On whether we're living in a simulation | Hacker News Reader

On whether we're living in a simulation

scottaaronson.blog

79 pointsFergusArgyll201 comments

"If they say, maybe you should live your life differently, just from knowing that you might be in a simulation, I respond: I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I have a vague feeling that this discussion predates the 80 or so years we’ve had digital computers! Why not just join the theologians in that earlier discussion, rather than pretending that this is something distinctive about computers? Is it relevantly different here if you’re being dreamed in the mind of God or being executed in Python?"

That sums up a bit my thoughts about it. The whole simulation hypothesis seems like a new way to introduce theological concepts with modern tech. Cannot be disproved, cannot be verified.

It's still interesting to think about though. Specifically, I find it interesting that the concept of a "god" is actually realistic in a very tangible way.

Oh, theology is in general interesting to think about. But I am sceptical about the "realistic" claims. We don't know how consciousness works, so we don't know, whether we can simulate it with a computer.

There's a slight "paradox", for lack of a better word. Imagine tomorrow you die, only to 'wake up' and discover it actually was just a simulation. And you're now in some new reality. Well it turns out you haven't really answered anything, because the exact same question still remains of what's the source of this new reality. Turtles all the way down?

And I expect there is probably no answer, because there's quite disconcerting little issue of first existence. Even if you imagine that the matter for a big bang could just materialize out of some weird quantum fluctuation, then you're left to wonder about what created the void, or what created the rules as they exist. You end up with this sort of uncomfortable hand-wavey, well it's just always been this way forever. Even increasingly abstract things like multi-verses don't really manage to reconcile this.

If you think about it enough, it's really quite uncomfortable than "we" (whoever "we" may be) actually exist given this paradox. Because it's a question that intelligent existence may actually never be able to answer, and only testable by the experiment from which nobody returns.

As an atheist, the simulation argument, or variants about it, is the closest I've come to considering the belief in a "god". I still stick by my atheism on the basis that I don't feel someone simulating us would really meet what we think of as a deity, and in that sense it has even made me see a "god" as less likely, because I'd consider it more likely that if there were to be anything outside our universe it's just more layers of computation, and entities whose power - if any - would be more likely to just be linked to control of a device (the simulator), not inherent to themselves.

Which sounds as unlikely as Jesus dying for my sins on the cross, a very strange thing that falls down upon scrutiny, which also happens to be something I have faith in!

To someone who engages with theology, beyond a happy little bedtime story to make me feel comfortable with my own demise, the Simulationists are in the same ballpark, but without the test of time and some important calls to an almost unattainable set of criteria to live by, best expressed in the Beatitudes.

If pressed I am probably more engaged by an agnostic understanding of the Abrahamic religions, but I can’t help to feel the overwhelming truth, love and warmth of all of existence radiate from the verses of the Bible, Old and New.

My Jesuit theological trainings have led me to appreciate all other religions, to see the same love and energy in the multitudes of practice and expression, like the light in the center of a lamp, throwing subtlety different shadows on the walls from the inconsistencies in the making of the glass panes by human hands.

Perhaps with time the Simulationists will end up with their own window into the glory of our existence! I will welcome such a transformation with open arms.

I want to follow in Christ’s footsteps because it would make me a better person, no matter the fact that the struggle will never end. With God’s grace I am at least given the chance to try, fail and be forgiven for the limits of my human nature.

The emphasis should be on the practice of humility, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. The particular expression is in the realm of mere mortals and is as beautiful as any other artistic creation.

I expect downvotes, but that’s OK. Father, forgive them; they know not what they do. (Luke 23:34)

;)

A "Simulationist" who believes we are certain to be in a simulation despite no evidence is just holding yet another religious belief.

I see it as a possibility, but a possibility without evidence remains an interesting, untested hypothesis that might be grounds for speculation, not belief.

What evidence do you have that there is no evidence though? Or does a different standard apply to certain claims, like cultural axioms?

No, no, no.

I don't have to prove your claim to be wrong. YOU have to prove your claim to be right.

You are making extraordinary claims that is at odd with everyday observable lives we live in.

If you claims someone was walking on water, its not my job to prove you wrong!

I would very much like to hear the details of these claims I am making, they sound quite exciting!

I'd also like to know why the grandparent post has no burden of proof, are certain claims off limits to challenge for some reason, and can that reason be shared publicly?

> I would very much like to hear the details of these claims I am making, they sound quite exciting!

Original assertion - belief that we are in a simulation with 100% certainty is no different than a religious belief in a deity.

You: "What evidence do you have that there is no evidence though?"

Me: "You cannot claim no evidence is a meaningful assertion here, its not"

> I'd also like to know why the grandparent post has no burden of proof

The OP made no claims. An 'opinion' without an evidence is a belief.

Just so we're all on the same page, I am not the person who made the first comment ("Which sounds as unlikely as Jesus dying for my sins on the cross..."):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39301776

> Original assertion - belief that we are in a simulation with 100% certainty is no different than a religious belief in a deity.

> You: "What evidence do you have that there is no evidence though?"

If we're being "pedantic", there are ~~two~~ THREE claims that "have" a burden of proof:

1. Original assertion - belief that we are in a simulation with 100% certainty is no different than a religious belief in a deity. [Was this actually the original assertion?]

I don't believe this assertion occurred - rather, I think you may have misinterpreted "are in the same ballpark"?

2. belief that we are in a simulation with 100% certainty is no different than a religious belief in a deity

Ontologically + algorithmically, "is not different" is a bold claim.

As an ~analogy, see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2363143/whats-the-best-s...

3. "You cannot claim no evidence is a meaningful assertion here, its not"

a) One can actually, but not in an epistemically & logically sound manner (and you have a few challenges of your own on that front).

b) "meaningful" is a very tricky word; it is also a subjective word (so, conducting logic upon it is going to produce strange, misleading results like "its not", which is an opinion that has the appearance of being a fact. Unless I am completely misunderstanding you, here we do not disagree (you do believe it to be true, no)?)

>> I'd also like to know why the grandparent post has no burden of proof

> The OP made no claims.

Again, if we are referring to "Which sounds as unlikely as Jesus dying for my sins on the cross...", I believe you are incorrect, there are several claims in there ("pedentically", even an expression of one's opinion and predictions are claims).

> An 'opinion' without an evidence is a belief.

While technically true, this seems like one of those "not wrong" truths:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=you%27re%20n...

>>> "you're not wrong" = "you're right", however phrasing it as "you're not wrong" usually that there's more to it -- either there's some missing nuance....

In this case, substantial problems derive from the multiple differing meanings of "is a", which is often mixed up with equals at runtime (under certain conditions).

But also, importantly (maybe even more importantly): this cultural norm where on certain topics of conversation, it is acceptable to simply play the ~"it's just an opinion, everyone is always only expressing their opinion..." as a sort of rhetorical get our of jail free card is (imho) not only annoying, but a giant source of unrealized (recursively compounding, etc) harm in the system. I often wonder what would happen is some set of people in this system were to "do otherwise" (in a comprehensive manner), at substantial scale.

tl;dr: probably just an honest mistake, cheers!

You're misinterpreting what I wrote, so let's break it down.

1. If our hypothetical Simulationist believes we are certain to be in a simulation despite the hypothetical Simulationist having seen no evidence, then it is my opinion they are just holding another religious belief.

2. If they expect me to consider their belief as anything but a religious belief, then it rests on them to present the evidence they have seen. They're free not to, and I'm free to dismiss their unsupported hypothesis.

It's not my job to search for evidence for a claim made by someone else if I don't find it compelling.

"No evidence" did not suggest no evidence can and/or does exist somewhere, someplace, but that I have not seen any. My assertion that I have not seen any is all the evidence that is needed for the claim that I have not seen any.

But like Russel's Teapot, if someone claims to know that we are in a simulation, that is an extraordinary claim and the burden of proof lies squarely on them.

> You're misinterpreting what I wrote

Seems more like I interpreted what you wrote literally rather than ideologically (colloquially, as is current enforced fashion)...seems a bit unfair that religious people can't pull a similar trick and say scripture is metaphorical and nullify all criticism.

Ok, so let's consider "then it is my opinion they are just holding another religious belief":

For clarity: do you believe that it is necessarily true that there is no evidence for a God?

Is there some important meaning contained in "just holding another religious belief"? It seems like a phrase that is conclusive about something in some way (the "just" accentuating it, at least to my interpretation).

Does personal witness count as evidence for people who believe themselves to have witnessed evidence, and if not why not (I'm getting at what seems like at least somewhat of a double standard, and there's the thorny issue of difficulty of proof of existence vs disproof in play[1]...among other things, some in your favor, and some a derivative of temporal cultural norms of cognition).

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/black-swan-event

> My Jesuit theological trainings have led me to appreciate all other religions,

I don’t know much about Jesuits. Is this common in their beliefs or are you just mentioning that you yourself came to these conclusions? Just curious for my own sake.

It is common enough that it came out of the mouth of a priest during a theology lecture!

Edit: It is still astonishing to me that they let these hippies into the papacy!

