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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

I've been advocating a Venus over Mars strategy for quite some time now. It is weird seeing your opinions hit the mainstream. On the one hand you are happy that other people have finally come around to your line of thinking, but on the other hand you worry that others will repeat the conclusion with little idea of the reasoning that went behind it.

I was also ahead of the curve on the simulation argument. When Elon Musk started talking about it I realized it was finally becoming mainstream. I'm hoping he gets on board with a Venus first space exploration too!

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What does all of this have to do with the simulation argument?

What is the "simulation argument"? I read the article but don't remember that.

It's a fallacious extrapolation of Moore's law into the idea that our universe must be a computer simulation (of course there's more to it than my flippant summary suggests, but I still find the arguments unconvincing even if the idea itself is interesting).

The rate at which computers have gotten powerful is simply mind boggling. Even as early as 20 years ago, something like an iPhone would sound like wishful thinking to someone who would think rationally. Heck WWW, internet, mobile phones and this whole thing looks right out of a science fiction book for some one in early part of 1900's

Its hard to imagine how much more computers can go. But I believe people in the future will look at our way of thinking about computing limits(Moore's law) in the same we look at vaccum tubes. Or the way we look at people who thought heavier than air flying objects are impossible by laws of physics.

We just don't know how many 'transistor events' or 'wright brother' events there are going to be in the future which will work around the laws of science orthogonally.

There is a limit to the amount of computation that can be done by a given amount of matter that only new physics could change. Given that limit, at best you would need every particle in our universe just to simulate an identical one. It's more likely that the best possible simulation would have significantly reduced fidelity and/or size with respect to its host universe, thus the inevitability component of the simulation argument falls apart.

What would convince me we are a simulation is evidence (e.g. proof that quantum randomness is caused by floating point rounding errors, or that entanglement is caused by lazy expression evaluation), hard empirical measurements. Not arguments from pure logic and extrapolation.

That said, I agree that we have done some amazing things with computers; I just doubt (in the extreme) the simulation argument is valid.

As far as I can tell, you don't even disagree with the simulation argument. The simulation argument is that one of three propositions is true:

1. It is impossible to create a simulated world that people can live in.

2. People consistently do not choose to create such simulations.

3. We are almost certainly living in such a simulation right now.

You haven't said anything to undermine the basic logic of the argument at all; instead, you're arguing that statement 1 is true. But the simulation argument is that one out of statements 1-3 is true. Hence you agree with the simulation argument. You just don't think you do because you identify the whole argument with statement 3.

Based on what you just said, the simulation "argument" is no argument at all. The three propositions cover all possible cases. How can you argue against that? What would be the counter-argument?

The counterargument would be simple: a counterexample where all three propositions are false at the same time.

The Simulation Argument is really a tool, and a challenge. It sets things up such that, if we manage to disprove 1 and 2 empirically, we get stuck with a shocking realization about the basic facts of our existence. It gives us an unusual way of indirectly testing whether or not we are living in a simulation. That's a lot out of something that "isn't an argument at all".

> The Simulation Argument is really a tool, and a challenge.

No it isn't. It is Pascal's Wager updated for the 21st century. The only way it can be "proved" is if we are living in a really bad, poorly maintained, fundamentally broken, cheaply outsourced simulation.

The argument seems to be missing a proposition:

4. It is possible to create and live in a simulated world, but not with the level of fidelity/flexibility necessary for the infinite regress that would make #3 convincing.

You can fold that into #1 if you want, or fold 1 and 2 together, but they're largely equivalent formulations.

I don't think it fits cleanly into 1 or 2. Maybe people choose not to live in deeply nested simulations because of the degradation, but that still misses the possibility that simulated people do want to keep the process going but it becomes increasingly difficult.

That's possible, but besides the point. The point is not to set up clear, unambiguous, "perfect" choices, but to wade into the long lasting philosophical question of whether our reality has a physical existence - one of the oldest questions of philosophy - and recast it in terms of technology.

The point is that unless there's some fatal logical flaw in the set of choices, some combination of the choices needs to be true, and whichever choice or combination is the correct one, it has profound implications on us.

The simulation could be lazy, only simulating what it needs to for the observers contained within. Keep in mind that if you are inside a simulation, your sense of time is artificial. When something requiring more fidelity is run, the entire simulation could slow down, or stop momentarily while lazy contexts are evaluated, and you wouldn't know it.

