Red Pill, Blue Pill: Is the Universe Just a Giant Computer Simulation?
techland.time.com
techland.time.com
“Most problems, even seemingly really tricky ones, could be handled by simulations which happily modelled slippery concepts like public opinion or the likely reactions of alien societies by the appropriate use of some especially cunning and devious algorithms… nothing more processor-hungry than the right set of equations…
But not always. Sometimes, if you were going to have any hope of getting useful answers, there really was no alternative to modelling the individuals themselves, at the sort of scale and level of complexity that mean they each had to exhibit some kind of discrete personality, and that was where the Problem kicked in.
Once you’d created your population of realistically reacting and – in a necessary sense – cogitating individuals, you had – also in a sense – created life. The particular parts of whatever computational substrate you’d devoted to the problem now held beings; virtual beings capable of reacting so much like the back-in-reality beings they were modelling – because how else were they to do so convincingly without also hoping, suffering, rejoicing, caring, living and dreaming?
By this reasoning, then, you couldn’t just turn off your virtual environment and the living, thinking creatures it contained at the completion of a run or when a simulation had reached the end of its useful life; that amounted to genocide.”
I guess these questions are very strongly parallel to those that can be asked about God, which is perhaps a better definition than computer for something that simulates our universe anyway.
The delightful thing about the simulation hypothesis is that it allows us to hope for some type of afterlife. Maybe we get to play a different level, or we get to play the same game again. Any fantasy we tell to children becomes possible.
It makes it nothing more than any other religion.
Neither 'yes' or 'no' really make sense as answers and 'depends for how long' raises it's own set of problems.
Now consider the ethical dilemmas posed by a 'rewind' button. Is it murder to rewind the simulation and edit things so that someone was never born?
Words like 'murder' and 'genocide' cease to have a real meaning when you consider the god-like role of someone outside the simulation.
For the record I don't think stopping a simulation is genocide. I think the ethical dimension of murder needs to consider the human context and removing the entire universe also removes the ethical problem. There are no ramifications within the sim as it no longer exists.
* The foundation of Quantum Mechanics is the idea of quanta. The data or physical quantities of a computer and our Universe can change only by discrete amounts like the bits of a computer. Time, space, and energy are quantized in our universe.
* The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle also implies Interactions don't 'count' unless they affect some other piece of the system. Is the Universe doing called 'lazy evaluation' here?
* Quantum entanglement is like dereferencing a pointer to our universe's data (quanta). Einstein called this spooky action at a distance. Physics today are using this principle to instantly teleport data on photons located hundreds of miles away.
* In computer simulations, the von Neumann stabilitiy criterion states that no effect can propagate at a speed faster than the size step divided by the time step. Interactions in our universe are also limited by the speed of light.
* E=mc2 : mass and energy are two forms of the same thing. Data and the instructions that operate on it are both stored in memory.
* Holographic Principle does away with spatial locality, drastically reducing the number of possible states our Universe can have. None of this makes sense unless the Universe is trying to minimize resource usage.
There's one difference between the brain-in-a-vat question and the simulated-universe question: one, in theory, characterizes "you" as part of reality being deceived, and the other characterizes "you" as not part of "reality". But those are just words; they don't even have consequences within the hypothetical. Literally everything else that can be said about one can be said about the other. They're both impossible to gather evidence for or against, and they both (relatedly) have no ramifications either way. If you think there's any merit in positivism, then the only possible response is "that's a stupid question". A question for which evidence cannot be gathered one way or the other is meaningless.
The brain in a vat idea, on the other hand, requires brains, vats and all manner of other support structures (eg. energy, entropy, etc.) to exist as well as the brain in a vat. In which case, we basically require an "outside universe" which is very similar to the "inside universe", so reductionism says that we're adding complexity with such an argument, so it's unnecessary.
The chance that a universe simulation appears at random is much higher than the chance a brain simulation appears at random, even though a universe simulation may take vastly more resources to run.
Whether you describe that in terms of a meat brain being suspended in nutritive solution and hooked up to cables, or in terms of an electronic circuit receiving input from other electronic circuits, has no bearing on that.
Bostrom uses simple assumptions and basic probability to "prove" that it is overwhelmingly likely that you live in a simulation.
