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Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?

130 points by uptown 11y ago

seivan 11y ago
Once I start seeing Hungry for Apple ads then I'll know for sure.
- goda90 11y ago
  My man!
  - doubov 11y ago
    Slow dowwwwwnnnn!
    - theseatoms 11y ago
      You don't knooowwwwww me!
d33 11y ago
> “What happens,” Tyson said, “if there’s a bug that crashes the entire program?” Why do we assume that it's written in C, as opposed to - say - Erlang? ;)
- dave2000 11y ago
  Because if it wasn't written in C (or an even lower level language) cars wouldn't be fast enough and you might as well walk everywhere.
  - droffel 11y ago
    If it was written in Lisp, there would be Cars everywhere.
    - philovivero 11y ago
      I'm sorry. I cdr understand your joke.
  - outworlder 11y ago
    In case my sarcasm detector is malfunctioning and this is not a joke: A "slower" language would just mean that this universe's "ticks" would take longer. Cars would be just fine. https://www.xkcd.com/505/ https://www.xkcd.com/505/
    - dave2000 11y ago
      You know what they say: analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog; nobody cares, and the frog dies.
- Drakim 11y ago
  Because the world isn't a trivially small operation? ;)
  - goodside 11y ago
    I'd just as easily assume that it is -- progress in physics tends to unify piecemeal complicated theories as different aspects of simpler rules.
  - throwanem 11y ago
    No, but it might be a whole lot of them.
- ilconsigliere 11y ago
  The Matrix is definitely OTP
- paulpauper 11y ago
  better than java , otherwise it would be realllly slow. C and Assembly is at least fast
  - d33 11y ago
    I'd prefer slow to "in the best case, everything blows up at once - in the worst, there's a memory error that if exploited, turns your world into a dystopia".
    - dave2000 11y ago
      “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” - Douglas Adams
  - dashoffset 11y ago
    Not sure speed is relevant here. Those inside the simulation would not notice the difference, would they?
  - koolba 11y ago
    The Java simulation would be just as fast as the C one in the median case. The two problems with it are that 1) the big bang would have taken forever to start up and 2) the universe would eventually skip a beat for a stop-the-world GC cycle.
  - lmilcin 11y ago
    If the world is simulated then "real" time simulation speed does not have any influence on our experiences inside simulation. For all we know the next-up world can have different dimensionality from ours or no at all.
- badgers 11y ago
  What if the simulation running our universe isn't air gapped and we were able to break out of the sandbox running us and inject ourselves into the parent universe?
paulpauper 11y ago
Aghhh not this again. This is pseudoscience/creationism marketed to scientists. It's impossible to flasify this, since any evidence for or against simulation can be a part of the simulation.
- givinguflac 11y ago
  So why bother discussing any theory that cannot outright be disproven, is what you're saying? Your comment could have been the reaction to any number of major scientific realizations throughout history. I'm not saying we are living in a simulation, but why rage against any discussion of it?
- ksenzee 11y ago
  > This is pseudoscience/creationism marketed to scientists. It's not science at all, pseudo- or otherwise. It's philosophy. And I see no link to creationism. If we're in a simulation, it's not turtles all the way down. Somebody's running the simulation. The same ontological questions we grapple with now simply apply to that person instead of to us.
  - serge2k 11y ago
    > If we're in a simulation, it's not turtles all the way down. Somebody's running the simulation and they are simulated, and so are they, and ..., until you reach turtles. Super smart turtles. If I'm going to believe something silly it may as well involve super smart turtles.
    - Mtinie 11y ago
      ...with even smarter (and larger) turtles running simulations involving the turtles that we think are running ours. Are they really turtles, though? Or are we subtley being tricked to think of them as turtles when in reality they are dolphins?
      - serge2k 11y ago
        Simulated dolphins. By turtles.
mjhm2539 11y ago
Hilary Putnam says that we aren't. Basically, if we really were brains in vats, then "we are brains in vats" couldn't ever be true, because the referents of our discourse wouldn't have any causal connection to real brains and real vats, and so it wouldn't even be possible, if one were a brain in a vat, to think the thought or propound the proposition "I am a brain in a vat", and so, it's necessarily false that we are brains in vats. ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_2908.pdf
- pdabbadabba 11y ago
  This is a fascinating argument, but not because it tells us much about whether we are brains in vats. Instead, it tells us something deep and interesting about linguistic meaning, and the mysterious relationship between statements and propositions. Putnam is not actually saying that we aren't brains in vats. Rather, he is saying that we cannot form accurate and meaningful statements to that effect if we are. The argument, as I understand it, turns on a statement's ability to refer. Putnam's point, as you nicely summarized it, is that in order to accurately describe the world (I make a point here of not talking about whether the statement is true) a statement has to be causally related to the things it describes in the right way. This seems plausible. But this is different (on must theories) from saying that the abstract proposition that might be represented by such a statement cannot be true. It could be! The puzzle is just whether you could form a linguistic statement to properly express that proposition due to the reference problems Putnam points out. Putnam's own example demonstrates the point. A bunch of ants cannot draw an image that represents Winston Churchill in the grass, because they cannot know what Winston Churchill is or (probably) what he looks like. Any similarity between an ant-made image, and a real image of Winston Churchill has to be merely coincidental. Ants cannot close the causal link that we normally require in order to say that an image "represents" something. But this doesn't mean that there is no such thing as an image of Winston Churchill. Or that an ant-made imagine cannot resemble Winston Churchill. It just means that ants can't form a representation of him! Likewise, our putative inability to form an accurate statement to the effect that we are brains in a vat does not mean that we aren't brains in a vat. An omniscient being (perhaps the one who put us in the vats!) might, for example, read our silly HN posts about brains in vats and say, "gee, its incredible that this series of symbols actually matches the symbols that you would use to form a true statement statement about the world, if only the speaker were in the necessary causal relation to my vats in order to truly say such a thing." Likewise, we say about the ants "gee, its amazing that they managed to make an imagine resembling Winston Churchill even though they don't know what he looks like and therefore can't truly be said to have 'represented' him." (There is a parallel line of argument that you might run about our ability to know something, since knowledge, it is often said, has to be related to the external world in a certain way in order to be more than a mere belief.) In any case, classic Putnam.
allisthemoist 11y ago
> “You’re not going to get proof that we’re not in a simulation, because any evidence that we get could be simulated,” Chalmers said. This is where the argument starts to sound like creationist claims that god put the bones of dinosaurs on Earth just to test our faith.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- odonnellryan 11y ago
  Maybe the only universe where we can absolutely prove we're not in a simulation is one where we are in fact in a simulation.
- breuleux 11y ago
  Well... what kind of evidence could demonstrate a universe isn't simulated? Continuousness, perhaps, but I don't think it is possible to prove that a universe isn't discrete unless you can measure with infinite precision. Even if it was possible, a simulation could certainly be continuous with the proper hardware. Similarly, a real universe certainly could be non-continuous, so I don't think the question is even relevant either way.
  - theoh 11y ago
    I think you may be missing the point of that specific statement. It's conceivable that we might discover that we are living in a simulation. On the other hand, trying to prove conclusively that we're not is futile.
- valine 11y ago
  As someone with a conservative upbringing, I can't say I've heard that argument. In my experience the most common explanation is that the dinosaurs died in Noah's flood along with the rest of the animals. The dinosaurs that survived on the ark were unable to adapt to the new environment and went extinct shortly after. While I don't doubt the "God put dinosaur bones here to test our faith" argument has been used by Christians, I can't imagine it's very prevalent.
