Quantum physics looks a lot like lazy evaluation (State doesn't exist until "observed").
The speed of light seems like a hack to prevent an n squared problem of everything in the universe effecting everything at the same time.
More obvious than many worlds?
The idea is that when you make an observation nothing special happens at all. For one, there is no wave function collapse. This is more an idea about how the observer experiences making a measurement. The salient feature is that the observer is not external to the system. He is a part of the system. His belief that the result was heads or tails is coincident in the wave function with the coin being heads or tails. In other words, the user becomes entangled with the system.
A toy wave function would look like this (I am leaving off normalization since I can't write a square root of 2):
Coin flip result, no observer: |heads> + |tails>
Coin flip with observer, "Tom": |heads>|Tom: it was heads> + |tails>|Tom: it was tails>
There is no collapse here. However, to Tom it appears as if the world did collapse. For the "version" of him that thinks the coin flip came up heads, his entire world is consistent with the measurement coming up heads.
I assumed most people who really understand quantum mechanics believe this (but I may be wrong). And that among them, there is no effort to say "There is no collapse" because indeed the effective result of the measurement is a collapse. I also use the language "wave function collapse" to describe what happens. This not because it is an objective reality of the universe but because it is the way we observe the universe.
Some might consider that a feature. John Bell of Bell's theorem thought QM's non-locality was the most important unresolved issue, so placing it front and center where it couldn't be ignored was a great idea. Interpretations like Copenhagen simply let you paper over the problems which will inevitably just arise elsewhere.
Finally, I think there's been some promising work in deriving covariant Bohmian mechanics. For instance, a preferred foliation of spacetime can be derived from the wave function itself [1], which means a preferred reference frame is actually a part of every interpretation of QM. This is the kind of result that probably would have never been found without research into Bohmian mechanics.
> Also, if it were the leading view, I don't think discussions of a simulated universe would be as popular.
I don't see why. Simulated reality is a purely logical argument [2].
Not only is it superfluous structure it makes the theory non-local, which is hard to reconcile with relativity.
If you have no a priori reason to reject a multiverse Bohm's theory is quite uninteresting.
The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Gerard ’t Hooft
The author is very far from a crank, too, being one of the most important influences in the Standard Model...
Such people are entirely ignorant of biology. The analogy to programming, the thing they do know something about, is and irresistible analogy because they don't know enough to see the massive flaws in the analogy.
To be more concrete, by using the computerese term of art "hack" you are begging the question.
Further proof god is an old school C coder
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5foq14/if_were_a...
This is a common misconception (¿among programmers?).
Let's think about the double slit experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
In a classical word, you must simulate only one path. In a quantum word, you must simulate both. You don´t need some magical conscious observer to force the collapse of the wave function. A CCD detector of a camera or a simple wall is enough to force that the "wave" collapse into a "particle" and the detector or wall gets a small spot where the "particle" hits it.
A similar experiment is possible with spin, and you can use that to get a qbit. In a classical word, a qbit is simply a bit and you only have to chose between the 0 or 1 state and simulate it. In a quantum word, you must simulate both.
But it's worst with many qbits. Let's say you have a 10 qbits computer. In a classical word you pick a value for each of them and simulate each one, so the total computation is ~10. In a quantum word, you can combine any of the states of the 10 qbits and you must simulate the 1024 states.
So the idea that a quantum computers is better than the classical computer is opposed to the idea that quantum physics is some hack to reduce computational resources.
I think that the main problem is the quantum mechanics is weird, use a lot of linear algebra, but the calculations are somewhat straightforward and well defined. But the popularization explanations try to avoid the algebra and make some simplifications, so the explanation only keeps the weird part.
While the alternative seems a little too far out to be true, I have to ask, how do you know?
> So the idea that a quantum computers is better than the classical computer is opposed to the idea that quantum physics is some hack to reduce computational resources.
Keep in mind, not all operations in a computer take the same amount of time. If those qubits are entangled, you are going to get the state of all of them from a single "operation". Finally, we assume deterministic and stochastic computation take the same time, but that's only true for us because we perform stochastic computations deterministically - I'm pretty sure we could squeeze a lot more performance out of our silicon if we relaxed our accuracy constraints.