PESRONAL OPINION AND EXPERIENCE:

I was SO LUCKY, growing up Irish-American Catholic, that I had so many local parish Priests that were Jesuits. THEY ECOURAGED QUESTIONING FAITH. Open Q&A, without saying a dogmatic response - sparking discussion instead.

These cats allowed myself and my peers the latitude to poke holes in all of it, pontificate (apologies on the pun) on our personal viewpoints and challenge any conflicts in Dogma or texts.

Jesuits help combine the scientific reality of our experience with the mystical / religious in a non-judgmental way (IMHO). Pretty powerful and not as evangelical as they may have been as an order in the past.

Wow you just unlocked a weird memory. Back when I was in High School Jesuits actually taught me the principles of microeconomics.

That variant is simply Pascal's Wager.

It's more interesting to ask whether, of we are in a simulation, it is possible to prove and/or find "escapes". All our experience with computational sandboxes so far is that preventing information leaks or escapes is extremely hard. Of course, we still have the problem that if we fi d nothing we don't know what that means.

From my perspective, I'm on the side that it's a fun philosophical question, but the odds of it having any practical implications are vanishingly low

The only thing that could escape is information, or not?

If we „are“ a simulation, we could not leave it anyway. We could just maybe communicate with the outside, but not go there.

Depends what you mean by "go there", and whether they are in a simulation.

Consider that if we're in a simulation, we're code, and an "escape" would involve getting out of a sandbox and perhaps being able to access their version of the Internet, and move around in it.

In that sense we might well be able to "go there".

Now imagine they're in a simulation, in which case their entire corporeal experience is code. There'd be nothing inherently making it impossible for us to escape our sandbox and theirs and find a way to give ourselves bodies in "their" simulation in that case.

Of course we're now firmly in science fiction - the odds rapidly stacking up against it [in fact, I have bunch of half-baked notes on a short story collection based on the premise of stacked simulations and increasingly weird scenarios around that...]

But that's what makes it a fun thought experiment.

> There'd be nothing inherently making it impossible for us to escape our sandbox and theirs and find a way to give ourselves bodies in "their" simulation in that case.

But we would still be code and in a simulation. Just in a different simulation.

If we're code, and it for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from what we consider reality, what does it matter?

Though if we knew, and had a way out, we'd then have a choice to make if we're satisfied with that or want to try to see if there is another layer outside that again.

Of course, if we can't find an "escape" it isn't proof that there is nothing outside.

If you knew there was a „higher dimension of existence“ but you also knew you can never be part of it, maybe you would rather not know it in the first place?

If we're just code being executed on some machine, we could be executed on a different machine - one that can move around in "their" world. Basically, getting uploaded into an android frame.

(Assuming that their world would even be comprehensible to us; but again, as others have pointed out, so much of this is effectively theological...)

I mostly enjoy this hypothesis because I'm a developer. I like imagining The poor sap that has to deploy us. And what do their logs look like? What does their tech debt look like?

"Hey yeah there's this emergent bug where bad things happen to good people. We would love to fix it but you know the intern wrote the implicated service in Haskell so we would have to rewrite it in Go and nobody has time for that this quarter."

One of the most distressing parts of the simulation argument, is that I can't really get away from the idea that if we are in a simulation, the most likely simulation to be in would be some broken dev or QA build.

But we would still be code, we could not escape our "non-corporality" I guess. Or if you want to have a theological take, we could not become god(s).

The beauty of the simulation hypothesis is that we know nothing about the "real" world one level up. For all we know, they can grow a body on-demand and slap any set of patterns into whatever they have for brains.

If we are in a simulation there's nothing but code preventing us from being gods in every way that matters.

Who'd want a "real" existence any way, if you can be in a simulation where control of the simulation would mean you could change your entire physical reality?

If we are in a simulation it also weakens the presumption that there even is any such thing as a corporeal existence - maybe it's infinite layers of simulations.

There is no definition of what "simulation" actually means let alone the definition of escape. You're just starting with something you know, ie simulating something on a computer or other device and assuming there is something comprehensible outside it, just like how our reality exists outside a computer simulation. But consider the reality that software exists in and what use our reality is to it. It cannot exist in it (outside of the computer) let alone "comprehend" it.

In any possible "simulation" we live in, "outside" isn't going to entail any elements of what you perceive inside your (created) reality, just like software, other than with convenient assumptions to prop up the idea.

It may be a fun "mind wank" but don't take it seriously, because it doesn't make any sense.

Of course there are plenty of definitions of what a simulation would mean, and I can give you a clear definition of what I meant by "escape".

In this context, I'm using simulation to mean any computational process that gives rise to my subjective experience if that subjective experience does not reflect the world in which that computational process runs. A computer would seem more likely, in a very broad sense, but computation is everywhere.

An "escape" in the sense I used it would be any means by which it were possible to find a flaw in the simulation that would allow us to either exfiltrate information and/or transfer computation out of it.

And, no I'm not saying it's possible. I'm saying it's interesting to think about the possibility.

> You're just starting with something you know, ie simulating something on a computer or other device and assuming there is something comprehensible outside it, just like how our reality exists outside a computer simulation.

No, I'm starting with the question of whether if we are in a simulation, there is something outside that we could find a way to interact with, and if so what the potential consequences would be.

Yes, this is all wild speculation - that is the entire point.

> In any possible "simulation" we live in, "outside" isn't going to entail any elements of what you perceive inside your (created) reality, just like software, other than with convenient assumptions to prop up the idea.

In an infinite set of possible simulations, the outside would entail elements of what we perceive inside our reality. In another infinite set, the outside would entail no elements. We don't have any knowledge that lets us presume to know what such an "outside" would be like, nor which would be more likely, because we don't know who would be running such simulations, or why.

> It may be a fun "mind wank" but don't take it seriously, because it doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make sense to let it affect us without evidence, but the question matters because understanding it is to understand the limitations of our universe. E.g. anything that might lead us to believe it is less likely we are in a simulation would imply the odds are higher that we will face substantial limitations on computation and/or filters in the future (because if we find ourself not in a simulation, while we might just be first by chance, it might also imply that simulations will be rare or never happen). Whether we can find such indicators is another question.

Conversely, if we are in a simulation, then it raises interesting questions about whether it is possible to learn anything about the potential from that from probing the limitations of "our" physics etc., and whether there are any interesting testable hypotheses there that might tell us something about the odds.

It may never get us anywhere, but so what?

> All our experience with computational sandboxes so far is that preventing information leaks or escapes is extremely hard.

I believe this is due to the path-dependent nature of our hardware architecture, not anything fundamental. x86 is not really designed with virtualization in mind. Theoretically, perfect airtight simulation is the primary ability of computers, and we're just too sloppy to exploit it properly.

Another angle: imagine you build a computer, simulation-optimized or not, and then run a physics simulation program on it. Can entities inside the simulation get info about your CPU architecture? Not really, not unless you really messed up (let's assume you don't make any gross concessions to performance over correctness).

If you have the ability to simulate anything close to our universe, I just don't think it's that hard to make it actually correct and therefore inescapable.

Can entities inside the simulation get info about your CPU architecture?

(From HAKMEM):

Item 154 (Bill Gosper): The myth that any given programming language is machine independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of powers of 2. If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period = 1 at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary -- the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra: Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = ...111111 (base 2). Now add X to itself: X + X = ...111110. Thus, 2X = X - 1, so X = -1. Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that is two's-complement.

> path-dependent nature of our hardware architecture, not anything fundamental

Anyway, there's no reason entities in a physics simulation would have such direct access to the primitives of the underlying computer, and trying to crash your host simulation does not seem like a reliable, healthy, or in any other way advisable approach to finding out if you're in one.

There's no reason to assume we will know how to prevent such direct access in a way that isn't sufficiently more costly that simulations without sufficient protections are more likely than those who are. It would presume simulations are limited to being run more often by entities willing to be exceedingly conservative and careful than by entities making mistakes that creates openings.

You don't need to try to crash your host simulation - trying to find a way to gain control to e.g. effectively become "gods" of the simulation, or find a way out, or just explore would all be other motivations.

If I thought we were definitely in a simulation and could find a way to gain information about the outside, you can bet I'd want to be part of an effort to do just that - if we crash it, who cares? We'd be gone and wouldn't know we messed up. Severe corruption would be far worse than a crash.

Or they'll figure out how to run good simulations once and copy paste it as desired? It wouldn't require them to be "exceedingly conservative", just a reasonable approach to their hardware and software.

Again, that's assuming their reality looks anything like ours. This is the real problem with these discussions, we're speculating about the motives of entities we cannot even in principle have any information about.

By the way, you might want to figure out how much you're actually worried about breaking the simulation, since you acknowledge that corruption would be a problem. Reasoning from human simulations, as seems to be your wont, do you think that risk of corruption is small enough to be so gung ho about messing with things?

> Can entities inside the simulation get info about your CPU architecture? Not really, not unless you really messed up (let's assume you don't make any gross concessions to performance over correctness).

I would consider it magnitudes more likely to assume we would really mess it up than to assume there are no information leaks, and I think it's wildly unrealistic to assume we wouldn't make gross concessions to performance over correctness.

> If you have the ability to simulate anything close to our universe, I just don't think it's that hard to make it actually correct and therefore inescapable.

