We might live in a computer program but it may not matter | Hacker News Reader

We might live in a computer program but it may not matter

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26 pointsgyre00784 comments

This thought is similar to solipsism. René Descartes was afraid that he is truly alone because all his experiences are just imaginations. He said «Cogito ergo sum», but this was not enough to prove that others exist. The similarity to the simulation argument originates from the problem that we can't be sure that our perception is truthful.

However there is a counter-argument from Ludwig Wittgenstein. In a summary we have language. Language is too complex a construct to be invented alone. Because we speak we know we are not alone.

This is of special importance to me, being born profoundly Deaf. There exist poor deaf children who were isolated from language and never learned the basics. I had the misfortune to meet some of them. This drove the nail home that language cannot emerge in complete aloneness.

Now this doesn't apply to the simulation argument, because language might be provided from outside by the simulators.

>However there is a counter-argument from Ludwig Wittgenstein. In a summary we have language. Language is too complex a construct to be invented alone. Because we speak we know we are not alone.

I'm not familiar with that argument, so I'm just going based off your summary, but to me that sounds eerily similar to people who claim that life cannot evolve because it is too complex.

Good point. However it's different. There were billions of molecules to evolve to life. But a single molecule can't evolve to life. Of course this argument is hyperbolic but you know...

There exist poor deaf children who were isolated from language and never learned the basics... in your imagination.

First I thought you were trolling. A good one.

Just applying the thought experiment. If everything is imagination, then that includes language itself and other people. So your understanding of language, and your perception of other peoples understanding of language could all just be your imagination.

But most probably it isn't, because language is too complex for imagination of a single, alone person.

I think the "imagination" Descartes is imagining is something with the ability to create the thing we typically call "imagination". i.e. You're ability to "imagine" is just part of the imagination :)

Yes I followed this thought too. Why not imagining that language is too complex to imagine? However you have finally to experience all these intricacies of language even those ones which exceed your capability to understand.

It's similar to the problem of a moderately intelligent author inventing a super-intelligent character and describing their actions and the rationales thereof in plausible detail. Somehow the outcome is just mediocre and meh.

But the complexity of language is just awesome.

For example the German articles. They have only five endings but manage to capture sex, plurality and case in their 24 combinations exactly and people understand these fine nuances in split seconds. This is too awesome for my brains to imagine.

Or in English the difference between ludicrous and ridiculous. The possibility to express this fine a nuance is just awesome.

> If everything is imagination, then that includes language itself and other people

That's a pretty powerful imagination. I'd say it is on par with God.

I figure that if we did live in a computer simulation it's been 13.8 billion years since the last downtime. I'm skeptical software could run for so long without any catastrophic bugs.

Is a Minecraft world aware it's was rebooted or restored from a previous state?

> Is a Minecraft world aware it's was rebooted or restored from a previous state?

That's an excellent point, we wouldn't know or be aware of that. For all we know the system is offline everyday as our reality stops for a thousand year for maintenance.

I'm confident you're making a joke but there's nothing to say that a simulation couldn't spawn a 13.8 billion year old universe that has only actually existed for a second.

And any downtime is likely to be invisible to anyone inside the simulation. Even a catastrophe could have the simulators restoring from tape and putting things back the way they were while we files are none the wiser.

Could actually go a step further if relativity is right your'e looking at time slices in your local environment and ephemeral time slices before or after your plane of existence outside your local observable universe depending on your relative motion. The very premise that there is a constant rate of change which cannot be exceeded could also indicate everything has already been simulated.

Is it fate or freewill? It's a debate as old as philosophy.

Backup systems - save a copy of the universe at some fixed time interval. In case of failure restore from the most recent backup and eventually correct the cause of the last failure.

You only know it's been around as long as you have. History may have been preloaded. Also, you may have started running at 18 with preloaded memories.

But the simulation doesn't have to be 1:1 in regard of time. They could have started the system just an hour ago. Hence blue screen of death is still a dreadful possibility.

13.8 billion years in the sim might only be 12 seconds on the sim.

