that the simulation hypothesis is a positive development. It shows that people are at least considering the question. It's like dipping toes in the cold water. You can see there is the willingness to go there, but they have their feet still firmly planted in the materialist view. It's an attempt at bridging the gap... but like they say in some teachings... to reach the other side of the river, you have to leave this one first =)
So you have guys like Bernardo Kastrup talking about idealism, or variations on it.
There is an enormous difference between entertaining the idea, and actually grasping what it means.
To truly grasp it, your world crumbles down. Everything you've built your life on, you have to see has never existed. Ultimately it's all from the same source. It's all for show. edit: didn't mean to be dramatic, but you would lose a lot of motivation in life, at least in the current paradigm. Or you have to live counter-current. Now you see your life as sacred and completely unknowable, but your values no longer fit in a society driven by separation and profit. A very uncomfortable position to be in?
In fact now that I think about it it's funny, because that's exactly the same with this "simulation" theory. You can see there has to be a disconnect here. There is the idea, and there is what it actually means. In theory it should in fact be extremely freeing to truly grasp that we are "simulated" since that would mean you no longer need to worry about dying, or striving for anything at all. Because by the mere fact of being simulated, somehow someone deemed it worthwhiole to spend the energy to do so. Your entire life purpose and meaning is self evident.
Yet we don't feel free, we still strive to "become" someone.. to "achieve" something... so that tells us two things: 1) we are merely entertaining ideas and 2) we are biologically wired to believe to we do exist, and that we are not simulated (much has to do with the left brain hemisphere, I am guessing).
That's an interesting thought for sure, I hadn't made the direct connection that essentially the simulation creator would be "God".
I think at least for me personally, I think the reason for "less trouble having faith" in this premise is the implications of believing it. Religion asks things of you to subscribe such as Sundays, cognitive dissonance with scientific findings (not all religions, I recognize generalizations are dangerous), tithing (again, some not all), and any number of social "requirements" of belonging to the community.
Playing around with this idea asks nothing but idle brain cycles and maybe some funny looks for saying crazy sounding things. Every time this debate comes up for me I think "Oh fun, I'll go play around with this some more and see if I find anything new" and then I forget about it until next time. I don't shape my life around it, I don't make any decisions based upon it, I don't get upset if other people dismiss it or don't "believe" it, and I don't even necessarily engage with the topic every time I see it.
Based on all of the last paragraph I'd say it's even a fair question how much I do "believe" this premise at all. My answer to that is that I don't believe in it in any sort of meaningful way, it's fun though.
I've never heard that a qualifier for the simulation hypothesis is that it must be finite. For example, there could be infinitely many simulations recursively, or there could be a sufficiently advanced extra-dimensional lifeform that has generated an unbounded simulation that we live in.
A friend and I had some deep discussions about this last year. We figured out the basic outline of an escape plan, but unfortunately there is no way to determine if it actually succeeds.
Essentially it boils down to creating an anomaly that cannot be ignored. Any simulation being run at that level should also have some sort of way of checking the contents and flagging things of interest for whoever is running the simulation.
By creating an anomaly you gain attention. That attention may allow you to be deemed valuable. If you are valuable, then you may be recorded outside the simulation for some purpose. That may be the only route of escape, and it may only happen as the data from the simulation is checked in post processing...
In conway' s game of life the glider is an example of escape. The pattern is useful, so we copy it from simulation to simulation for reasons it cannot comprehend. It has escaped.
I'm not sure how it matters if we're in one. Our goal in all realities should be to break free of that reality's constraints.
On the detection part, I predict we won't figure this out until we start simulating realities ourselves; then for each bug we have to fix, we'll check it against our reality. "A simulation inside a simulation!"
Or we may realize that energy is being supplied to the universe from an external source.
Or we may be able to rowhammer a neighboring simulation (or any other part of the machine really). Of course we might accidentally cause memory corruption and destroy our universe, but we might also get root access! Basically execute an in-universe hack to escape our simulation confines. Fun to think about how this would all seem to aliens in the simulation next door when humanity first fiddles with their data then is able to execute arbitrary code.
If we can detect that we're running in a VM, this by definition means that the virtualization is imperfect. We could use these imperfections both to obtain abilities not normally allowed by the VM rules, or contact either the "supervisor" or "parallel VMs", again, gaining abilities not normally possible.