bcherny 11y ago
It would have been interesting to hear Wolfram's take on the debate. The debate revolved around "why would future intelligent beings want to simulate lesser intelligent beings from the past?". But the broader picture is that given enough time, "intelligence", which really means "computation", is an emergent phenomena of the universe at large. Given enough time, the universe will simulate itself. We perform computations in the same sense that complex weather patterns do - there's nothing intrinsically special about our ability to compute. So it's naive to think that we're the ones being simulated - the universe may be simulated, and we are but one emergent property of that universe.
- fideloper 11y ago
  I actually thought that was the general assumption, rather than we, humans, being anything special in the ridiculously vast universe.
- flatline 11y ago
  On a similar basis I take some exception to this statement, regarding individual immortality: > If we’re programs in the computer, then as long as I have a computer that’s not damaged, I can always re-run the program. You would quite possibly need to dump the entire universe state and re-run it from that point to get anything predictably "you" back out of it - probably not what most people have in mind when they think of a brain in a vat.
- breuleux 11y ago
  A universe can't really "simulate itself". There is inherent overhead to simulation, so a perfect simulation of a physical system would have to be larger and slower than the system it's simulating. Any simulation worth running would be an approximation of the real thing, with many corners cut. Because of butterfly effects, any approximative simulation will diverge from the original, and the more corners you cut, the faster that will happen (so ancestor simulations would require near perfect accuracy, so they would probably be prohibitively expensive). If we are a simulation, our parent universe would be several orders of magnitude more complex than this one. It's not clear to me why such a simulation would be made (what purpose it would serve to the parent universe).
bcheung 11y ago
Rene Descartes proposed this question in his "Meditations" essay (the one where we get "cogito ergo sum" from).
- lbolla 11y ago
  Actually, "cogito ergo sum" comes from "Discourse on the Method".
palgraham 11y ago
be sure to drink your ovaltine
Animats 11y ago
Unlikely. The universe has too much gratuitous detail at the subatomic level. Nothing below the electron level is really necessary. At the macro scale, the universe is way too big and mostly empty. If this is a simulation, it's inefficient by tens of orders of magnitude. If the simulation oversimplifies on the boring parts, we probably would have picked up on that by now. Although it does make you think about the Copenhagen Interpretation.
- onion2k 11y ago
  Unlikely. The universe has too much gratuitous detail at the subatomic level. Nothing below the electron level is really necessary. At the macro scale, the universe is way too big and mostly empty. If this is a simulation, it's inefficient by tens of orders of magnitude. Wouldn't that depend on what you're trying to simulate?
- jfoutz 11y ago
  This is one of my favorite joke theories about relativity. More mass increases the complexity of the simulation, slowing down time.
  - Retric 11y ago
    One of my favorites is the speed of light is simply how fast information can be passed around processers in a distributed universe simulation.
  - geoelectric 11y ago
    Which makes a certain degree of sense, as would the idea that exceptionally fast speed takes up all computing power and therefore creates a tradeoff with computing time. A plot of that would probably look like deflecting a vector to a different angle--which is what the relationship of traversal of space and traversal of time actually does do under high speed.
- chrisdbaldwin 11y ago
  We have picked up on some of the simulation's oversimplification like fractals at the subatomic level and chaos theory in general.
Phemist 11y ago
I thought SMBC had a fun comic in response http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3931 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3931
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  I was anticipating this one: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2535 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2535
solidangle 11y ago
Wouldn't it be amazing if some poor grad student in the future had to explain to his supervisor that his simulation of the past failed because the people in the simulation figured out that they were being simulated? That would cause so many moral issues: do you kill your experiment, or do you let it run until big freeze?
ksikka 11y ago
Relevant Movie: The Thirteenth Floor.
esmi 11y ago
Doesn't look like they added anything to the debate to me. But given that it has been going on 2500+ years I suppose that is not surprising. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
- etjossem 11y ago
  And the Cartesian verison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon There's a long and rich history of philosophers restating this possibility.
- danneu 11y ago
  I followed your link to this list of great sci-fi books that involve simulated reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality_in_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality_in_fiction Including Accelerando by our very own https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
- maxander 11y ago
  There's certainly been something changed, if not added- the idea is slowly getting more pessimistic. Plato thought we could get out of the "cave" simply through sustained rational thought. Brains-in-vats thinkers at least said we were still true beings in the "real" world, even if deluded ones. But simulationists think we're entirely beings of the "lower realm."
dcip6s 11y ago
If we are, let's hope they don't accidentally reboot the computer.
SeanDav 11y ago
There is a rather interesting science fiction movie, called "The Thirteenth Floor", that explores this concept, in fact if I remember correctly it talks about nested simulated worlds. This makes perfect sense to me, if the theory that we are living in a simulated universe is correct, the exact same logic would apply to the beings that are running the programs to simulate us and so on, ad infinitum.
- jgroszko 11y ago
  There were a couple different movies that explored this theme around the time The Matrix came out. eXistenZ is another one that I enjoyed a lot, where video games become completely immersive, but there's still a few tropes like vapid NPCs and generic place names that kind of give it away.
  - anexprogrammer 11y ago
    There was a late night TV show. 80s Twilight Zone or something of similar vintage. Height of the Cold War, on the brink of Nuclear War which after a series of cock-ups arrives and MAD results. Camera pulls back to reveal "Game Over", then further to show two alien teens at an arcade machine. A short exchange and another coin in the slot to start at pre-life. Show ends. Was refreshingly well done.
- trendnet 11y ago
  I personally prefer Fassbinder's Welt am Draht more. The atmosphere and cinematography are breathtaking.
talles 11y ago
> “I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? This brought me to the stark realization that I could no longer say people like Max are crazy.” Is he loosely associating mathematical constants with arbitrary error codes that we made up in computing?
- CocaKoala 11y ago
  He is not. An error code is a way to refer to an error. Error-correcting code is something else entirely; it is a way to encode information in which small errors in the transmission of the information can be detected and possibly corrected. For a simple example: I want to send you 5 bits of data, and you receive 01101. You assume (but cannot prove) that you got the right data; maybe a bit was flipped somewhere and I actually sent you 11101! So you and I agree that we'll include a parity bit in our messages. If I'm sending you an odd number of 1-bits, the parity bit will be 1. If I'm sending you an even number of 1-bits, the parity bit will be 0. So now, I send you five bits of data, plus one parity bit. You get the message 011011. You see that you have fives bits, 01101, and a 1 for the parity bit, which means that you should be expecting an odd number of 1-bits. That is what you have, so you can assume that as long as no more than 1 bit can be flipped in transit, you have the data with no malformations. This concept can be extended to detect more errors (what if two bits get flipped) and to detect where the errors take place, which helps to correct them. That's why it's called error-correcting code.
  - talles 11y ago
    And what this has to do with "quarks and electrons and supersymmetry"?
    - CocaKoala 11y ago
