Whether we are living in a computer simulation is indeed a fascinating question, and I'm not dismissing it, but there's no proof or experimental evidence for it as far as I know.
I know about the simulation argument[3], but that's not a mathematical/physical proof or an experimental result. Lots of brainteasers and paradoxes have arguments structured like the simulation argument; one example is Olbers' paradox: Why is the night sky dark if there is an infinity of stars, covering every part of the celestial sphere? The argument about the stars seems to make sense but it doesn't count as proof or experimental result, and we know it's not true.
So I'm wondering how and why so many people are now convinced that we are living in a simulation?
[1] https://neal.fun/lets-settle-this/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29866981
[3] https://simulation-argument.com/simulation
If it is not possible, then, well, it's not.
So to a good approximation, the question "do you believe it is more likely than not that we are living in a simulation?" is equivalent to the question "do you believe that a simulation of the phenomenon you have observed is possible?"
And... well, sure, there's not a strong reason to think it's /impossible/, based on the evidence available to us. So, yeah, more likely than not.
Another way of phrasing this: Do you think it's more likely than not that there's some physical law, as yet discovered, that makes high fidelity simulation impossible? Such a law is certainly imaginable (limits on information density, magical-ness of souls, whatever); but if you don't have a reason to believe such a law is likely, then you probably believe we are more likely than not in a simulation.
We already do have a law of physics that is relevant here. We know that the information capacity of space is finite and fixed. A centimeter of space can only store so much information before it becomes a black hole. That means that to build a simulation in our universe you can only ever subdivide a fixed pie of information. That means the more relevant thing to ask is if a quantity of information is more likely to exist in the base reality or the simulated one. Because we have to assume that the base reality is not carpeted over with simulation super computers it seems safe to assume a random bit of information is more likely to be part of the base reality rather than a simulation all else being equal.
I think the idea of the universe being a simulation is just more fun
Well, what quantity of information? It seems relatively unlikely that one would bother simulating an entire universe for billions of years at this level of fidelity; what's the point? On the other hand, the quantity of information needed to simulate your current experiences, including the experience of having memories, is probably in the megabytes; human bandwidth just isn't that high.
The same logic suggests that, even if you discount simulation for reasons of faith or whatever, Boltzmann brains are worth considering. The idea that the experience you're having right now of reading my precious prose is worth keeping a universe running, or even a large-scale simulation, is a bit self-centered of you, isn't it?
Unless we think most information exists in simulations than if you take a random bit of information out of the universe it's more likely to be associated with the root existence's goinings on than it is with any kind of simulation. This works because it's an argument about that bit of information, not anything else. I think you could push back and say that really actually information isn't what's important and that actually even if we think that most information won't be part of a simulation most consciousnesses will be, but idk, that seems suspect, we don't have any reason to think that. Certainly most simulations we do now seem not to include consciousnesses.
I think the idea of Boltzmann brains fall apart because in that sea of possibility space it actually seems much more likely for the seeds of a universe to form than a complete brain full of consistent memories of writing 3/4th of a post on a randomly generated website called hacker news. I think it's just another illustration of the problems apply infinity to probability.
In fact if I were to build a simulator, I most likely have to design a mechanism to prevent its residents from observing beyond a certain micro scale due to limited cpu/mem resources and laziness to implement all the details. Tiny black hole is a good mechanism to reduce resource consumption when simulating a fixed volume of this universe. Imagine living in the world of Minecraft, the minimal unit is a block. Trying to look inside of it yields nothing. All physically meaningful characteristics are described by its surface. In our universe this looks very much like a blackhole.
It's pretty trivial to have this reality be a 'container', as it were, within some superset reality, regardless of the information density of said contained reality.
Think of it like a human body sort of being its own unique, low-entropic thing.
I personally like thinking that in one sense, we're all a bunch of bits of fleeting consciousness on the edge of some fractal of realities, and the 'substrate' is simply possibility itself.
After all, the mandelbrot fractal is drawn by which series terminate, and often how long it takes them to terminate.
Why not us? Why can't we be one infinitesimal reality in the entire sea of possible realities, held together by the fact that our reality happens to have coherent rules that allows it to exist as some possible state in the greater states of some amorphous soup of possibility?
Just a thought. I know it may be more out there for some.
Edit: I don't understand the argument that if many good simulations exist, we must be in one, either. It seems bizarre to me. So having a bit of an odd suggestion about information density is as good of a response as any.