So finding a reliable proof that our world is a simulation automatically means finding some kind of an escape hatch from it, or at least a peephole to the "outside", which arguably would matter.
If we're in a "simulation", ie, in a computer program, there is a possibility we may find a bug, an exploit, or a backdoor, that would let us become "superuser" and do magical god-like things (and most probably, just crash the process, destroying the universe and all there is inside it).
On the other hand, simulation or not, this doesn't exclude or prove the existence of God. A simulation could be generated by unconscious physical processes in the super universe, as they could be created by "people" in that super universes (ie. gods). If the universe is not a simulation, it can still be a creation by a God, or happen to be by itself (or some unconscious meta-physical process).
And as you note, it's also orthogonal to the question of whether the universe is a closed system or not. (both information-wise and energy-wise).
I probably don't understand the argument. My limited understanding is it's a thought experiment
1. We have GTA5
2. GTA5 will continue to improve until there are actual A.I. NPCs in it
3. Those NPCs will not know they are living in a simulated world
4. Every PS2000 playing GTA5 = more simulated people than actual people. QED, odds are we're simulated people
The problem I have with this is the basic premise. Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe? It seems impossible to me. The argument is supposed to be that like GTA5 only the parts being observed by the NPCs need to be simulated (actually GTA5 is only parts observed by the player).
In either case that seems false. In order for the causality to work out when an NPC observes any part of the universe all causality for all atoms for the NPC's observation need to be calculated since they were last observed. I don't believe you can take shortcuts like a game does.
Also, games rarely save the state of the entire game world, usually they reset any changes in few seconds.
Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are impossible problems
* You need more atoms in the universe to simulate a universe (so that means the outer universe has to be several orders of magnitudes larger than this one)
* You can't actually take any shortcuts so you need insane processing power. More processing power than our entire universe.
I seems like the basic premise, that it's obvious we'll eventually have universe simulators, is just flat out false. We could make a holodeck maybe, but it will have to be limited the same way games today are limited since otherwise it would require nearly infinite storage and computing power.
> Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are impossible problems
Our universe has 10^70 atoms (or whatever). This is an arbitrary number. Maybe in the host universe there are 10^700000000 atoms, and 10^70 atoms are what fits inside a small "tenis ball" from that universe.
BTW, we are already running pretty accurate physicals simulations, if only for extremely short periods of time and small spaces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD
Simulating a lot of atoms doesn't require more atoms, with quantum mechanics. You only need to compute the wave function! You need to instanciate atoms only when they're observed (and you can garbage collect them once they vanish again into the wave probability).
I think there are deeper problems in the argument than merely "it would take a lot of resources". I'm concerned by arguments in the form "I can imagine that something is true, therefore it is true". From this perspective, I see the argument like this:
1) (Assume that) we can create a simulation with intelligent beings in it.
2) Therefore, it is not impossible that someone has created a simulation in which we are the simulated intelligent beings.
3) Therefore, it is highly likely that we live in a simulation.
I simply don't get the logical implication between 2 and 3 from "not impossible" to "highly likely". I have the same concerns with the ontological argument for the existence of God:
1) I can imagine a being that is perfect and all-powerful.
2) This being therefore exists, because if it didn't it wouldn't be perfect nor all-powerful.
In both cases I see an extreme case of begging the question.
Who says that the simulation has to be done in realtime?
Without any outside reference the NPCs inside the simulation have no way to know that one second in the simulation has taken them for example a year in real-life.
Elon Musk did respond to a similar question that you have asked here. The entire Universe need not be simulated at the same time. It could be a generative program. The reality could be limited to just what we are observing.
If you have enough resources to lazily simulate the entire observed universe, you probably have enough resources to consistently simulate the entire observable universe.
I haven't kept up with the latest out-of-universe hardware upgrades, so I could be talking out of my ass here.
With that said, why would you simulate something so ridiculously large and detailed if you only had the resources to run a small portion of it at a time? It's like buying an 8K 3D monitor and hoping your 3DFx Voodoo 2 will do the trick.
>Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe?
For you to be a simulation doesn't require the entire universe be simulated. It only requires simulation of you and the inputs you receive. Scale that and you can simulate a population to see how they react, all without needing to simulate every unobserved event to the finest detail.