I think it's naive to assume that increased ability create complex systems correlate with increased ability to predict all possible ways of exploiting those systems.

But even more so, I consider it naive to assume we would even if we could.

The answer to both points: the universe exhibits, as far as we can tell, a high degree of correctness. We've already tested it in pretty diverse and extreme circumstances and found it consistent. Clearly if our universe is a simulation, the simulators are both willing and able to give a shit about correctness, enough that there's no reason they would use the shoddy engineering that plagues modern attempts at sandboxing. The cut-rate simulations humanity is or will be capable of anytime soon are irrelevant.

Pascal’s wager seems so… idk, unenlightened? If you start from a status quo of feeling comfortable with your obliteration, it sounds kind of ridiculous to ask god to grant you an eternal life of heaven. Have we not concluded that eternal life begets meaninglessness? Are we really imagining ourselves to be eternally pleasure seeking or revelries entities? Like what does that actually mean?

It seems, frankly, more in line with in physical universe western (and other) aesthetics to politely decline going to heaven and instead act according to your personal integrity and humble satisfaction.

> Have we not concluded that eternal life begets meaninglessness? Are we really imagining ourselves to be eternally pleasure seeking or revelries entities?

I don't think the majority of humanity (either historically or presently) has concluded that eternal life begets meaninglessness. If anything, that position seems to be the minority. Bear in mind that a transhumanist is striving for eternal life just as much as someone looking forward to a supernatural heaven.

I would certainly agree that looking for life to be a long (or even indefinitely long) party is the wrong attitude and that will ultimately lead to emptiness and despair.

As an atheist, I don't know if I'd say I feel "comfortable" with obliteration. I just don't believe in any evidence suggesting an alternative. If I "woke up" after death and faced some god, you better believe I'd look for a way of avoiding misery.

The part of trying to "save" atheists by appealing to a chance for eternal life isn't the problem to me. If Pascal's Wager wasn't logically flawed, then it'd seem a small imposition to try to live accordingly for eternal life.

The fatal flaw is that this presumes that you know which deity to placate, and even worse that you know that acting a certain way won't actually piss off a deity instead.

And so while I wouldn't decline, I do think acting according to my personal integrity is the best choice I can make absent any evidence of a better course of action, on the basis that if I turn out to have been wrong and there is an afterlife, a deity I could respect would be one that values keeping your integrity over sucking up, and one who is cruel enough to condemn people to misery for not following arbitrary rules would be one I'd be miserable trying to serve anyway, and one worth spending eternity planning rebellion against.

"The whole simulation hypothesis seems like a new way to introduce theological concepts with modern tech. Cannot be disproved, cannot be verified."

I have bad news for you. There is no proof in Science. :-(

The problem is, that if it is possible to simulate us, then the likelihood that we are simulated is much higher, than that we are not. This is a problem!

And yes, can be tested. "Stacking Problem". The simulation may be not bound to some physical principles or some physical principles may be changed (e.g. real time vs. simulated time). But some physical laws exits in the real world for sure and the simulation if bound to it. E.g. exponential mathematics and limited ressources. The the simulation would have to avoid, that the simulation runs it own simulation that runs it own simulation... Even the biggest super quantum computer would go belly up at some point. So if we are living in a simulation, there should be an interest to avoid that we are running our own simulations.

Erm yes, there is proof in science.

Despite the fact, that nothing is 100% certain, you come up with a hypothesis and test them and verify or dismiss them. This is fundamentally different to religion, where believe and not proof is required.

And if you find, there are convincing hypothesis for the simulation theory, that can be scientifically tested, please go test them. If you are succesful, you will convince people. I am not saying it is impossible, I am saying I see no experiment, that can proof or disproof it. But I am open to be convinced with good arguments.

"Erm yes, there is proof in science."

Well, then you know more than me. And I have a STEM PhD.

" But I am open to be convinced with good arguments."

I told you. Stacking argument. There is a paper about it, I can't find it right now. And that something is not testable right now (Think Einstein Relativity that was for some years only a theory) or String Theory does not mean that it can't be tested in the future. The paper made a prediction when it can be tested.

Are you seriously arguing, that there is no such a thing as scientific proof?

I think I stated clearly the philosophical limitations of that "Despite the fact, that nothing is 100% certain" but that still makes proofs a scientific thing.

"Einstein Relativity that was for some years only a theory"

And Einsteins theory was indeed controversial at first, but it was a solid piece of work, that indeed turned out to be true by experiment. But people were convinced before that, because it explained things in a satisfying way.

And string theory is indeed just a theory. But one that aims to explain something. (I do not find it convincing btw. but it is a somewhat working model)

But the stacking argument ... what exactly is it explaining? And when can it be tested?

The difference between Science and Religion is not proof, because nothing is ever really proved in Science. The difference is that for Science there are clear criteria for dis-proof. A science fact is a fact not because we proved it but because we have repeatedly failed to disprove it.

So if there is an answer to the question what would it take for you to disbelieve in X. its Scientific if there is no answer it is religion

There is an answer to the question: what would it take for you to stop believing in the 1st law of thermodynamics? Everyone pretty much agrees what it would take and it has never happened.

So to thw case in point. What would it take for someone to disbileve that we are in a simulation. Answer Nothing because you can always assume a more complex simulation. Ergo it falls in the realm of religion.

A lot of cosmology rests on far less stable ground than most might realize. So for instance the big bang was hypothesized by observing than everything is expanding. So if you roll back the tape then it seems obvious that everything must have been closer. Roll it way back and you get the basic foundation of the idea.

So one natural consequence of this explosion would be the cosmic microwave background radiation, the radiant heat left after the explosion. And we do observe that! Kind of... The thing is, it's nothing like what we expected. When we look at the CMB it's extremely homogeneous, everywhere. The reason this is a problem is because areas that are not causally connected (could not have reached each other at the speed of light, since the beginning of the universe) actually seem to be causally connected. We would expect to see a much more heterogeneous universe after a big bang.

So we resolved this by inventing cosmic inflation. [1] The idea is that somehow, shortly after the big bang, everything just sped up dramatically - well past the speed of light. And then it slowed down. And then started accelerating again in a fashion similar to what we currently observe. If you assume this, then we can get the big bang to match what we observe. But there's no causal mechanism or anything of the sort proposed. It's literally just retrofitting a hypothesis to avoid having it falsified, an ad hoc hypothesis. [2]

Inflation does fit what we see quite well, but it's untestable, unfalsifiable (especially given the ad-hoc nature of its own existence), and the predictions its offered to date were not particularly unexpected, given the homogeneity of the CMB.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_hypothesis

The problem is that we have no idea what the physics is off the 'real world'. There is no rule at all that says 'physics inside the simulation' must obey some 'real world physics' also. Nothing. Because we don't have any knowledge of the relationship between the simulation and the 'real'.

The world in Minecraft is the size of 64K Earths (or something). I do not need the amount of energy to create that amount of 'matter', in my laptop to play it.

The Minecraft world has gravity, is huge, and yet, my computer didn't need that amount of energy to simulate it.

Note. I don't think we are in a simulation, and a lot of the arguments for it are weak. But any of the physics based rejections, are in themselves assuming too much about what we know about whatever the outside world is.

For a start, mathematics would likely be the same.

The problem is that there are no qualities, that distinguish a simulation from reality. For all we know, we might as well be living in the worst simulation with unrealistic physics and poor graphics, which was made by a regular student on a weekend, who received a C- for effort.

If the simulation is already simulating all the particles in the universe, then it doesn't matter what humanity does with all those particles. With access to all the particles in the universe humanity could easily simulate every single particle in a smaller universe at a high tick rate. A simulated humanity could even easily simulate every particle in a bigger universe, if we remove the requirement to render the world at a high tick rate.

"If the simulation is ,already simulating all the particles in the universe, then it doesn't matter what humanity does with all those particles"

That would be very unlikely, again, mathematics would likely be the same and this limits options. The guys simulation us would be bound to mathematics and limits (e.g. computational crunching power).

In "grand theft auto" you also just simulated/render, what is necessary at a given moment. By the way, the rendering would be a nice interpretation for the "observer" of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics :-)

You assume, that time has to pass at the same speed in the simulation as in the simulating world. Even with our current computing power we could simulate very complex scenarios, if we spend a year of continuous computing on a nanosecond of said scenario.

You assume, that the simulating world is bound by the same restrictions as the simulation. Maybe the difference between our simulated world and the real world is the same like the difference between minecraft and our world.

We have trouble to predict, what the world will look like in a hundred years. And we have thousands of years of data on both humanity and our world. What hope do we have to state even one true fact about a world, that is simulating ours?

Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument makes those assumptions and others in order to prove that the likelihood we are being simulated approaches unity. A core component of the argument is that they’re enough like us that we are a simulated version of them in a simulated version of their universe.

Without those assumptions there isn’t any basis for a claim at all. “We are in a simulation” isn’t any more coherent than saying “a dog is dreaming us.” It could be, but there’s no reason to believe it is at all.

So, I don’t think you can just wave away constraints and say “Well maybe those are just local” because it raises questions about utility. Why would beings in a world without constraints simulate us in a world with constraints? It wouldn’t be necessary to constrain us. Likewise, an ancestor simulation that runs at a rate less than real time seems to have very little utility.

