Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?
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Or mathematics. Mathematics is of course good at describing our universe, we created it for that. Well, that is probably a bit too simplistic but anyway. And what would you expect the outer universe to be like? A structureless random mess without rules that could be described by mathematics? How would you make a simulation in such an environment? If you have some time to kill or want to write a science fiction novel, go ahead, think about it, but there are certainly more relevant problems to our existence than pondering whether we are one or a billion levels deep in a stack of simulations.
Being sentient as an experience is completely different to appearing to show sentient behaviour. You can make a model of sentience that's as complicated as you can invent, and you'll still have no idea whether or not a modelled sentience is having a sentient experience of the universe around it, or whether it's faking its responses mechanically.
The corollary is that having a model isn't enough to simulate a universe, You also need some way of knowing when sentience has been achieved.
Nothing in our current technology is anywhere close to even beginning to understand how to do that.
If you make a brain that is physically identical to an extant human brain (let's say, your brain) then the only way you can claim that brain isn't sentient is if you claim that the original brain is also not sentient.
I mean, what do you think is going on in your head that doesn't count as "faking responses mechanically"?
When people suggest that science has things pretty much figured out by now, this sort of thing is one of the (many) counterexamples that I offer.
You don't know this. All you know is that being sentient as an experience seems to be completely different from appearing to show sentient behavior.
> You can make a model of sentience that's as complicated as you can invent, and you'll still have no idea whether or not a modelled sentience is having a sentient experience of the universe around it, or whether it's faking its responses mechanically.
This is the standard "zombie" argument, and it makes no sense to me; it is tantamount to saying that the fact that you are sentient makes no difference to your externally observable behavior. Really?
Anyway, if one starts thinking the whole universe is a simulation, then that word loses all meaning, as every experience we've ever had is a simulation, including whatever you think isn't a simulation. A predicate needs to have two results to be meaningful. If you have a predicate that always returns the same value, it tells you nothing. So if we can define "F(x) = 'Is x a simulation' = TRUE", then F is meaningless.
Therefore it's a bit of a moot point when talking about simulations, since you're asking about something we can't do in ANY universe right now.
We are trying to create another form of intelligence. I am of the belief (for numerous reasons) that the best way to do that is to create a simulation[1]. But by its nature it would have to be so large and complex that it could be difficult for us to "look into" it and make sense of the vast seas of data it produces to actually identify intelligent behavior, and more, to cross the barrier and interface with it somehow. What if our creators simply haven't found us? What if we don't look like intelligence to them? Or maybe they identified something but don't know what to make of it?
Dolphins are actually fascinating in this regard, they diverged from us long ago and they definitely have something going on in there, but we haven't yet figured out quite what it is[2]. They are the closest thing we have to an alternate form of intelligence, with the benefit that it resembles ours enough to be recognizable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life
[2] http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/dolphin-intelligen...
I think that AlphaGo is sentient in the domain of Go play. In other words, AG was conscious in that space of table positions and game strategies. A number of Go experts were so impressed that they said they could hardly tell which is the human and which is the computer. They gained so much respect for it that they awarded it the highest dan rating. I'd award it a Turing Test pass, at least on Go play.
To answer your question, I'd take the same approach as Turing: if it behaves like a human or better, then it is conscious in that particular domain. The difference from common machine learning applications was reinforcement learning - the fact that it was embedded in an external world, interacted with it and the opposing player and learned from experience - it behaves essentially like us, in a loop of perception-decision-action. And we are like it, if you look down the stack, we too are just a pattern of chemical reactions and electric currents that have no innate subjective feeling to them. There is no "unobtainium" or "magic fairy consciousness dust" in our brains either, and we shouldn't try to essentialize consciousness, it is not a pure essence like space and energy, it's an emergent quality.
[1] http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-rea...
Is there a difference? What is the difference? Doesn't duck typing apply here? If I act like I am sentient I am probably sentient.
Then there are some dreams where the natural laws seem different. I can fly and fly well in those and observe well as well and be observed. What do I make of those. Are beings sentient in them?
The illusion of our own sentience and the sentience of those "characters" are generated by the same brain, so yes.
The universe is seen as a dream of 'God'. Which means start of a dream is like Big Bang and waking from dream is like extinction of Universe.
This actually brings up an interesting question. Can we formulate mathematically consistent laws for a universe which would allow for significantly more efficient algorithms?
If you invent better math, you can use it in our universe!