Why? This seems to me to be the weakness in the argument.
Of all the universes in which it is possible for a technological species to evolve and create a simulation of our universe, what’s the probably of said simulations having a given incentive or conducive cost/benefit ratio for said species?
Theoretically this could range from “can only do one once before our budget runs out and we move on” to your “unbounded” claim. But with what distribution?
This question seems fundamental and so reduces the initial question to a more complex one than what you pose: is it possible and if so how plausible?
Unless I’m missing something, leaping over this factor, as seems to be the mainstream approach, indicates to me that some techno-utopic-transcendentalism bias is at play.
Yeah, at some level. The universe that we observe doesn't seem to be set up, in the current epoch, to have very tight resource limits other than time. Energy is plentiful. The main cost of anything is opportunity cost. Sure, simulating a universe might cost /our/ civilization so much compute capacity that we have to choose between than and advertising Christmas sales, and that's clearly no choice at all -- but it only takes a small percentage of similar planets to hold civilizations that are just slightly more advanced to make this a reasonable freshman project, and at that point, plentitude creeps in again. Basically -- and I agree this can totally be interpreted as utopianism -- it's hard to imagine a line between "it is possible to build a computer capable of computing <X>" and "it is expensive, on the scale of reasonably-advanced civilizations, to build a computer capable of computing <X>."
I don't see any reason to assume it's entirely impossible to make a computer system that provides brain IO indistinguishable from the real world. It'd obviously be very far beyond us, but it seems possible that a sufficiently advanced computer could manage it. But accepting that doesn't mean I have to accept that enough people did it to establish a population, they did so permanently, they forced it on their offspring (conceived both in the real world and simulation), and they never told anyone or left clear signs in the simulated world.
Alternatively it could assume that we are ourselves simulated, just programs unaware that we're programs. But that leaves many of the same questions (who did it, why keep it going forever, etc). We currently could dedicate all of humanity's exaflops of computing power to Monte Carlo simulations of Snakes and Ladders, but why? I don't think there's any reason to step from "theoretically it's possible" to assuming any amount of likelihood.
Like in the “clearly people doing the work is why potatoes are on store shelves, not due to the shareholders of Ore-Ida, which is hallucination.”
Looking at how green/co2 certificates work, looking at politics and misinformation, looking at escalating wars out of stupidity, looking how many countries have been far-right-winged lately into Sharia law,...I think that's the far more likely option.
Humans are petty, humans are irrational, humans forget too quickly.
Always bet on humans acting like psychotic apes wanting more bananas even when their belly is so stuffed that it almost explodes.
Whether you want to admit that this is how the planet works or not doesn't matter. In the end, right wing populism always wins because they bet on stupidity and irrational beliefs, not on compromise and rationality.
And I think humans are highly susceptible to creating explanations without evidence.
Extend this to Roko’s Basilisk and it’s even more similar - instead of getting tortured in hell for eternity for coveting the ox you get tortured in cyberspace for eternity for not working on the AI.
How simulated Universe would be different from a "real" one? Some give an answer like "we couldn't know" and finish at that. But this approach is a way to lose opportunity to think. Suppose we can guess some properties of a simulation, what they would be? I'd say simulated Universe would have an informational nature. We can create informational models of real phenomena. But our models tend to have limitations brought to simplify calculations.
For example, we limit precision of calculations. Probably these can be detected from inside of a model.
We tend to resort to stochastic models in some cases. And quantum mechanics sees a lot of stochastic.
Physicists tend to talk about information like it is a real thing. I do not understand what they mean by that, maybe they just talk about logarithms of probabilities? But it looks weird... simulation like.
All this leads me to two questions:
1. Can we make some falsifiable predictions from a simulation hypothesis? Information in physics could be one of such predictions, but it is not, because we retrospectively explain it with a simulation.
2. Probabilities and information look to me as artefacts of a human mind's way to function, it is very strange that they pop up in quantum mechanics. Is it possible that they are not really real but a projection of our mind to reality?
Because of stellar dust? I'm not sure what makes this a paradox. There's a well-known explanation.
Yet even if the dust was mostly local, it would still block out light from infinity. Assuming it’s thick enough. But presumably the dust wouldn’t only be local; it could even be worse in other parts of the universe. Essentially we just don’t live in a perfect vacuum. There’s a bunch of crap blocking the light.
I suppose at some point in the history of the universe, there was probably less dust and it actually was much brighter.