Additionally, if the universe is a computing system, the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics may be a way to work around paradoxes, i.e. Godel's incompleteness theorem.
>In 1927 Heisenberg discovered that the ``more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa''. Four years later G\"odel showed that a finitely specified, consistent formal system which is large enough to include arithmetic is incomplete. As both results express some kind of impossibility it is natural to ask whether there is any relation between them, and, indeed, this question has been repeatedly asked for a long time. The main interest seems to have been in possible implications of incompleteness to physics. In this note we will take interest in the {\it converse} implication and will offer a positive answer to the question: Does uncertainty imply incompleteness? We will show that algorithmic randomness is equivalent to a ``formal uncertainty principle'' which implies Chaitin's information-theoretic incompleteness. We also show that the derived uncertainty relation, for many computers, is physical. In fact, the formal uncertainty principle applies to {\it all} systems governed by the wave equation, not just quantum waves. This fact supports the conjecture that uncertainty implies randomness not only in mathematics, but also in physics.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems have in some sense much deeper reasons, they are based on the logical consistency of the entire construction. Maybe you can look at it in a similar way, a theory is an object like a signal above and the properties of being consistent and complete can not be realized at the same time. But I have a hard time imagining that this could really be similar to signals where you can trade localization in time for localization in frequency and vice versa, but how would you trade a bit of consistency for a bit of completeness?
EDIT: To be a bit more concrete, in classical mechanics you have to specify position and momentum (velocity) of a particle to specify its state, those are two independent properties that can have specific and independent values. That is not true in quantum mechanics, there position or momentum alone fully specify the state of the system. The wave function (in position space) tells you where the particle is with what probability, the frequencies of the wave function tell you what the momenta are with what probability.
And from here it is the same as above, if you force a particle into a very well localized position, i.e. make the wave function a narrow spike at some place, then the frequencies and therefore the momenta are no longer well defined. If, on the other hand, you make the wave function of the particle like a sine wave, then you get a well defined frequency and therefore momentum but the wave function becomes spread out across space and the position is therefore no longer well localized.
This is a common misconception (among programmers). There's zero experimental evidence for the effect you mention, and zero theoretical derivation. Circumstances under which wave function collapses is the greatest mystery of QM.
If you follow the equations of the wave packet of the particle arriving to the wall (or CCD) detector, you then need to solve the equation of the interaction of the particle + all the particles in the wall or the CCD. The challenge of the collapse is that simulating anything beyond a few dozen quantum particles is too demanding. Mathematical models that simulate millions of particles need to make assumptions (typically they are too hot, too cold, too strongly bound, so you can ignore most effects - think 1D Ising model, Bose-Einstein Condensates, Photon gases, etc). But the full description of a particle + all particles in a detector still escapes us.
Therefore the transition between: superposition of paths -> particle lands at specific points has never been truly explored. The best description currently involves decoherence. Many theorems have been proven (and experiments done) in that area. The gist is that as you add particles to a system (2, 3, 4, 5, 10, ...) the superposition effects slowly cancel each other out. Another angle is the monogamy of entanglement (the more particles are entangled, the weaker the entanglement between any 2 particles). The idea of decoherence is that as things get larger, the weird effects of quantum physics become more "dilute". However, going from double slit to macroscopic reading still has many assumptions along the way.
Take the above explanation with a grain of salt (as I have tried to make it accessible).
I agree with that.
Anyway, if you have an optical system, you can assume that coherence is present while the light hits mirrors, lens and similar optical equipment. (If the difference in the optical paths are smaller than the coherence length of your laser or light source.) But as soon as the light hits a white screen or a brick wall, all the further calculations must use only the intensity of the light at each spot in the screen, forgetting about the phase angle. And all the spots are not coherent.
It's not clear what cause the wave function collapse, but if you are using photons in the visible spectrum probably a mirror will not collapse it, and a brick wall will collapse it. [Or your preferred rewrite with the multiple word interpretation, or the abstract Hilbert space calculations.) I'm guessing decoherence is the correct explanation, there is a nice comment in a reply.
For other particles, the abstract calculation is equivalent, but it's necessary to choose another system to do the experiments.
There's a lot of complex maths and polar notation. There are a couple of good simulators out there that lets you play with qubits and their probabilistic coefficients.