It's how we can simulate all sorts of things now that relate to the physical world without having to simulate the physical world in it's entirety.
you need to simulate unobserved events when they are observed. I'm not looking at the Nile river right now but when I look at in again in 50 years it better look correct for the 50 years that passed. For it to look correct requires simulating everything about it, everything feeding into it, everything it affects, from the moment I stopped looking at it until I looked at it again.
Please note how the simulated world in GTA5 is based not on atoms, but on entirely different concepts which allow modeling "large" amounts of in-world physics using a "small" amount of out-of-world atoms.
As long as we don't suppose that the simulated world copies all the features of the simulator-running world, there should not be a problem of needing more outer-world stuff to simulate a given amount of in-simulation stuff. They can just be quite different.
There's still an information-theoretic argument that the complexity of a simulated world cannot exceed the complexity of the outer "true real" simulator-running world. We still could see "more complex" activity of a simulated world by spending more "real" time to model "simulated" time, and having the simulated world to more often and more evenly fill various parts of its phase space, as opposed to the outer, simulator-running world.
> note how the simulated world in GTA5 is based not on atoms
That's actually my point. GTA5 doesn't work on atoms but the simulation of our actual universe would have to. Any NPC in our simulated universe can turn any building into rubble, turn any sand into glass, empty any lake, divert any river, put any drop of water under a microscope, mix any chemicals and watch their reactions, put any atoms in a particle accelerator, draw an animated stick figure with an electron microscope.
I'm arguing we can never simulate a universe because we'd need a computer larger than the entire universe to do it. I'm arguing that the thought experiment of "simulations will continue to get better until we can put A.I NPCs in a simulation of our universe and it will be impossible for them to tell the difference" is itself impossible.
The argument for why it's "likely" we are in a simulation is because it's argued it's inevitable we'll create such simulations ourselves. In doing that there will be more simulated people than not. It a huge assumption that "it's inevitable we'll create such simulations ourselves". If that is not inevitable then the likelihood we're in one drops dramatically.
A counter argument is we'll simulate a smaller universe for our NPCs but that argument doesn't really hold as it would argue that every universe is a simulation running in a larger universe to infinity. That would require infinite complexity
> Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe?
In quantum mechanics there is something called collapse of wave function, which takes place when observer is making an observation on certain object. When there is no observer state goes into superposition which means it is one and zero at same time. So basically this means that object can exist and doesn't exist at same time.
That's why Einstein said he likes to think that moon exist even if no one is watching.
This looks similar to mechanism we use in rendering games today, you only load and render the view that players is looking at and the stage/level that player is in. Of course it's a lot more simplified in case of games. You can save resources using those methods while making huge scale simulations.
I wonder if by the time we solve a 'theory of everything' (or understand by some other means the basic mechanisms of our universe), we'll be able to efficiently, procedurally, generate a simulated universe.
Also, the Fermi paradox could be a solution - we don't see any other alien life forms because we're running in a computationally limited simulator, and everything outside our (relatively easy to simulate) solar system is running on minimum resolution (so to speak).
But we could simulate (in theory) a smaller universe than our own. Maybe that is what is happening. We can also simulate alternate physical properties. Maybe the simulating universe has vastly different rules/requirements.
> "As a huge bonus, Campbell claims the experiment could also explain the weird way that events in quantum physics seem to be influenced by the observer: It may be a quirk of the simulation we live in, not a fundamental aspect of reality."
I'm not a quantum physicist, but my spidey senses are tingling. Isn't this a common misrepresentation of a relatively well-known behavior in quantum mechanics, analogous to the Fourier transform trade-offs where a narrow window yields a poor resolution?
That's the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. He's talking about the observer effect, which is a different thing entirely. If you want some background on it, google the double slit experiment. This isn't an endorsement of Campbell's claims above, of course, just some clarity on what he's talking about.
You're talking about the Uncertainty Principle, which is indeed a property of all waves and not unique to Quantum Physics (I like to use the analogy of taking a single slice of a 44.1khz PWM data stream of an audio signal, in which you'd have 100% certainty of amplitude and 100% uncertainty of frequency. The more slices you take the more certain you are of frequency, less of amplitude.) Popular science and even QM itself has deeply confused itself on this issue over the past 100 years, yet it is as based in pure logic as the value of π is; nothing to do with the nature of the universe we happen to live in.