At least the way I think about it, these analogies are neither accurate to the theory nor necessary to explain it to the layman. Let's look at it academically. If our technology had the capacity to completely simulate any sort of universe, you can bet a least one research team would do just that. Well, if you, like me and many others, think of the intelligent mind simply as a very powerful and self-aware computer capable of learning and abstract thought, and if the so-called universe simulated by researchers has a model of matter capable of creating the logical gates needed to replicate such a computer, and the simulated universe contains natural processes by which these logical gates might evolve, then you must agree that it is possible intelligent life may emerge in such a simulated universe -- no matter how different, similar, big, or small it is in comparison to our own. Then, following the same reasoning, you must also agree that there is the slightest possibility that the nested universe may produce one or multiple collections of intelligence capable of the same thing.
In this thought experiment, the simulation isn't imprisonment, doesn't violate a sense of self-awareness or free will, and doesn't even rule out the concept of a god or ultimate creator. It simply abstracts the container in which our universe lives from something mysterious to something relatively relatable to our current technology.
Another interesting thought is if we ever become capable of simulating such a universe, it seems much more likely than not we're also a simulation, since there's a possibility for each simulation to produce it's own simulation or collection of simulations.
The most obvious way of verifying how we create our own simulations mentally is by thinking about the blind spot in our eyes. If you hold your thumbs up at arms length in front of you and gradually move them apart, your thumbs disappear from view at some point. They are in your blind spot. However, you don't have large black holes in your field of vision, so your mind interpolates the data that it expects should be there.
This has been proven in many different ways over the past 50 years.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5975778/scientific-evidence-that-you-...
There's a lot of "ifs", though, for the argument to work:
The simulations must support a higher density of life than the universe does. If you need a planet the size of Jupiter and a hundred years to simulate one second of life on Earth, then each nested layer of simulation is going to make the number of simulated humans smaller. It seems highly dubious to me that simulations could be dense enough: if you can build a simulator capable of evolving a million life forms, couldn't you slash all the overhead of environmental simulation and use these same resources to build ten million life forms that interface with the real world directly (imagine nano-life, if that helps)?
There must be sound economic reasons to build these simulations. Otherwise, too few of them will exist, and they will not be run for long enough. I can think of a few reasons, like research or entertainment, but I do not think they would suffice. Specialized, focused simulations are useful. Simulating whole universes is overkill. It's a waste of resources.
As for practicality, simulations don't need to support a higher density of life (although they very likely will use approximations and variable level-of-detail to effectively simulate space using less resources than the space itself would use) because they have other advantages; you can pause them, take snapshots, revert to earlier states, branch, etc.
Think of it as like virtualisation for the universe. Even though virtualisation takes up some system resources, there are still huge advantages to running virtual hosts.
As for simulating whole universes being a waste of resources - if we're in a non-historical simulation, we don't even have any conception of what "a waste of resources" means in universe zero. Maybe our entire universe, simulated on a regular grid smaller than the Planck length, is as trivial to store and manipulate on a 5-dimensional universe-zero computer as a 1-dimensional cellular automaton is on a modern desktop computer for us.
That's the contention, though. Someone in the future might simulate some unknown one-year slice of the past, and leave it at that. That would lower the probability significantly below 50%.
> (although they very likely will use approximations and variable level-of-detail to effectively simulate space using less resources than the space itself would use)
The devil is in the details, though. You can save a lot of time approximating an ocean using fluid dynamics, but you're axing all the low level chemical reactions that would make live evolve in it. There are no ways to use variable levels of detail that won't make the simulation diverge from the original. And I'm not even mentioning the synchronization issues and the overhead you'll need to resolve them.
> they have other advantages; you can pause them, take snapshots, revert to earlier states, branch, etc.
Only if you use hardware that's analogous to modern computers, but that hardware is not good at simulation to begin with. Unless you use specialized simulation hardware you're probably going to have to endure billion-fold slowdowns, and I'm being generous.
Assuming you have good hardware for simulation, you can't assume the ability to pause, snapshot or branch, you have to build it in. Each of these features will add overhead and make the simulation slower and larger. Nothing is free.
> As for simulating whole universes being a waste of resources - if we're in a non-historical simulation, we don't even have any conception of what "a waste of resources" means in universe zero.
That's possible, although the fact that it is possible is basically all we can say about the idea. There is no way to evaluate the probabilities involved.
Agreed about the fact that too many shortcuts in the simulation might make it unable to develop or sustain life, but then we don't know when the simulation would have started or how much it might have diverged from universe zero by now. Presumably it would be intended to diverge anyway because they already know the outcome if it doesn't.