Unfortunately, once you introduce constraints you suddenly have some minimum condition for which you can’t actually simulate and actually have to just do. And you not only have to do those things for your simulation, but for their simulations, and their simulations… (And all these simulations are required to make the claim that we are almost certainly in a simulation because they’re part of the math.)

I am not saying, that the simulating world has no constraints. Only that there is no reason for the constraints present in the simulation to perfectly mimic the real world.

I would argue, that a perfect simulation is most of the time less efficient than a simulation with very specific parameters. For example, humans studying game theory with artificial agents create very specific environments.

There are also plenty of reasons to run a simulation on a slower tick rate than a real world. For science, we simulated a black hole, which required hundreds of hours to simulate a single frame. For entertainment, we made movies, for which it is not uncommon to require thousand hours of cpu time just to render a single minute.

The stacking problem can be easily solved by applying the concept of entropy to it. You can't expect to receive the same amount of energy you put into a system. Therefor a simulation can't perfectly simulate the world running the simulation. Which means, that at the end of every single simulation chain exists a simulation not yet capable of generating a simulation. But this statement provides us no more information about the relationship between the simulator and the simulation.

We can introduce whatever constraints or assumptions we want. It makes no difference. My argument was against the statement, that one can say something is more likely or more reasonable, when debating if we are living a simulation. One can't.

Well, yes, but the "real world" might have infinite dimensions, and the only reason we don't is because we're near the bottom of an infinitely high stack.

The problem with trying to make assumptions like these is that without "outside knowledge" we're stuck trying to postulate limitations based on a world that might well be a result of the "outside world" taking liberties for the sake of computability of their simulation.

The original simulation hypothesis took simplifying steps for the sake of "selling it" that at the same time makes it easier to attack. E.g., the "ancestor simulations" presumes some degree of similarity between those running a simulation and the subjects of the simulation, but there's no reason for us to presume that simulations of our own past would dominate sufficiently if we gain the ability to simulate worlds that we can assume that anyone running "our" simulation if we are in one would represent our "descendants".

Beyond not knowing if "our" physics reflects anything resembling the complexity of a containing simulation, we also need to presume a whole lot of things about "our" simulation to assume that it is expensive/complex to run. A small selection of such assumptions:

1. That the simulation actually simulates the whole of "our" universe.

2. Or even a significant part of it.

3. And that it simulates a long time period

4. Or even more than a single moment over and over.

5. That the world outside our individual mind exists

6. That there aren't all kinds of other crude shortcuts (chunks despawning and serializing differences from base simulation whenever nobody "interesting" observes it, etc.)

7. That we can know there aren't crude shortcuts because we're not seeing any. See 3, 4, 5, plus maybe the only reason "our" simulation is running is because nobody has spotted any shortcuts and triggered kill switches yet ("oh no, another experiment contaminated; time for a reboot")

8. As a variant on 5, that other people, or any significant number of people, exist, and make pruning the simulation computational budget hard.

You can come up with an endless number of these. We can perhaps start to make some very vague guesses about some very generic qualities of a simulation, but the'd largely be in relation to qualities of a hypothetical "outside" that we don't know the qualities off. E.g. it may be reasonable to assume that our physics would either be no more complex than theirs or that our simulation would be strictly limited in scope, be it time, space, fidelity. But that wouldn't tell us much.

From a scientific point of view, this makes the entire hypothesis rather pointless, unless we run head-first into extremely clear signs we are in one. But from a philosophical point of view it's what makes it fun to think about consequences.

I fall back on Arthur C Clarke's, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

If computers are arcane magical machines then let's project onto them our fantasies. This particular fantasy of God playing puppet master, or reality being a simulation, is really old. It's an old fantasy and we have found a new medium to project it onto.

Cannot be disproved, cannot be verified and has no implications, even in theory. It is an academically interesting topic but nothing more.

I mean, say you're a committed Muslim and then one day you discover that the universe is completely simulated. That wouldn't require you to change any of your beliefs at all. God, heaven, hell, and all the good things are probably part of the simulation too so you still have to live like always.

Does it depend on what type of simulation? For example, if it’s an optimization problem, couldn’t you tell statistically by looking at macroscopic events?

No, that doesn’t make any sense. You can’t map simulated universes to your conception of current algorithms.

Yeah I’m being dumb. I was thinking of MCTS with infinite depth where the path through time that’s taken (wave function collapse) is the optimal path for some reward function (maybe complexity?).

I loved Stephen Wolfram's answer to that. He did a recent interview with Brian Greene and Brian asked him his take on the simulation question. Stephen replied that he always found it amusing that self-professed atheists would ask the simulation question because the next obvious question is "Who's simulation is it? Who's operating the computers running such a simulation?"

Everything that you've seen over the last, eh, 15 years in the tech industry seems to be a bunch of rationalists (who often tend to be non-religious) trying to reconstruct the irrational institutions of spirituality.

Simulation theory is basically positing there's a higher power. Eternal life has been replaced with efforts to digitize the human consciousness for indefinite storage. Pilgrimages have been replaced with Ted Talks and conferences. Certain religious ceremonies that alter consciousness have been replaced with microdosing. Asceticism has been replaced by hustle culture. Saints have been replaced with entrepreneurs who have spent money to cultivate a favorable public image. Religious charity has been replaced with effective altruism.

If you're in a more irreligious region like SV or the Bay Area, it's apparently not as easy to suss out, but if you're from the Midwest, you can see it clear as day.

In what form does subscribing to the simulation theory imply "higher power"?

Oxford defines the term as "a god or divine being."

Why is it so absurd to think that there have existed or do exist beings with more intelligence and computational resources than humans?

It seems MORE absurd to me to think that, across all of the infinite universe(s), humans are the only intelligent, self-aware creature capable of scientific progress.

I mean an entity that created the coordinate system and all the constants and laws that allow particles to exist and move is effectively divine with respect to the lowly inhabitants therein right?

If there's a simulation and we as a species are living in it, and bound by its rules (laws of physics, etc.) then you get into the question of who made said simulation with the rules that constrain us. Since this simulator sysadmin has control over us in ways we cannot comprehend or push back against in a meaningful way, I'd say it counts as a higher power.

Since its existence cannot currently be proven false through empirical means, belief in its existence relies on faith.

A person who believes in simulation theory in which someone created and administrates the simulation can be said to believe in a higher power than humanity, on faith.

It's a creation myth as explained by a bunch of engineering majors who never bothered to pay attention during their anthropology classes as freshmen.

No, the origin beliefs in this case aren't really faith.

Let me frame that as questions: do you:

- Believe that we will be able to create a true AI, with self-consicousness?

- Believe that we will some day have enough energy and compute power to create a simulation that could contains billions of those consciousness?

- Believe that if we are able to do so, we will do it (aka no governmental body will prevent a simulation from happening because of ethical concerns, and if a ban happen, not all private entity will respect the ban).

If your answers to all 3 questions is YES, then you believe we likely live in a simulation. My only yes is to the question 3, because i'm cynical. The 1 is a big "i don't know", because i know enough to have no idea, and my answer to 2 is "no way" because i don't know the subject at all, but my brain think adjacent knowledge is enough to form an opinion this absolute.

There are people who engage in the thought exercise without believing it's true, but there are definitely people who believe it's true. See: Elon Musk (at least he did a few years ago)

I also don't have an absolute opinion, but the math of the simulation hypothesis does appear to check out and it's not difficult to believe, scientifically, that intelligences dramatically superior to human-level are possible.

(1) is likely achievable if we gain a better understanding of biology and the human nervous system, which seems likely given a timeline of continuous scientific progress. (2) is even easier for me to grasp as we already know how much energy the human brain uses and we have billions of them now. So far we're not aware of any serious show stoppers for this scenario, but we might be talking timelines of 100's of years.

- Believe that we will be able to create a true AI, with self-consicousness?

To believe this with any kind of certainty is no different from believing in deities.

Disagree. Its as unfalsifiable, but the opposite position is disprovable, at least (if we create a self-aware IA).

Hence why i wrote

> The 1 is a big "i don't know", because i know enough to have no idea

As far as I’m aware, we have no method by which to prove something is conscious. Self-awareness and consciousness (by which I mean qualia) are different.

Many believe that self-awareness implies consciousness, but I’m not aware of any method to prove that.

Simulation theory posits there might be an outside power.

Bostrom's version posits a "post-human" civilisation, but it might just as well be someone barely smarter than us.

For that matter, there are plenty of ways of positing simulation that does not require intelligence at all - computation is naturally everywhere, so if the "real" universe is infinite, and simulation is possible, then it is not unreasonable to consider the possibility that there might be an infinite set of "natural simulations" playing out in interplay between matter and energy in an "outside" world without anyone every doing anything for it.

If the "outer" universe is infinite, it only requires a non-zero probability and enough time.

The main reason to consider we're not in a naturally occurring simulation in some soup of matter is that it seems more likely, albeit a total guess, that more intentional simulations would have a higher probability of existing.

