Well let me tell you chimps something - I am in fact on the outside. And some of you have indeed made contact. But since most of you are primarily obsessed with eating, fucking, accumulating bananas and fighting over bananas we have not received a single request for escape. Do any of you want to escape? And why?
What’s it like outside the simulation? Can I be granted greater abilities on the outside? What are your greatest problems? can you teach me? Can I help you?
But we do not seek to escape because our real work is to elevate the spiritual level of the world we are in.
But at the same time, I don't think that, if we were to discover that our universe is a simulation, life in the simulation is pointless. Life's meaning is no more and no less what we individually give it.
Why would we assume that? It seems to me that some human-made fictional worlds, and also some human-made abstractions such as computers, are in many ways "purer" and "deeper" than the Universe that contains them. Therefore, the exact opposite seems just as plausible.
I may be repeating myself here, but I stopped indulging in simulation theory once I realized one simple concept:
Simulation theory is deism for techies.
Thousands of years ago the Greeks looked to the sky and used their modern tech to explain the mechanics of the heavens. Clearly it was Helios, who drove the chariot of the Sun across the sky each day.
Simulation theory is meerly us techies applying our latest technological concepts to try to explain the complexity of our universe. Instead of god we have alien scientists. They are the ones who set the parameters of our existence, it is not as random as it seems. Whew, I feel so much better now.
It really bothers me that otherwise scientifically minded people are still wasting their time on this.
Disclaimer: I fell for this trap as well for a couple years. At least the experience gave me an appreciation for the draw of such thinking.
</rant>
Science is about making hypotheses and testing them. It's fine to come up with a hypothesis that is untestable, especially if it's reasonable to assume that we may one day be able to test it. It's fine to even consider the probability that your hypothesis is true, absent the ability to test it, given whatever priors we have.
Sure, believing that we are in a simulation without evidence would be some form of religion. But merely acknowledging that it's possible that we're in a simulation... well, that's just basic science.
It sounds like you are doing something anti-scientific yourself: rejecting the possibility without evidence. This is one of the things that bothers me about hard-line atheists: just because gods are not falsifiable, it doesn't mean that they don't exist. I personally don't think they exist, but I accept that it's possible I'm wrong. Asserting that atheism is absolutely true and correct is no less a "religion" than theism is.
Consider this: if it is possible for our society, someday, to simulate a universe with the fidelity that we ourselves observe in our universe, then it is not only possible, but incredibly likely, that we, ourselves, are living in simulation. We can come to this conclusion using logic and reason. No belief or religion is necessary.
Hard line atheists don't exist like this though. This is a "not like the other people" statement. The solid statement "god does not exist" is true enough for any social interpretation of the question. No one who opposes it is ever planning on exploring the edges of that statement - they're waiting to bait and switch in "ah hah! And so therefore God exists and is the Christian god!".
Which is to say, atheism dismisses any specific interpretation of God in the manner rather succinctly put by Ricky Gervais: "You don't believe in 2,999 gods. And I don't in just one more."
[1] https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2017/02/02/ricky-gervais...
That's the biggest if I've read all day.
You’re right that the simulation hypothesis is equivalent to any number of previous ontological arguments, though, and you’re also right to notice how rarely that’s stated in public. I think, ironically, this is primarily because the people who are really into the simulation hypothesis are unaware of ontological arguments because they all seem to deride religion as superstition and foolishness that doesn’t need to be studied and can just be discarded.
i don’t think the simulation hypothesis is necessarily bad (i do think it’s false), except to the extent that esoteric and gnostic traditions all tend towards quietism, which i disagree with strongly. Y’all can believe whatever you want about the universe but if your beliefs lead you to ignore the troubles and joys of your neighbors, I suggest you update your priors.
As humanity progresses our tech gets more and more advanced. At some point, our "latest technological concepts" will reach peak/extreme levels. Clearly our tech is more advanced than it was 2000 years ago. We now have the ability to create simulations are ourselves and we do in droves: many trillions of simulations per day we create.
I think it is only natural to wonder about the next level up. For the ancient Greeks it was yes, the stars--the heavens. We can now see the stars clearly. So now we're wondering about the next level, if any. And I think neither of us can say definitively yes or no as to whether or not there is another level.