Of course, while we can guess about this stuff, ultimately at this point our guesses are unfalsifiable so as fun as it is to speculate, we're really just shooting the breeze. :)
I remember reading once that the limitation on speed of light could be a performance optimisation. Isolating each "light cone" of local spacetime allows the simulation to be distributed and run on separate compute clusters, because it limits things to local interactions rather than universal ones.
Things in superpositions only becoming "set" after observation... that is just lazy evaluation. It's fun to think about.
>Things in superpositions only becoming "set" after observation... that is just lazy evaluation.
I've always thought about it this way also, I'd love to get a source on where you read it so I can see a different take than my own.
Some other things to consider:
1. Planck length is the most granular unit or pixel the computer can measure.
2. The time it takes to move one Planck length at the speed of light is the time of one iteration of the simulation's "main loop".
3. The reason time dilates as you approach the speed of light is because the faster a particle moves, the more the main loop must access that particle, and the more the particle's state may be in a "being processed" lock where it can't be mutated by anything else.
Just some thing I've always thought about when trying to see if I could use code patterns and processes to quantify the behavior of the universe. Of course, I wouldn't say I believe these things as fact or anything, just awesome to think about.
There's a simpler reason, I think. Any mechanism or "clock" must have moving parts of sorts (atoms, exchange particles like photons, etc.) which means that when functioning or "ticking", some parts move faster than some other parts. But if the mechanism is moving at the maximum speed, it can only be the case that some parts move at c, and others move slower, but these slower parts can never catch up, so the clock disintegrates. It can only remain whole if all parts move at maximum speed, which means it is static: it is frozen in time.
I imagine that given a speed distribution for all components of the mechanism, there would be a smooth time dilation effect as the speed of the whole mechanism increases. I'd have to calculate. In any case, I think time dilation is basically necessary in a system with a maximum speed. I'd expect to see something similar in cellular automata, regarding complex objects that can move at various speeds.
> Isolating each "light cone" of local spacetime allows the simulation to be distributed and run on separate compute clusters, because it limits things to local interactions rather than universal ones.
I don't know if that would make a difference. If you split the universe into zones and assign a cluster to each, they still have to interact with each other all the time because of the boundary. Besides, in a universe where interactions can be "universal", what's the performance gain of local algorithms?
> Things in superpositions only becoming "set" after observation... that is just lazy evaluation.
Really, though, what collapses a quantum state is interaction in general. It happens everywhere, all the time, so I don't know if there's actually anything to gain with this "lazy" evaluation.
Lazy evaluation is generally used to defer some expensive computation until later. In this case, though, the pre-measurement state (a superposition of states) is MORE complicated (computationally speaking) than the post-measurement state, which is nominally a single definite state. It's not a good analogy I'm afraid.
When this function is called, it causes some algorithm to set up these data points. You can extend this to treat entanglement as copy-on-write style branching, where entangled particles A and B have some subset of their properties stored in the same physical memory, but calling this methods causes writing to those properties, and, thus, when the function is called for particle A, a copy of the properties is made for both A and B, and the evaluation is done for both.
IMO the biggest reason to think the universe isn't a computer is just how darn non-computable quantum mechanics is. The complexity grows at an absurd rate. Even for just the position of two particles you have a 6-dimensional wavefunction with (as far as we know) an infinity of possible values for every (infinitesimal) point in that 6-dimensional state space.
If an intelligence is simulating a universe, they aren't exactly going to be doing it von-neumann style.
They could just be simulating the universe as you view it, everything outside of your view doesn't exist, you are just a complicated AI that could be fed data.
You have no way of proving that others have "consciousness", and simulating what a single person can experience is MUCH easier than simulating an entire universe, hell I believe we could have access to technology that could do that within my lifetime.
It's also fun to think about. What if my forgetfulness is just an optimization?
Much like how we are making ML applications now, you could be a complicated AI who's purpose is to calculate something encoded in your experience. You wouldn't need to know your purpose in order to complete it.
I'm clearly grasping at straws here, its just fun to think about :)
To be fair, far-fetched things happen all the time, the trick is that we're usually wrong about which ones do.
There's a long and rich history of philosophers restating this possibility.
Including Accelerando by our very own https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
This is where the argument starts to sound like creationist claims that god put the bones of dinosaurs on Earth just to test our faith.
Continuousness, perhaps, but I don't think it is possible to prove that a universe isn't discrete unless you can measure with infinite precision. Even if it was possible, a simulation could certainly be continuous with the proper hardware. Similarly, a real universe certainly could be non-continuous, so I don't think the question is even relevant either way.
My experience growing up as a Mormon is that questions of how exactly God created the world are mostly left up to science. I haven't seen any hints of evolutionary science being considered 'taboo' with any seriousness in quite a long time.