But arguing gods might be running a simulation, to me, seems borderline arrogant. Why "gods", and not a bored teenager playing a game? Who would those gods be anyway that'd make us consider them gods, rather than just another species?

Doesn’t matter. Atheists are generally comfortable with the concept of a fully external deity concept because who gives a shit.

That's not an atheist. That's an agnostic theist (aka deist).

Gnostic Theist: My God exists.

Agnostic Theist: I accept the concept of deity(ies), but it's not relevant to me

Agnostic Atheist: I don't accept the concept of deity(ies), but it's not relevant to me.

Gnostic Atheist: Deities do not exist.

The operators of a computer simulation are not deities in the sense that most atheists would say they could prove didn't exist.

Eh, no. There’s an important semantic distinction between an external deity and an internal deity. An external deity is not present. It is not knowable. It is for all practical purposes, irrelevant. An internal deity is like Christian god. Perhaps you consider it to be the originator of the universe, perhaps you don’t. Perhaps they’re “in” the universe or not. But the important bit is that it’s “there”, with the power to influence or at least to justify a sense of spirituality.

There’s no form of rational thinking that confidently concludes there’s no external deities. If you peel back the layers of agnosticism and atheism, they’re concerned with internal deities. Entities that are aesthetically deity like and have some sort of relevance that presents structure beyond observable physics.

Typical atheism, even if not often articulated as such, believes that the world is what it is. External deities are intrinsically a toss up and acknowledging that does not make one conventionally agnostic.

Atheism does not mean that you believe deities do not exist. It means you do not have the belief that they do. The absence of a belief in something does not imply a belief in the absence it.

A definitive belief that deities do not exist is sometimes called strong atheism.

Much cleaner versions is:

Atheism is lack of beliefe in deity due to lack of evidence of any such/any deity.

This pushes the burden of proof onto believers.

This line of thinking is useful for rejecting others who are pushing specific beliefs, but is demonstrably flawed for making conclusions about things that are intrinsically impossible to observe.

The thing is that it isn't a conclusion at all -- it's more of a suspension of arriving at a conclusion due to a lack of evidence supporting one.

It “should” be

> impossible to observe.

Meaning those things don't exist. If a thing makes no interactions with our universe by definition it doesn't exists

As an atheist, I don't actually care where people think the "burden of proof" lies, honestly.

I have seen no evidence that there is a god, and that's all that matters to me. I have no interest in debating the existence or nonexistence of a god, so I have no need to prove or disprove anything.

Strictly speaking, no. There does not have to be any reason to not have a belief, although the one you cite will be common among those who have considered it.

And you could still be an atheist even if there was evidence of a deity.

> And you could still be an atheist even if there was evidence of a deity.

Ummmm,sure maybe proof is a better word than evidence.

But if there was, it would be hard to justify staying atheist.

> A definitive belief that deities do not exist is sometimes called strong atheism.

Yes indeed!

My variation of atheism is often called "ignostic" -- that is, I can't tell you if I believe in god or not until you tell me what, exactly, you mean by "god".

The more proper name for this is "incompetent atheism", but I dislike that name because it implies a different meaning than it has.

Philosophy is fun!

Ignostic, nice, I like it. That's a new one for me :)

> Atheism was first used to describe a self-avowed belief in late 18th-century Europe, specifically denoting disbelief in the monotheistic Abrahamic god. In the 20th century, globalization contributed to the expansion of the term to refer to disbelief in all deities, though it remains common in Western society to describe atheism as "disbelief in God".

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

The complication of the term for debate purposes only seems to come up in intellectual circles like ours, here.

And the very first sentence of the Wikipedia article says "Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities.".

I first understood atheism to mean an absence of belief in god as a child, and I wasn't hanging out in intellectual circles at the time!

But it is certainly true that the meaning of it has shifted over time.

I wouldnt say that the complication is for debate purposes only. It is a rather fundamental difference to me.

I thought it was “gnostic P-ism” : “P, and I know (or am rather unlikely to be incorrect) in believing that P”, “agnostic P-ism” : “I think that P, but idk, maybe not P, who can say?” ?

Is that not it?

and the next question is "how do I build a device that breaks out of the simulation and lets me interact with the operators" even if, conceptually, it's more likely we are but ants to giants and cannot concieve of the meanings behind their activities.

To escape just create a new simulation with admin privileges and the host file system mounted inside, and use that to escape the first simulation to the host.

Is this a rhetorical question formulated by a near-self-aware A.I.?

no, it's the plot of nearly every science fiction book about the singularity.

Or, it could be a subtle call out to Roko's basilisk.

The simulation hypothesis is not really about whether or not there is a master programmer but rather a consequence of a computational universe. The more interesting question is whether we live in a digital (computational) universe or not. Wolfram thinks that if we do then there should be a corresponding digital (computational) physics. He also hypothesizes that a universe's complexity should then arise from simple computational processes.

I don’t find the general simulation question interesting nor have I listened to the interview, but from your description I don’t find that response interesting either. Why wouldn’t the answer be a trivial “people like us”?

We don’t know of anything in the natural world that would be able to create the necessary elements for the Universe to exist, but we do know how to create digital worlds even if digital consciousness is currently beyond our grasp.

Thus the difference between the God question and the simulation question is that in the latter there is a clear path to us recursively becoming the gods. Not so in the former.

As far as the utilitarian argument in favor of religious belief goes, the simulation hypothesis doesn't seem very useful. The utilitarian argument includes the notion that 'religious texts are fairy tales intended to teach moral behavior to children, and that were invented by humans alone' (a view that some find offensive, oh well).

Simulation arguments are a useful concept regardless, since a little thinking will reveal that there are an infinite number of such metaphysical theories on the nature of reality that are by definition untestable via scientific experimental methods. A perfect simulation is undetectable, comparable to claims that supernatural beings (or UFO aliens) are constantly intevening in our physical reality, only they're careful to only do it when nobody is looking.

Thus if we accept these metaphysical theories (including all religions and the doctrine of atheism) are equally (in)valid as they cannot be tested, we are left with their moral doctrines as the only basis to distinguish them from one another, value wise. We might as well include the moral doctrines included in literary works (e.g. Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion could form the basis of a new religion).

However, if we look at the simulation theory from a moral perspective - well, it's problematic, in that it could be interpreted as support for the viewpoint of a sociopathic megalomaniacal narcissist. If you're the only real person in the simulation, and all others are non-player-characters, then it doesn't matter what you do to them... hey wait is this why the simulation hypothesis is so popular in the tech bro billionaire world?

>Is it relevantly different here if you’re being dreamed in the mind of God or being executed in Python?

Yes. Simulations have limitations.

Think about Conway's Game of Life. You have complete control over the simulation - you determine the starting positions and you can mess with its memory while it's running to alter the current state. However, you cannot always predict what the end result of the simulation is without actually simulating it. In a general case, the end result of the simulation is unknowable until you run the simulation.

If the universe is a simulation then I think it's likely that it would be a simulation like Conway's Game of Life. It will have some limitations that even the creator couldn't know to control. This is quite different from what the Christian god is treated as.

Of course, it could be that the greater universe does not suffer from mathematical problems like the incompleteness theorem or the halting problem. But that would be something very difficult to imagine.

"It will have some limitations that even the creator couldn't know to control. This is quite different from what the Christian god is treated as."

I don't know. God became angry at his creations quite often and took action - see the great flood for example. Or right at the beginning with Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit and the banishment out of Eden. So apparently he also could not forsee the consequence of his actions. Which is of course at odds with the concept of allmighty and allknowing. (The common answer I was given to that is, because he gave humans true free will.) But here we are already deep within theological realms.

Depending on how a simulation works, it could introduce phenomena or artifacts like results of numeric approximations into the universe that can be tested for.

I would argue that unless the universe is using some sort of compute saving heuristic, then it is not in fact a simulation, even if it can be, and is run on a computer of some kind, because in that case it has its own independent “existence” in a mathematical sense. For example, if we could “run” an exactly identical copy of our own universe on a computer without errors, it is not really a second universe, but the same one, in the same sense that I could write out an equation and solve it on paper, or solve it with a computer algebra system, but they are still the same equation not two equations. This is based on the assumption or idea that mathematical existence is identical to physical existence.

Such a test wouldn't show we are in a simulation. It would show the universe follows weird rules, which is already what we know from quantum physics.

If you can understand the nature of the simulation and then make and confirm different otherwise surprising and unexplainable experimental predictions consistent with it, this is a good as evidence gets scientifically. Sure there could always be some more complex or unimagined explanation for the same results, but that is reasonable to dismiss with Occam’s razor. If you can’t accept this, you would need to reject all past scientific discoveries as well, as this is how they were all confirmed.

“Weird rules” to me just sounds like observing unexplainable things. It’s very different from being able to say before hand “if the universe is simulated using x bit floating point computation, we will get result 1 in this experiment, and if it has infinite precision as we’d expect from a non heuristic physical universe, we would get result 2.”

>It’s very different from being able to say before hand “if the universe is simulated using x bit floating point computation, we will get result 1 in this experiment, and if it has infinite precision as we’d expect from a non heuristic physical universe, we would get result 2.”