I'll be honest that I was never all that great at the higher maths and a lot of this taxes my brain or goes way above my head. But all these quantum computers are deterministic. The simulators can fully simulate them.
It's just that simulating several qubits requires gigs and gigs of ram. A real quantum computer can't do anything you can't do with a traditional computer, it can just do it in a more computational faster time and fewer resources.
You can run small quantum programs yourself on the IBM cloud quantum platform. They allow people to queue up programs to run, similar to old punch card systems:
Not just "both", you have to consider all quantum states.
It is more like adding an imaginary component to a real probability making it a complex probability. It is possible to calculate with the complex probabilities and only collapse to the field of R in the end.
How do we "know" that the camera collapses the wave function? Maybe WE collapse the camera by observing IT.
That's how you get things like Schrodingers cat.
That sounds ridiculous. The double slit experiment is a small system. The detector apparatus is much larger. The world outside of that, even more so. If your view is how the universe works, the number of superpositions of states that must exist between the "magical human observer" and the experimental result must be huge. Every particle in contact with every other particle. It seems ridiculous that the entire universe must be in superposition to give humans this special property.
The "observer" here is simply an outside system.
(FWIW, we only covered the basics of quantum mechanics in my chemistry undergrad. Perhaps a physicist can explain better.)
According to your argument, a situation like Schrödinger's cat, where a Cat is both dead and alive, is completely ridiculous.
Which is a fair point. But apparently a whole lot of quantum physicists believe that Schrödinger's cat is a perfectly reasonable situation.
Err, while this might be used to support the hypothesis, the popularized and most discussed version of the simulation argument doesn't even really mention this [0].
The universe is a giant hack job, and I think it evolved that way. I'm a big believer in the "multiple nested universes" theory that our universe began as an offshoot of another, parent universe, and that some of the larger/heavier black holes in our universe could be gateways to other child universes.
And how do you mean, dirty hacks. Our fundamental physics nowadays is quite elegant, I'd say, and still we have many questions still to be answered and much deeper to delve till we hit the "bare metal". We've only been in the universe-figuring-out business for real for about 200 years after all!
7,100,000,000 people seem to find it quite easy [0] (although I'm not one of them)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations
but then there's the question of what came before the universe(s) ours originated from and what came before that and so on, since, following our current understanding, everything has an origin
even if we were to argue our universe is a simulation, who/what's running the simulation and where did that originate from? how did it come about?
In order to simulate a human brain, you need to simulate physics. Not a mathematical model of physics, but the actual true process that governs nature. In order to do that, you need to (1) understand the true laws of physics and (2) the process needs to be simulatable in polynomial time (at the very least). Where in the essay does he give you a convincing argument that these are true? Or is it just the lack of impossibility enough to convince you that they are possible?
Since these are post-humans, they understand the subtle interconnected algorithms implemented by human brains, and so can in principle bypass the need for low-level simulation. But even if that were not so:
> In order to simulate a human brain, you need to simulate physics. Not a mathematical model of physics, but the actual true process that governs nature.
You seem to be drawing some implicit distinction you find meaningful between "real" and "simulated", but this distinction isn't explained, and doesn't seem meaningful in any case.
> In order to do that, you need to (1) understand the true laws of physics and
The laws of physics needed for such simulations are sufficiently understood by post-humans, ie. for all physical observations simulated ancestors might make, posthumans understand physics far beyond that. So even without a perfect understanding of physics, they merely need to replicate the physics understood by their simulated ancestors.
> (2) the process needs to be simulatable in polynomial time (at the very least).
I don't see why. We already run non-polynomial simulations all the time (such as to solve fluid dynamics for aerodynamics, or climate models). As long as the results are expected to be useful, we will run them. This is actually a core premise driving Bostrom's argument: that ancestor simulations will be useful to future social sciences and such.
But all of this is neither here nor there, because Bostrom's argument is exhaustive. If there are legit reasons why post-humans cannot run such simulations, and there very well might be, he already covers this possibility as "we will go extinct before reaching the posthuman stage".
Like I said, Bostrom's argument is solid and there is no wiggle room. You get to choose one of the possibilities, for properly articulated reasons, and no more.
Bostrom assumes all simulated minds will be "of a similar sort." Another assumption that "minds" are well understood.