When I think about the simulation hypothesis, I picture Skyrim. You boot it up, load the maps, etc, and you see a picture perfect (on the PC anyway) world that looks millions of years old. Mountains are weathered. There are pre-existing historical races that died out thousands of years ago. Portions of the terrain are covered in deep snows. There's rain; it might even be raining randomly when you spawn from a save.
Bethseda isn't lying when they make the place old. It's that way because it has to be. Who knows, our reality for God could be the same thing?
Picture the Wind Fish from Link's Awakening. Whole island with people, places and attack chickens. It was a simulation in the mind of the Wind Fish.
If only I'd received a nickel for every time I've seen that online. I might buy myself a latte.
(Downvote? If one is arguing for the evidence based life, then it's a bit weird to engage in non-factual hyperbole. I doubt I've encountered that more than about 30-40 times, because by the time one has seen that stupid non-argument and all the other stupid arguments about 30-40 times, one is done with the places online where people think it's clever to post such nonsense.)
We perform computations in the same sense that complex weather patterns do - there's nothing intrinsically special about our ability to compute. So it's naive to think that we're the ones being simulated - the universe may be simulated, and we are but one emergent property of that universe.
> If we’re programs in the computer, then as long as I have a computer that’s not damaged, I can always re-run the program.
You would quite possibly need to dump the entire universe state and re-run it from that point to get anything predictably "you" back out of it - probably not what most people have in mind when they think of a brain in a vat.
Any simulation worth running would be an approximation of the real thing, with many corners cut. Because of butterfly effects, any approximative simulation will diverge from the original, and the more corners you cut, the faster that will happen (so ancestor simulations would require near perfect accuracy, so they would probably be prohibitively expensive).
If we are a simulation, our parent universe would be several orders of magnitude more complex than this one. It's not clear to me why such a simulation would be made (what purpose it would serve to the parent universe).
(For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down )
Instead, imagine implementing HashLife inside a Game of Life universe. It is possible, because the system is Turing complete, but the overhead would be horrific: probably thousands of cells for each cell you try to simulate. You would have to duplicate the cache all over the place to minimize roundtrip costs, each cell would be a whole machinery to allow signals to be routed there, plus logic to handle synchronization issues between each "unit", and so on.
It's a very neat idea that works very well with our computer systems, but if you were to implement it using the resources of the simulated system, it would be a catastrophe. And similarly, I don't think you could build a physical "cache" that can simulate physical interactions faster than they happen, except in a few contrived cases.
Imagine the simulating species is running something akin to a weather simulation, and you just happened to evolve - along with the weather patterns of interest - in the simulation.
That is, it's not about you, it's about the phenomenon the simulators want to study. Maybe it's galactic evolution?
It's sad to think that we're just a side effect and being left unnoticed.
In that case, are we special (i.e. unexpected piece of code questioning about its existence)?
If we could prove we were running in a simulation, perhaps we could guess the purpose of the simulation, and interfere with the results in a manner that might catch the attention of the simulators?
"This is the third time in a row that the weather simulation has produced rain only on prime numbered days."
Better hope the simulators don't fix that problem by re-imaging the universe.
This is true of simulations in our universe. There's no way to know how external universes might work.
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2009/01/dust-hypothesis...
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ...
What if there's a bug in the simulation, and the whole computer goes up in flames- but then the experimenter restores from a backup, fixes the bug, and re-runs the simulation with the same random seed. Things proceed again exactly as before, and pass the bug-triggering point without incident. Do we notice anything happened?
Deja vu.
What is real?
The Creator.
>Where is this experimenter?
Right here. Right now. Everywhere. All time. No time. Outside this Universe. Inside this Universe. We are inside of him. The universe is just a small part of him. He has no definable form. This Universe, and all these things that exist in the present moment, are part of his form. All things that have existed, and all things that will exist, that's just a small part of his form. Even things that don't exist are another small part of his form. Time is a restriction that he puts on this universe. Time is just another part of him, a part of him where he chose to limit and restrict himself to the rules of time that he himself made up. He has no restrictions, no limits.
>What if he (and his world) is also simulated?
He is already everything and nothing. Nothingness is already part of him. There's no world where he lives in, because that already is a part him. There is nothing beyond him. Because that nothingness beyond him, is also part of him. The things that exist are part of him. The things that don't exist are also part of him. He encomapss everything and nothing, all of infintity and all of the void, all of extistance and all of non-existance. All time and all space. No time and no space. All those things are just parts of him. He is sum the whole of all those finite, infinite, time, timeless, outside, inside, everywhere, nowhere. He is not limited in anyway. He is unlimited every everyway.