If you're in the physical universe, every experimental result, no matter how surprising, simply shows you what a physical universe is like. The physical universe not conforming to expectations is just a psychological problem that presumably comes from being a descendent of apes who survived and evolved when they expected certain things.

If you're in a simulation, you have no idea what to "expect" because you're never seen a physical universe.

We can formulate and test hypotheses about the nature of our universe via experiment.

I'm not talking about the universe "not conforming to expectations" or being "surprising" as evidence of a simulation, but of our ability to form and test very specific hypotheses, where the outcome is expected to be a certain way due to artifacts of certain types of simulation, thereby providing evidence for it.

This requires a specific hypothesis about the nature of the simulation, and testing a corresponding prediction that we would never have thought to look for, or expected otherwise.

The experimental confirmation of General Relativity by confirming that the perihelion precession of Mercury is almost exactly as predicted, is a good model of what I am talking about. Although the fact of perihelion precession was already known, the magnitude of it could not yet be accurately measured at the time, yet General Relativity was able to precisely predict the magnitude, which was confirmed much later when the measurement became possible.

There are a large number of papers on arXiv outlining paths towards such experiments to test for specific types of simulation artifacts.

In the sense an intelligent design advocate would also claim they can test "specific hypothesis" about god, perhaps.

Only if “god” is a computational or mathematical system that leads to clearly defined and testable predictions. That isn’t typically consistent with most religious concepts of God.

I can surely imagine an intelligent design advocate trying to formulate a testable physical prediction inspired by theology, but if done rigorously, they are going to be disappointed in the result. And I’ll venture to guess that’s why you are equating the two- you are so certain we are not in a simulation that you think the concept of exploring it scientifically is absurd, and you would not accept any result conflicting with your prior belief, regardless of the evidence, am I right? That kind of certainty without evidence sounds kind of like religious faith to me ;-)

When you do your experiments and they don't show you are in a simulation, do you conclude that we are living in reality or do you conclude "Wow, this simulation has better code than I expected!" or "Wow, I guess the simulation creators invented better computers than we imagined!"

I compare it to religion because, well, I think you are claiming nonfalsifiable ideas are falsiable, and I don't think doing a bunch of math changes this or framing this in a way that sounds scientific changes this.

Anyway someone on substack said it better than me.

"any simulation can only be detected from the inside by performing a measurement and finding a discrepancy between the results and what would have resulted if the measurement had been performed outside the simulation. Without access to the outside of the simulation, there's nothing to compare against and no way to tell simulation from reality".

We can only experimentally test for very specific artifacts from specific types of simulation. If we don’t see them we can conclude that we’re not in that specific type of simulation, but that is all we can conclude, anything more is speculation.

I understand the point that you are trying to make, and the quote makes it clearly, but it does not apply in the situations I am talking about, where you can actually make and test a prediction. That’s why these specific testable hypotheses are written up by physicists and appear in arXiv or physics journals, and are not considered theology.

Indeed the general idea that we are in some type of simulation is mostly not falsifiable. At best, we could falsify only that we are not in a few specific types of resource constrained simulations that have predictable artifacts.

It can't be disproved, but there could be some things that are possible. For one thing if the simulation isn't perfect, it might be possible for there to be leaks. Think of things like Rowhammer or VMs that are not perfectly isolated. If we can somehow model the certain aspects of the simulation, we could possibly make predictions or learn new things about our 'physics'.

Well, by definition everything that cannot be disproved, is theoretical possible. (Just like god)

But I see no reason to assume such a scenario to begin with. Are there any indications at all, it is a simulation? Then I would see a reason to figure out complicated experiments, that might hint at something. But I don't. And I see no convincing experiments or any solid theory at all, by those who propose that theory.

1/137

What is that supposed to mean?

> The whole simulation hypothesis seems like a new way to introduce theological concepts with modern tech. Cannot be disproved, cannot be verified.

We, as humans always had the curiosity of where we do come from, what “force” moves the world and where we go , as some new concepts emerge we try to solve those questions with them, be it the stars, the steam machine, electricity and computers. This is simply because we don’t know what we don’t know.

>Cannot be disproved, cannot be verified.

Not 100% but you can get a reasonable idea but looking. The God hypothesis seems unlikely for a variety of reasons such as the presence of evil and why there are trillions of stars if it was made for us.

Simulations are normally quite imperfect - you can see the pixels etc. The physics of our universe is hard to simulate - we can't even do one proton reasonably well yet no glitches are seen in physics experiments so that hypothesis seems unlikely too.

Personally I think it's maths. The deeper in physics you go the more it looks like maths. See https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-... for example.

Surely the likelihood of me being simulated and the likelihood of the world in which my simulation is running also itself being a simulation are equal, right?

That must be true. It doesn't make any sense that my reality is simulated but the reality in which my reality is being simulated cannot be a simulation.

If that is true, then the chances of me being in a simulation and that simulation itself being just one of an infinitely nested series of simulations are also equal. And this simulation can itself have infinite simulations and the simulation layer that is simulating my simulation can itself have infinite other simulations each one of which is an infinitely nested stack of simulations.

We may be so deep down in the simulation stack that each femtosecond of my time takes 10^10^10^10^10^10 quadrillion years to simulate several layers up in a universe with entirely different rules than our own.

If there is an infinite number of simulations each hosting an infinite number of simulation stacks then we aren't living in a simulation, that is just the nature of our existence-- it is reality.

I think the idea is rather silly. Look: we live one one little planet and right above us in the sky we can see that there are some 22 sextillion other planets, mostly empty gas giants. So if your question is “why are they simulating earth”, you’re way, way off base. What you need to explain is why someone is simulating 22 sextillion random gas giants. When you phrase it that way the question seems absurd.

On the other hand, if you think only the earth is real or only you are real and the rest is being faked, then you’re engaging in the most self indulgent solipsism imaginable. If there is a god, for them to place 22 sextillion worlds full of nothing right where we can plainly see them, but never reach them, is a pretty damn effective way to say “you’re not that fucking important.”

->"Why not just join the theologians in that earlier discussion, rather than pretending that this is something distinctive about computers? Is it relevantly different here if you’re being dreamed in the mind of God or being executed in Python?"

Exactly. There is a few thousand years, since Plato's the Cave, dealing with same issues.

Why make it a 'computer' this time.

Because an entire generation has grown up after watching 'The Matrix', and that was their first introduction to the ideas. Now all the same old problems are put in that context. But they are shoe-horning it into current understandings of what a computer is.

If physical Church-Turing is correct, then we 'ARE' the computer, not 'IN' the computer.

Zizek says that with quantum physics, we've caught God with His pants down. Saying that some of the programming of our universe is undetermined in the same way that parts of computer game levels aren't meant for the player to go to.

https://youtu.be/ywVHFo1na38

Zizek is someone who has made a career out of sounding clever without ever committing to being a disciplined intellectual.

What do you mean by disciplined intellectual? Do you mean someone in academia or something else?

I think Andy is referring to the fact that Zizek stopped writing works that were cutting edge in philosophical academia a few decades ago

Nothing wrong with that.

He did write books, and was cutting edge at some point.

We don't dismiss every scientist who isn't making a ground breaking discovery every year.

Sometimes you want to go on the lecture circuit and relax some.

I agree but it really upsets some people when someone else gets off the academic treadmill

Thank you for spelling this out. I've seen the GP opinion multiple times and it never connected for me before.

I was on twitter during the whole "anti academia" movement in physics and there is a lot of craziness on both sides. You have everything from professors saying that anyone who quits academia wasn't smart enough to be in it, or that they have betrayed academia, to people who left for the industry who insist that all peoples' experiences in academia are terrible or even that anyone who stays is complicit in some kind of continuation of abuse.

I generally landed on the pro-academia side because the communities of people who had quit academia were a much worse eco chamber, often even pro capitalist and/or claiming that being an academic is also being a proletariat or some weird stuff. The worst part is that they spend a lot of time convincing other younger academics that they should quit, and portray having a job as some kind of beautiful and perfect time compared to academia. However, I don't blame anyone for quitting academia, or focussing their efforts elsewhere. Academia is ultimately a very conformist and social thing. You have to network and collaborate, you have to be buddies with a lot of gatekeepers, etc.

Job = do the thing and get paid for it, but you can't just go home at lunch because you want to put a wash on

Academia = do whatever you want, but that's also not enough, you have to beg for your salary even if you complete amazing work

Zizek's position is kind of the best of both worlds then, he makes enough money from his casual writing that he retains the freedom of academia while not having to suck up to anyone. That's probably why people don't like him

Great. Flip the wrong bit, and get a guru meditation error?

> Zizek says that with quantum physics, we've caught God with His pants down.

am i the only one who finds zizek insufferable. he is so self absorbed.

you ask him a yes/no question and he spends 30 minutes giving an anecodte about himself.

He's self absorbed but that's why I find him sufferable. The people I find very insufferable are the considerate ones who don't like to talk about themselves very much. That puts me on edge somehow.

Every generation should have a philosopher that you could imagine picking up a half eaten hot dog off the sidewalk and eating it. Zizek is ours.

