The simulation has to be 'good enough' to make a thinking person (win the lottery); my mind has to be only smart enough to think of multiple universes but not perceive the obvious simulation artifacts; I have to be written (as a simulation myself) to be capable of accepting multiple universes.
Since we even ask ourselves "Are we a limited simulation artifact, or a real thinking person?" the answer is right there in the question.
> The simulation has to be 'good enough' to make a thinking person (win the lottery); my mind has to be only smart enough to think of multiple universes but not perceive the obvious simulation artifacts
Why is it necessarily true that the creator of a simulation would want to indefinitely prevent people in the simulation from recognizing that their universe is simulated?
> Since we even ask ourselves "Are we a limited simulation artifact, or a real thinking person?" the answer is right there in the question.
Let's go along with the notion that the simulation would want to avoid discovery of the simulation. How are you sure that you're really asking the question if you're so convinced of the answer? Is it crazy to imagine that in the hypothetical simulation a person's consciousness would be given degrees of freedom but have imposed constraints?
That's a false dichotomy. Why couldn't a simulation include "thinking" and such "self-doubt"?
But how could we possibly know what are simulation artifacts without knowledge of the rules of the outside universe? Paraphrasing an old SMBC comic, we live in a universe with a maximum speed, a minimum temperature, and a rule that position and momentum are only knowable to certain tolerances. If I were writing a universe simulator, heck yeah forced locality of side effects within the light cone makes the simulation and memory structures much more manageable.
Is that just the natural state of how things exist? Or are they constraints from simulation optimization within a parent universe where objects move infinite distances along 20 spatial dimensions as fast as they'd like? Depending on the rules outside, maybe our light speed limitations don't even help with simulation optimization and they just put that rule in here for fun to mess with us.
I just don't see how we have any grounds for talking about the odds of being a simulation based on absolutely no information. Best case we can say "If I make these assumptions about the parent universe I can draw X conclusions," but that doesn't mean much.
Therefore from an optimization standpoint simulations are unlikely to simulate worlds nearly as complex as the real one. Either they are going to simulate minds, or they will simulate tiny subsets of the real world, or vastly less complex worlds. We are not operating as minds without body's which rules out the pure mind simulation leaving far less efficient options which must therefore simulate smaller spaces, less complex universes, and or shorter periods of time.
ED: And by complexity I mean in terms of building blocks useful for simulating a universe or hosting life. Complexity that's not useful for either purpose is useless.
In a more complex universe the bacteria equivalent could be more intelligent than humans. But it does not go the other way simulations of a life form will always be less efficient than the least complex lifeforms in a parent universe.
That doesn't follow logically.
It's perfectly fine to be able to simulate life forms MORE efficient than the one's in your universe.
That's not to say the simplest possible equivalent organism exists in that universe, but anything that could make a simulation should also be able to make that life form.
True for some values of "a lot", false for others.
What's undeniably true is that it incurs some overhead over NOT running a simulation.
But that doesn't prove that a simulated life form incurs overhead larger than its real life counterpart.
For one, there might not be any real life counterpart.
We say "simulation" here, but what we actually mean is "virtual world", which might simulate an actual world, or it might be its totally own thing (the same way I can chose to write a simulation of actual things, like e.g. "the Sims", or a simulation of a domain I only imagined). If, for example, as per TFA, our universe is a simulation, is doesn't mean that it actually simulated something else. Just that it's a simulation in itself.
So, "simulated" in this discussion means "not an organically created world made of some physical substrate, but consciously created/programmed by some advanced civilization".
So, the thing simulated could be totally unlike (in properties, physical laws, etc) what exists in the universe of those doing the simulation.
Second, a simulation (as we know it and practice it ourselves) usually has much less overhead than the real life thing it simulates (when it does simulate some real life thing). That's like, it's whole point. E.g. a weather model running in some supercomputers has some overhead, but nothing like that of the actual weather. Similarly, Sims has some overhead, but nothing like the equivalent real-life place and humans would have.
Where you seem to be confused is that you assume that: (a) a simulation must be of something that exists, (b) a simulation must be perfect, e.g. 1:1 to the thing it simulates. Only then would your argument make sense.
But neither of those things are necessary -- even our Earth and universe, if they are simulations, they could be very crude models, running with very low resources, in a vastly more complex and powerful real universe.
A simple rule like Conway's Game of Life that isn't too physically realistic but is instructive because of how intimately it's been analyzed while exhibiting some relatively high complexity, shows remarkable compressibility using techniques such as memoization in HashLife[0].
Even more striking is the potential for superspeed caching where different nodes are evolved at different speeds often allowing _exponential_ speedups of pattern generations to be calculated for longer than the timeframe of the universe we speculate about today for real physics.
But, consider if you want to run a simulation 100 times using the same data you can speed that output up by just copying the output of the first simulation 100 times. But that's not simulating the same mind 100 times it's simulating the mind only once. Hash life and similar approaches don't increase your ability to compute unique mind states.
(b) a simulation must be perfect.
No, if you can get away with a less accurate simulation you can get also get intelligence from less computational power using the same approach in the 'real' world.
It seems to me that there is also a similar analogy to be made in the methods that we can use to compress information. Is there a functional difference between a compression algorithm that is lossless and one that would maybe corrupt 1 rgb value a tiny nudge in an entire image with millions of pixels if our only tool for examining it for corruption were our eyes? What if we then used that compression algorithm only in situations where we know the tools used to examine the results wouldn't be able to identify the losses, and used a lossless compression only when such tools were available?