But they seem to be talking about the so-called Observer Effect, an even more deeply confused issue in QM. I'm not a physicist but from what I've read it can be understood as a quantum system becoming entangled with another system, the detector/observer, which causes the original system to lose coherence. But nothing magical is happening due to consciousness or whatever, it's just 2 or more systems interacting and interfering with each other. The trick is that "observation" of a quantum system is said to collapse the wave function into well defined values instead of probabilities. I think this is explained well by Quantum decoherence[1], that the isolated system acquires phases from its surrounding environment and thus loses it's original coherence and superposition, however the total system of observed and observer is still coherent (and I'm not totally clear on why the new system takes up well defined values for certain properties, but it seems to be some dynamical time evolved process especially when a small system interacts with a much bigger one, if you can follow the linked article).
And yes, I've heard these confusions combined into the notion that the universe only generates information when observed by some consciousness as some kind of space optimization, so maybe that is what the article is getting at.
Again, not a physicist, so I could be just as confused as everyone else, but I prefer to try to understand things these ways than trying to make sense of the constant refrain of dead and alive cats, the darkside of the moon not existing until we sent a probe to see it, and "you might be able to be in two places at once, just like a quantum particle!" we get from pop-sci and some grant seeking scientists.
I was taught the ‘wave (eigenstate) collapse upon measurement’ concept, and in the lab, it’s just silly; the decoherence concept you describe is quite obviously the proper way to think about it, or we wouldn’t have to worry about losses from anything that wasn’t measured.
Simple explanation of QM: a classical object has a vector of properties, but in quantum this is a matrix. Any interaction is a matrix multiplication. After a bunch of matrix multiplications, you end up with a single eigenvalue, and now the quantum property matrix acts just like the classical property vector. The choice of linear operators, and probably the internal linearity among properties as well, is just a simplification, but otherwise we’d be mathematically lost in a world of functions that arbitrarily modify other functions.
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We don't have AI in GTA. We don't have strong AI at all. Our computing is running into all kinds of physical limitations right now. Moreover, the only thing that distinguishes GTA from accounting software is that we built it in such a way that it can be interpreted as a cruder version of the real world. There is no fundamental difference.
Did you miss the part where they are doing just the opposite of that? The post's title is about scientists "looking for ways to put the hypothesis to the test...
This is like saying "there are invisible elephants walking everywhere, let's try to see if they are made of neutrinos".
If life is a simulation, you can set an arbitrary boundary on how good you assume the simulation is, so any test you do would naturally be inadequate to confirm or deny the simulationness of life.
This is the point of Buddhism, the work of Alan Watts, etc. It's nothing new.
The simulation has to be 'good enough' to make a thinking person (win the lottery); my mind has to be only smart enough to think of multiple universes but not perceive the obvious simulation artifacts; I have to be written (as a simulation myself) to be capable of accepting multiple universes.
Since we even ask ourselves "Are we a limited simulation artifact, or a real thinking person?" the answer is right there in the question.
A simulation like GTA is only useful because it is staggeringly crude, but the goals of the simulation are commensurately staggeringly modest. I just don’t see how running a simulation of our universe, in our universe, at high enough fidelity to appear real even under detailed scientific analysis, could be useful or worthwhile.
I’d like to see a more credible and compelling proposal than hand waved ‘history simulation’. What’s the point of a history simulation that runs many times slower than real time? If it’s low fidelity, it will also be low accuracy, so why simulating at the physics level at all? I don’t see how it would give useful results.
Yeah, people really really want to believe that they’re not just an accident, that hasn’t changed. “Simulation” is the new creation myth, and no more rigorous or convincing. It doesn’t even pretend to answer fundamental questions, it just puts them off by one level. It literally does nothing except make people rephrase the question slightly, a la “Ok then, how did the simulators’ universe come to exist?”
It’s as boring and inconclusive as religion, without the self-awareness in many of its adherents of it being explicitly religious. It has all of the characteristics of a religious belief, from the lack of falsifiability, to the existence of potentially interventionist powers beyond our reality, creators, a higher purpose, etc.
Even though we have disproved many of the fundamental axioms which serve as basis for many religions, the human tendency towards religious thought remains. It's just currently in vogue to portray such tendencies as '(unfalsifiable) science' instead of 'divine word'.
Such studies range from simple recall exercise to analyses of witness reliability.