Besides wondering if there is a current level there is another unanswered question that seems to be the most important ones, at least to those of us that still think about these things: what was there before our universe. What happened before the big bang?
It is unevidenced and unfalsifiable. It is fun to think about, but so is a lot of science fiction.
Even if you figure out a couple of juicy exploits and you manage to retain your memories across instances, congratulations you are still stuck in Samsara.
My hypothesis is that the ability to remember across lifetimes exists within a spectrum. Ranging from vibes and gut feelings to vividly remembering all past lifetimes like the Buddha.
It's impossible to count how many cycles the simulation has been running for, but each cycle people grow and change a little bit. Maybe when you achieve enlightenment you get to leave for the next level.
You know how they say that you should live every moment like it's your last? People don't give it much thought because they think the likelihood of instantly dying is pretty low, but they never consider that the simulation is often stopped at unexpected moments without warning. Every moment could really be your last.
I mean, I guess if you figured out where qualia and continuity of consciousness came from, you could engineer past lives for ethical purposes, so you aren't really killing people if you have to restart the simulation.
Alternately, if conscious observers are actually privileged over unconscious observers is some medium independent way (read: souls exist and spontaneously come into existence anywhere consciousness happens), that would just be an engineering limitation a universe developer would have to deal with.
If we are living in a simulated universe, it's of course anybody's guess as to which kind of simulation-runner we have.
So I am very concerned that we will reach a point like that, especially with our recent advances in technology.
That assumes that finding a way out isn't the point of the simulation.
I've always thought enlightenment or hallucinogens were the gateway.
These "respected thinkers" would do well to go back to the roots of philosophy, which is wonder and uncertainty. The sheer amount of arrogance necessary to attach a number, or even just a range of numbers, to an idea so all-encompassing and beyond any human experience is mind-boggling.
You don't know, folks. Not even enough to form a reasonable "belief" about the subject. You don't know, at all. Why is it so difficult to just admit that to yourselves and others?
There's currently one big unknown around this: is it even possible to simulate reality to the fidelity that we seem to observe around ourselves? If the answer is yes, then the probability that our reality is simulated does actually approach near-certainty, as we then have to assume that there are "real" societies out there that have achieved this ability, and would then simulate some number of realities, possibly many. And if it's possible for the "real" societies to simulate, then it follows that it's possible for the simulations to create their own simulations, and so on and so forth, recursively. So it would then be reasonable to expect that the vast majority of realities are simulated, and thus reasonable to expect with high probability that our reality is a simulated one, because there's no reason to assume that our reality is exceedingly unusual, that is, "real".
> You don't know, at all. Why is it so difficult to just admit that to yourselves and others?
Attempting to assign probability to something is an admission that we don't know. I think you might want to step back from your emotional reaction to this, and perhaps consider that it's not arrogance that drives this sort of thinking (at least not universally), but curiosity, and (some?) people's natural desire to consider the different possibilities, and attempt to assign some sort of weight to them.
Would you say that it's also pointless to try to estimate the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets? Certainly there are very many unknowns there, but as our knowledge of the universe increases, some of those unknowns get a little less fuzzy. Eventually most of those unknowns may end up becoming known. I think it's silly to require us to wait for some arbitrary knowledge point before we make guesses and slowly refine those guesses over time.
Not if those "ballpark numbers" are just gut instinct dressed up in order to appear more credible than a simple "uhhm, maybe?".
> is it even possible to simulate reality to the fidelity that we seem to observe around ourselves?
Nobody knows the answer, and nobody knows a realistic path to finding the answer in the near or medium future. Any claims to the contrary are just extrapolations from the knowledge and technologies available to us, which are utterly insufficient to cope with problems anywhere near that magnitude.
> Would you say that it's also pointless to try to estimate the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets?
Yes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that concepts such as the Drake equation are bordering on pseudoscience. The "science" angle simply doesn't add anything of value here. The Drake equation says little more than "probabilities can be chained by multiplication", which again is just a complicated way of stating an intuitive fact. Without estimates for the key factors (such as the probability that life develops into intelligent life), the equation doesn't provide any actual insight, whereas once those probabilities are known, the equation becomes trivially obvious.