The universe could well be infinite, but the Hubble volume is pretty much finite...
If it was only dust, it alone would not explain the darkness due to re-emission of light (as other commenters pointed out).
So unless the "entity" doing the simulation interferes with it in some way, it simply doesn't matter.
If a universe exists with laws that allow for a simulation which cannot be detected from inside, but that the simulation itself is observable from outside, that means information can only flow outward. A universe like this would basically be an infinite substrate with many different systems in it that cannot observe each other, and the inability to observe a separate system would be the stable state of such a universe. So it wouldn't make sense that an observer in such a universe would exist to observe the simulation as he would be a system without the capability of observing anything outside of himself, or in other words, information cannot flow outward either. So, it is very unlikely that we would not be able to detect and learn about the bare metal from inside, which means that it would be falsifiable. If it is falsifiable then people making the claim ought to be able to demonstrate it. If not, it's a "simulation" that is completely isolated to the point that nobody in the universe where it is running can even detect that it is running, or in other words, not a simulation at all.
> So it wouldn't make sense that an observer in such a universe would exist to observe the simulation as he would be a system without the capability of observing anything outside of himself
I can easily simulate and observe systems without influencing them as they run. I may have the means to influence them, but it doesn't mean that I have to use them. In fact, many simulations in this world are performed for the exact purpose of inspecting what the end result is going to be without interfering while they're being run.
There's a third aspect to it, which is following the spiritual aspect of it while not actually believing in a creator/actual divine entity (see for example Christian atheism^1).
I go regularly (albeit less so in the past few years, since covid made me lose the habit) to church while having developed my belief into only a "metaphorical god" and the idea of Christ. The main thing I get from it is the spiritual aspect of it. It feels nice being into that kind of meditative space, into the idea of unconditional love, endless forgiveness, absolute empathy.
My experience of practicing christians is that they're on a spectrum when it comes to how literally they believe, from not at all, to metaphorical at every level, to people who actually think there's a grey-bearded guy in the clouds. Those last ones are not marginal by any means and constitute the core of the hardcore flock (it's much easier to wake up on a sunday morning (or even in the week) if you think that you punishment for missing mass is hell).
* The 4 million internet users that self selected to answer a philosophical question on Matrix type simulations are unlikely to respond to general questions in the same manner as, say, 4 million K-Pop fans.
* Neither of the above groups are likely to be a good and true representation of the mean responses of the 5.3 billion internet users worldwide.
The question is not whether we are in a simulation, but rather is there an experiential reality outside of this simulation, or did the simulation pop into existence from nothing.
I mean, reality might be just what it is even if it feels and looks like a simulation.
How living outside of the simulation would feel? Could we tell it is not a simulation?
Edit: what if blackholes == instance crashes? o_O
- Dark energy would make it less compute-intensive towards the end of the simulation. If you knew where your observers are you could simulate less and less over time, while also reaching an ethical endpoint for the simulation
- and with Double-slit experiment, we kinda know that universe knows when things are observed
- Cosmic Microwave Background would hide a lot of signals further away, giving a possibility of aggregating or dropping signals further away from observers
- Diffraction Limit would limit the resolution of observations we can make from further away, limiting the resolution of the needed simulation.
- Quantum uncertainty principle would be easy way to make the simulation non-deterministic by just adding some jitter / variance.
I might have written some things that are wrong. Also it doesn't really answer your questions as this doesn't really lead me to believe we surely live in a simulation, it's just something I like to think about sometimes.
Edit: this has an obvious issue: if (when?) humanity (or rather the most ubiquitous "observer" species, whatever it is) "saturates" the cosmos, these optimization opportunities will get rarer and rarer. If it leads to localized "slowdowns" of physical phenomena then we'll have positive evidence of the simulation hypothesis.
LLMs are quite forgiving in that regard now.
Religion can be seen as a special case of God’s simulation
"It won't let me see the article without filling out a survey."
"I enjoy being a 19 year old Black woman with a PhD on such surveys." -- Male with PhD in his 50s, either Caucasian or ethnically Indian (as in the country), iirc.
Some here may be too young to remember it, but there was a television show at the time called "Beverly Hills 90210". Guess which zip code would immediately come to mind for people who didn't want to use their real one.
The wave particle duality is just a min-decision/min-consciousness optimization.
Church-Turing thesis has no sign of being wrong - the maximum expressiveness of this universe is captured by computation.
