Why we are likely NOT living in a simulation
higherlogics.blogspot.com/2021/02/why-we-are-...Posted Feb 16, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC
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higherlogics.blogspot.com
Paraphrasing from a physics lecture by Leonard Susskind- This question is not useful, if we were living in a simulation, then who is on the outside running the simulation? Then we end up with the same big questions again.
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if we were living in a simulation, then who is on the outside running the simulation? Then we end up with the same big questions again.
Not the same questions, but different questions. Bostrom's simulation argument suggests it's likely our descendents, if indeed we are in a simulation. I think that's unlikely per the article though.
The only other possibility is that we are in some kind of random simulation, a post-human version of The Sims.
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Why they will need to run simulation? Author can't find the reason for post-humans to do so.
- From *our* POV they won't need it
- BUT do we really can imagine their needs? Could some human from Ancient Egypt imagine *our* needs? I don't think so :)))
- So this argument (and argument about "costly resources" - they would be costly for us, but for them... they may be trivial) I fear is not too serious :)
- And there may be other needs, not just scientific... For example, we run a lot of simulations, because we like... to play games. Strategies, MMORPGs etc.
So, sorry. Not valid.
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BUT do we really can imagine their needs? Could some human from Ancient Egypt imagine our needs? I don't think so :)))
We don't need to imagine. Simulations provide a certain utility, but if that utility can be fulfilled by less costly means, then there is no reason to run a simulation.
And there may be other needs, not just scientific... For example, we run a lot of simulations, because we like... to play games. Strategies, MMORPGs etc.
- There are multiple orders of magnitude of difference in the cost of those kinds of simulations, and the cost of simulating a civilization of human minds. I don't think you're appreciating how much computing power would really be needed.
- Post-humans would better understand how fun works, or what utility games provide. A meandering open sprawling world of human minds with untold suffering seems less likely to have the fun and utility they seek.
- Even if some advanced civilizations would pay this cost, in order to conclude that we are likely living in a simulation, then it must be true that virtually all such advanced civilizations would act this way. That seems implausible, which means case #2 from the article still holds, ie. that such simulations won't be built.
Edit: fixed typo.
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Well, may be just one strange post-human hikki guy made this sloppy simulation just to try his (very bad) skills in his (illegal ) copy of Unity XXXXXXXXXXXXX, all with cheap free models and... by chance, that's where we live and who we are :))
Once more: what is incredibly costly means for *you* is just nothing for him ))))
Why he did it? Who knows, may be he is not quite sane? :)) (Ah, do you think that he should be Sane, Serious, Responsible, Cost-Effective etc... But why?)
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Asserting that post-humans would run ancestor simulations is to simultaneously assert that post-humans won't have a satisfactory understanding of whatever problems a full ancestor simulation would answer. That by itself already seems less plausible, because a civilization capable of simulating a human mind with perfect fidelity would likely understand human behaviour.
But how would a post-human society come to know human behavior sufficiently well without studying a simulation? It's not clear there will be scientific advances that allow us to acquire precision information of neural dynamics from living people. A post-human society might also include significant psychological changes such that the behavior of their ancestors is still an open question. There's also the question of how much culture plays a role in observed behavior. So analyses of post-human behavior won't necessarily answer all psychological questions they might ask. A simulation might be the only way to answer such questions.
I'm not sure the statistical mechanics angle works either. We can study the behavior of statistical systems because at certain scales, the microscopic behavior starts to matter less and aggregate information matters more. I'm not sure the same can be said for humans. It seems likely that the microscopic state of neurons play a crucial role in the macroscopic behavior of the human. It's not clear to me that there will be any shortcuts to predicting behavior than to just simulate the whole brain at some sub-level of the neuron.
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But how would a post-human society come to know human behavior sufficiently well without studying a simulation?
You can't create a simulation if you don't know how to model a system, so there are two paths to simulating the human mind: simulate the physics, which is prohibitively expensive, or simulate a higher-level model, which is far more reasonable but requires understanding of the system in question.
So what is more likely to occur first:
- Neuroscience advances to the point where we understand the human mind and so can model a civilization of minds directly.
- Computer science and physics advances to the point where we can simulate the physics underlying the mind, and so bypass the need to understand it in order to model a civilization.
We can quantify #2 and say with high confidence that it will take millennia of Moore's law proceeding uninterrupted, if it's possible at all, to achieve the computing power needed to simulate our civilization using physics. Doesn't it seem more plausible that neuroscience will understand the mind considerably earlier than that?
Perhaps this calculation would be a useful addition to the argument.
There's also the question of how much culture plays a role in observed behavior. So analyses of post-human behavior won't necessarily answer all psychological questions they might ask. A simulation might be the only way to answer such questions.