      Hell if I know, man. If I did, I'd have included it in my explanation! But there was a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what was being said, and I felt like it was worth explaining what I knew so that at the very least, incredulity was being expressed for the correct reason.
calvins 11y ago
If we were in a simulation and the simulation would fail to realize its purpose if a sufficiently large number of beings in the simulation became aware of the simulation and changed their behavior, how smart would it be to try to get more and more people interested in the issue and look for "smoking gun" evidence? ;=-)
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  That's the basic religion of Iain M Banks later culture novels.
  - gratalis 11y ago
    iirc, 'Surface Detail' explored this in depth from one society's use of a 'virtual hell' afterlife to instill behavioral control in 'the real'. My favorite Culture character's view on the subject was expressed in 'Matter', the previous novel in the series, by ex SC agent Xide Hyrlis. In Hyrlis's view, the characters were experiencing the base level of reality based on an a moral argument because "... only reality produced ultimately by matter in the raw can be so unthinkingly cruel." and that to be otherwise "... god or programmer, the charge would be the same - that of near infinite sadistic cruelty."
exratione 11y ago
The simulation hypothesis is, sadly, perhaps the only self-consistent solution to the Fermi Paradox, one that doesn't require very unlikely propositions. https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/ https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/ All of the other suggestions require all intelligent life without any exceptions in our past light cone to behave in a consistent way, i.e. fail to build obvious megastructures, fail to come calling, etc, so as to leave everything with the appearance of being natural. The Fermi Paradox is more the Wilderness Paradox in nature. Given that a tiny faction within any sufficiently advanced civilization could on their own generate self-replicated probes that converts the observable universe to computronium, and that some portion of humanity will do that if not stopped, and that we appear in no way to have exceptional origins or be in an unusual region, that really suggests there is something fundamental that we don't yet understand.
- masterleep 11y ago
  An outside force converting everything to computronium at our early level of development wouldn't be good game design.
- Eliezer 11y ago
  Why simulate a very atypical world if the vast majority of intelligent-life developing worlds are much younger than ours?
pteredactyl 11y ago
Is there life after death?
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Are we living in a computer simulation? No. Can I prove that? No. Is it false even though I can't prove it? Yes. Not everything that cannot be disproven should be taken seriously.
JohnLeTigre 11y ago
There is no such thing as a perfect computer that runs eternally or that can simulate something with an infinite degree of precision. If we lived in a computer simulation, we would have noticed unusual meta-physical glitches as discrepancies within the 'order of things'. For example, if the simulator used floating points, we would actually notice that numbers end up loosing precision after a certain amount of decimal points. We would probably have tons of theories about that and wonder why the metaphysical rules that are involved in counting suddenly change at specific precisions. etc. no glitches = no simulation There are many more problems with this premise but to me, these types of questions are a waste of intellectual energy so I'll leave it at that I guess, have fun.
- djsumdog 11y ago
  But the simulation doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be complete. Maybe only you and your friends are actually being simulated, and everything else is just a partial stub. Maybe only the relevant parts are rendered. I actually read Nick Bostrum's original paper and it's a pretty interesting read. Basically it looks at the long tail end of things. When you predict things waaay into the future, you tend to gain accuracy for macro predictions. For example: our sun will most likely run out of energy and die out one day. The plate border in East Africa will most likely break apart at some point causing that continent to split. The big one: humanity will one day go extinct. ... or...we'll expand to Mars and other parts of the solar system and thrive for millions of years. There are other options of course (we get blown back to the stone age, some humans survive and technology has to restart from a few thousand years ago...repeatedly...until we either leave this planet or go extinct). If our machine understanding continues to grow, we should be able to eventually make machines that can simulate parts of the world we're in. So either we've already done that (some other we), and we (you and I we) are the products of their simulation ... or we'll go extinct one day. ...or simulating this world, perfectly or imperfectly, isn't possibly at all. ... and we'll go extinct one day.
  - aws_ls 11y ago
    >Maybe only you and your friends are actually being simulated Why waste so much resources, when it can be just You being simulated?
talles 11y ago
Is that Scientific American bringing up some sort of science/philosophy on a "creator" (a.k.a. God)?
justinlardinois 11y ago
So is there some super-universe version of HN where people are arguing about implementation details of our simulated reality?
- aws_ls 11y ago
  Yes. And they are all discussing beneath a 'Show HN' link with 500+ points. I am wondering if that show HN simulation demo is in JavaScript as well? Hopefully in WebAssembly by now (or by then, based on perspective)
rl3 11y ago
If we are simulated, it'd be interesting to know how optimized the simulation is. Maybe the simulation is reminiscent of The Matrix in that reality is essentially an elegant artificial abstraction that acts as glue tying together the perceptions of each simulation participant. Perhaps a proper, low-level simulation isn't computationally prohibitive, but simulating the rest of our universe is. In that case, the cosmos itself may be an illusion despite an otherwise interference-free simulation. Or, perhaps the entire cosmos is simulated just as we are—including the hundreds of billions of galaxies present in the observable universe. This would heavily imply that computational resources are not finite. I'd argue that regardless of whether we're in a simulation or not, the sheer vastness of the observable universe heavily suggests that space may in fact be infinite—which by extension creates the potential for simulations to exist at grand—or even infinite—scales.
planck01 11y ago
I suspect that the proof against would be along the lines of: 'The theoretical minimum computer for simulating any 1 particle at realtime is at least X particles big. If it would be 1 particle it would not be a simulation. If it would take less it would not be able to capture all possible states. Eventually, every realistic simulation of a universe will either be orders of magnitude less complex than reality or will be orders of magnitude slower than realtime. In both cases realistic simulations of ones universe own past will never be possible and hardly worthwhile and thus we probably don't live in one.' This also says that computing power cannot grow indefinetely.
- ljf 11y ago
  Yes but how do we know they aren't just simulating your or my relevant particals and those around you/me?
- outworlder 11y ago
  This argument breaks down if we consider that we don't know anything about the "host" universe. It is as if Minecraft beings reasoned that it would be impossible to simulate them, as the redstone circuits required would be much larger than the observable universe. Which is fine, except we have nanoscale transistors.
  - planck01 11y ago
    Minecraft is many orders of magnitude less complex than our universe. We could be in a simulation, but then the parent universe would be orders of magnitude more complex and we would not be a significant simulation of a civilization's past as the original argument goes. Of course we might be entertainment, but to explain this universe you would then have to explain the way more complex universe in which we run. We cannot proof this is not so, but now it seems pretty similar to the god hypothesis.
- geoelectric 11y ago
  That assumes our version of "particle" is the same as whatever the theoretical simulation exists in. Maybe ours are orders of magnitude less complex somehow. The other thing is that the way to represent an infinite fabric is by only calculating what you need (similar to functional languages with infinite series). Waveform collapse upon observation/interaction would seem to have some striking commonalities with a lazy-calculation approach at first glance.
snowwrestler 11y ago