He is the most foundemental of all. Everything existed because he pretend that it does. Earth exist because he pretended that billions of years ago, star dust gather to form a planet called Earth. Earth goes around the sun because he pretend that Earth follows a rule he made up called Gravity.
When an object push another object, he:
1. Pretend that there are two objects there. 2. Pretend that one object is pushing on another object. 3. Pretend that the other object have moved according to a made up rule that he made up: Newtown Force. 4. Pretend that there's a scintist and pretend that the scientist "did" see and measured those object moved.
Most of all, he:
5. Pretend that there's a guy here typing this out. 6. Pretend that this guy typing this out have conscious and free will. In other word, I am just something he made up and pretend to exist. My free will is just him pretending I have free will. I am only typing this because he is pretending that I am. It is him who actually have free will. Free will and conciousness are fundenmental.
It's just like when you're a little kid, and you have a toy soldier, and you pretend that he's a Knight. You pretend that he as a sword and a shield. You pretend that there's a dragon and you pretend that the dragon is attacking a pretend village. Then you pretend that he fight and slayed the dragon with his pretend sword. And the pretend village made him into a pretend king.
Everything is just him pretending. Nothing really exist. He just acts like it exist. And everything have to act like everything exist. Just like the toy solder have to act like a dragon exist, because you act pretend that the dragon exist.
If you are interested enough to post a comment then you probably should upvote the article, even if you don't agree with it. Why? Because it's likely generating a good and interesting discussion. This article is a great example of this phenomenon.
If the simulation oversimplifies on the boring parts, we probably would have picked up on that by now. Although it does make you think about the Copenhagen Interpretation.
Wouldn't that depend on what you're trying to simulate?
If I were writing a simulation of a universe, I'd save myself a ton of cycles by only "rendering" interactions that are observed by the "players" of the simulation. Much like one possible interpretation of quantum physics.
And there are more problems. One of them is computers: in a sense, every computer created by one of the entities you simulate becomes a new "player". You have to fully simulate these computers all the time, lest you want the players to notice computers only work when they look at them.
I mean, ultimately, it seems to me that the only way to efficiently simulate a universe without arbitrary restriction on motion or glaring artefacts is to build a 1:1 model of the thing: store the data in 3D so that things that are nearby in simulated space are nearby in physical space too, and process the data locally.
The further you pursue such possibilities, the less significant they become, because you reach the boundaries of human epistemology.
The difference between simulated and "real" reality is beyond the scope of the senses and deduction. We would have to be outside the world to know the truth, and this is of course impossible.
Why do we assume that it's written in C, as opposed to - say - Erlang? ;)
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
- Douglas Adams
A "slower" language would just mean that this universe's "ticks" would take longer. Cars would be just fine.
https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/
All of the other suggestions require all intelligent life without any exceptions in our past light cone to behave in a consistent way, i.e. fail to build obvious megastructures, fail to come calling, etc, so as to leave everything with the appearance of being natural. The Fermi Paradox is more the Wilderness Paradox in nature. Given that a tiny faction within any sufficiently advanced civilization could on their own generate self-replicated probes that converts the observable universe to computronium, and that some portion of humanity will do that if not stopped, and that we appear in no way to have exceptional origins or be in an unusual region, that really suggests there is something fundamental that we don't yet understand.
human > transhuman > energy (in the grid): immortality at this stage > long period of answers about our universe, research and exploration > boredom > nostalgia > depression > take part in simulations where you dive in but to fully enjoy the "animalic" experience you have to forget who you were and start fresh. There are some experiences that only in relationship with death (and knowing that your existence is short) produce really positive effects. This story can get long and is filled with "ifs" but I don't dismiss the idea...at all.
If we lived in a computer simulation, we would have noticed unusual meta-physical glitches as discrepancies within the 'order of things'.
For example, if the simulator used floating points, we would actually notice that numbers end up loosing precision after a certain amount of decimal points. We would probably have tons of theories about that and wonder why the metaphysical rules that are involved in counting suddenly change at specific precisions. etc.
no glitches = no simulation
There are many more problems with this premise but to me, these types of questions are a waste of intellectual energy so I'll leave it at that I guess, have fun.
I actually read Nick Bostrum's original paper and it's a pretty interesting read. Basically it looks at the long tail end of things. When you predict things waaay into the future, you tend to gain accuracy for macro predictions.
For example: our sun will most likely run out of energy and die out one day. The plate border in East Africa will most likely break apart at some point causing that continent to split.