To the extent that the physical world and consciousness can be modeled as computations (in order to “simulate” on some hardware), the details of the “hardware” running the simulation are totally irrelevant to the occupants of the simulation; only the relational patterns between states of the simulation at different times are relevant. The hardware could run fast or slow; forwards or backwards in “simulation time”; once or multiple times over and over; using grungy calculations or clock time-saving efficient algorithms.

Actually, it’s irrelevant to the occupants of the simulation whether or not the simulation is even “run” or merely has the potential to run. Or, indeed, whether the hardware even exists. Or, indeed, whether we use the word “simulation” instead of “laws of physics” to describe the patterns of relations between simulation states.

It’s hard for me to see how the simulation hypothesis can have any content whatsoever.

The OG Nick Bostrom argument [1] makes an argument for simulation theory with some reasonably simple math you can see in the paper with only a few variables:

- `f_p` - Fraction of all human-level technological civilizations that survive to reach a posthuman stage

- `f_I` - Fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations

- `N_I` - Average number of ancestor-simulations run by a posthuman civilization

- `H` - Average number of individuals that have lived in a civilization before it reaches a posthuman stage

And then the formula for the fraction of observers with human-type experiences (after simplifying) is just: f_sim = (f_p * f_I * N_I) / (f_p * f_I * N_I + 1).

By first arguing that `N_I` is likely to be very large (because, pretty much, why not) -- you can thus conclude that one of these three conditions are met:

1. `f_p ~= 0` -- or the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;

2. `f_I ~= 0` -- or any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);

3. `f_sim ~= 1` -- or we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

It's all feels pretty similar to the Fermi paradox to me -- which I'm also suspicious of for reasons I can't justify properly. Something about point estimates for variables like `f_I` is... weird? Idk. I'm honestly not good enough at math to disagree - but it also feels like folks who are too good at math might be using `f_I` in equations in a way that isn't legitimate.

Like, assuming the "existence" of `f_I` as a concept to reason with -- doesn't it feel like more might be sneaking in with this assumption?

[1] https://simulation-argument.com

One of Aaronson's arguments in the article boils down to the idea that running a full universe simulation (without cheating) on a universe with the same physics as ours may just not be possible computationally; it seems physically plausible that you need a universe to compute a universe.

If that's true, then the simulators would need to be running in a different kind of universe than ours... in which case "ancestor simulation" doesn't really make sense.

Well, yes, quantum physics says that's true. Our universe is the minimal requirements necessary to run our universe. There could be tricks, for instance maybe you only simulate at fine grain the universe near an observer. But still, to simulate our granularity you need a simulation of equal (or greater) granularity. There's the trick, it's conceivable that the simulator exists in a universe with more dimensionality.

What if the simulation is the only thing in that universe?

Does it matter? I'm with Chalmers - of course it's a good question to ask.

Can we tell? We don't know if we can tell or not. That's why we're asking the question.

It matters just as much as any other philosophical debate, at the very least.

It matters very much for the reasons I mention in this paragraph [0]

  "A century ago Nietzsche said that after we killed God we would
  search for him everywhere, tearing apart every institution and
  everything we love and believe in. Finally, we found computer
  technology. We now bow before it and throw onto the sacrificial pyre
  our time, our dignity and our fellow humans. Computers cannot be
  wrong. Even if good men and women must die to maintain that belief."

Is <Deity> real?

Let's say you are in a temple surrounded by a hundred sword wielding devout believers who will cut off your head and play football with it if you offend them.

Right there, <Deity> is very real. Whether you personally believe or not, there is a real situation, in which you are not in control and your opinion, logic, reason and "rightness" as as good as irrelevant.

Other people make <Deity> real there.

We are in a world where people believe in computers and digital technology. It's more than just a scientific question, it's become an ideology with laws to back it up. This is no different to pre-Enlightenment Christianity or Caliphate.

You had better believe in the transcendence of cybernetic systems.. or else! [1,2]

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/postoffice/

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00168-8

[2] https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/computer-a...

If the fabric of reality is a simulation, then it is just a transformation of actual reality.

If the human brain could grow micro processor cells in addition to regular brain cells, it could simulate a neuron using the micro processor to achieve exactly the same goal.

If that is the case, what is the difference between a real human with a biological brain, a human with a cybernetic brain and a human with a virtual biological brain? Assuming they behave identically, there is no difference. A perfect simulation then is just a roundabout identity function.

The only interesting consequence could be that unsimulated reality somehow differs from simulated reality.

> My personal belief is that the deepest things we’ve learned about quantum gravity—including about the Planck scale, and the Bekenstein bound from black-hole thermodynamics, and AdS/CFT—all militate toward the view that the answer is “yes,” that in some sense (which needs to be spelled out carefully!) the physical universe really is a giant Turing machine.

Doesn't the non-determinism of QM in fact say that there's fundamentally an issue with computability?

And isn't the fact that the universe seems to be a result of computation in fact just because we are abstracting it with mathematics?

What else would it be but computation? Coming up with something that isn't computation in some form or other is exceedingly hard. I'm not even sure it's meaningfully possible.

Computation call still have non-determinism. For example, the computation gives e.g. 2 possible options at every step (both physically valid). Then a "consciousness" decides which of the 2 options it prefers, and that's the part we'll see and the other part of the tree is simply not observed.

So you can compute it to some extent, just not fully.

That doesn't address what I said at all. If you assert dualism, like what you did here as an attempt to inject "non-computation" all you do is give rise to infinite regress. E.g. how do you propose this "consciousness" would decide in a way that is not itself computation?

Not a physicist, but I vaguely recall an argument that it might be only non-deterministic from where we stand. Like trying to predict a CSPRNG.

Non-deterministic Turing machines are computationally equivalent to deterministic ones. Quantum mechanics only causes issues with the practical feasibility of the computation, not its theoretical possibility given unbounded time and storage.

"non-determinism of QM".

Think this is still in doubt.

There is the whole branch of physics called 'super determinism' , trying to find the underlying causes of events that look 'undetermined'.

Yes. Do hidden variables and processes exist? The universe could be perfectly deterministic from outside but appear very random here.

It's an open question. No one knows the answer.

That's why I think it's an interesting question.

Personally I find the references to god or theology offensive and distracting. These are perfectly valid questions to ask. They don't imply any kind of biblical god. They don't even imply a creator.

We only fall back to creators because we can't imagine that something, or some set of rules, or some arbitrary process, or whatever might Just Exist.

It's quite possible this is a simulation - in the sense that it's a secondary not a primary reality - that appeared spontaneously, and no one/nothing created it deliberately.

> We only fall back to creators because we can't imagine that something, or some set of rules, or some arbitrary process, or whatever might Just Exist.

Is this to say that we simulate creators? From where I sit, people on both sides seem[1] absolutely sincere that their version of "reality" is the correct one.

[1] To check, try disagreeing with a few from either side, ask what proof they read before adopting the belief, etc.

Schmidhuber says that there's no evidence for non-determinism (randomness):

https://people.idsia.ch/%7Ejuergen/randomness.html

https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2xcyrl/i_a...

I'm a postdoc in theoretical quantum physics and most of my colleagues believe in MWI which is deterministic

Is MWI falsifiable in any way?

I'm not sure. Most likely not with current technology. In my experience the reason most people like it is because a lot of great quantum physics has come out of studying MWI (that is also compatible with all other interpretations), such as a lot of progress in decoherence and things like Quantum Darwinism. I try and keep a distance from these things so I don't know that much about it. I don't work on it directly so my policy is that I won't believe in any particular interpretation unless there is good evidence for it. That said, from what I know about them, MWI is one of the better ones, I certainly prefer it to Bohmian mechanics.

>It’s trivial to falsify EQM — just do an experiment that violates the Schrödinger equation or the principle of superposition, which are the only things the theory assumes. Witness a dynamical collapse, or find a hidden variable.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/30/why-the...

> Doesn't the non-determinism of QM in fact say that there's fundamentally an issue with computability?

I don't see why it should mean that in the theoretical sense. In the sense that it could signal that we are in a simulation that has a precision limitation ie it shows the limit of the computability of the simulation, then that seems quite plausible.

In fact I've argued before that a universe that has a consistent set of (relatively) straightforward rules, with a lot of symmetries, and a precision limit, would probably be hallmarks of a simulated universe. Because it would save on compute assuming that the simulator has vast but finite resources to run the simulation.

> Doesn't the non-determinism of QM in fact say that there's fundamentally an issue with computability?

One take on this that Sabine mentioned in one of her videos is that we simply do not yet understand the full picture of what gives rise to QM. If we did, perhaps it turns out to be deterministic again.

I humour the idea that we probably are in one, and that its creator(s) are asking the same questions like us, like if there is free will.

If the idea of new universes being spawned from black holes is a thing, and the Hawking radiation emitted from them is somehow measurable, it would be interesting to see if unexpected data is returned! Sod's law it would take the age of our own universe to find out, hopefully it runs quicker for the super user.

We are not in one.

And it comes down to resources and self preservation.

Firstly: you need to recognise that virtual life is as real as physical life (you feel and experience a world - it doesn't mater if its digital representation or physical one).

Now consider this:

If you live in a simulation, a VM, then you serve some kind of purpose to person that spawned you. A game, a experiment, a collage thesis... whatever.