Plus the whole mess seems pretty glitchy to me. I'm guessing undergraduate work at best.

Honestly, we hacked most of it together in Perl. https://xkcd.com/224/

1. They restore and restart the simulation from the last known stable snapshot. So you don't know about a downtime even if one happened.

2. While testing out a RTC program on 8085 processors in college we used to run the clock faster just to check if Clock counted to all conditions correctly. There is a always a fast forward option to jump the states you are interested in.

3. For the people running the simulation the time between big bang and heat death could be something like 5 mins what we perceive as billions of years.

How long does it take Dwarf Fortress to create a new world?

We don't live in a computer simulation. Here's why: No matter how efficient your computer is, the total state space of all the simulations in the universe is less than the total state space of the containing universe. In fact even if you dedicate the total energy output of the universe to running simulations, the total simulated state space is much much less than the state space of the containing universe. And that applies recursively- all simulations contained in the simulations can't possibly add up to more than a tiny portion of the volume of the containing universe. So, you're incredibly more likely to be in a real universe.

Your argument only knocks down the idea that the universe is simulations all the way down, assuming a finite prior probability distribution on the size of the universe (which I would be inclined to agree with). Even if each simulation was three orders of magnitude less efficient than its parent universe, that would still leave a lot of room for simulation.

Right, but what I'm saying is that the total "room for simulation" is at most as large as the room in the parent universe, and probably much smaller. So if you were randomly spawned somewhere in the total space made up of all the real and simulated universes, the chances are very good you'd be in a real universe, not a simulated one.

That would be true, assuming a uniform prior probability of complex life in the real universe and a simulation. In actuality the simulation would almost certainly have rules that encourage the aggregation and stability of information, such that the probability of complex life would be much, much higher.

If this universe is designed to be efficient in terms of the ratio of living matter to inert matter, I'd hate to see what the parent universe looks like. Also, the matter in the parent universe running the simulation has got to be active matter using energy somehow, so why not construct native life forms? The simulator itself is a device for maintaining information, if you want to create intelligent life, (or any other life), it's always more efficient to just create an AI than a virtual universe with an AI in it.

Why not create life forms? Why not create an AI? Why create a simulation at all? In my opinion, the best argument for why is entertainment. The originator of a simulation of the universe this nuanced probably has existence on full autopilot, what is left but recreation? You could think of the universe like minecraft (the best selling PC game of all time, btw) raised to some ridiculous power.

I've never understood this argument in the context of this discussion. Why would the constraints of the simulation apply to that which is running the simulation?

Exactly.

OK, there are lots of people here insisting that you can simulate a larger machine inside of a smaller machine, in terms of the total state space. Let me assure you that in general, you cannot. That's absolutely a fact. Windows can fool you into thinking it can simulate a 20GB system inside a 10GB system, because it's using the hard drive as the extra 10GB. Which means you really still have a 20GB+ simulating system! I'm talking about a system in which you don't have some other form of memory to fall back on. Data cannot be infinitely compressed, and state space is finite no matter how it's partitioned into dimensions and so forth.

Still simulation means you may not have to represent every particle/state but can instead estimate. Or even not represent them at all until they are observed. Like a graphical system renders only what's in front of the camera. So the effective universe size could be enormous and use fewer resources than is apparent.

Actually, the opposite is true. Read this great explanation by Richard Feynman: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman....

You can't write a virtual machine with 20 GB of memory running on a real machine with only 10. Simulation isn't magic.

I'm not understanding your point - which may be completely on me - but your example here - why would the "child" universe require more memory than the parent has available?

On my computer, I can write 2D simulations, or 1D. Or even 4D or 5D. The simulated universe doesn't have to have any relation to the host one.

That's magical thinking. I was referring to the total simulated state space, which does not depend on the number of dimensions or any other parameter of the simulation.

Not sure that sentence means anything. Of course the dimensionality has everything to do with the state space. It grows, by definition, geometrically with the number of dimensions.

If your state space is 16 bits, then you can create a 4x4 2-dimensional space or a 2x2x2x2 4-dimensional space, but the total space is still 16 bits. You cannot simulate a 32-bit state space on a machine with only 16 bits of memory, regardless of how many dimensions the simulated space has.