The big one: humanity will one day go extinct. ... or...we'll expand to Mars and other parts of the solar system and thrive for millions of years. There are other options of course (we get blown back to the stone age, some humans survive and technology has to restart from a few thousand years ago...repeatedly...until we either leave this planet or go extinct).
If our machine understanding continues to grow, we should be able to eventually make machines that can simulate parts of the world we're in. So either we've already done that (some other we), and we (you and I we) are the products of their simulation ... or we'll go extinct one day.
...or simulating this world, perfectly or imperfectly, isn't possibly at all. ... and we'll go extinct one day.
Why waste so much resources, when it can be just You being simulated?
It is impossible to infer the capabilities of the "host" machine, being inside the simulation.
My mind can't also infer why beings advanced enough to simulate our universe would stick with something as primitive as IEEE floating point. Surely their machines would be fine with arbitrary precision?
In fact, we know that there are limits in our world to how small a physical magnitude can be - Planck's time, Planck's length, etc. This seems quite coherent with a computer with finite memory simulating our world.
If the guys creating the simulation have enough resources and skill (superhuman beings from an external universe wouldn't necessarily make bugs when coding) I don't see why we would notice any glitch. Even more so when the part of the universe that we perceive is relatively tiny, and anyway the set of things that we can and cannot notice may be determined by the program itself.
Like... dark matter?
If it is a computer simulation it has more storage than any computer he have now because of all the galaxies of stars and their own solar systems to keep track of. Does life exist on some other planet? We don't know until we get better telescope technology to get a better look at planets.
I do think we live in a computer simulation because there are so many things in the universe that can kill us, yet we survive to an old age for most of us. That means there is some unknown force that prevents most of us from dying. Everything in the universe can be simulated using Math for the laws of physics and other sciences. Very much like a computer uses math for video game simulations.
It could be that we exist in this universe and our real bodies are in a different universe Matrix style and when we die we wake up in the other universe, and this universe is like training for the other universe that we can't see because all around us is this simulated universe.
This makes perfect sense to me, if the theory that we are living in a simulated universe is correct, the exact same logic would apply to the beings that are running the programs to simulate us and so on, ad infinitum.
Height of the Cold War, on the brink of Nuclear War which after a series of cock-ups arrives and MAD results. Camera pulls back to reveal "Game Over", then further to show two alien teens at an arcade machine. A short exchange and another coin in the slot to start at pre-life. Show ends.
Was refreshingly well done.
Maybe the simulation is reminiscent of The Matrix in that reality is essentially an elegant artificial abstraction that acts as glue tying together the perceptions of each simulation participant.
Perhaps a proper, low-level simulation isn't computationally prohibitive, but simulating the rest of our universe is. In that case, the cosmos itself may be an illusion despite an otherwise interference-free simulation.
Or, perhaps the entire cosmos is simulated just as we are—including the hundreds of billions of galaxies present in the observable universe. This would heavily imply that computational resources are not finite.
I'd argue that regardless of whether we're in a simulation or not, the sheer vastness of the observable universe heavily suggests that space may in fact be infinite—which by extension creates the potential for simulations to exist at grand—or even infinite—scales.
I remember reading about how NES and other cartridge game systems are harder to emulate than disc-based systems like the PSX. The reason is that cartridges are more than just flat data storage, they have chips and other electronics on them that screw with the emulation.
I'm inclined to believe (and I believe it's actually been proven) that quantum information is incompressible, that would make any algorithm that would simulate it to have the same time and space requirements as the physical system.
'The theoretical minimum computer for simulating any 1 particle at realtime is at least X particles big. If it would be 1 particle it would not be a simulation. If it would take less it would not be able to capture all possible states. Eventually, every realistic simulation of a universe will either be orders of magnitude less complex than reality or will be orders of magnitude slower than realtime. In both cases realistic simulations of ones universe own past will never be possible and hardly worthwhile and thus we probably don't live in one.'
This also says that computing power cannot grow indefinetely.
It is as if Minecraft beings reasoned that it would be impossible to simulate them, as the redstone circuits required would be much larger than the observable universe. Which is fine, except we have nanoscale transistors.
Of course we might be entertainment, but to explain this universe you would then have to explain the way more complex universe in which we run. We cannot proof this is not so, but now it seems pretty similar to the god hypothesis.
The other thing is that the way to represent an infinite fabric is by only calculating what you need (similar to functional languages with infinite series). Waveform collapse upon observation/interaction would seem to have some striking commonalities with a lazy-calculation approach at first glance.