Juicy bits like:
"Bias creeps into memory without our knowledge, without our awareness. While confidence and accuracy are generally correlated, when misleading information is given, witness confidence is often higher for the incorrect information than for the correct information. This leads many to question the competence of the average person to determine credibility issues." [1]
"R.T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate." [2]
Also, this is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation
Now imagine that story-telling reality-justifying part of the brain as intersubjective phenomenon in a large network of humans. What do you get? Concepts like "the nation", corporations and the kingdom of God.
[1] https://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.h...
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/idea-happe...
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Sort of like how in Permutation City they create a simulated universe via cellular automata and then when they tell the residents of that universe they are simulated they don't believe them.
What purpose does Goat Simulator http://www.goat-simulator.com/ serve to solve/understand issues in our universe?
How do you know our universe is not a child's toy for a race of deity-like beings? Or an art project?
Maybe the outer universe is populated by immortal godlike entities and has the equivalent of the guys who made Dwarf Fortress saying, "hmm, I wonder what would happen if there were a race of pseudo-intelligent creatures that just arbitrarily died after just a few million seconds?" Or, "I wonder what would happen if the fundamental building blocks of the universe did not behave predictably, but instead made a random choice to determine the outcome of every interaction?"
And maybe that programmer is just about to come back from his coffee break, look at what happened, and say, "hmm, that was boring", kill the process, and move on to other things.
When you're talking about something that could be powerful enough to simulate our entire universe, assuming that our sense of scale matters at all to it is pretty much the definition of hubris.
... said one Tetris block to the other.
I would say the world is full of simulations, and while many will try to simulate aspects of the real world, there are just as many simulating completely or at least hugely different things from our world.
At some point a simulation may have the goal to understand the existing world. But once that field has been harvested enough and simulations on that scale have become a commodity people would probably move on from the things "that are", to the things that "could be", or are even impossible.
Even if that was the case we still could not tell the difference between a real universe and a simulated universe. We look at our universe and observe X, then what? Are we in a simulated universe and in the real universe something slightly different X' is true? Or is X simply true in the real universe in which we live? [And in a galaxy far away some aliens are running simulated universes in which something slightly different X' is true and observed by the simulated aliens?]
But why would any of that matter? In the end it's just a blob of data, modified by some algorithm with every tick. That's not much different than computing 2+2=4. Does it matter whose computer calculated that? Will the answer be different if they pull the plug? None of that matters: maybe multiple beings are simulating the exact same universe, or maybe none of them are. Why would anything need to be computed "physically" to make the simulation happen?
This take on the simulation hypothesis is the main plot point of "Permutation City" by Greg Egan, which to this day, is (IMHO) the most reasonable variant of the hypothesis I have read.
Reminds me of one of, in my opinion, the more underrated quotes from The Matrix:
I think that's why it's important to know where this "computer" came from that's simulating us if it's true. We can't just get one answer and give up, we have to keep following the trail.
The expectation that it's impossible for something to come out of nothing is just a superstition.
In short, if it matters to me, it matters.
Then again, this was just one of many variants of the simulation hypothesis, just something unfalsifiable that shouldn't be taken too seriously. :-)
You can't make a more general statement of meaning out of your very specific declaration.
The timeline for a BB is about 10E(10E50) years, quite a bit of time. But this gets me thinking as well: What kind of mess would that BB be?
Imagine you could actually survive that long, floating out in the black vacuum. In a flash, a BB appears in front of you, spun out of the electrons and dark energy. Over the eons you've figured out how to plug these BBs in and chat with them. But they are mostly just random fictions of physics. Sure, some astronomically small number of these BBs are the Kings of France, but nearly all of them are just gibbering lunatics of random thoughts and memories. I guess, in this manner, all possible versions of us are reincarnated as BBs in the void. The quantum chance of an entire universe winking into being is ~10E(10E(10E56)), so there's a bit of time to expect these things to happen. But God! How boring!
Is that really any different/less likely than a Boltzmann brain with any other "understanding" on a topic? It seems just as likely to me as a Boltzmann brain spontaneously forming that understands our existence to be the result of religion or any other origin story.
And ultimately I think Boltzmann brain doesn't get talked about all that much because it's unfalsifiable by its very definition (as some might argue this hypothesis is), but it doesn't have all that much to talk about other than "yeah, I guess that can happen".
Similarly if it were "proven" true in any instant that a Boltzmann brain were to exist it would be inconsequential because the brain would cease to exist in the very "next" moment, there would be no purpose for the observation.