Possibly, but it seems pretty unlikely they would not already have answers to these questions given the timeline of the above argument.
It's not clear to me that there will be any shortcuts to predicting behavior than to just simulate the whole brain at some sub-level of the neuron.
I have nearly 100% confidence that most people could be found in and around their place of residence during most of the pandemic. I also have nearly 100% confidence that prior to the pandemic, most of those people could be found at their work place or a school during certain hours, and at home the rest of the time.
I don't think human behaviour is as unpredictable as most people believe. In some ways it certainly is because it requires so much contextual knowledge, but it's also highly regular when that context is known.
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That's so many things to simulate at once
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Less than simulating all of physics though!
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Well, wouldn't even our consciousness be simulated? I don't know how that can be done.
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No one does yet. The question is which is more likely to happen first, our computing power advances to the point where we can simulate the physics required to simulate a civilization of minds (probably take millennia), or neuroscience advances to the point where we understand the brain's functioning and so can model it directly without needing to model the physics. It seems more plausible that the latter will occur much sooner than the former.
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Define the word simulation. And then define the word reality and then cross reference cultures, morals and philosophy....in other words, as any parent who has heard this time and again on a road trip....."are we there yet?"
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There's unfortunately a lot of rhetorical nonsense in that paper. It started out promising, but the discussion of the electronics of digital computers went completely off the rails, speaking as an electrical engineer. I think the paper I linked in my article is a much better analytical attempt at detecting simulations.
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Well this is quite a boring argument, to be quite honest. The argument just seems to be a rehashing of Cartesian doubt with modern sensationalist undertones(or rather, overt sensationalism), and I just don't think that's very interesting. There is a much more interesting conversation buried in here though, which is 'what follows if we do indeed live in a simulation?' Indeed, I'd say that not only is that an interesting hypothetical, if we expand the definition of simulation from strictly being a computer program, it's a very good way to read the modern world. Who says that a computer has to do the simulating? Isn't a movie like Saving Private Ryan just as much a simulation of reality as Arma 3 is? And isn't much of what we know influenced directly by the advertising and media we see and consume? Indeed, social movements have historically been propped up or propelled by media and advertisement(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom). Could we not say that much of our reality is entirely synthetically constructed by something that's not an authentic or natural superstructure? And if that's the case, I think you could make the argument that we live in a simulation without even having to go into the weird ontological arguments about whether we're just a couple of bytes on the Godhead's hard drive.
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The argument just seems to be a rehashing of Cartesian doubt with modern sensationalist undertones, and I just don't think that's very interesting
Not sure which argument you're referring to, the simulation argument, or my rebuttal of the simulation hypothesis. I find it quite interesting that we can speculate on the plausibilty of simulated civilizations using simple logic, and considering the utility of simulations is what led to this insight:
Asserting that post-humans would run ancestor simulations is to simultaneously assert that post-humans won't have a satisfactory understanding of whatever problems a full ancestor simulation would answer.
Not sure if that's novel, but it does constrain the probabilities in a way I haven't before seen.
There is a much more interesting conversation buried in here though, which is 'what follows if we do indeed live in a simulation?'
I can't say I find that particularly interesting, since a simulation could be of virtually anything. Thus, anything might follow depending on the nature of the simulation.
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I'm referring to the original simulation argument, I think it's fairly non-sensical. Ok, we live in a simulation, so what? And I'll grant you that you've rebutted the argument, ok, so we don't live in a simulation, who cares? But if we take a step further and ask ourselves, if we do live in a simulation, what does that mean for epistemology? Can we know what's true empirically? Now that's a very interesting question, because implies a certain telos. What is the truth for? Who or what is creating the truth? And so forth.
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But if we take a step further and ask ourselves, if we do live in a simulation, what does that mean for epistemology? Can we know what's true empirically?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "what is true empirically". Certainly we can know what is empirically true of the world in which we live, which may or may not be simulated. We do this with science.
If you mean whether we can know anything about the outside world assuming we're in a simulation, that's tougher. The simulation hypothesis depends on the external world being the same as the simulated world, because that's how the argument's induction works.
If you reject Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, but still assert we are in a simulation of some other kind, then I suggest reading the paper Sabine linked to in her video which places constraints on the type of simulator we could be in. Constraining the nature of the simulation would seem to be the best we can do in this case.
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> I suppose it depends on what you mean by "what is true empirically". Certainly we can know what is empirically true of the world in which we live, which may or may not be simulated. We do this with science.