The most complex theorems of the generalization of mathematics, computation, are actually about what would happen in formal systems, which physical systems are... So high complexity truth is... Simulcrums like Truman Show. Have fun, ahh
As an aside, if the question is falsifiable, then you don't want to simply ask people what they think. Asking people questions is usually a waste of time. Setting up an accurate poll is really hard. Even in good faith, anonymously, people will answer based on social norms and expectations. Knowing if you have an accurate population to poll is really hard, too. I think it's more reliable to set up a scenario where people can bet money or other another resource on the answer. You have to define how the "right" answer will be determined, and time box it. Assuming you set this up well, you might get some approximation about what people actually think about your question, and how confident they are in their assessment. It's still not foolproof, but it's meaningfully closer than just asking them.
For a question that's not falsifiable, or that you can't pin down a way to determine the "right" answer, such as if we're living in a simulation or not, there will be a small margin of people who will refuse to answer either way. A question that's not falsifiable is not a question at all. It's source material for fiction writers. This is a very small sliver of the population though. Most people will play along.
Among the remaining population (which is most people) you will get two broad groups. One doesn't think very hard about the question at all (if they did, they'd realize it was not falsifiable, and so kind of silly). These folks will split roughly along the proportion of the prevailing society at large. They're just answering whatever seems the most fun or heartwarming to them. It might be interesting to know, though. It'd tell you which way the "wind is blowing" so to speak.
The second group will actually think about the problem, and suspend their philosophical apprehensions about non-falsifiable questions, and kind of mull it over in their heads. They'll be willing to consider arguments. They might even (shudder) search the internet for articles or videos about it. The most you can ever hope for is that some of these folks have actual credentials or education in the field your question relates to, so their answers might actually even be credible. You won't know if they're credible or not though. And even if they have credentials, you probably don't have any way to judge the credibility of their credentials. But even still, they've given it some though, and are answering with a bit of investment. You'd probably like to know how this population sees the question, as it's the closest you can get to a "right" answer, given that the question is not falsifiable.
Here's the rub though. You have no way of separating the people who answer flippantly from the people who answer with some modicum of thought put into it. You can't know if somebody is trolling you, or a subject matter expert with decades of applicable scientific knowledge. And you can't judge a person's decades of scientific knowledge if (just as one example) their job depends on them answering a certain way. There are so many unknowns involved, that the proportion answering the question one way or another is basically noise. If I told you that half of people think gremlins are real, or that the God of the Bible is real, or that aliens are among us, I haven't really told you anything at all. It'd be like saying "I took this six sided die, rolled it, and it came up a 3. What does that mean?"
Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left. - Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Persuasion, 1818
The people who think they are living in a simulation because they can't argue their way out of it should tell the people who accuse them of it to prove it.
(I think I passed the subject. Waiting for the results.)
/ please appreciate the humour in that I know nothing more than I knew last year
The argument goes like this, summarized: if ancestor simulations are possible then there are more ancestor simulations than real worlds. Therefore it is highly likely you're in an ancestor simulation.
First, we forget the importance of the word "ancestor". Dive into the details if you like, but suffice to say this word was not included in the initial argument for no reason. Second, it is unfalsifiable by definition. Third, it is inconsequential unless it is detectable. Finally, and this is a subjective claim, it would appear that something much more interesting is going on with regard to this whole existence thing than something as small minded as an ancestor simulation.
While the former is just ridiculous, the latter is pretty plausible. When people are answering this question they can imagine any definition of simulation they like.
Not whether we think we do or don't.
Which is a quite different question.
For my 2 pennies, whether or not it makes a difference (as mentioned in simulation argument) does itself not matter, all that matters if people think it matters (it is, after all, entirely in our head at this point). Does it create a disassociation effect where counter-intuitively a constructivist approach allows is to see the world more positively (positive, as in positivist). And if not, are poll answers blunder or is there no disassociation of self determination.
It’s like when people ask “what was before the beginning?” The answer is something that can’t possibly matter; can’t be settled and wouldn’t matter if it were settled.
I work on soft real-time simulations as a career, so I think this reality being a simulation is exceedingly unlikely.
I think the idea that this reality is a simulation gives people comfort that all their problems are not real and there's a reality somewhere else which is more fair?
It doesn't.
Xide Hyrlis: "War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale."
Choubris Holse: "Of course, your god could just be a bastard."
seems you're at about 50/50 human traffic :)
tl;dl: There's no way to know so it's a thought experiment that has no pertinence to reality.