Bostrom assumes we will never have the means to glean any information related to whether or not we are in a simulation. Indeed, compared to the unprecedented assumptions needed to admit posthumanity (computers the size of planets, for one!), the assumption that we can determine whether we are in a simulation seems paltry by comparison.
Bostrom's indifference argument is unfounded. In particular, say I only give his proof a 1/N chance of being correct for a very large N. Then by his indifference principle I _still_ must assign an overwhelming probability that I am in a simulation. This doesn't help in that I cannot be 100% certain his argument is wrong since he does not define things rigorously enough for a proof, nor can he possibly do so because of our lack of understanding about human minds or the future of computation. So to be a "rational" being (I hate this term, because it's also undefined), I can't disagree with his argument and conclude the opposite of what he concludes.
Knowing what kind of simulation we're taking part in, assuming such knowledge is possible and processable in the simulated world, that's incredibly important and interesting knowledge! :)
Abiogenesis, the existence of physics, every "discovery" that results in new-found understanding of what is, the universe itself.. life is a boltzmann brain, physics is a boltzmann brain, discoveries are boltzmann brains, the universe itself, a boltzmann brain?
Since you're trying to demonstrate the impossibility of the situation, I think the analogy you're looking for is ransomware breaking out of your computer and kidnapping you.
The data/code/simulation can't suddenly escape the sandbox and materialize into whatever the "reality" is made of. For that reason, it is trivial if we are in a simulation.
3D Printer owners would disagree with you.
There is also the fact that we can't use 3D printers to create "perfect" or generic objects.
For example, if you were simulated as a series of electrical signals in a computer, and if you were simulated as having some decision-making capacity, you could decide to take certain actions inside he simulation that might, for example, contextually outside the simulation, change one electrical signal from 'on' to 'off'. Like, "this is the 0 1 switch that represents the aliveness/deadness of SpriteActor32605." If you knew you were in a simulation of this type and you learned how to locate memory addresses, you might be able to execute a rowhammer attack, for example, and gain some sort of user access and more straightforward method to interact with the signals out of which you were made.
I'm not indicating that it would be easy or even that it would be necessarily useful, but particularly if there isn't someone 'monitoring' the simulation (as in, the simulation is the result of randomness and there's nobody trying to eliminate unexpected behavior from the simulated beings), there's every reason to imagine that we could begin to understand and learn to manipulate the medium out of which we were made.
If, you know, we are actually in a simulation and dependent on outside information for continued existence. Which is not settled at all, merely proposed as an explanation for some of the peculiarities we note here.
It's reasonable to argue that all computers are these kinds of computers.
We know that systems can be nested. Do we know that the systems we perceive and can test directly compose the most fundamental layer? How can we tell? If we want to have any faith in science and testing our direct experiences, we need to keep those questions in mind.
So in the event that someone holds a firm an unwavering belief that we're in a simulation unrelated to availability of facts, then their belief would be akin to a religious belief, sure, but the intent of the simulation argument is not to claim that there is evidence we live in a simulation.
Specifically, it does not argue that we live in a simulation at all.
It presents the hypothesis that at least one of the three given propositions must be true (paraphrased):
1. Either very few human-level civilizations reach a stage where they can run ancestor simulations, OR
2. Very few such civilizations have any interest in running such simulations, OR
3. Most people live in a simulation.
Basically it boils down to an argument that if many civilizations reach a stage where they can and do run such simulations, then our odds of living in simulation by pure chance will be high.
But the argument says nothing about whether or not we live in a simulation in isolation, because the argument does not quantify the odds of 1 or 2, and even if it happens that the chances of living in a simulation are astronomically high chance, that is still not evidence that we are, it would just be an indication that we probably are.
But let's say it turns out we have something akin to a "soul" that can't be simulated. In that case the number of civilizations in #1 is 0, and we're not in a sinulation under any circumstances. Or the odds of hitting a Great Filter and die out before we reach the technological level necessary might simply be insanely high, in which case the number in #1 might very well be very close to 0.
It may also be that any civilization that reach such a stage first will hit a singularity or other event that changes its priorities such that nobody are interested in such a simulation, or can justify the effort or expense. In which case the number of civilizations interested in running such simulations even if possible may be close to 0 (these options may also affect #1 - it may be we opt to change our future in ways that sends us off in a different technological direction).
