One is an assertion with no logic to justify it, the other is an assertion with a somewhat persuasive argument justifying it [1]. They are simply incomparable.
I respect people who believe in a bearded White omnipotent homophobic God who lives in a sky palace more than I respect people who believe in this insane drivel about the probability of living in a simulation. At least the former were indoctrinated as their brain was forming.
I think you've expressed a number of confusions.
First, I think you contradicted yourself. The line you quote says that posthuman civilizations are unlikely to create simulations, but you say this is false because a universe simulation requires more power than available in the universe. So you're agreeing with the outcome while saying you're disagreeing.
Second, I suggest reading the the paper fully, because Bostrom explains that we don't need full universe simulations, we need only consciousness simulations (kind of like the Matrix). The very premise of a post-human civilization is that they have knowledge sufficiently advanced that they have algorithms to simulate human minds.
Much like how video games only render the part of the world that is visible to the players, so a consciousness simulation only needs to simulate minds and their perceptions of a macroscopic, classical world, they do not have to simulate a full quantum universe. Our brains are great at filling in information that we expect to be there, so even the parts that we directly perceivedon't need to be simulated with complete fidelity.
Frankly, I don't think you've given the argument sufficient thought, but by a happy accident you picked exactly the outcome that I think is most likely, and I elaborate on why here:
https://higherlogics.blogspot.com/2021/02/why-we-are-likely-...
Right, but the simulation is nonetheless bottlenecked by whichever system requires the greatest fidelity, and the more technology advances, the more of a problem that becomes. For instance, medieval times would likely be far easier to simulate than modern times, because the latter requires simulating our entire computer infrastructure.
And I think that infrastructure is harder to simulate than you'd think: I could use a solver on a big NP problem (we'll assume that P != NP), get a solution after an hour, and in theory, with some practice, I could probably check if the answer is correct in my head. So the simulator can't simply give me what I "expect". It has to actually compute the thing, and then it's clear that the faster our computers get, the slower the simulation has to run.
Alternatively, the simulation could mess with our minds so we never notice anything out of place, but at that point I'm not sure I understand the point of it. Might as well wonder if this is all a dream.
Agreed.
> because the latter requires simulating our entire computer infrastructure.
Maybe, that isn't clear. There are probably plenty of optimisations here too if given some thought.
> I could use a solver on a big NP problem (we'll assume that P != NP), get a solution after an hour, and in theory, with some practice, I could probably check if the answer is correct in my head.
Yes, but note that we very rarely solve NP or EXPTIME problems exactly due to the costs. We often solve them heuristically or approximately, which wouldn't pose a problem for a simulation either.
Then there's also the possibility that we are simply not free to choose the problem to solve. When running a solver for an NP problem, we just need to input any kind of NP problem, and a simulation could easily have large sets of precomputed solutions available.
> Alternatively, the simulation could mess with our minds so we never notice anything out of place, but at that point I'm not sure I understand the point of it
Depends on whether any such changes affects the point of the simulation. If the simulation is to test world-scale economic models, then isolated tribes wouldn't have much influence on those outcomes.
Then again, maybe the point is simply entertainment. Maybe we're just The Sims for post-humans, in which case there's no point anyway.
Idle curiosity is drives a lot of human behaviour, particularly in philosophy!
No, they are saying the opposite. The argument that simulating the universe requires more atoms than the universe says that a later civilization would not simulate the entire universe. IE, #2 of the refutations really true.
The simulation only needs to produce observations that are consistent with the knowledge of the first observer. Sometimes bit even that, as I describe in the blog post, because eyewitness testimony is known to be quite unreliable.
I'm not sure what sort of history you're thinking of specifically.
The amount of information science could infer on many questions is strictly bounded and in those cases we could only reason stochastically. The data presented at time of first observation can then be generated randomly from the set of answers consistent with what's already known.
The place to implement an optimization like this would be at the items with the biggest O in your world, which is usually the smallest building block--what you'd have the "most" of, which would drive the largest memory and processing demands.
Also, why the assumption that post-humans are running the simulations (as in the paper)? Couldn't it be any ultra-advanced civilization that's playing with an evolutionary simulation?
> Also, why the assumption that post-humans are running the simulations (as in the paper)? Couldn't it be any ultra-advanced civilization that's playing with an evolutionary simulation?
Sure, potentially. The paper makes no assumptions about the existence of other life forms, it instead extrapolates the likelihood of a simulation given the only intelligent life we know to exist: us.
Therefore you can see the simulation argument from that paper as a lower bound on the probability we live in a simulation. Positing the existence of other life forms that run random simulations can only increase the probability we're living in a simulation, assuming one of the other outcomes isn't more likely.
I think the parent poster was noting that it is a pretty fundamentally different argument than say, positing the existence of a creator, because we exist at all - and that said creator has certain specific requirements of us regarding what we do on Sundays, for instance, or with whom and when we have kids.
Is that a requirement of every flavor of creationism? Actually, maybe I shouldn't use 'creationism' in this context because that's a loaded term with a lot of baggage at this point. What else to call a hypothesis that asserts there's some kind of intelligence behind the universe that we see? Simulationists would seem to fall into that broader category as would old-school creationists.
Seems like first you'd need to have some kind of falsifiable evidence that we were in a simulation first before jumping there? Plenty of folks trying to do that though, without falling into the first case.
Personally it seems to have little to no real impact on anything I care about one way or another, so filed in the 'cute but who cares' bin.
Assuming any kind of simulation at all leads to more questions than answers - simply delegating the creation of the universe to the next turtle down. It's not a matter of how "persuasive" an argument is or isn't. It is the evidence the scientific method has produced from which we draw our conclusions.
A. The idea that intelligence beyond human beings would grant it's possessor power that are in ways absolute in very specific, rigid fashion. Human being can accomplish a lot of things. It's notable those things human beings do better than computers seem very tenuous. Humans seem to drive rather haphazardly yet humans drive much better than computers and driving overall seems a "bucket chemistry" sort of activity. Humans calculate much worse than computers and calculation is an exact, defined activity (arguable, the exact, defined activity). But for the singularians, transhuman devices will do the uncertain, tenuous activities that humans do but with "no mistakes". And for a lot human activities, "no mistakes" actually might not even mean anything. Despite humans driving better than computers, humans probably wouldn't even agree on what absolute good driving even means.
B. Simulation as exact map. Any human created simulation of some system is going to be an approximation of that system for the purpose of extracting particular phenomena. Some things are discarded, other focused on and simplified. A model of the solar has to consider conservation of energy or tiny deviations will produce instability over time since errors overall on unavoidable in current hardware. Even a simulation of a computer chip isn't useful unless one knows the chip's purpose is logical operations. But for Bostrom and partisans of
C. Incoherent ontology. If we could produce an exact model of a thing, which is the real subject and which is simulation? What if we could produce twenty "exact simulations", which is real? In a realm of unlimited hypotheticals and unlimited exact simulations, wouldn't a least a countable infinite simulations of "everything" exist. Which is real is quite a conundrum but this problem itself only exists in a world of multiplied objects which we actually have no reason to suppose exists.
As for aging and life extension, I honestly don't understand how anyone could reasonably think we shouldn't stop or reverse aging.
I can certainly comprehend why one would wish to become an immortal being incapable of death. But I just want to be human. Sure you can live forever, but at what cost? A fear for sunlight, garlic, and crosses? For me, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life."