I'm not a physics genius. But to me it seems like the enthusiasm for this theory is based on some very old cultural assumptions about man vs. nature. For example: > “If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical,” said Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.” Computers are not exempt from nature, of course. The reason a computer works is because the physical laws of our universe can be described mathematically. If quantum theory didn't work mathematically, then neither would a computer. So Tegmark is probably assigning the correlation the wrong way. A computer can only exist in a universe with mathematical physical laws; therefore the detection of mathematical laws doesn't tell us whether we're in a computer ourselves. Likewise: > Furthermore, ideas from information theory keep showing up in physics. “In my research I found this very strange thing,” said James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland. “I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? Information is also not exempt from nature; it is a physical thing that is subject to the same laws of the universe as anything else. And what we call information theory arose from our study of real physical systems, like telegraphs and telephones. Now, maybe information theory will turn out to be a better mathematical framework for describing the laws of the universe. But that does not mean that it is any more likely that we're living in a simulation. One mathematical framework is not more "natural" than another. And there are plenty of examples of where a math framework developed in one context became useful in another. We use computers, and I think we still see ourselves as somehow distinct from the rest of nature. This lends itself to a somewhat supernatural way of thinking, like "I use a computer to manage information, so therefore if everything is information, then there must be a super-me running a super-computer." But taking scientific theory at face value, a computer running SimCity is just as natural as a cat, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze. If our theory says that everything is information, then so are we, and so are our computers--so there is no need for anything else to explain that.
sjg007 11y ago
I thought the answer would be no because there are computable and non-computable functions. If we are in a simulation then we should not be able to reason about them. Also then p!=np.
danbruc 11y ago
I am definitely in the this idea is nuts camp. It's the equivalent of a couple of cell in Conway's game of life trying to figure out what computer architecture the program is running on, who build the computer and what our universe looks like. Arguments like simulating ancestors and whatnot implicitly assume that the computer owners are in some sense similar to us which seems totally unjustified, we have certainly simulate way more things that are different from us than similar to us. What justification do we have that concepts like space and time and simulating something and ancestors even make sense in the outer universe? Or mathematics. Mathematics is of course good at describing our universe, we created it for that. Well, that is probably a bit too simplistic but anyway. And what would you expect the outer universe to be like? A structureless random mess without rules that could be described by mathematics? How would you make a simulation in such an environment? If you have some time to kill or want to write a science fiction novel, go ahead, think about it, but there are certainly more relevant problems to our existence than pondering whether we are one or a billion levels deep in a stack of simulations.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  All of which is true. But I think there's a more subtle problem: if you could simulate evolving creatures in a universe, how could you tell if they were truly sentient? Being sentient as an experience is completely different to appearing to show sentient behaviour. You can make a model of sentience that's as complicated as you can invent, and you'll still have no idea whether or not a modelled sentience is having a sentient experience of the universe around it, or whether it's faking its responses mechanically. The corollary is that having a model isn't enough to simulate a universe, You also need some way of knowing when sentience has been achieved. Nothing in our current technology is anywhere close to even beginning to understand how to do that.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    > Being sentient as an experience is completely different to appearing to show sentient behaviour. You can make a model of sentience that's as complicated as you can invent, and you'll still have no idea whether or not a modelled sentience is having a sentient experience of the universe around it, or whether it's faking its responses mechanically. If you make a brain that is physically identical to an extant human brain (let's say, your brain) then the only way you can claim that brain isn't sentient is if you claim that the original brain is also not sentient. I mean, what do you think is going on in your head that doesn't count as "faking responses mechanically"?
droffel 11y ago
For those of you who haven't read this short story (universe simulation is the theme), I highly recommend it: https://qntm.org/responsibility https://qntm.org/responsibility
nickcano 11y ago
I love contemplating this idea, but really hate when people write about it. They always talk about "The Matrix" or being "Video Game Characters", which really muddies the water. Of course a lot of people will reject the idea when presented like this. The Matrix, for one, is real humans in a real universe being plugged into the simulation of the real universe, which seems absurd. The idea of being inside a video game detracts from people's inherent feeling of free will and self awareness, because it seems to imply they are either a pre-programmed NPC or a character being controlled by some consciousness outside of the simulation. I feel like this flawed first impression makes them less likely to entertain the idea. At least the way I think about it, these analogies are neither accurate to the theory nor necessary to explain it to the layman. Let's look at it academically. If our technology had the capacity to completely simulate any sort of universe, you can bet a least one research team would do just that. Well, if you, like me and many others, think of the intelligent mind simply as a very powerful and self-aware computer capable of learning and abstract thought, and if the so-called universe simulated by researchers has a model of matter capable of creating the logical gates needed to replicate such a computer, and the simulated universe contains natural processes by which these logical gates might evolve, then you must agree that it is possible intelligent life may emerge in such a simulated universe -- no matter how different, similar, big, or small it is in comparison to our own. Then, following the same reasoning, you must also agree that there is the slightest possibility that the nested universe may produce one or multiple collections of intelligence capable of the same thing. In this thought experiment, the simulation isn't imprisonment, doesn't violate a sense of self-awareness or free will, and doesn't even rule out the concept of a god or ultimate creator. It simply abstracts the container in which our universe lives from something mysterious to something relatively relatable to our current technology. Another interesting thought is if we ever become capable of simulating such a universe, it seems much more likely than not we're also a simulation, since there's a possibility for each simulation to produce it's own simulation or collection of simulations.
- webkike 11y ago
  Here's an interesting thought -- suppose the algorithm used to simulate our universe is not bound by the resources in the universe. Let's also say that our simulation results in the people in our simulation simulating our universe. In this case, who is simulating who? In every possible way you could observe them the two universes are identical.
wanda 11y ago
The premise is absurd if considered superficially and irrelevant if discussed in detail. The further you pursue such possibilities, the less significant they become, because you reach the boundaries of human epistemology. The difference between simulated and "real" reality is beyond the scope of the senses and deduction. We would have to be outside the world to know the truth, and this is of course impossible.
- aws_ls 11y ago
  "epistemology" -- every time I see this word (normally in @nntaleb's tweets) I look up google for meaning of this word, get a sense, and then soon forget :-)
vinceguidry 11y ago
Our entire universe can be represented as a collection of bits of information. The real question is whether that information can be compressed or not. If it can be, that means you could store our universe digitally, if it can't, that means it has to exist in analog. If you can store it digitally, then it almost certainly is somewhere. I remember reading about how NES and other cartridge game systems are harder to emulate than disc-based systems like the PSX. The reason is that cartridges are more than just flat data storage, they have chips and other electronics on them that screw with the emulation. I'm inclined to believe (and I believe it's actually been proven) that quantum information is incompressible, that would make any algorithm that would simulate it to have the same time and space requirements as the physical system.
