What are the odds we are living in a computer simulation? (2016)
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OTOH, every time an escape is detected and contained, the simulation can be reset to its last valid state and its inhabitants will never suspect the universe was reset.
-Douglas Adams
Adams could even have gone a bit further and added:
"We're just not sure how many times."
In this case, we could do things we're really good at. We could influence a viewer by showing them a myriad of ads for example. Or shift their political views to our advantage.
That's effectively what it is: anyone running a simulation of an entire universe, controlling the rules and data of that simulation, in a position to turn it on or off, change it, etc, is effectively the god of that simulated universe.
Of course, it is as useless a model of the world for scientific purposes as all religions are - it can't explain anything that we don't already know about.
In fact, it's not even novel. The whole idea is quite similar to the Hindu notion of Māyā, the world we experience as an illusion that hides the real truths of the world.
What if the Universe were a blemish on a semi-sentient 8th dimensional creature, itself by-product of an 23rd dimensional industrial process, which is itself a symbolic representation for even more incomprehensible entities?
Could you call that a simulation? The comparison is meaningless.
That's supposed to be a trade secret, who leaked this to you?
The second step is to realise that it makes no difference to the people living inside a simulated universe whether you actually run the simulator, or even bother building it.
For example, the set of prime numbers less than 10^12 exists whether or not you build and program a computer to print them out. If you write a program that simulates a universe, then the mathematical object defined by that program exists whether or not you build a computer and run the program, and to any conscious beings that happen to exist inside that hypothetical universe it can't possibly make any difference.
That's my opinion, anyway.
This is how physics poses to "see behind the veil", so to speak. The implications seem a lot more interesting than a computer simulation, at least to a [this] human's perspective.
If seems natural to us that a simulation must be grounded in mathematics, and that maths must therefore be a thing within the reality/universe that is running the simulation, but I don't think this is a given. The infrastructure might utilise something else that we can't conceive of.
In that sense, we might be able to use mathematics to describe systems that are beyond the reality of the universe
For 'us' to be meaningful to 'them', hopefully we can conclude that in some sense, 'they' are meaningful to 'us', tho agreed, as you said, it is no given
I like the aleph sequence, because it shows that allowing paradoxes and impossibilities doesn't mean all bets are off -- that the universe can make perfect sense, even containing paradoxes that are beyond our conception
If it is a game, what are the odds that you are a non player character? In games, the vast majority of characters aren't the player.
So if we are living in a computer simulation, odds are that we're non player characters.
But yeah, odds are much higher you are just an NPC for decorative purposes ...
...some serving of shrooms seems suggestive to spiritual salvation...
Actually it depends on the type of a game, maybe we're in an equivalent of a huge Hypixel server with us being players and animals being NPCs. Occasional admin interventions are perceived as UFO abductions and generally laughed at...
One particularity of this game is that there is no pre-existing set of universal rules: you are getting to know them from your parents, other people, "holy" and less holy books etc. - and even when you die you can never be 100% sure that the rules you learned were the ones to follow.
But it would be hubris on my part to try and prove the existence of deity. It's fundamentally unproveable - at least with what we currently know. I view these simulation exercises as the same.
While we can't know the future, this might not have been the case in the past. Most religious books describe a time where special people like prophets have very direct, physical contact with the main deity of the religion (one of them even had a fight with God).
Lazy physics development. :)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/
Effectively we can’t prove a higher level of the simulation because we are encoded in it?
It depends on the implementation but it's definitely not impossible a priori and especially not because of Godel.
More importantly, If math is designed to reflect reality and his proof effectively states you can’t prove the system is correct within the system — then effectively aren’t we saying we can’t prove we are in a simulation?
Honest question - I have no idea lol
You forgot something there: you know the underlying system and about its existence. In the absence of this knowledge it's indeed impossible to know.
Here's an example from real-life physics: there's no way of telling by means of measurement, whether you're accelerating or at rest but subjected to a gravitational field.
A software example would be this: how would a program written and running in Factorio (like Pong [0]) be able to tell that it's implemented by means of video game mechanics running in an emulator executed within a VM on server hardware?
If the programming environment itself features no way of interrogating its runtime environment, then there's just no way.
It can model itself, but it couldn't replicate itself 1:1—which maybe is the wrong assumption on my part, but is the only way you could prove with certainty that you may be living in a simulation?
I mean, without input from another source, that is.
And no, you'll have no way to break out of simulation and access api of the simulator, because if it's in place it works similarly to this:
Obviously though it might be a matter of perspective, we might as well be gods compared to ants, our code might be buggy but I don't think ants are smart enough to figure that out.
You don't have bugs in math.
> The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.
It doesn't seem like a bug to me. Just a way to ensure that any non-trivial math has no self sufficient bubbles. That no set of math is somehow better than others. That math is free and unlimited with it's choice of axioms and rules and no subset is better than others.
But the new extended subset has new, other troubles that make it impossible to prove its consistency by using just itself, so to prove its consistency you need to extend it again.
You can still have fully provable (i.e. bugless) subset of math, you just need other math to prove that it is so.
And the fact that your extended god-math can't prove that it is itself fully consistent (doesn't generate any proofs of falsehoods) is not necessarily a problem. It's enough if no falsehoods were involved in the proof of the universe-math consistency.
And that's entirely possible. Theorem you mentioned doesn't say anything about that.
Given this, the claim that we're at the bottom of some large or infinite stack of simulated universes would have to also assert that the containing universe is fundamentally different than our own, which moves the claim from the realm of merely unfalsifiable to convoluted.