How much effort is required to build an entirely new 'modern' operating system from scratch?
How much effort can be saved in that effort of producing obscene amount of complexity if you start with a small idea that is fairly generic and is able to be incrementally grown?
The Boltzmann brains specifically relies on an argument of statistical mechanics, which is really a statement about the average energy costs. But brain neurons forming spontaneously to the hallucination-in-isolation kind require extreme amounts of hidden Joule fees in creating that structure compared to a slow ramp up of complexity lowering the next set of energy barrier costs at an increasing rate.
This just scratches the surface of the idea of _catalysts_, that there are huge barriers between highly structured states arising from the chaotic, and even if the absolute energy cost is smaller it's still very possible to be more unlikely to spontaneous form if the physical dynamics of the universe itself have caveats as to how the successive tiers of compounding catalysts are constrained in ability to form, rate of formation, and bottlenecking supply of input reagants and the expedient utilization of outputs.
God is generally described as a being who is outside the plane of our existence, and created our existence.
It's intriguing to me that those who argue we're in a simulation have much less trouble having faith in that premise despite the difficulty in proving it being exactly the same as proving the existence of God.
If you think about it, the vast majority of the world which believes in a God essentially believes we're in a simulation.
It's like Neo when he escaped the Matrix only to find himself in the subterranean world. What if THAT world was also a simulation? In fact it's hilarious because in the movie he would have far more ground to believe that he still wasn't free, seeing as he just escaped a simulation. Of course it's a movie...
I really think that the simulation hypothesis is a positive development. It shows that people are at least considering the question. It's like dipping toes in the cold water. You can see there is the willingness to go there, but they have their feet still firmly planted in the materialist view. It's an attempt at bridging the gap... but like they say in some teachings... to reach the other side of the river, you have to leave this one first =)
So you have guys like Bernardo Kastrup talking about idealism, or variations on it.
There is an enormous difference between entertaining the idea, and actually grasping what it means.
To truly grasp it, your world crumbles down. Everything you've built your life on, you have to see has never existed. Ultimately it's all from the same source. It's all for show. edit: didn't mean to be dramatic, but you would lose a lot of motivation in life, at least in the current paradigm. Or you have to live counter-current. Now you see your life as sacred and completely unknowable, but your values no longer fit in a society driven by separation and profit. A very uncomfortable position to be in?
In fact now that I think about it it's funny, because that's exactly the same with this "simulation" theory. You can see there has to be a disconnect here. There is the idea, and there is what it actually means. In theory it should in fact be extremely freeing to truly grasp that we are "simulated" since that would mean you no longer need to worry about dying, or striving for anything at all. Because by the mere fact of being simulated, somehow someone deemed it worthwhiole to spend the energy to do so. Your entire life purpose and meaning is self evident.
Yet we don't feel free, we still strive to "become" someone.. to "achieve" something... so that tells us two things: 1) we are merely entertaining ideas and 2) we are biologically wired to believe to we do exist, and that we are not simulated (much has to do with the left brain hemisphere, I am guessing).
I think at least for me personally, I think the reason for "less trouble having faith" in this premise is the implications of believing it. Religion asks things of you to subscribe such as Sundays, cognitive dissonance with scientific findings (not all religions, I recognize generalizations are dangerous), tithing (again, some not all), and any number of social "requirements" of belonging to the community.
Playing around with this idea asks nothing but idle brain cycles and maybe some funny looks for saying crazy sounding things. Every time this debate comes up for me I think "Oh fun, I'll go play around with this some more and see if I find anything new" and then I forget about it until next time. I don't shape my life around it, I don't make any decisions based upon it, I don't get upset if other people dismiss it or don't "believe" it, and I don't even necessarily engage with the topic every time I see it.
Based on all of the last paragraph I'd say it's even a fair question how much I do "believe" this premise at all. My answer to that is that I don't believe in it in any sort of meaningful way, it's fun though.
Essentially it boils down to creating an anomaly that cannot be ignored. Any simulation being run at that level should also have some sort of way of checking the contents and flagging things of interest for whoever is running the simulation.
By creating an anomaly you gain attention. That attention may allow you to be deemed valuable. If you are valuable, then you may be recorded outside the simulation for some purpose. That may be the only route of escape, and it may only happen as the data from the simulation is checked in post processing...