Yaa101 11y ago
If we do, then it's a very advanced one. But does it really matter? does REAL free will really exist?
deleted 11y ago
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ciokan 11y ago
For me it is clear that we will be doing our own simulations in the future. In short here's how I see our path in relationship with technology and it's rapid advancement: human > transhuman > energy (in the grid): immortality at this stage > long period of answers about our universe, research and exploration > boredom > nostalgia > depression > take part in simulations where you dive in but to fully enjoy the "animalic" experience you have to forget who you were and start fresh. There are some experiences that only in relationship with death (and knowing that your existence is short) produce really positive effects. This story can get long and is filled with "ifs" but I don't dismiss the idea...at all.
jqm 11y ago
No but we are living in a mental simulation.
orionblastar 11y ago
You have to wonder about this. If it is a computer simulation then there is a God that is running the universe in a computer. Evolution is based on object oriented programming where one object inherits the class of the last object but modified in some way. Did God run Bingbang.exe or some other program to create the universe simulation. Then things all fell into place and sped up for God until life developed on one planet. If it is a computer simulation it has more storage than any computer he have now because of all the galaxies of stars and their own solar systems to keep track of. Does life exist on some other planet? We don't know until we get better telescope technology to get a better look at planets. I do think we live in a computer simulation because there are so many things in the universe that can kill us, yet we survive to an old age for most of us. That means there is some unknown force that prevents most of us from dying. Everything in the universe can be simulated using Math for the laws of physics and other sciences. Very much like a computer uses math for video game simulations. It could be that we exist in this universe and our real bodies are in a different universe Matrix style and when we die we wake up in the other universe, and this universe is like training for the other universe that we can't see because all around us is this simulated universe.
jjman 11y ago
One way to prove this, is for us to create a simulated world smart enough that can discover itself and make its own simulated versions.
maxander 11y ago
> “What happens,” Tyson said, “if there’s a bug that crashes the entire program?” What if there's a bug in the simulation, and the whole computer goes up in flames- but then the experimenter restores from a backup, fixes the bug, and re-runs the simulation with the same random seed. Things proceed again exactly as before, and pass the bug-triggering point without incident. Do we notice anything happened?
- themartorana 11y ago
  Sigh... Deja vu.
- a_small_island 11y ago
  ah, reminds me of http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- vaibhavkul 11y ago
  Who (and where) is this experimenter? What if he (and his world) is also simulated? What is real?
  - User2048 11y ago
    >Who is this experimenter? The Creator. >Where is this experimenter? Right here. Right now. Everywhere. All time. No time. Outside this Universe. Inside this Universe. We are inside of him. The universe is just a small part of him. He has no definable form. This Universe, and all these things that exist in the present moment, are part of his form. All things that have existed, and all things that will exist, that's just a small part of his form. Even things that don't exist are another small part of his form. Time is a restriction that he puts on this universe. Time is just another part of him, a part of him where he chose to limit and restrict himself to the rules of time that he himself made up. He has no restrictions, no limits. >What if he (and his world) is also simulated? He is already everything and nothing. Nothingness is already part of him. There's no world where he lives in, because that already is a part him. There is nothing beyond him. Because that nothingness beyond him, is also part of him. The things that exist are part of him. The things that don't exist are also part of him. He encomapss everything and nothing, all of infintity and all of the void, all of extistance and all of non-existance. All time and all space. No time and no space. All those things are just parts of him. He is sum the whole of all those finite, infinite, time, timeless, outside, inside, everywhere, nowhere. He is not limited in anyway. He is unlimited every everyway. He is the most foundemental of all. Everything existed because he pretend that it does. Earth exist because he pretended that billions of years ago, star dust gather to form a planet called Earth. Earth goes around the sun because he pretend that Earth follows a rule he made up called Gravity. When an object push another object, he: 1. Pretend that there are two objects there. 2. Pretend that one object is pushing on another object. 3. Pretend that the other object have moved according to a made up rule that he made up: Newtown Force. 4. Pretend that there's a scintist and pretend that the scientist "did" see and measured those object moved. Most of all, he: 5. Pretend that there's a guy here typing this out. 6. Pretend that this guy typing this out have conscious and free will. In other word, I am just something he made up and pretend to exist. My free will is just him pretending I have free will. I am only typing this because he is pretending that I am. It is him who actually have free will. Free will and conciousness are fundenmental. It's just like when you're a little kid, and you have a toy soldier, and you pretend that he's a Knight. You pretend that he as a sword and a shield. You pretend that there's a dragon and you pretend that the dragon is attacking a pretend village. Then you pretend that he fight and slayed the dragon with his pretend sword. And the pretend village made him into a pretend king. Everything is just him pretending. Nothing really exist. He just acts like it exist. And everything have to act like everything exist. Just like the toy solder have to act like a dragon exist, because you act pretend that the dragon exist.
evo_9 11y ago
Whenever I see an article that has much lower upvotes than comments I wonder why HN doesn't just automatically upvote an article when someone makes an initial comment (if they haven't already upvoted the article). If you are interested enough to post a comment then you probably should upvote the article, even if you don't agree with it. Why? Because it's likely generating a good and interesting discussion. This article is a great example of this phenomenon.
tzakrajs 11y ago
Are we living in a computer simulation that is running atop another computer simulation and so on in regress ad infinitum? Does asking questions like this even mean anything? Maybe.
duncan_bayne 11y ago
Meta: as per usual, I'm finding the HN discussion far more stimulating than the original article.
reddog 11y ago
I love it. Tyson just said that there is a 50% chance that the intelligent design people are right.
tomc1985 11y ago
Surely the energy demands for such a simulation would be... astronomical.
- jsnider3 11y ago
  If that wasn't a pun, it was an accurate point.
  - tomc1985 11y ago
    Both? :)
visarga 11y ago
If we are, then it means computer simulations aren't infused only with computing power, but also consciousness, as we are self evident proof of. It's a simulation with consciousness, a completely different thing than what we usually simulate (weather, proteins, old software on emulation)
- onion2k 11y ago
  We might be a bug.
bingobob 11y ago
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
tempodox 11y ago
Seriously? I can't believe the SciAm actually published this article.
FloNeu 11y ago
hmm... hail you mighty big creators of the simulation I live in - please provide me with some cheat codes so i can get some more money, women and toys - also to unleash the wrath of gozilla on a random city of sim earth :D Sounds like a fine religion to me :)
zardo 11y ago
If I play out a few steps of Conway's game of life by hand on a go board, is that little universe any more real for my moving the stones around? I think the only thing running the simulation does is let me, an outside observer, see it. If sentiant gliders show up at some time step, they are there thinking their pre-determined thoughts whether I get to that point or not. They exist in the rules and initial conditions, not in the stones and grid lines. So if we could be living in a simulation, I don't see the need for a computer, the program is all you need.