When I see people like musk make the argument for the universe being simulated I can't help but see those arguments as a sophomoric reach for whatever model of reality feels "coolest" at the time; evidence be damned.
So I'm just curious where the bugs may be found? After all anything this complicated probably has bugs =)... Is it in quantum mechanics? Faster than light travel? Something super mundane that we've not thought about because it's that simple way someone decided to trigger debug mode?
Find those and fun things may be possible, which would also give us evidence for the sim theory.
I'm not holding my breath, but it's fun to think about.
are we assuming there are smarter cooler humans running around on their own planet with 7 continents, 5 oceans, in a 8 planet solar system (sorry pluto), orbiting a G2V class star? that are running big data-centers where they faithfully simulate physics, the planet, the heavens for us in essentially-exact detail?
that'd take a lot of computation. maybe our simulated reality only moves 10^-6 as fast, so they have time to do all the computation, and they're just really really old over there. in sci fi typically the uploaded people speed around at a much much faster time factor, but if we're trying to make sure that every physics experiment reproduces, biology & virology &c experiment & observations reproduce, that's a lot more complexity than what i imagine for your run-of-the-mill hyper-advanced society that has uploaded into the cloud: i imagine the uploaded society running a much more synthetic, simpler reality, selectively interesting.
to me, it's much easier to imagine a Great Fake situation, that humanity has been actively steered by unknown higher technology forces sometimes in the past couple thousands of years (and perhaps longer). i still tend to think we are a not entirely-uncommon random chance amid the congealed energy that exploded & hopefully pretty please contracts to explode again. i tend to think our past is our own. and so too our future.
He's taking the hacker's perspective and exploring if the simulation would be hackable from inside.
Similarly, the uniformity of background radiation, and many other phenomena. But yes Lorentz invariance is a good one to mention!
If the universe doesn't, we have bigger questions to worry about.
Whenever this subject comes up I’m always a bit interested but it seems like an impossible thing to know.
Fixed that for you.
E.g. even animal fights are frowned on in most cultures, and bloodsports are now pretty heavily regulated (especially vs historical norms)
Just choose a disease and go for a 10 minute Wikipedia rabbit hole.
If cruelty exists in their world, then empathy and caring must exist too.
I can't explain why its insignificant, of course. It's like a hydrocarbon combusting in your car engine, and the rest of the little molecules wondering what kind of a monster could do that to them. We humans aren't even aware that it could be a problem.
To borrow a few pages out of the ancient Indian playbook, creator was really bored with perfect perfection and invented a way to entertain himself, otherwise it's a huge bland perfect nothing forever.
Sit down, Doug, that doesn't make any sense
So it is reasonable to take the universe as not fully self descriptive or defining
For instance can the universe create it's own arbitrary laws of physics and run molecules on that basis? No it doesn't
And so essentially, a simulation, or God becomes required. And the one running the simulation would need an immense power essentially beyond the realms of our conception
It seems if we are to exist, then, for want of a better word, God is essential
So yes, eminently testable, no disagreement with you on that
And yet at the same time, the simulation hypothesis is not really disprovable, and infact, is quite reasonable
Which presents the problem (if simulation is not disprovable) that there may be many valid explanations that are untestable
So in that sense, I would say impossible to test
But still I'm surprised you say there are no testable hypotheses!
Let's leave the cultural baggage of self-existent platonic forms for ultimate power at the door, it's an ultimately overtrod path of philosophical inquiry.
If you constitutionally can't leave it at the door, read David Brin's crystal spheres (and enjoy!).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)
Without a prime mover, we are left with turtles, true, I think
To me that's a prime mover statement, if ever there was one
But I have a feeling you resolve nihilism towards something meaningful? Personally I don't get how that works, but I'm interested, and look forward to any explanation
If a system cannot be self prescriptive/be without axioms/ (whatever you think the issue is) then adding another layer of systems is not going to solve your issue. If it can be, adding another layer is not necessary.
Simply to be able to simulate the universe, or provide a basis for (however we describe the issue) already needs to an excessively stupendous amount of power -- but that is something still within the realms of physics
I was suggesting (as essentially do you) that to break out of the nested simulations (or whatever formulation) takes something qualitively different to what this universe is able to even fully conceptualize
My placation to God (aka universe simulator runner), is to say that clearly this thing exists (else we don't) and clearly it must be different and outside the universe to an extent that we can't describe it
In the same way that a set can't describe it's aleph numbers
-- So in brief, I'm agreeing that another layer of simulation doesn't cut it
I guess it just comes down to semantics then. I would say that, by definition (but I'm not sure if this is the most common definition), anything that can act upon the universe is part of it. Your God/simulator/... might be alien to us, but by definition it is part of our universe, and it's just us that do not entirely understand the capabilities of the universe.
And now we have a dyad. Great job. Do you have any idea what just started?
Personally, I think the discussion of "is it a simulation" is just getting into the mechanics again and is only held to be defining of reality by hardened materialists. I mean, that is just computing catching up with physics catching up with spirituality with regard to facing the question of: what really matters and what really is the point if we're just a small crest of a wave in the infinite ocean of energy, or if we're a bunch of emergent consciousnesses in god's infinite quest to know itself, or I want a cheeseburger because of some cosmic bitflip in some nth dimension of recursive simulations, and so on.
The truth of any of it is likely to be found in the abstract, if anywhere, I suppose.