Virtual Reality Poses the Same Riddles as the Cosmic Multiverse
nautil.us
nautil.us
SF authors have explored these fascinating concepts without falling into such holes in logic: such as presuming that a technology capable of simulating an incomprehensible volume of intelligence was simultaneously too lazy to leverage that intelligence to not cut corners in the simulation.
That said, I do subscribe to the school that says we must conclude one of the following:
a) civilization in the abstract generally does not progress to the point of being able to simulate itself, or
b) we are the the first civilization ever, or
c) we are a simulation
My guess is that simulation indistinguishable from reality is never going to happen because it isn't possible, having nothing to do with how evolved we are.
This is what I think of when considering spacetime and relativistic effects. If you think of "matter" as being equivalent to processing power required, then the more processing required, the longer it takes to update the entire frame. So other things with less matter are updated more quickly relative to more massive segments.
Those are galaxies...in a tiny patch of "empty space". Space is big. Really big...
This is borderline nonsensical. The "laws of logic" (i.e. law of identity/non-contradiction, or propositional logic), are universal axioms that would not change regardless of whether we're in a simulation or not. The "laws of physics" could change, i.e. certain cosmological variables could be tweaked, but this wouldn't affect our ability to reason about things like this.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(mathematics)
I love that you point this out here. One of the interesting things is that even still today, as we speak, axioms and their utility are being debated. This stems from the second part of your reply:
> I suppose one could argue...
This is the fundamental reason I do not adhere to axiomatic systems in general. One could always argue any point, and so axioms from the get-go are "self-defeating". Fortunately with ibGib's logic, "self-defeating" is more equivalent to "in some given environment, some statement is not fit enough to survive." So any statement in environment X could conceivably be fit to survive in environment Y.
Apologies if this is a stupid question, but aren't all systems fundamentally axiomatic?
It's not, and I think we all know that ;-)
> aren't all systems fundamentally axiomatic?
Both yes and no (and others). That fact that "one could always argue..." exists (as I mention in another comment), gives us the ability to say "no". And we could digress ad nauseam with these kinds meta-statements. It comes down to the economics of your decision whether or not to continue attending any given statement. That said, here is my reasoning for shying away from the given acceptance of Mathematics and axiomatic systems in general (bear in mind I used to be a math dude...800 math SAT, 36 math ACT, 5th place in state math tourney (1st place team), 0 days of homework)
Consider the wikipedia definition of axiom:
> An axiom or postulate is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Greek axíōma (ἀξίωμα) 'that which is thought worthy or fit' or 'that which commends itself as evident.'
With that in mind, consider this: Once I recognize that I have produced a false statement (made a mistake), then thereafter I have a non-zero probability that any statement I make is also false. This includes any statements that I make that make other statements, i.e. systems. So any axiomatic system, wherein there is at least one statement that is "taken to be true", is built on a foundation of hubris - right from the start.
So I personally have been on a long journey, where presently I am now working on the ibGib library which turns state into Goedelian numbers (content-addressable hashes of merkle trees/forests), essentially black-boxing "things" into a universe-sized fundamentally interconnected nodal network.
In this instance the author is discussing logical reasoning in relation to our understanding of the laws of physics. If our understanding of the laws of physics is wrong then our logical deductions based on those laws would equally be wrong.
Journalist: "So, is it possible that X is true?"
Scientist: "It's far more likely that A, B, C...Z are true, but we can't quite rule out X."
Headline: "Scientists discover X!"
Think of it like Geometric level of detail in video games: when the observer is viewing a character from very far away a low-polygon mesh is displayed -- this is because the mesh only takes up a few pixels of screen space for the observer so rendering a high polygon mesh or a low polygon mesh is indistinguishable.
Now when the character is closer to the observer a high polygon mesh with more detail is substituted.
The observer can never tell that this trick is happening. If they designed an experiment to test for this the universe could simply spend more time fooling the observer.
I am quite sure if we are living in a simulation it makes a lot of approximations. When we conduct complex experiments it simply computes better approximations so that our observed results fit the "axioms of physics".
When I open a tree view, it doesn't have to eagerly evaluate all of the contents of each node. It gives you the nodes that you are looking at and you have a decision as to what you want to open. This is precisely analogous to what you "pay attention to". So the "tricks" that you mention could be thought of in terms of lazy evaluations.
We have to get back to the relationship between consciousness ... does an axiom even exist if it is not fathomed by some conscious being?
If you believe that it does not exist absent an observer then it is certainly possible that particular axioms simply cannot exist within the universe -- they cannot be fathomed because time itself might slow down to infinity when such things are fathomed.
All the evidence comes from inside the universe. All the evidence is suspect. There is no progress that can be made on this question without, effectively, divine revelation. Which would still be suspect.
And why would the universe need to conform to what makes sense to us small-brained monkeys?
Without our understanding of computers, networks, and virtual reality, a simulated universe theory would be very difficult to come about (not sure if someone actually did theorize this back then, but even if they did, the vast majority would have no idea what they were talking about).
That being said, what possibilities are we neglecting now due to our limited knowledge? In 200 years, it may be obvious we're living in a totally different type of universe.
In my opinion, we really won't have good idea of what kind of universe we're living in for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There will be many cycles of scientific consensus overthrown in the coming centuries as we discover new layers of reality and technology.
Of course, Plato's cave is the most famous writing about the idea of a "simulated" reality from antiquity, in the sense that it discusses the idea that prisoners who spent their entire lives in a cave would assume that the cave they see is the only reality.