Ok a precision argument I understand. But the number of states will grow geometrically. And also, we use multiple words to create larger numbers all the time in simulation. I'm not sure how important this is at all.

I'm not talking about 32 bits of precision; I'm talking about 32 bits of data. If you only have 16 bits then the number of unique states you can represent is 65536, and it does not matter how you divide that up into dimensions.

You don't know the capacity of the host universe to start with though.

Sure you can. There is just noticeable delay and "glitches" in the simulation.

That doesn't even make sense, nor does it have anything to do with the argument I was making.

I don't know what argument you were making and apparently neither does anyone else in this thread.

Revisit your assumptions and use clarity.

Also take your own advice and research memory compression and probability densities.

It is very possible to write a VM that exposes 20 Gb of "memory" to an application in a host machine with only 10 Gb of physical memory by using cache which would introduce latency to the simulation.

Here is an implementation for you to study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap

Maybe the host swaps to the disk? ;)

Right, but assuming we don't have some alternative supply of extra memory.. :)

> You can't write a virtual machine with 20 GB of memory running on a real machine with only 10. Simulation isn't magic.

You can, and it will work as long as the memory of the virtual machine can be compressed to less than 10 GB.

Programs compiled to run on current amd64 CPUs have access to 2^48 bits of virtual memory, yet they run on real machines with much much less real memory.

Hey, look, most of the space out there is a vacuum! Gravity may be the hashing/pre-compressor function the simulation we are living in. ;)

In general, no you can't. That's a fact and I encourage you to do some research if you don't understand why. It's for the same reason that there are strings of data which cannot be compressed by any form of data compression.

Luckily, it does not appear that reality is uniformly distributed. Instead, we've found that quite a few phenomena can be modelled using one statistical distribution or another. In other words, reality is quite regular, which makes it unlike high-entropy strings that are difficult to compress. In fact, reality has been repeatedly shown to compress well: images, audio, and language all exhibit statistical regularities that support compression. Throughout nature, fractal structures manifest regular patterns. All of this compresses well.

As long as not all the memory is actually used, you can pretend that there is 20GB though. Once you actually need to map more than there is, you would need to stop the virtual machine.

If you read e.g. the Bostrom 2003 paper, you will see that this is more or less what they claim: If your simulation technique is good enough, you can just fake most of the universe and only actually perform fine-grained simulations where it matters. This would e.g. assume that you have special simulation rules for brains, large scale chemical reactions etc., which allows you to just skip most of the details and make them up once you need them. You could even automatically detect whether your simulation is fine grained enough by running the same simulation at two different granularities at the same time, readjusting whenever the outcome between the two differs too much.

I think the argument in its original form does not make too much sense (future humans simulating todays humans for research and fun). What you would probably simulate much more, are human-like entities in a much simpler universe (e.g. no weird quantum-mechanics that are really hard to simulate).

So in my opinion, you could take away from the simulation argument that there is a non-zero chance that we are living in a simulation. But the computer that performs the simulation most probably lives in a universe that does not follow the same rules our universe does. It might be a universe with two or more time-like dimensions. It might be one where quantum mechanics are just super-easy to simulate for some reason (maybe in the same way it would be really easy to e.g. build Conways game of life in transistor hardware for us).

I have another counter-example. Why not simulate a smaller part of the universe, not the whole experience?

Suppose you have a real machine with 10 GB. You simulate a world of 1 GB. Inside the world, the universe is contained in 1 GB (say, a smaller version of the universe, simplified physics, etc). Inside the virtual machine, in the simulation world, the perceived universe is 1 GB. They simulation agents don't perceive a short-coming because they have never been exposed to the out-the-simulation experiences.

Right. But if you were randomly spawned somewhere, you'd be 10 times more likely to be in the 10GB than the 1GB.

Except we are anything but randomly spawned, on the scale of the universe.

> Inside the world, the universe is contained in 1 GB (say, a smaller version of the universe, simplified physics, etc).