In conway' s game of life the glider is an example of escape. The pattern is useful, so we copy it from simulation to simulation for reasons it cannot comprehend. It has escaped.
On the detection part, I predict we won't figure this out until we start simulating realities ourselves; then for each bug we have to fix, we'll check it against our reality. "A simulation inside a simulation!"
Or we may realize that energy is being supplied to the universe from an external source.
Or we may be able to rowhammer a neighboring simulation (or any other part of the machine really). Of course we might accidentally cause memory corruption and destroy our universe, but we might also get root access! Basically execute an in-universe hack to escape our simulation confines. Fun to think about how this would all seem to aliens in the simulation next door when humanity first fiddles with their data then is able to execute arbitrary code.
Eh? Even if we cease to exist “outside” this “reality”?
What does it mean for a 2D pixelated game sprite to “break free out of its reality”?
So finding a reliable proof that our world is a simulation automatically means finding some kind of an escape hatch from it, or at least a peephole to the "outside", which arguably would matter.
On the other hand, simulation or not, this doesn't exclude or prove the existence of God. A simulation could be generated by unconscious physical processes in the super universe, as they could be created by "people" in that super universes (ie. gods). If the universe is not a simulation, it can still be a creation by a God, or happen to be by itself (or some unconscious meta-physical process).
And as you note, it's also orthogonal to the question of whether the universe is a closed system or not. (both information-wise and energy-wise).
Like some neural net life forms found such an exploit in a physics simulation.
1. We have GTA5
2. GTA5 will continue to improve until there are actual A.I. NPCs in it
3. Those NPCs will not know they are living in a simulated world
4. Every PS2000 playing GTA5 = more simulated people than actual people. QED, odds are we're simulated people
The problem I have with this is the basic premise. Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe? It seems impossible to me. The argument is supposed to be that like GTA5 only the parts being observed by the NPCs need to be simulated (actually GTA5 is only parts observed by the player).
In either case that seems false. In order for the causality to work out when an NPC observes any part of the universe all causality for all atoms for the NPC's observation need to be calculated since they were last observed. I don't believe you can take shortcuts like a game does.
Also, games rarely save the state of the entire game world, usually they reset any changes in few seconds.
Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are impossible problems
* You need more atoms in the universe to simulate a universe (so that means the outer universe has to be several orders of magnitudes larger than this one)
* You can't actually take any shortcuts so you need insane processing power. More processing power than our entire universe.
I seems like the basic premise, that it's obvious we'll eventually have universe simulators, is just flat out false. We could make a holodeck maybe, but it will have to be limited the same way games today are limited since otherwise it would require nearly infinite storage and computing power.
Our universe has 10^70 atoms (or whatever). This is an arbitrary number. Maybe in the host universe there are 10^700000000 atoms, and 10^70 atoms are what fits inside a small "tenis ball" from that universe.
BTW, we are already running pretty accurate physicals simulations, if only for extremely short periods of time and small spaces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD
1) (Assume that) we can create a simulation with intelligent beings in it.
2) Therefore, it is not impossible that someone has created a simulation in which we are the simulated intelligent beings.
3) Therefore, it is highly likely that we live in a simulation.
I simply don't get the logical implication between 2 and 3 from "not impossible" to "highly likely". I have the same concerns with the ontological argument for the existence of God:
1) I can imagine a being that is perfect and all-powerful.
2) This being therefore exists, because if it didn't it wouldn't be perfect nor all-powerful.
In both cases I see an extreme case of begging the question.
1. Assuming any rate of improvement of simulations there will reach a point where a simulation is indistinguishable from reality
2. Advanced species have reached this point and are interested in running simulated universes.
3. There are likely to be many more simulated universes than real ones
4. Given the previous 3 it is more likely that we are in a simulated universe than a real one.
Read the original paper from Bostrom for yourself. https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
Without any outside reference the NPCs inside the simulation have no way to know that one second in the simulation has taken them for example a year in real-life.
I haven't kept up with the latest out-of-universe hardware upgrades, so I could be talking out of my ass here.
With that said, why would you simulate something so ridiculously large and detailed if you only had the resources to run a small portion of it at a time? It's like buying an 8K 3D monitor and hoping your 3DFx Voodoo 2 will do the trick.
For you to be a simulation doesn't require the entire universe be simulated. It only requires simulation of you and the inputs you receive. Scale that and you can simulate a population to see how they react, all without needing to simulate every unobserved event to the finest detail.