It's like how the brain used to be an ocean, then it was a windmill, then it was a steam engine, then it was a computer, and now it's a GPU cloud. I wonder what will come first: humans finally understanding what a brain is, or making one.
I don't think you're giving enough credit to thinkers of the past. They didn't have the technology that lets us play with some of these ideas more directly, but they were still very capable of thinking through the philosophical ramifications. Descartes' Meditations comes to mind: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/#3...
Back in Tesla's day - which was also Einstein's, and so many others - the dominate paradigm was of waves and resonance, and we got physics made of waves and resonances.
Nowadays, it seems like the dominate paradigm is one of information and computation, and so we get lots of physics - and weird, have-baked speculations - considering the world from those perspectives.
No clue what the next paradigm will be, but if I had to bet, I'd bet one whatever comes out of quantum computing (probabilities and ???? ?).
I love this, but I would rather phrase it that it would have been much more expensive to communicate the ideas as efficiently back in the day. This both captures the essence of what you're saying (which is something I totally agree with and was just thinking of yesterday when thinking of the idiom "shave the yak"), as well as speaks to some of the critics of your statement that say you're not giving enough props to philosophers of old.
Btw, I don't want to be pushy or start a flame war, but actually reading the Bible and thinking in exactly this mindset of "what if I were a hyperdimensional population planting seeds for training 'simulacra'/AI characters" is incredible. I was never religious before a couple years ago, and let me tell you, the logic in the actual Bible (not the dogmatic interpretations still memetically floating around today) is awesome.
I'll give one example, and again I ask forbearance and patience of anyone who get their hackles raised: God's name. When he's speaking to Moses, Moses says "Who should I tell them is giving me this message to lead them out of Egypt?" God replies "I am who I am" (which is also a multi-layered phrase "I am what I am", and "I will be who/what I will be"). Yahweh ("LORD") is actually "I am". So this is the fundamental, recursively self-defining "Name" of God. When reading it, it just seems weird and out of place. But when reading it in context of today's understandings of the magnitude of the size of the "Universe" (vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big) combined with the prospects of computation and "What if I were to program a universe that is designed to itself program universes?" (and many other reasons), I've done a 180.
The hard part is 1) Getting over existing, dogmatic interpretations and all of the negative connotations associated with them. and 2) Actually believing it. The interesting thing is, the actual Bible repeatedly talks about the practitioners of the religions not understanding and not getting it. It's a theme both in the Old and New Testaments (It's why the Jews crucified Jesus, after all).
How is this not just... religion?
I always figured that religion was what happened after a particular metaphysics/philosophy came up with a guess about something unobservable through science and people started taking that guess seriously.
It usually takes the form of making up a bunch of rules for everyone to follow to keep from angering a postulated deity, but not always.
In this case you can observe this particular "faith" hatching into a minor religion (almost in toy/model style) with Roko's Basilisk.
This statement presumes that "flesh and blood" are already not "ones and zeros". It also relates to my view that the conflation of "information" and 1s and 0s is very misleading. 1s and 0s are a view of information. The things on my hard drive are not 1s and 0s, otherwise what would I call corrupted locations?
The simulation argument is "If we ever create a simulation, we'll create more, so we're probably in one of those simulations, unless we were first or are unique at cosmic scales." Would lazy loading make it harder to simulate our own universe at similar scales (harder to build a simulation in a simulation?)
At some point, unless we're living in a limited simulation that can itself not be fully simulated, aren't we getting something for nothing? And if it is in fact limited, how do you show that?
Edit: basically what zerofries said...
I think the answer is that if our Universe is currently, say, nested N levels deep in a simulation hierarchy, the Universe we currently observe may appear much more vast than it actually is, but since the speed of information is limited, we could never prove this. So while the number of estimated atoms in the observable Universe is something like 4×10^79, the actual number of simulated particles may be far, far less. Certainly, the information that comes to us via the light from distant galaxies is incredibly coarse grained and time-lagged, and if we're in a simulation it may well be that no finer grained representation actually exists (assuming there are no observers in those galaxies).
I don't actually know if I believe the simulation argument, and all of this is currently (perhaps forever) non-falsifiable. By the time we're able to even send an observer to some distant galaxy ~5 billion light years away, the Universe would have expanded even more, making the galaxy even further away. But the limitations imposed on the speed of information via light cones seems to make it very computationally feasible to simulate a Universe that appears much larger and detailed than it actually is. So in other words, the inhabitants of Universe at level N of the simulation hierarchy should be able to simulate a lower-entropy coarse approximation of their Universe at level N + 1, that would be indistinguishable from Universe N to the simulated inhabitants of N + 1, provided that sufficient restrictions on the speed of information and the number of observers is enforced.
But intuitively it seems there should be a limitation here, in that as N increases the level of nested computational resources available would need to decrease, until you hit a low entropy "leaf Universe". But that doesn't really affect the probabilistic angle of the simulation argument.
Maybe the simulation hierarchy is like a neural net - where hierarchy represents more abstraction and meaning - the higher we go, the more exotic the universes and more capable of carrying meaning by integrating information from below. Such a neural-net hierarchical universe could be seen as "God".
This is precisely a neural network, and it's especially interesting when you consider each person as a node in a larger network. You have your inputs and your outputs and a bunch of layers sitting in between, i.e. you take an ANN, draw a circle around it and connect it to other ANNs ad nauseam.
If we're in a simulation, we can't assume too much about the host reality's physics. Quantum computers or something else capable of simulating quantum physics simply could be easy to make in the host reality.
>What am I gaining by using a physical system to simulate a physical system?
We run simulations all the time for entertainment and research.