Who is doing the science? How are the parameters for the science established? If we do live in a simulation, where do the laws emerge from? Science, as simple inductive reasoning about reality, becomes useless when reality itself is conditioned subjectively(which is what a simulation implies). Now, I'll grant that we can probably know what is true in the more "ontologically pure" sciences, such as physics or chemistry, but sciences like biology, economics, neuroscience, medicine, etc. are all inextricably tied to the subjective. What I'm trying to raise is that the simulation is itself created by human beings, none of us have a direct, immediate connection to pure being in itself.
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Consciousness is not possible without a functioning brain therefore a physical substance is required to produce consciousness. Any matter within a simulation is not real physical matter so cannot produce consciousness. You are conscious therefore you are not in a simulation.
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Any matter within a simulation is not real physical matter so cannot produce consciousness.
If physical matter is necessary to produce consciousness then that's no trouble at all. The root simulating computer is constructed from physical matter.
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Consciousness is not possible without a functioning brain therefore a physical substance is required to produce consciousness
That's conjecture, not established fact. There is also little reason to suppose it's true.
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This is super speculative and is banking us buying into some flavor of realism or materialism.
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All these shots in the dark remind me that we need more scientists in this world and wayyyy more funding.
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Can't argue with that!
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I love this group and i love philosophy. We need more thinkers in this world.
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I'm inclined to believe simulation theory is rediculous based on the energies required alone. "What if 'they' had enough energy?" They would not, and could not have the energy required, because simulation theory requires infinite power. Sim theory is a fun thought experiment, but it is only hypothetical.
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That's a silly argument, since you using your understanding of energy that you learned from the supposed simulation.
Also, the universe isn't infinite. Common misunderstanding.
Not to mention it would only have to exist in the presence of observers, so even if it was infinite, it wouldn't cost infinite resources.
Just like there are tons of video games today that technically infinite. Or rather "endless", like the universe is "endless".
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Once again, your entire assumption is based on this "simulated" universe's science and math. Making it pointless.
Two, it is widely accepted the universe is "endless" not "infinite". There is a big difference. Most people mistakenly use the word infinite without understanding what it means.
So you are either grossly wrong, or don't know what calling the universe infinite means.
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Once again, your entire assumption is based on this "simulated" universe's science and math. Making it pointless.
Isn't it pointless the other way too as if we were a simulation and base reality could have completely different laws of science and math, we couldn't know so people arguing that could just speculate that those laws would be whatever they'd need to be to make it possible to simulate us
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They would not, and could not have the energy required, because simulation theory requires infinite power.
I don't see why that would be true.
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The amount of power required is infinite because of how many variables are interacting with eachother. Each quantum interaction must be accounted for. This is not something that can be done at any scale other than infinity. To say any less would be ignoring the complexity of our reality, in my view.
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Each quantum interaction must be accounted for.
No it doesn't. Per the article, a simulation just needs to simulate the mind and provide it with the expected sensory input. This doesn't require simulating the physics at its lowest level.
And even if it did, modelling quantum interactions classically do not require infinite information or energy.
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Your argument assumes such a simulation would have been designed by hand by the post-human society who’s running it, but that seems doubtful. Given the way our own current tech is progressing, it would be more likely for a self-modifying blackbox AI to have built the simulation, and therefore a lot to potentially be learned from that simulation - both about an ancestral society and about the AI itself.
No, the argument is specifically about post-humans simulating us humans. What guarantee would you have that an AI-generated simulation would actually be simulating humans? Unless you understand the human mind, that probability is 0% because you would not be able to sufficiently constrain your training model for the AI to generate something of high fidelity.
The only way around that conundrum is actually understanding how the human mind works to begin with.
Now you’ve got a circular issue. If the hypothesis is true, then it’s not necessary that the simulation be accurate to humans who were not in simulation. If we are in a simulation, the chances of us behaving the way the simulation has us behave is 100%; we lack any basis of comparison to claim with any degree of certainty whether that’s accurate to anything outside the simulation or not. You can’t disprove a hypothesis with an assertion whose knowability depends on the truth of the hypothesis itself.
But it would be necessary, because simulating humans was the whole motivation for post-humans to run simulations. If post-humans lack any motivation for high fidelity human simulations, then we're in case #2 which is what I was arguing for.
Now, maybe you're suggesting that some civilization is running random physics or intelligent agent simulations. I see two responses:
That may be true, but then we fall back on the same plausibility arguments on the utility of simulation, which leads again back to case #2. The utility of simulations follows from computability arguments, which are universal.
In order for it to be more plausible that we are living in a simulation per the simulation argument, the number of simulated minds like ours would have to vastly outnumber the number of real minds. This doesn't immediately follow from asserting that post-humans run random simulations.
Edit: fixed typo.
Wouldn't simulating alien minds have more utility than running simulations of minds of the base post- species? Higher chance of producing novelty?