It's how we can simulate all sorts of things now that relate to the physical world without having to simulate the physical world in it's entirety.
As long as we don't suppose that the simulated world copies all the features of the simulator-running world, there should not be a problem of needing more outer-world stuff to simulate a given amount of in-simulation stuff. They can just be quite different.
There's still an information-theoretic argument that the complexity of a simulated world cannot exceed the complexity of the outer "true real" simulator-running world. We still could see "more complex" activity of a simulated world by spending more "real" time to model "simulated" time, and having the simulated world to more often and more evenly fill various parts of its phase space, as opposed to the outer, simulator-running world.
That's actually my point. GTA5 doesn't work on atoms but the simulation of our actual universe would have to. Any NPC in our simulated universe can turn any building into rubble, turn any sand into glass, empty any lake, divert any river, put any drop of water under a microscope, mix any chemicals and watch their reactions, put any atoms in a particle accelerator, draw an animated stick figure with an electron microscope.
I'm arguing we can never simulate a universe because we'd need a computer larger than the entire universe to do it. I'm arguing that the thought experiment of "simulations will continue to get better until we can put A.I NPCs in a simulation of our universe and it will be impossible for them to tell the difference" is itself impossible.
The argument for why it's "likely" we are in a simulation is because it's argued it's inevitable we'll create such simulations ourselves. In doing that there will be more simulated people than not. It a huge assumption that "it's inevitable we'll create such simulations ourselves". If that is not inevitable then the likelihood we're in one drops dramatically.
A counter argument is we'll simulate a smaller universe for our NPCs but that argument doesn't really hold as it would argue that every universe is a simulation running in a larger universe to infinity. That would require infinite complexity
In quantum mechanics there is something called collapse of wave function, which takes place when observer is making an observation on certain object. When there is no observer state goes into superposition which means it is one and zero at same time. So basically this means that object can exist and doesn't exist at same time.
That's why Einstein said he likes to think that moon exist even if no one is watching.
This looks similar to mechanism we use in rendering games today, you only load and render the view that players is looking at and the stage/level that player is in. Of course it's a lot more simplified in case of games. You can save resources using those methods while making huge scale simulations.
Also, the Fermi paradox could be a solution - we don't see any other alien life forms because we're running in a computationally limited simulator, and everything outside our (relatively easy to simulate) solar system is running on minimum resolution (so to speak).
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I'm not a quantum physicist, but my spidey senses are tingling. Isn't this a common misrepresentation of a relatively well-known behavior in quantum mechanics, analogous to the Fourier transform trade-offs where a narrow window yields a poor resolution?
But they seem to be talking about the so-called Observer Effect, an even more deeply confused issue in QM. I'm not a physicist but from what I've read it can be understood as a quantum system becoming entangled with another system, the detector/observer, which causes the original system to lose coherence. But nothing magical is happening due to consciousness or whatever, it's just 2 or more systems interacting and interfering with each other. The trick is that "observation" of a quantum system is said to collapse the wave function into well defined values instead of probabilities. I think this is explained well by Quantum decoherence[1], that the isolated system acquires phases from its surrounding environment and thus loses it's original coherence and superposition, however the total system of observed and observer is still coherent (and I'm not totally clear on why the new system takes up well defined values for certain properties, but it seems to be some dynamical time evolved process especially when a small system interacts with a much bigger one, if you can follow the linked article).
And yes, I've heard these confusions combined into the notion that the universe only generates information when observed by some consciousness as some kind of space optimization, so maybe that is what the article is getting at.
Again, not a physicist, so I could be just as confused as everyone else, but I prefer to try to understand things these ways than trying to make sense of the constant refrain of dead and alive cats, the darkside of the moon not existing until we sent a probe to see it, and "you might be able to be in two places at once, just like a quantum particle!" we get from pop-sci and some grant seeking scientists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence
Simple explanation of QM: a classical object has a vector of properties, but in quantum this is a matrix. Any interaction is a matrix multiplication. After a bunch of matrix multiplications, you end up with a single eigenvalue, and now the quantum property matrix acts just like the classical property vector. The choice of linear operators, and probably the internal linearity among properties as well, is just a simplification, but otherwise we’d be mathematically lost in a world of functions that arbitrarily modify other functions.