All this is to say that I believe you could feasibly create a perfect simulation of something more complex than the thing performing the simulation with proper optimizations, but it would require certain stipulations like knowing when to use various optimizations to avoid contaminating fidelity of the simulation. Simple example would be simulating human history before a microscope was invented would allow us to constrain all approximations to have less error than would be visible to the most precise observer's senses of measurement.
Further, simulating worlds vs keeping real people in pods to see those simulated worlds seems to favor people in pods. Especially if you alter the biology of those pod people to have real physical brains operating on some hardware and little else. Philosophically you can argue about simulations vs "FPGA" boards ruing minds, but direct minds on "FPGA" boards still introduces direct impacts from the real world vs pure simulation.
If I were to use the kinematic equations to simulate throwing a ball through the air, but my simulation only used 1 significant digit, rounding errors would quickly add up to produce a path for the ball that would significantly deviate from the path if we were to make the same calculation except treating the ball as made of quarks/atoms/molecules and painstakingly analyze forces on every single atom until the collection of them being the ball reached the end of the throw. It is that deviation from the result that we need to avoid for our simulation to retain enough fidelity to be said to be simulating throwing a ball, otherwise we're just simulating some other interaction that doesn't really match what we would observe.
Your post also makes the assumption that the simulator even cares if we notice that we're in a simulation. I don't think that this premise as a whole includes any assumption as to the motivation for our simulation (if we indeed were to be in one). For all we know, it could be a simulation to determine how long it takes to develop sentient life to a point that it can observe inconsistencies in its environment and deduce that it is in a simulation.
We just don't know anything about the 'real world' in this instance and I think guesses in that realm venture into the realm of being impossible to verify. It can still be fun to think about, but it can't really be based on any experimental evidence unless it were deliberately placed there by a hypothetical simulator.
So, granted, there's undoubtedly a massive and permanent loss of resolution at each level of simulation depth. But this is not an argument that our own universe, with all its complexity, cannot be a simulation. We have no idea what the complexity of a "base" universe could be. Perhaps the gap between our own physics and the physics of the universe we're being simulated within is as great as the gap between GTA bytecode and quark-gluon interactions.
For that matter, we have have no idea what base-universe consciousness might look like. Perhaps running a universe-simulation which (if implemented in our own universe) require roughly a galaxy-mass worth of computronium -- perhaps this is the sort of thing that fifth graders do for a science project.
"But that would be ridiculous" isn't an acceptable objection. Geocentricism was able to sustain itself in large part because the alternative -- heliocentricism -- seemed absurdly disconnected from the human experience, implying a sun that was ridiculously huge, planets absurdly far far, and other suns that were so far away that they didn't even appear to move. This, quite obviously, had to be wrong. Nothing is allowed to be so vast.
Now, of course, we know that those too-far-away stars are just one tiny corner of one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies. Turns out that the scale of the universe doesn't have any regard for what we consider to be reasonable. So let's not put any artificial constraints on the capabilities of our parent universe.
If you are inside the simulation, you don't know the actual universe's rules. Thinking beings being more likely to be in the real universe is just the kind of thing a thinking being inside a simulation with limited computing power would say.
Just half-joking, of course.
Who said thinking requires that much power?
Note, the computing substrate may not map to what the Brain’s thinks it’s substrate is, but that would still impose effects from the real world onto the mind. The equivalent of a cosmic ray flipping a bit in the hardware would actually flip something in the mind where a simulation could detect and correct such errors at the cost of overhead.
A simulation like GTA is only useful because it is staggeringly crude, but the goals of the simulation are commensurately staggeringly modest. I just don’t see how running a simulation of our universe, in our universe, at high enough fidelity to appear real even under detailed scientific analysis, could be useful or worthwhile.
I’d like to see a more credible and compelling proposal than hand waved ‘history simulation’. What’s the point of a history simulation that runs many times slower than real time? If it’s low fidelity, it will also be low accuracy, so why simulating at the physics level at all? I don’t see how it would give useful results.
A game is a perfectly valid reason to do this. We're running millions of crude, low level simulations today.
> I’d like to see a more credible and compelling proposal than hand waved ‘history simulation’
Civilization is a crude, low level "history simulation" that doesn't try to be accurate.
Our world might be equally low level and crude by the standard of a future with vastly more computational capability.
Also consider that if you're in a simulation, then you have no basis for saying anything about the size or scope of the simulation: it's not a given many people are simulated at full fidelity, for example.
Hardly. They’re nowhere near a simulation of a “reality.”
How does a game character “see” something?
By a global agent checking the position of that character, along with the position of other characters, and a bunch of other variables and conditions, then tells the character if it sees anything.
This is a far, far, far cry from everything being made up of particles, emitting countless photons every “tick”, and those photons being absorbed by certain materials, emitting electrons and chemicals that travel to a neuron....
Nothing inside a game actually generates sound waves, or infrared and other parts of the EM spectrum that can only be perceived by certain creatures and tools..
It’s not even a simulation of that, just an extremely simplified and filtered representation of the end result as perceived by us, that we find convincing enough for the context.
Misses the point. The point is that each such instance is an example of something where the fidelity of the simulation is restricted by technical ability, not desire. It answers the "why" by giving a concrete example of an area where we keep pushing the boundaries of simulation, because more fidelity gives more believable interactions.
We went from SimCity and Civilization with really dumb AIs that never seemed remotely real, to games like Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri where the faction leaders had distinct personalities, to Sims with large sets of competing traits. And yes, they're still crude. But you have game designers out there today toying with individual neural nets for the NPCs to augment the generic AIs.
And keep in mind it's not a question of whether or not we can do this tomorrow, but whether or not *our descendants from now until the heat death of the universe - or the end of civilization - will do this. If they do it even once, it's 50/50 whether you're in the simulation. Every additional run reduces the chance that we're in the "real world".