The point of the argument is exactly the questions it raises, first and foremost by making people think about the possibility, and secondly to make people think about what may prevent us from being able to (which is tangentially related to the Fermi paradox), and what might make us want to or not want to, and lastly the questions it raises about whether there are ways for us to quantify or investigate each of the propositions. E.g. if #3 holds, are there any ways we can determine if we are in a simulation or not?
It is a philosophical argument, put forth to present the possibility that we live in a simulation that similar to e.g. the Drake equation seeks to define a set of parameters to focus a discussion around. It is not the intent that we should just assert the 3rd proposition is true, as even if it is true, it does not resolve all the questions around the 1st and 2nd, and it would just raise new question (the hypothesis can apply recursively - if it is possible to run such a simulation, then if it is posible to also run such a simulation within a simulation, then how that does affect the propabilities? it might seem as it creates a rather large subset of possible solutions that would make the probability of being in an infinitely nested simulation approach infinity; is there something that would prevent that?)
So it's not a bad scientific theory - it's a good philosophical hypothesis. It might in the future give rise to scientific theories. E.g. attempts to define falsifiable bounds to the probabilities, or falsifiable predictions about properties the world must have if we are in a simulation or not in one. But for the moment, it is a philosophical argument, and attacking it for not being a scientific theory is aiming in the wrong direction.
Can a world be simulated in a computer?
If yes, how many worlds and individuals are simulated at the same time? (And it may make sense for example market research, science etc. Of cause the simulation will run much faster then the real world).
Then there is a problem. If the world CAN be simulated and MUCH MORE simulated individuals exists than real persons it is more likely for you to live in a simulation than in the real world. A point worth thinking about.
I'd argue it is a religion. The word religion means to "bind back" or "yoke" [edited], i.e. to seek an understanding of the universe and our place in it.
That's what physicists and cosmologists do. These disciplines also fulfill the needs of scientists for meaning and community and ritual, not unlike Christianity or Islam or whatever.
Just because you might happen to believe something doesn't make it not a religion.
No, it doesn't. Less importantly, you mean "yoke" and not "yolk", and more importantly you are confusing the definition of a the Latin word religare from which it is believed the Latin word religio may have been derived (from which, in turn, the Middle English "religion" meaning "life under monastic vows" may have been derived) with the definition of the Modern English word "religion".
The Modern English word religion doesn't mean the same thing as Latin religare, or even Latin religio, or even the original Middle English sense of religion.
If you look at these lists of 'modern' definitions of religion, the plurality (if not the majority) of the ones from academia seem roughly aligned with the (disputed) etymology.
http://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/religion/Definitions.htm
http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln101/defi...
E.g. the William James quote: "[Religion is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."
That's basically another way of saying what I said, and I don't see any reason not to include scientists under that umbrella. I mean even the phrase from the paper "a quantum state eternally evolving in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space" sounds an awful lot like a conception of "the divine".
The word religion means to "bind back" or "yoke" [edited], i.e. to seek an understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Here you are retconing. The religio or bond/obligation refers to a monastic vow. It has nothing to do with seeking an understanding of the universe or our place in it. Therefore, the etymology of the word religion is completely irrelevant to the conversation.
I didn't realize the etymology was in dispute, so my bad. But regardless of whether religare or relegare is the etymological origin of religio, wouldn't either predate the concept of a monastic bond by centuries?
I would say his quote refers to spirituality rather than religion.
Each of us are carving an eternal (if minuscule) shape during our lives. All we ever do, all we ever can do, is move atoms and electrons around (intentional motion of our body against the resisting world) yet we arise from moving atoms (unintentional motion of our body, e.g. at the cellular and atomic level).
BTW our self awareness has only one possible good purpose: to do what no other life could do, could ever do, which is escape the bonds of gravity, and spread life beyond earth. If that is not possible, then our species, and all life we know of, will perish on this planet, in the long run if we're smart, in the short run if we're stupid. But space travel, even trips that are very close, are incredibly difficult and expensive. The solar system is likely out of human reach. Interstellar travel is likely out of reach even for hardy, intelligent robots.