I think the only thing running the simulation does is let me, an outside observer, see it. If sentiant gliders show up at some time step, they are there thinking their pre-determined thoughts whether I get to that point or not. They exist in the rules and initial conditions, not in the stones and grid lines.
So if we could be living in a simulation, I don't see the need for a computer, the program is all you need.
Basically, if we really were brains in vats, then "we are brains in vats" couldn't ever be true, because the referents of our discourse wouldn't have any causal connection to real brains and real vats, and so it wouldn't even be possible, if one were a brain in a vat, to think the thought or propound the proposition "I am a brain in a vat", and so, it's necessarily false that we are brains in vats.
ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_2908.pdf
Putnam is not actually saying that we aren't brains in vats. Rather, he is saying that we cannot form accurate and meaningful statements to that effect if we are.
The argument, as I understand it, turns on a statement's ability to refer. Putnam's point, as you nicely summarized it, is that in order to accurately describe the world (I make a point here of not talking about whether the statement is true) a statement has to be causally related to the things it describes in the right way. This seems plausible.
But this is different (on must theories) from saying that the abstract proposition that might be represented by such a statement cannot be true. It could be! The puzzle is just whether you could form a linguistic statement to properly express that proposition due to the reference problems Putnam points out.
Putnam's own example demonstrates the point. A bunch of ants cannot draw an image that represents Winston Churchill in the grass, because they cannot know what Winston Churchill is or (probably) what he looks like. Any similarity between an ant-made image, and a real image of Winston Churchill has to be merely coincidental. Ants cannot close the causal link that we normally require in order to say that an image "represents" something. But this doesn't mean that there is no such thing as an image of Winston Churchill. Or that an ant-made imagine cannot resemble Winston Churchill. It just means that ants can't form a representation of him!
Likewise, our putative inability to form an accurate statement to the effect that we are brains in a vat does not mean that we aren't brains in a vat. An omniscient being (perhaps the one who put us in the vats!) might, for example, read our silly HN posts about brains in vats and say, "gee, its incredible that this series of symbols actually matches the symbols that you would use to form a true statement statement about the world, if only the speaker were in the necessary causal relation to my vats in order to truly say such a thing." Likewise, we say about the ants "gee, its amazing that they managed to make an imagine resembling Winston Churchill even though they don't know what he looks like and therefore can't truly be said to have 'represented' him."
(There is a parallel line of argument that you might run about our ability to know something, since knowledge, it is often said, has to be related to the external world in a certain way in order to be more than a mere belief.)
In any case, classic Putnam.
Since no one has any trouble uttering or understanding such a statement, I question the value of this viewpoint.
Quentin: "Am I hallucinating?"
Elliot: "If you were, would asking me help?"
So, I either I don't understand Putnam's argument or it's plainly wrong.
I recognize that when we say "We are brains in the vat" it seems, at the surface, self-referentially false. Because if we are brains in a vat, we wouldn't have the experience of being brains in a vat--- we'd have the experience of walking around and being people. But I can make a statement like: "Despite my experiences, I think that I am a sentient being that is contained inside a vat."
His argument that the word "vat" refers to different things in "vat-English" and normal English doesn't matter. The concept held behind vat & brain are fundamental enough that they would be self-generating among a community of sentient beings. If we say: "I am a sentient meatcomputer inside a vase filled with liquid food" we may be saying something different, but we are still expressing the core idea.
Even though the simulated world might be vastly different than the host world, language allows abstractions such that we can make the statement.
Putnam goes on to entertain the idea of a twin earth where beeches and elmes are switched, or a world where water has a different chemical forumula than H2O. That is a better starting point, but it doesn't help. I can simply generalize my statement: "I am a sentient being experiencing a hallucination, and the brain which executes my thoughts are self-contained in an environment I cannot perceive, but which nurtures my brain while networking stimulus with it."
I'd like to add a thought experiment to this. Imagine you have two vastly different communities with vastly different chemistry, and possibly operating with more than 3space and 1time dimensions. What would happen if, by the act of an Angel, both communities were given the rules for chess?
The names of the pieces don't especially matter--- if one community never had a bishop, we can simply pick a different word. Or call it piece #4.
With enough games played and thought put into it, the communities would discover tactics. They would compare and contrast the Queen's Pawn vs King's pawn. They would figure out 3-move checkmate. They would understand why en passant was a good rule to be added. And despite have different words and names for all of these concepts, these concepts still refer to the same things. Even if one world played chess with stone pieces, and the other world used leashed rabbits with hats.