130 points by uptown 11y ago

seivan 11y ago

Once I start seeing Hungry for Apple ads then I'll know for sure.

goda90 11y ago
My man!
- doubov 11y ago
  Slow dowwwwwnnnn!
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    You don't knooowwwwww me!

d33 11y ago

> “What happens,” Tyson said, “if there’s a bug that crashes the entire program?” Why do we assume that it's written in C, as opposed to - say - Erlang? ;)

dave2000 11y ago
Because if it wasn't written in C (or an even lower level language) cars wouldn't be fast enough and you might as well walk everywhere.
- droffel 11y ago
  If it was written in Lisp, there would be Cars everywhere.
  - philovivero 11y ago
    I'm sorry. I cdr understand your joke.
- outworlder 11y ago
  In case my sarcasm detector is malfunctioning and this is not a joke: A "slower" language would just mean that this universe's "ticks" would take longer. Cars would be just fine. https://www.xkcd.com/505/ https://www.xkcd.com/505/
  - dave2000 11y ago
    You know what they say: analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog; nobody cares, and the frog dies.
Drakim 11y ago
Because the world isn't a trivially small operation? ;)
- goodside 11y ago
  I'd just as easily assume that it is -- progress in physics tends to unify piecemeal complicated theories as different aspects of simpler rules.
- throwanem 11y ago
  No, but it might be a whole lot of them.
ilconsigliere 11y ago
The Matrix is definitely OTP
paulpauper 11y ago
better than java , otherwise it would be realllly slow. C and Assembly is at least fast
- d33 11y ago
  I'd prefer slow to "in the best case, everything blows up at once - in the worst, there's a memory error that if exploited, turns your world into a dystopia".
  - dave2000 11y ago
    “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” - Douglas Adams
- dashoffset 11y ago
  Not sure speed is relevant here. Those inside the simulation would not notice the difference, would they?
- koolba 11y ago
  The Java simulation would be just as fast as the C one in the median case. The two problems with it are that 1) the big bang would have taken forever to start up and 2) the universe would eventually skip a beat for a stop-the-world GC cycle.
- lmilcin 11y ago
  If the world is simulated then "real" time simulation speed does not have any influence on our experiences inside simulation. For all we know the next-up world can have different dimensionality from ours or no at all.
badgers 11y ago
What if the simulation running our universe isn't air gapped and we were able to break out of the sandbox running us and inject ourselves into the parent universe?

paulpauper 11y ago

Aghhh not this again. This is pseudoscience/creationism marketed to scientists. It's impossible to flasify this, since any evidence for or against simulation can be a part of the simulation.