So you have to come back, once again, to the value of the Inscrutable First Cause, which is: relax. You're gonna die someday, your sculpture will be closed off, but your carving it every day, including right now. Enjoy it! Make fun shapes!
If you believe that the leaves were rustled by something inanimate and you're wrong, you get eaten by the predator.
There's an evolutionary advantage in expecting agency where there is none. Whether it's rustling leaves, the weather, celestial bodies or life itself.
To put it another way: if you see Jesus in your soup doesn't mean there's some divine truth in soup, it's just an artifact of your brain having evolved to recognise faces in a way that encourages false positives over false negatives.
Understand the fallibility of every aspect of yourself and a lot of supernaturalist arguments go out of the window.
Wouldn't you agree?
Also, as science helps us advance technology it becomes a continuously stronger tool.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." [1]
If we're talking about the hand-wavey mysticism of Michio Kaku or Deepak Chopra, or researchers who have decided to believe a particular unfalsifiable interpretation of QM, and will not be convinced otherwise, that stuff is closer to what I would call religion.
The good thing about the modern era is that even when institutional biases may momentarily prevent a theory from gaining mainstream recognition at least it will be preserved as part of the body of scientific knowledge so future generations can rediscover it.
Science might not be, but there are plenty of Scientismists out there.
Most "scientism" I see in the wild is just people who were already indoctrinated into magical thinking treating "science" the same way they previously treated religious dogma.
It's irrelevant to science the same way astrology is irrelevant to astronomy. It's cargo cult "science"-iness.
This is unfortunate as embracing mysteries keeps one from seeking out more fundamental interpretations that actually provide real insight into how things work.
Time and space being an illusion are similar. These notions come from the mathematics which can be formulated in such a way that time and/or space (depending on the theory) are not axiomatic assumptions but rather emergent artifacts of a more fundamental timeless (or rather, time-arrow-less) or spaceless (rather, non-local) formulations. But that's just math. Time and space are as real as anything else. If you doubt that, I have a 23-story window you can walk out of.
Thanks for the clarification!
I think this is a common misconception. Scientific theories provide predictive power, but they also provide explanatory power. The latter has fallen out of favour due to quantum mechanics, despite plenty of good interpretations of QM that provide good explanations, but it has always featured prominently every other scientific theory.
And given explanatory power is important, every scientific theory also therefore defines an ontology (your metaphysical concepts). This too has always been part of science.
> "String theory, loop quantum gravity, causal-set theory: these are just a few of the approaches that theorists have taken. ... But when you take a step back from the dispute, you notice all agree on one essential lesson: the space-time that we inhabit is a construction. It is not fundamental to nature, but emerges from a deeper level of reality."
Dumbledore: Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?
---
(time to get the super soaker...)
Obligatory Cegłowski talk: http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
Just to elaborate, this is really easy to show. Just take two pieces of paper, and scribble all over one of them for 10-15 minutes.
Then crumple them up and throw them to the ground.
The blank one will fall to the ground smoothly. But the one that has a lot of image information will tax the Universe's GPU, because it isn't able to compress it easily, so it'll fall slowly and in a jerky motion. it's really easy to see.
OH WAIT NO IT ISN'T. There's absolutely zero evidence of any kind whatsoever, not even a whisper of an indication, that we're living in a simulated reality, and the suggestion that leading technologists state we "almost certainly" in a simulated reality is absurd.
Who is saying that?
Very few are arguing that we're almost certainly in one. Philosphers like Nicholas Bostrom are arguing that either something will prevent most simulations from reaching a stage where we can or will simulate the past, or we most likely live in a simulation, but you'll note it's very possible that the answer is that we can't or won't too.
The problem is that we don't have the faintest clue what the probabilities of each of the propositions are.
What do they mean by "simulate the past"? If we're talking actual true-to-history simulations, that is going to require an unprecedented amount of inital data on how the world was in the past. An there's no way for the system to collect all that data, seeing as it's in the past before the omnipotent simulator was created.
On the other hand, if they mean "simulations of some hypothetical past with loose connections to the actual past, Matrix-style", i.e. "they" have the freedom to generate the scenario we're in, why on earth would they choose this one with all the troubles and suffering in the world? Why not make one where everyone's a pony and we all eat rainbows and poop butterflies?