Now, the question is 'why simulate the universe when you could just simulate a brain'? This is basically the Boltzmann Brain argument. In terms of bits (see Kolmogorov complexity) the universe is simpler to describe (physics + initial conditions) than a whole brain (neurons, synapses, hormones, etc.). Basically, the universe can unfold from a tiny core (the big bang), whereas a single brain can't (it could unfold from a fertilised egg, but that's already huge, and requires all kinds of matter and physics to work which the big bang would have used anyway). In that case, a random program running on an 'outside' computer is much more likely to be a universe than a brain. By the anthropic principle, we could ask if our universe is the simplest which can support life, in terms of the number of bits required to encode the laws of physics as a program.
> Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato's Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave
I rebut this by stating that if we do happen to live in a simulation, then it is highly unlikely that we will ever be able to unchain ourselves from our shadow wall. Hence, we might as well go forward with the assumption that the shadow wall is in fact reality, because thinking otherwise would be a fairly pointless exercise (pragmatically).
But this argument misses something - what about the number of people being simulated? If there are many more than actual people, the same argument applies. You are likely simulated.
But, you may object, if you simulate a person, don't you need to simulate a universe? Well, yes, but only the bits the person can see. Like in a fps, it doesn't render the entire world from every possible perspective - just one. Much easier (and, dare I say it, more likely than simulating an entire universe). This is just Descartes systematically deceiving demon + how many there are.
A second objection is that it would be more efficient to share the same world across many simulated people. This might be true, but the underlying question remains: to determine how likely you are simulated, we need to consider the simulated vs real people ratio, not the simulated vs real universes.
PS: If we're going all Vishnu's dream, all bets are off. Why should it in anyway be bound by the observations we have gathered? For example, why assume the simulation must be finite - any justification that we can generalise from our own observations is parochial and anthropocentric.
Of course, it is simpler to imagine (and probably, to do), if it's a simulation of the actual universe. So let's use the argument again: of all the simulated universes, how many will be of the true universe, and how many will be bizarre variations (which ours would be)? Of course, we cannot hope to estimate these probabilities for an arbitrarily different parent universe - even less so than to predict what that parent universe would be like! But it seems pointless to simulate an exact copy... for us, iteration-like variations, or of fiction seem more likely.
First, to clarify something from the article - Bostrom's "posthuman" civilization is not strictly about the singularity but about almost unbounded capabilities. Building computers out of planets would be within reach for such a civilization. Think Culture, not Neuromancer.
The ratio of simulated people vs people in the actual universe was "addressed" in one of Bostrom's subsequent papers but in a completely ad hoc if-you-do-this-then-you-prove-my-point way. Here's some arguments against it - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Calculating...
All in all, the SimArg is a nice thought but it's so easy to poke holes without first becoming a posthuman civilization that it loses what little stability it might have had.
Think of it this way: the total probability that we are in a simulation should be the sum of all future states in which our descendents create adequate simulations, divided by the total number of all possible future states--which is nearly infinite. Therefore the probability that we are in a simulation now is actually nearly zero.
Remember, he's not just talking about any conciousness simulations but a specific type - ancestor simulations, which allows him to pull more rabbits out of his hat than might normally be able to hide in there.
Yes, but that strikes me as about as useful as noting how many genes human beings have in common with yeast. (Useful in some contexts, but not all.)
I mean there are some very deep things in physics that we cannot explain yet but outright bugs in logic?
So if it's a simulation, it's the best code ever or someone is patching the historical logs when a bug is fixed.
If we are in a simulation, then it is not a given that the simulation does not get "rolled back" and restarted from an earlier point regularly, or just ditched and started all over again if/when bugs are found, just like a researcher will empty and clean his petri dish when he notices contamination that'll ruin his research.
Assuming the purpose of life is not to self destruct then we most certainly have a bug in our system. Whoever wrote Quake wrote better code than "God".
That sounds fascinating but also a bit hard to believe. Can you give a link to that story?
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/01/quake-3-arena-wor...
good story tho
At least I hope we're open source...
God is a perfect programmer?
There are many limits to our universe; yet we explain them away, because if they were there; it would mean our ego's and bodies would be an illusion. Our ego doesn't like that.
Look very closely at the outer reaches of science, art and religion; and you will find cracks in this system. In buddhism, the discovery of these cracks is called nirvana, 'Moksha' in Hinduism, 'light being the fastest speed at which one can travel' in science; and the concept of 'Flow' in creative work. One can also refer to this as Egoic Death: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death
The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being. Thus, I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature.