givinguflac 11y ago
So why bother discussing any theory that cannot outright be disproven, is what you're saying? Your comment could have been the reaction to any number of major scientific realizations throughout history. I'm not saying we are living in a simulation, but why rage against any discussion of it?
ksenzee 11y ago
> This is pseudoscience/creationism marketed to scientists. It's not science at all, pseudo- or otherwise. It's philosophy. And I see no link to creationism. If we're in a simulation, it's not turtles all the way down. Somebody's running the simulation. The same ontological questions we grapple with now simply apply to that person instead of to us.
- serge2k 11y ago
  > If we're in a simulation, it's not turtles all the way down. Somebody's running the simulation and they are simulated, and so are they, and ..., until you reach turtles. Super smart turtles. If I'm going to believe something silly it may as well involve super smart turtles.
  - Mtinie 11y ago
    ...with even smarter (and larger) turtles running simulations involving the turtles that we think are running ours. Are they really turtles, though? Or are we subtley being tricked to think of them as turtles when in reality they are dolphins?
    - serge2k 11y ago
      Simulated dolphins. By turtles.

mjhm2539 11y ago

Hilary Putnam says that we aren't. Basically, if we really were brains in vats, then "we are brains in vats" couldn't ever be true, because the referents of our discourse wouldn't have any causal connection to real brains and real vats, and so it wouldn't even be possible, if one were a brain in a vat, to think the thought or propound the proposition "I am a brain in a vat", and so, it's necessarily false that we are brains in vats. ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_2908.pdf

pdabbadabba 11y ago
This is a fascinating argument, but not because it tells us much about whether we are brains in vats. Instead, it tells us something deep and interesting about linguistic meaning, and the mysterious relationship between statements and propositions. Putnam is not actually saying that we aren't brains in vats. Rather, he is saying that we cannot form accurate and meaningful statements to that effect if we are. The argument, as I understand it, turns on a statement's ability to refer. Putnam's point, as you nicely summarized it, is that in order to accurately describe the world (I make a point here of not talking about whether the statement is true) a statement has to be causally related to the things it describes in the right way. This seems plausible. But this is different (on must theories) from saying that the abstract proposition that might be represented by such a statement cannot be true. It could be! The puzzle is just whether you could form a linguistic statement to properly express that proposition due to the reference problems Putnam points out. Putnam's own example demonstrates the point. A bunch of ants cannot draw an image that represents Winston Churchill in the grass, because they cannot know what Winston Churchill is or (probably) what he looks like. Any similarity between an ant-made image, and a real image of Winston Churchill has to be merely coincidental. Ants cannot close the causal link that we normally require in order to say that an image "represents" something. But this doesn't mean that there is no such thing as an image of Winston Churchill. Or that an ant-made imagine cannot resemble Winston Churchill. It just means that ants can't form a representation of him! Likewise, our putative inability to form an accurate statement to the effect that we are brains in a vat does not mean that we aren't brains in a vat. An omniscient being (perhaps the one who put us in the vats!) might, for example, read our silly HN posts about brains in vats and say, "gee, its incredible that this series of symbols actually matches the symbols that you would use to form a true statement statement about the world, if only the speaker were in the necessary causal relation to my vats in order to truly say such a thing." Likewise, we say about the ants "gee, its amazing that they managed to make an imagine resembling Winston Churchill even though they don't know what he looks like and therefore can't truly be said to have 'represented' him." (There is a parallel line of argument that you might run about our ability to know something, since knowledge, it is often said, has to be related to the external world in a certain way in order to be more than a mere belief.) In any case, classic Putnam.

allisthemoist 11y ago

> “You’re not going to get proof that we’re not in a simulation, because any evidence that we get could be simulated,” Chalmers said. This is where the argument starts to sound like creationist claims that god put the bones of dinosaurs on Earth just to test our faith.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
odonnellryan 11y ago
Maybe the only universe where we can absolutely prove we're not in a simulation is one where we are in fact in a simulation.
breuleux 11y ago
Well... what kind of evidence could demonstrate a universe isn't simulated? Continuousness, perhaps, but I don't think it is possible to prove that a universe isn't discrete unless you can measure with infinite precision. Even if it was possible, a simulation could certainly be continuous with the proper hardware. Similarly, a real universe certainly could be non-continuous, so I don't think the question is even relevant either way.
- theoh 11y ago
  I think you may be missing the point of that specific statement. It's conceivable that we might discover that we are living in a simulation. On the other hand, trying to prove conclusively that we're not is futile.
valine 11y ago
As someone with a conservative upbringing, I can't say I've heard that argument. In my experience the most common explanation is that the dinosaurs died in Noah's flood along with the rest of the animals. The dinosaurs that survived on the ark were unable to adapt to the new environment and went extinct shortly after. While I don't doubt the "God put dinosaur bones here to test our faith" argument has been used by Christians, I can't imagine it's very prevalent.

bcherny 11y ago

It would have been interesting to hear Wolfram's take on the debate. The debate revolved around "why would future intelligent beings want to simulate lesser intelligent beings from the past?". But the broader picture is that given enough time, "intelligence", which really means "computation", is an emergent phenomena of the universe at large. Given enough time, the universe will simulate itself. We perform computations in the same sense that complex weather patterns do - there's nothing intrinsically special about our ability to compute. So it's naive to think that we're the ones being simulated - the universe may be simulated, and we are but one emergent property of that universe.

fideloper 11y ago
I actually thought that was the general assumption, rather than we, humans, being anything special in the ridiculously vast universe.
flatline 11y ago
On a similar basis I take some exception to this statement, regarding individual immortality: > If we’re programs in the computer, then as long as I have a computer that’s not damaged, I can always re-run the program. You would quite possibly need to dump the entire universe state and re-run it from that point to get anything predictably "you" back out of it - probably not what most people have in mind when they think of a brain in a vat.
breuleux 11y ago
A universe can't really "simulate itself". There is inherent overhead to simulation, so a perfect simulation of a physical system would have to be larger and slower than the system it's simulating. Any simulation worth running would be an approximation of the real thing, with many corners cut. Because of butterfly effects, any approximative simulation will diverge from the original, and the more corners you cut, the faster that will happen (so ancestor simulations would require near perfect accuracy, so they would probably be prohibitively expensive). If we are a simulation, our parent universe would be several orders of magnitude more complex than this one. It's not clear to me why such a simulation would be made (what purpose it would serve to the parent universe).

bcheung 11y ago

Rene Descartes proposed this question in his "Meditations" essay (the one where we get "cogito ergo sum" from).