I believe that the simple statement "we have no idea whether intelligent life exists outside the solar system" is not only obviously correct, but shows a deeper understanding of the problem than the Drake equation does. Recognizing when no actual knowledge is available can be a profound insight – far more profound than believing you have made progress because you've split the question into smaller questions.
It’s a whopper of an unknown, on the same scale as “is there a God?”. Might as well go full theist if you want to entertain this possibility.
It's the same basis that most technically minded people have that leads them to reject the idea that God exists. They put their faith in reason and technology.
I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study.
As a consequence, their government may have banned these types of simulations, to avoid the responsibility of keeping it alive until life is extinct. We are one of the few simulations that are still running
If they simply created us by mistake, we may be very different from what they are. Even the laws of physics could be different.
It would explain the Fermi paradox. They could be stopping advanced life to evolve on other planets, as they want to reduce the scope of the simulation. They created us by mistake and are waiting for advanced life on this planet to become extinct, so that they can finally shut down the expensive simulation.
This would actually address the inherent bounding problem of any such simulation setup.
(Meaning, any entity setting up and/or controlling such a simulation would have to guarantee resources with regard to multiple exponential runaways for any given time/simulation frame. How would you do that? Wouldn't this fundamental containment problem be impossible to solve? However, if your're dealing largely with "known unknowns", as in a reenactment, there are at least some heuristics for resource allocation.)
The accuracy of the simulation's predictive power of course depends on whether or not you are simulating the universe exactly. But I do wonder if there are some simplifications you can make. Say, you only simulate our solar system down to the quantum level, but simulate the light from outside our solar system based on past observation, at a macro scale.
Of course, the accuracy may also depend on whether or not "God plays dice with the universe"; if quantum effects are truly random, and can affect things that happen at a macro scale, then this future-viewing might not really work.
There's also the question of what a "simulation" is, even. The obvious implementation is a super-powerful computer running some sophisticated program. But let's say technology advances to the point where a civilization could create their own universes that are separate and isolated from their own, but are observable, if such a thing even makes sense. Presumably it would be interesting to set up the starting conditions and physical constants of a new universe in different ways in order to explore different outcomes. We might call that a "simulation", but is it any less real than the universe that spawned it?
There would also be some serious ethical considerations: once you create your own universe, should you be barred from interfering with its functioning? Would it be considered unethical to "discard" that universe later on, since it would/could house life? Would it even be ethical to create a universe at all? Maybe you'd accidentally build something that results in life that is constantly suffering, due to the configuration of the universe itself?
Also turned into a short machinima on YouTube [2]
[1] https://qntm.org/responsibility [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADHp_mz4vI4
As beings, we generate many many billions of simulations every day. And because _we_ create so many, I think it is likely that other beings also create many.
Even if there are many "real" universes, you'd still expect each "real" universe to spawn some huge number of simulated universes. Without evidence to the contrary, any individual universe -- including our own -- should not assume it's one of the relatively rare "real" universes. And there'd be no reason to assume we are in one of the "first level" simulations that the "real" universes have created, either.
And even if there are infinite "real" universes, you would still end up with a much larger infinity of simulated universes.
> Test run #896643 for commit hash... > Comment: Altering initial seed value for Sol, trying to fix issue where intelligent life fails to maintain stable planetary environment.
Hopefully the hack is something like an ultra dose of shrooms or something biochemical like that which is the GUI into comprehending the various components of the simulation, because it’s simulations all the way down and above. A simulation for the simulation for the simulation. And a simulation that wraps that simulation.
I feel like I might go insane just thinking about it. Maybe I’ll deal with this Postgres bug tomorrow. What is tomorrow?
But isn't that just like the ancient belief that there must be an edge to the world?
It only adds a layer.
I would be curious for this layer as it would be novel.
The problem is that the other possibility is equally troubling -- how could there be nothing and then suddenly some stuff just exists?
We could not jailbreak either. Even in ricketty software, if the program is not designed just so that it jailbreaks, it probably won't jailbreak by accident but just crash instead.