They are running into exactly the same debates that Christian philosophers have been struggling with for millenniae - why is there evil in the world created by God / our hyperintelligent great^{n}grandchildren? Which indicates to me they are much closer to religion than science.
It's a simplification of the argument for the sake of making the first two prepositions easier to swallow as possibilities.
Consider that if we can simulate consciousness, then we could conceivably simulate a near infinite set of variations of consciousness.
This would still affect our likelihood of being in a simulation, as we don't have any outside knowledge that lets us know which type of entities we "should" be. It doesn't need to be human-type civilizations simulating their ancestors, it could just as well be some aliens playing a hyper-advanced version of Spore and making disgusting aliens to creep out their friends.
But it is easier to get people to picture e.g. Sim2,000,000 simulating full brains based on actual humans, set in a world based on "our" earth as having relevance to our existence, and it makes it more relevant to speculate on proposition #1 and #2. E.g. is there anything in human type society that will prevent us from getting there or wanting to do it?
> On the other hand, if they mean "simulations of some hypothetical past with loose connections to the actual past, Matrix-style", i.e. "they" have the freedom to generate the scenario we're in, why on earth would they choose this one with all the troubles and suffering in the world? Why not make one where everyone's a pony and we all eat rainbows and poop butterflies?
I don't know about you, but most of my Civilization/FreeCiv/Civ:CTP games ends up with things like nuclear war or brutal conquest - it's a lot more interesting to play the games in extreme directions. It's a good question, and one reason to explore this problem space.
Even so, in some sense it's not quite the right question: The point is that with high values for propositions #1 and #2, we could just happen to be in one of a potentially nearly infinite number of simulated realities. Perhaps they're running vast quantities of them to figure out of different choices would have different outcomes, for example. Or perhaps we're some kids afternoon entertainment.
We don't have a way of telling.
Unless we know that the possible set of "realities" is low, however, it makes little sense to speculate in whether there is anything "special" about "just this" simulation, because we have no basis for determining whether or not there is anything special or if the number of simulations is just so great that "ours" is just one tiny variation in a near endless sequence.
> They are running into exactly the same debates that Christian philosophers have been struggling with for millenniae - why is there evil in the world created by God / our hyperintelligent great^{n}grandchildren? Which indicates to me they are much closer to religion than science.
I'll repeat myself: It's not meant to be science. It's a philosophical argument. Nicholas Bostrom is a philosopher. It's his job to be a philosopher, not to set out scientific theories. Scientific theories could arise from speculation around the choices in question, such as e.g. whether or not there could be possible ways of determining if we're in a simulation, that might yield hypotheses that could be tested and potentially falsified.
But until that time, what separates this argument from religion is that the argument is not making any claims for either possible outcome - it is setting out a set of possibilities and asking questions around what we can learn from it.
As I've said elsewhere, if someone picks one on belief and sticks to it in the face of contradictory evidence, that'd be akin to religion. But asking questions and seeking ways of refining those into testable hypotheses is not religion.
Some have floated the idea that this could be behind some of the peculiarities of physics. E.g. quantum effects, wave/particle duality etc. Of course that is purse speculation.
> That's at least 10^50, i.e. "frickin enormous". Where would they even put a computer of this size? How would they power it?
It's "frickin enormous" by our standards. If we are in a simulation we don't know the properties of the outside universe. E.g. for what we know it fits in some kids PDA.
The problem with even thinking about this is that we don't have any kind of references to go by at all for what is or could be possible.
What now smarty pants.
But in the case where we, ourselves reside entirely within a simulation (or whatever) then we're tied, lock-step, with the universe's time, and any jitters or pauses (even outright simulation termination) would be completely unobservable to observers within: the ants in SimAnt don't recognise when I pause the process in Task Manager.
Odds are we're living in a simulation, says Elon Musk
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11837874/elon-musk-says-odd...
Physics is pretty weird.
What an absurd "test". A trivial counterargument: your sense of time is also computed by the simulation, so no matter how much "real world time" might pass to compute some outcome, "logical world time" can march on at the same pace.
But this has nothing to do with the simulation argument anyway. I suggest you read it:
"leading technologists agree that we're almost certainly in a simulated reality" is false.