> They simulation agents don't perceive a short-coming because they have never been exposed to the out-the-simulation experiences.

I agree, and this was the only part I found lacking in the article. For example, where it says:

> The argument is quite simple: we already make simulations, and with better technology it should be possible to create the ultimate one, with conscious agents that experience it as totally lifelike.

This is implying that the world we experience is somehow the "ultimate" one, and it would require super-intelligence to bring a mere simulation up to this pinnacle of existence. In fact, that's also an implicit assumption being made by those searching for 'errors' (not to dismiss such efforts; chasing empirical evidence is the best contribution to make in such arguments).

Yet if our universe is a simulation, there's nothing to say it's not actually a crappy, low-res, toy-physics sandbox; the simulators may consider it to be as "ultimate" and "lifelike" as we find 80s home computer games.

Why is it so hard to imagine universes bigger than our own?

That's like saying "I only own a computer with 10Gb of memory, so certainly a program using 20Gb is impossible!"

Go back and read what I wrote again.

What makes you think beings simulating us are in a universe with resources lesser than us?

If the laws of physics are different in the universe that's running the simulation, then all bets are off.

Wrong.

This is the German Tank problem applied to simulated universes. What is the maximum likelihood state space of the simulating universe, given that the simulated universe has a state space of X?

Yes! And the state space of the simulating universe must be at least as large as the state space of all the simulated universes in it.

So far you're the only person who really got my argument at all. What was I unclear about? Maybe I assumed too much knowledge of math and physics.

What I can distill is that a simulating universe may be computationally stronger than the simulated universe, and not computationally equivalent. However, given Church-Turing theorem (ie, the simulatung universe does not need to be in a higher computational class to simulate equivalent universes), you can make a similar argument. What is the likely computational class of the simulating universe, given a class X of the simulated universe

Simulated universe might have more live-density per state space bit then host universe. I.e. most power of host universe might be dedicated to running "stupid" processes (using, for example, 10^200 bits per sentient being), while simulated universe might be better optimized (using only e.g. 10^40 bits per sentient being). So even if simulated universe is much smaller, it still will be more likely to "be born" in it.

(This argument is similar to other arguments against your claim, but rephrased)

> Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

And for the other universe, who's experiment is it? I don't think the question matters. What matters is to acknowledge that we don't know and we have no way of knowing, it's the most urgent thing to do, in order for humanity to reach its "golden age". We'll get here eventually, since it's about the very survival of mankind. It's our "golden path", for those who get the reference.

>To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.

-Lao Tzu

Unless we can get out of the simulation and start kicking someone in the upper-dimensionals about all the crap we're put through in their test-to-destruction, all the philosophical theory don't really matter, does it?

If it turns out there is an afterlife, I seriously hope to haul management out into a back alley for some discussion about a few things.

A great read on so-called modern society living in a simulation is Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation".

Also a good place to store cash and MiniDisc.

I had to look that up :)

http://matrix.wikia.com/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

Maybe our universe is just a microverse within another universe, and energy is extracted from our microverse to charge someone's car battery.

http://www.adultswim.com/videos/rick-and-morty/the-ricks-mus...

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

As far as I can tell, this is just a rehash of the Boltzmann Brain paradox. Instead of random fluctuations in the heat death, it's intentional simulations run by our descendants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

BigBang --> GRUB v12039.0.0-beta

Nah, the universe is definitely running on UEFI. Why else would it take hundreds of thousands of years after the big bang for the first stable atoms to form?

And rain could be a giant's pee? There's no evidence we do live in a computer so why bother

>There's no evidence

It's also an unfalsifiable claim, since there is no way to prove we are or are not. As such, it's a waste of time to think about, since it doesn't matter.

could this explain meditation, maybe you're not just rewiring your brain but the universe too.

What's to explain about "meditation"?

Even more, what's there to explain that would be explained by the idea that "you're not just rewiring your brain but the universe too"?

So people who are bored on airplanes because they forgot to bring reading material are rewiring the universe?

being bored isn't meditation

It's very similar to unfocused meditation.

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