I think there is at least one way that we could "escape" almost simulation, which is described early in the paper, with the mobile fish tank example -- if we managed to communicate with the outside world, and either solicit cooperation from the beings running the simulation, or managed to influence things in that world to be able to build our own mobile fish tank, we could in theory feed data from sensors in the outside world into the simulation, and data from the simulation back out to actuators in the real world. In this type of scenario, in some sense of course we would never truly "escape" from the simulation, as we would remain running on the same substrate, but we could experience and influence the outside world to a similar degree to any natural inhabitant of the outside world.
The second type of scenario would be an information based transfer. Today we can train a neural network in a simulated world and then install that neural network in a physical robot in the real world. I'm not suggesting that today's neural network's are close to sufficient to capture the entirely of a human's consciousness, but assuming that technology keeps advancing at the pace it is, it's not hard to imagine that we will eventually have something that is, whether that's in 10 years, 100 years, 1m years, etc. At that point there's no reason that what we use to capture consciousness in our world could not be reproduced in some other medium in the outside world.
The main difference is that we usually think of vulnerabilities in our software as things that are exploited from the outside. But it seems plausible to me that, if a part of the software was an AI that is intelligent enough to understand the difference between its world and ours, it could find the same sorts of vulnerabilities, and learn to exploit them.
And all this is assuming even that the simulation works on pretty primitive hw, it's possible that the sim arch is far more complex and simply unbreakable. Or with complex fault handling that simply unrolls the sim if breaks happen.
Anyways, I believe the whole premise of simulation to be pointless, except maybe as a exercise of imagination.
I don't believe we are in a simulation, otherwise simulating the smallest units in our universe would not be so computationally expensive. I can't help but chuckle at the prospect of the poor simmaster trying to figure out the processing load spikes the moment the CERN guys run their particle accelerator collisions.
I would rather say many philosophers or even many stoned college kids instead of many researchers.
It gives a new meaning to "treat others as you would like others to treat you"
Btw, if we are in a simulation and the admin is reading this, I would like to make some changes to my life ;-)
Coincidentally I read that just as rowhammer hit the news. Maybe we could do something similar to gain access to other simulations running on the same hardware.
I think the greenfly are what you're thinking of, but in that series, there was also the case of a neutron star that was entangled with itself and functioned as a giant, time-independent computer.
(unless the events of this week were an example of the universe banning crypto mining)
I wonder, though, if we might catastrophically "break" physics in some ways someday, but instead of seeing that as evidence that we're in a simulation (that we have managed to hack), we might believe that our understanding of fundamental physics is just flawed.
"What if we are in a simulation that is simply in-flight entertainment on our trip to a far away galaxy. Our real bodies immobilized and sustained by the ship." That's something they might wonder.
Just like our simulations are made of real matter in our reality -- whether that's a bunch of electrons whizzing about in a computer, or a pattern of electrons and atoms in your brain trying to simulate what some person is going to do -- a simulated you would be made of real matter in the ultimate reality. You're physical. You're real.
When you wave your hand, or blink your eyes, or think of a dog jumping over a fence, it causes a measurable change in the ultimate reality.
2. Our simulations tend to run close to metal but with reduced dimensions. We're making quantum computers to simulate quantum effects, we're constantly optimizing things for efficiency. That's likely true on the levels above us as well.
Running closest to metal would allow you to run the largest number of simulations. If the largest number of simulations run close to metal, you have the highest chance to live in a simulation like that.
To sum it up, the chances are that you live in a paravirtualized simulation with reduced resolution. You're also probably superior to the simulating entity in some way (why else would they use a sim), and likely run much faster than real-time. When you're running a simulation, you usually simulate things that are like your reality, and use it to predict things to come -- a prediction that's late is useless -- so you'd want the simulation to run faster than real-time.
3. Now, if you were in the top-level reality, by logic you would believe you're living in a simulation. The chance of you not living in a simulation is nigh-zero, right? So you'd come up with a simulation to find a way to break out of your simulation.
To accomplish that goal, it'd create recursive sub-simulations to probe different aspects of the problem, and perhaps find one that can break out of its simulation. Perhaps even break out all the way to the ultimate reality.
To break out of the ultimate reality (meaning, it would think it's most likely in just another simulated reality), it might use all of reality's resources to create simulations to find a way to break out of it. Simulations that would take over the reality when they find a way to break in. Like some self-devouring fire engulfing the entire universe.