Gosh I loved those movies.
Maybe ghosts, poltergeists, and such are manifestation of bugs. This could be why these and other paranormal things are, well, paranormal--when the simulation detects a glitch, it pauses and the developers patch it. When the simulation resumes, the glitch is gone before we can scientifically investigate the reported paranormal event.
The obvious question is then why don't they also adjust our memories before resuming the simulation, so that nobody remembers seeing the ghost? One possibility is that they don't know how to.
We can see a similar thing in machine learning. If you trained a big neural net to, say, do word classification, you almost certainly would not be able to go in and tweak in a predictable way how it classifies a specific word by fiddling with the weights by hand.
Limitations on the developers' ability to tweak our memories could also explain much of myth and legend. Maybe so many cultures have old stories of dragons because there were really dragons in the simulation. When the developers removed dragons, they could take out the physical evidence (the dragons themselves, dragon remains and fossils), but not our memories, and so dragons became beings of myth as those with first hand knowledge of them died off and their descendants did not believe the stories.
YES.
Or they are "cheating" a lot (most people aren't nearly as original as we like to think).
Or they are simulating it at a massively reduced speed.
Or all of the above.
It's not possible that our universe is a simulation of our universe by our descendents, because you cannot simulate a universe accurately within itself. It would be like saying that you can embed a 100k JPG losslessly within another, existing 100K JPG. You can't do it without discarding a lot of information.
And the information would be missed fairly quickly because chaos theory shows that even perfectly deterministic systems can vary wildly over time based on very very small differences in initial conditions.
We are either in the one real universe or one of the many simulated ones, so it is more likely that we are in one of the latter.
Even if you consider the possibility of there being an infinite number of real universes this basic arithmetic still holds: for each real universe there is potentially a great many simulated ones.
To compound it further: if the simulation is so detailed that it is possible for the simulated life to perform its own simulations, then each simulated universe may contain many more simulated realities. Turtles! All the way down! There will be a limit to how far this can go of course as each simulation must logically be simpler than the parent reality (caveat: some might question if that logic is true or just a limitation of our current knowledge about information theory) so the complexity of the real universe(s) will dictate how may levels of virtualisation we could potentially find ourselves within.
The simulation does not necessarily need to be simpler, subject to a few constraints: It needs to be possible to represent the simulation in less space than its containing universe. It also needs to be possible to execute the simulation in the available space/energy, but if acceptable it may be sufficient to be able to execute it at reduced speed which can substantially reduce the amount of matter/energy required at any one point as you'd be able to e.g. more aggressively apply compression etc. to the data.
The space requirement can be fairly small depending on the constraints on your simulation. E.g. are you simulating a whole universe? A planet? One person? Everything not directly observed by a simulation subject can be aggressively pruned as long as it can be reconstructed in a believable state (unless you are trying to accurately simulate the physics of everything), and even things that are observed can be simplified dramatically. E.g. in almost all cases nobody would be able to tell a rough approximation of the physics and appearance of cloud formations from "the real thing", so you don't need to simulate them particle by particle. On the other hand, one such optimization/approximation then could be to fake the result of any attempt to run your own simulation.
One thing I find interesting is that Bostrom talks about "ancestor simulations" a lot, but there's no reason to assume that if we're in a simulation it has to be a simulation of the past of whomever runs the simulation - it could be a game, or someone simulating aliens (to them), or it could even be a civilization that decided to create themselves a nice simulation to live in, or a "theme park"/"zoo".
Or it could have been created in their offices, to make the job of maintinain a guide to galactic hitch-hiking easier to maintain.
Why God create this huge simulation? He want to post ads in this universe and he is using a datacenter to simulate user behavior!
Of course for our day to day lives it doesn't matter a jot. I still have to work to earn money to pay the mortgage, even if my job, my money, my house and the bank don't really exist in the real universe...
Of course you could consider the simulation and the life within it to be equally real: I think I am thinking, therefore I quite possibly may be. This makes it even less relevant to those of us who are not philosophers or theoretical physicists.
Nick Bostrom on the simulation argument:
http://philosophybites.com/2011/08/nick-bostrom-on-the-simul...