A great example of this is when I went to China and play Go (or Weiqi, as they call it). I spoke 10 words of mandarin, and they spoke zero english. I was able to play a couple of games without having any shared language about the game. In the second game, an older chinese guy would sometimes yell at me and move the stone I had just played--- essentially saying: "no, that's not the best move, HERE it is." I didn't always understand why it was the best move, but often it was plainly clear that I was incorrectly read the truth of the board.
So. The act of thought supersedes what we immediately refer to in language, by it's ability to abstract. boom!
Likewise, in your former, generalized statement, it works if you continue to think of "our universe". The entire notion of anything remotely resembling a brain, or anything like what we understand to be cause and effect (like, nurturing something to keep it functional, or even the very concept of "functional"...) existing in the host environment (whatever that means! :) ) makes the abstract statement devoid of meaning.
What's the use of this kind of thought? Here's a candidate: any philosophical debate that can be made the target of this pattern of argument is an argument that is not worth having. It cannot lead to real knowledge even if the disputants happen to arrive at what would be the right answer. This argument takes as a premise that the conclusion "I am a brain in a vat" is not causally related to the actual brain or the actual vat. This would seem to suggest, among other things, that there can be no concrete evidence for this claim--and Putnam is telling us that if we indulge in such a debate anyway we are not merely unlikely to hit upon the right answer, but that we are doomed to talk nonsense.
Is he loosely associating mathematical constants with arbitrary error codes that we made up in computing?
For a simple example: I want to send you 5 bits of data, and you receive 01101. You assume (but cannot prove) that you got the right data; maybe a bit was flipped somewhere and I actually sent you 11101!
So you and I agree that we'll include a parity bit in our messages. If I'm sending you an odd number of 1-bits, the parity bit will be 1. If I'm sending you an even number of 1-bits, the parity bit will be 0.
So now, I send you five bits of data, plus one parity bit. You get the message 011011. You see that you have fives bits, 01101, and a 1 for the parity bit, which means that you should be expecting an odd number of 1-bits. That is what you have, so you can assume that as long as no more than 1 bit can be flipped in transit, you have the data with no malformations.
This concept can be extended to detect more errors (what if two bits get flipped) and to detect where the errors take place, which helps to correct them. That's why it's called error-correcting code.
For example:
> “If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical,” said Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.”
Computers are not exempt from nature, of course. The reason a computer works is because the physical laws of our universe can be described mathematically. If quantum theory didn't work mathematically, then neither would a computer.
So Tegmark is probably assigning the correlation the wrong way. A computer can only exist in a universe with mathematical physical laws; therefore the detection of mathematical laws doesn't tell us whether we're in a computer ourselves.
Likewise:
> Furthermore, ideas from information theory keep showing up in physics. “In my research I found this very strange thing,” said James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland. “I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry?
Information is also not exempt from nature; it is a physical thing that is subject to the same laws of the universe as anything else. And what we call information theory arose from our study of real physical systems, like telegraphs and telephones.
Now, maybe information theory will turn out to be a better mathematical framework for describing the laws of the universe. But that does not mean that it is any more likely that we're living in a simulation. One mathematical framework is not more "natural" than another. And there are plenty of examples of where a math framework developed in one context became useful in another.
We use computers, and I think we still see ourselves as somehow distinct from the rest of nature. This lends itself to a somewhat supernatural way of thinking, like "I use a computer to manage information, so therefore if everything is information, then there must be a super-me running a super-computer."
But taking scientific theory at face value, a computer running SimCity is just as natural as a cat, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze. If our theory says that everything is information, then so are we, and so are our computers--so there is no need for anything else to explain that.
It's not science at all, pseudo- or otherwise. It's philosophy. And I see no link to creationism. If we're in a simulation, it's not turtles all the way down. Somebody's running the simulation. The same ontological questions we grapple with now simply apply to that person instead of to us.
and they are simulated, and so are they, and ..., until you reach turtles. Super smart turtles.
If I'm going to believe something silly it may as well involve super smart turtles.
Are they really turtles, though? Or are we subtley being tricked to think of them as turtles when in reality they are dolphins?
By turtles.
Anyway their ontological questions might not be anything like ours. Perhaps they ARE god, and don't need to wonder about that.
If they were, how would they know?
How do you know this for sure?
Also, this does not mirror creationalism. Here is your argument rephrased:
>any evidence for or against God can be a creation by God.
Anyway a universe simulation doesn't sound any more stupid (to me) than any other reason for the universe being here.
Also then p!=np.
Can I prove that? No. Is it false even though I can't prove it? Yes.
Not everything that cannot be disproven should be taken seriously.
But does it really matter? does REAL free will really exist?