The problem isn't runtime, it's the memory. The earth is the most efficient storage of all the information about the positions/trajectories of all particles that make up earth.

That's missing the point, I think. In the simulation the Earth doesn't exist. Instead, some high-level model is used to generate the observations we make at the macro scale. Only when we perform sensitive experiments which require a finer resolution is that detail generated in such a way as to remain consistent with observations made so far.

Of course as someone who writes simulations I can tell you that it is not so easy in our computational models. Indeed it would seem very difficult, though not fundamentally impossible for a high level model to correct macro behavior in all cases. But we cannot know the constraints of the universe which contains our simulation, which may be very different from ours.

Just to nit-pick, the simulation argument doesn't rely on simulations-in-simulations, let alone an "infinite regress".

If we consider the proposed form of simulation to be feasible/reasonable/etc. then the existence of one simulation would give us 50/50 odds of being inside it. With two simulations running, we're more likely to be simulated than not.

The simulation argument claims that, if such simulations are possible at all, then there will be very many of them. In which case, the improbability of being in a particular simulation is more than compensated by the number of simulations.

What if the simulation of the fidelity required surpasses the energy and time available in any sensible host universe? If the slowdown in a simulation universe is say 10, then it doesn't need many nested universes before life would never get the time to form in the client universe before the host dies (though of course you could set up the universe from 10 seconds ago, which seems like a cheat).

The argument is wrong, or at least, incomplete. Another possibility is:

It's possible to create a simulated world, but it would be much smaller than the world we live in, hence our world is probably not simulated.

On the other hand, jail inmates and astronauts in the International Space Station will (eventually) reasonably be able to consider option (3).

Except that there exist a #4: "We are unusual".

It's a big jump to conclude that we are usual in every way, one that normaly leads to flawed conclusions.

Then, apart from some serious anthropomorphization in 1 and 2, the simulation argument as you have described it is a tautology. I also never agreed with 1; I don't think simulation is impossible, just infinitely recursive simulation.

You don't need to simulate every particle in the universe to have a convincing simulation, from the perspective of a small number of observers (or just one).

How many particles are you currently observing, in sufficient detail, to be sure they are being individually modeled, rather than the subject of macro-approximations? The answer is likely 'zero', or at least a number much closer to zero than the number of particles in the rumored universe.

Also, if you are in a simulation, you can't reason about the size and computational capabilities of the physics of the simulating system. All the limits you've ever perceived may be arbitrary choices of the simulation, countless orders-of-magnitude more limited than the "host" universe.

"Flatland" comes to mind with respect to the latter part of what you wrote.

> All the limits you've ever perceived may be arbitrary choices of the simulation

Such as the speed of light? That's the simulation tick rate.

More like step. There is no such thing as time. The simulation could be paused for (real) years, then continued and there would be no way for entities in the simulation to notice that. This is also why we technically don't need super fast computers for such a simulation; it would be slow to us, not to those inside. Although it's not practical to have a very slow simulation of course.

"There is a limit to the amount of computation that can be done by a given amount of matter that only new physics could change. Given that limit, at best you would need every particle in our universe just to simulate an identical one. It's more likely that the best possible simulation would have significantly reduced fidelity and/or size with respect to its host universe, thus the inevitability component of the simulation argument falls apart."

Or, potentially, one would only need to simulate the minds of any observesers in the simulation, not every particle in the simulated universe.

Or, potentially, one would only need to simulate the minds of any observesers in the simulation, not every particle in the simulated universe.

...for every possible interaction those minds could have with the simulated universe. The only lossless way to simulate a mind's interaction with a universe is to simulate the universe. Further, one must define "observer", as well as simulate accurately what happens to non-"observer" objects, animals, microbes, etc. while "observers" aren't looking.

Or the way we look at people who thought heavier than air flying objects are impossible by laws of physics.

Did any people actually think this? That would be weird, considering how we are surrounded by heavier-than-air flying animals.

Everybody rational knew that it cannot be done.

"cannot be done" means "too difficult to be feasible" more often than it means "impossible by laws of physics"

A philosophical bauble: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

The idea is that if computers continue to become more and more powerful, then we'll run more and more simulations on them, including simulations of ourselves; and if we can simulate consciousness, as some suggest, the the statistical likelihood is that we are living in a simulation, because it the least computationally expensive assumption. Conversely, if we're not living in a simulation then either we will never be able to simulate consciousness or there will be some other factor that makes it an unpopular activity.

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