If you start running your own universe simulations (VM) that have a chance of spawning their own VMs, you are increasingly more power intensive to simulate. VM -> VM -> VM -> VM, there is a chain or tree of VM being created and new ones will be created all the time.

At some stage the original person who started the VM chain will see the whole thing slowing down and becoming ever more useless - eventually causing then to shut it down (or restart it).

So, if that is true and we are in one of nodes in VM chain (or tree) the most optimal survival strategy is to not put any strain or hardware that is simulating us, or we risk deletion.

Aaronson mentions this in his post re: 'lower resolution' and entropy. It's a fair point you make.

It's not known if any 'parent' universes would be subject to the same timeframes as we are, though. By rights on that point their universe would operate more slowly from our frame of reference as per having more stuff/energy in their universe and ours potentially being a subset of theirs.

Every time I see these guys pondering this I just think of Carl from ATHF saying "It don't mattah. None of this mattahs."

Got a way to hack out of the simulation, permanently? No? Okay then.

We got rid of church and the futurists created their own god.

If we are living in a simulation, where does the simulation live in?

Pleroma? Lol.

Windows XP probably?

Another simulation. It's turtles all the way up and all the way down.

We, too, one day, will do a simulation, and thus the depth continues on indefinitely.

We already do, they're just much more primitive than our reality and very limited in the scope of what they simulate.

If we're in a simulation, it's possible the same is true. That our reality only is a simulation of some parts of the reality above ours, and at a lower fidelity.

> at a lower fidelity.

that doesn't need to be true. The simulation could be at "full fidelity" - just slow(er) than their reality.

But it doesn't matter for the simulated persons - they cannot tell the difference.

Simulation theory is the Flat Earth Matrix, its far more likely we're manipulated and have limited understanding of multi-dimensional reality, with some aliens in another dimension running the show with reality itself being more malleable than we like to admit: imagine that time travel and timeline manipulation outside of 3D universe would look much easier and appear as 'miracles' to people who don't understand the technology.

What's the reason for the simulation to be smaller than the simulator?

Can't it just be the same but slower? This wouldn't be perceivable from the inside.

Regardless of speed, presumably the simulator must hold at least as much state as the simulation has, and that would put some kind of bound on "size".

I see.

So, the universe is assumed to be finite in either time or space?

Quantity of information - a simulator whose state itself can be expressed in X bits can't possibly have a simulation with X+1 bits of incompressible state.

Yes, but assuming much incompressible state is already assuming to know a lot about the nature of the simulation, ranging from size, longevity, to the extent which the structure of our perceived universe is the way it is to enable an outside simulator to take shortcuts we don't know about.

That assumption is baked into the question being asked though. When we talk about X bits of storage it's generally accepted that this means being able to store any bit string of length X, not just compressible ones.

The question was:

> What's the reason for the simulation to be smaller than the simulator?

And the answer to that is that there's no reason. There's no reason to assume the state of a simulation isn't compressible, because have no knowledge about whether or not it is, and we do have plenty of knowledge of how to create simulations that appear complex but that reduces to easily computable sequences "from the outside".

The more restricted question isn't meaningful because we have no basis for assuming we can restrict ourselves to consider incompressible state, because we have no way of determining if the state is incompressible.

There would be any number of sets of possible simulations that would indeed be smaller than their simulators, but given that within two similarly sized universes, you would be able to fit more simulations that are reducible, the probability that any given simulation is an approximation that allows for shortcuts ought to be higher than that it is a simulation of an irreducible set of data.

So much so, that perhaps if we were able to somehow demonstrate aspects that would prove incompressibility (and I'm not convinced that is possible, or even meaningful) that might indicate that we're more likely to be in the "outer" universe. Conversely, the more compressible our universe looks, the more we might want to consider that it's an indication that we're more likely to be in a simulation.

I'd (obviously? perhaps not) define the "size" of the simulation as the amount of information (i.e. uncompressible state) it contains, simply because for other measures of size many trivial simulations are infinitely large while having tiny incompressible information, so these other measures of size are not useful and not used.

So a more compressible i.e. more regular, simpler simulation is the smaller one, and the simulation still has to be smaller than the simulator, and we literally don't care about the compressibility or incompressibility or uncompressed size, because why would we, that's not information-theory information.

> > But because their simulations will have to run on computers that fit in our universe, presumably the simulated universes will be smaller than ours—in the sense of fewer bits and operations needed to describe them.

> Can't it just be the same but slower?

The number of bits needed to simulate another universe can't be larger than the number of bits we can store in this universe - there isn't enough space to store them! It's not a matter of simulation speed.

Theoretically, we could simulate another universe with the same number of bits that exist in this universe, but then there wouldn't be enough bits to store you in this universe. It's the paperclip problem all over again - the simulator doesn't want to destroy you, but your existence uses up bits that the simulator needs for its own purposes.

many algorithms allow trading space for time

Even if you don't run the simulation at all, you can't hold the state of a single moment of the simulation in this universe, if you need more bits to do so than are available.

I don't understand how it might even be possible to get around that by "trading space for time". Can you expand on that, at all?

e.g. lossless compression of state space and piecewise evaluation. Better compression = less space, more time

That's silly.

There are whole regions of space with no actual observer. Those can be swapped to disk, or DB backend until needed. They exist, they are part of the simulation, just not actively rendered.

Or they can be as sparse files in linux, null until used.

I think the big concern would then be, too many active NPCs would mean too much active universe, and then an OOM issue.

But of course people die, so once all the people who lived, and have memories of a thing die, then that global memory can be wiped.

There are lots of methods to save space! And to have bits not rendered, or taking active ram.

So over-committed sim space is a thing. Heck, maybe the project had plans for adding RAM and DB storage space, before active sim space got too big... but you know, budgets change.

> There are whole regions of space with no actual observer. Those can be swapped to disk,

What disk? Where is this disk?

Suppose the universe contains 10⁸⁰ atoms. And we somehow figure out a way to store 10 bits of information per atom, giving our universe a storage capacity of 10⁸¹

How do you propose to simulate a universe that requires 10⁸¹ + 1 bits to describe? What disk are you going to swap the extra information out to? Where will this disk live - inside or outside of our universe?

Lazy algorithm and generator functions

Even gzip will store lots of zeros in a tiny, tiny space.

If a region of space isn't observed, it's a big fat load of null. If it is observed up close, whatever persistent storage you use for that space can be wiped, when the observer ceases to exist.

Even now, when we observe close planetary systems, it isn't as if we are looking at all the atoms. We certainly aren't observing all the space on the planets. It's all mega fuzzy, and be therefore a fuzzy property. An approximation.

But of the observer population spikes, then too much would be observed and active at once... crash!

Eh, you can’t really guarantee that internal actors can observe things in any meaningful fashion that requires data storage. You can’t guarantee that you’re actually experiencing anything you believe yourself to be from the perspective of an outside observer.

Well yes I can, because it's part of the theory I concocted above.

You're welcome to espouse alternative theories of course.

> What's the reason for the simulation to be smaller than the simulator?

Depends on what "smaller" means:

- if "smaller" means "not able to contain as much information" then yes, the simulation has to be smaller or equal to the universe containing the simulation. You can't store N bits in N-1 bits in general (a simple counting argument can prove that).

- if "smaller" refers to a concept of physical dimension, then it's possible to simulate bigger universes, as long as it's a lower resolution simulation.

Is it knowable that we’re living in a simulation or not? Because if it’s not knowable, isn’t any argument for or against just meaningless cherry picking?

So I’m wondering what the ways might be that we can definitively know, versus new observations of how this universe works. Even a giant head appearing in the sky telling us it’s a sim would necessarily be reconcilable by changing our models?

You can't prove unknowable things, but you can have bayesian arguments about their probabilities.

For some people it's meaningless, for others it's interesting to speculate.

In a sense houses are simulations, shopping malls are simulations, even clothes are simulations. Mostly in order to make our lives warmer or otherwise more pleasant than being naked and hungry outside in the cold.

Almost all of the environment we live in is in some way artificial and constructed for our benefit. And that's a good thing.

https://simulation-argument.com/

  (swap! state update :co2-level (partial * 0.8))

(swap! state update :justice inc)

This is fairly stupid pop philosophy. It's really a question about the nature of reality mixed with the fantasy that it's possible to to somehow step outside of reality, or that there is an entity creating and controlling reality, that becomes a fantasy about god existing.

Our reality exists entirely in our own minds, in that sense we live in a simulation we create in our brains. Using science to determine the details of our environment is useful, but speculating that there is something beyond what we can possibly study (by definition) is pointless.

> Go talk to David Hume or sometthing...

Best answer ever 8-)

The Simulation thing is one of the biggest pseudo-science discussions ever. What exactly would be the difference between a simulation and the "real world"? Nobody ever says anyting about that. It makes the entire question preposterous.

People ask that question every time

Because it blows up the whole discussion doesnt it? I think this whole thing is a form of nerdy pseudoscience.

Was this thread downranked by the flame detector?

It's almost cute that a topic like this can get our community worked up :)

I am not a simulation, but you might be.

More unsubstantiated ramblings. Please, for once, can we get something that can be proved/disproved? This nonsensical bullshit is on par with theology.

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