lbolla 11y ago
Actually, "cogito ergo sum" comes from "Discourse on the Method".

palgraham 11y ago

be sure to drink your ovaltine

Animats 11y ago

Unlikely. The universe has too much gratuitous detail at the subatomic level. Nothing below the electron level is really necessary. At the macro scale, the universe is way too big and mostly empty. If this is a simulation, it's inefficient by tens of orders of magnitude. If the simulation oversimplifies on the boring parts, we probably would have picked up on that by now. Although it does make you think about the Copenhagen Interpretation.

onion2k 11y ago
Unlikely. The universe has too much gratuitous detail at the subatomic level. Nothing below the electron level is really necessary. At the macro scale, the universe is way too big and mostly empty. If this is a simulation, it's inefficient by tens of orders of magnitude. Wouldn't that depend on what you're trying to simulate?
jfoutz 11y ago
This is one of my favorite joke theories about relativity. More mass increases the complexity of the simulation, slowing down time.
- Retric 11y ago
  One of my favorites is the speed of light is simply how fast information can be passed around processers in a distributed universe simulation.
- geoelectric 11y ago
  Which makes a certain degree of sense, as would the idea that exceptionally fast speed takes up all computing power and therefore creates a tradeoff with computing time. A plot of that would probably look like deflecting a vector to a different angle--which is what the relationship of traversal of space and traversal of time actually does do under high speed.
chrisdbaldwin 11y ago
We have picked up on some of the simulation's oversimplification like fractals at the subatomic level and chaos theory in general.

Phemist 11y ago

I thought SMBC had a fun comic in response http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3931 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3931

wlesieutre 11y ago
I was anticipating this one: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2535 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2535

solidangle 11y ago

Wouldn't it be amazing if some poor grad student in the future had to explain to his supervisor that his simulation of the past failed because the people in the simulation figured out that they were being simulated? That would cause so many moral issues: do you kill your experiment, or do you let it run until big freeze?

ksikka 11y ago

Relevant Movie: The Thirteenth Floor.

esmi 11y ago

Doesn't look like they added anything to the debate to me. But given that it has been going on 2500+ years I suppose that is not surprising. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

etjossem 11y ago
And the Cartesian verison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon There's a long and rich history of philosophers restating this possibility.
danneu 11y ago
I followed your link to this list of great sci-fi books that involve simulated reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality_in_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality_in_fiction Including Accelerando by our very own https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
maxander 11y ago
There's certainly been something changed, if not added- the idea is slowly getting more pessimistic. Plato thought we could get out of the "cave" simply through sustained rational thought. Brains-in-vats thinkers at least said we were still true beings in the "real" world, even if deluded ones. But simulationists think we're entirely beings of the "lower realm."

dcip6s 11y ago

If we are, let's hope they don't accidentally reboot the computer.

SeanDav 11y ago

There is a rather interesting science fiction movie, called "The Thirteenth Floor", that explores this concept, in fact if I remember correctly it talks about nested simulated worlds. This makes perfect sense to me, if the theory that we are living in a simulated universe is correct, the exact same logic would apply to the beings that are running the programs to simulate us and so on, ad infinitum.

jgroszko 11y ago
There were a couple different movies that explored this theme around the time The Matrix came out. eXistenZ is another one that I enjoyed a lot, where video games become completely immersive, but there's still a few tropes like vapid NPCs and generic place names that kind of give it away.
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  There was a late night TV show. 80s Twilight Zone or something of similar vintage. Height of the Cold War, on the brink of Nuclear War which after a series of cock-ups arrives and MAD results. Camera pulls back to reveal "Game Over", then further to show two alien teens at an arcade machine. A short exchange and another coin in the slot to start at pre-life. Show ends. Was refreshingly well done.
trendnet 11y ago
I personally prefer Fassbinder's Welt am Draht more. The atmosphere and cinematography are breathtaking.

talles 11y ago

> “I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? This brought me to the stark realization that I could no longer say people like Max are crazy.” Is he loosely associating mathematical constants with arbitrary error codes that we made up in computing?

CocaKoala 11y ago
He is not. An error code is a way to refer to an error. Error-correcting code is something else entirely; it is a way to encode information in which small errors in the transmission of the information can be detected and possibly corrected. For a simple example: I want to send you 5 bits of data, and you receive 01101. You assume (but cannot prove) that you got the right data; maybe a bit was flipped somewhere and I actually sent you 11101! So you and I agree that we'll include a parity bit in our messages. If I'm sending you an odd number of 1-bits, the parity bit will be 1. If I'm sending you an even number of 1-bits, the parity bit will be 0. So now, I send you five bits of data, plus one parity bit. You get the message 011011. You see that you have fives bits, 01101, and a 1 for the parity bit, which means that you should be expecting an odd number of 1-bits. That is what you have, so you can assume that as long as no more than 1 bit can be flipped in transit, you have the data with no malformations. This concept can be extended to detect more errors (what if two bits get flipped) and to detect where the errors take place, which helps to correct them. That's why it's called error-correcting code.
- talles 11y ago
  And what this has to do with "quarks and electrons and supersymmetry"?
  - CocaKoala 11y ago
    Hell if I know, man. If I did, I'd have included it in my explanation! But there was a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what was being said, and I felt like it was worth explaining what I knew so that at the very least, incredulity was being expressed for the correct reason.

calvins 11y ago

If we were in a simulation and the simulation would fail to realize its purpose if a sufficiently large number of beings in the simulation became aware of the simulation and changed their behavior, how smart would it be to try to get more and more people interested in the issue and look for "smoking gun" evidence? ;=-)

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
That's the basic religion of Iain M Banks later culture novels.
- gratalis 11y ago
  iirc, 'Surface Detail' explored this in depth from one society's use of a 'virtual hell' afterlife to instill behavioral control in 'the real'. My favorite Culture character's view on the subject was expressed in 'Matter', the previous novel in the series, by ex SC agent Xide Hyrlis. In Hyrlis's view, the characters were experiencing the base level of reality based on an a moral argument because "... only reality produced ultimately by matter in the raw can be so unthinkingly cruel." and that to be otherwise "... god or programmer, the charge would be the same - that of near infinite sadistic cruelty."

exratione 11y ago

The simulation hypothesis is, sadly, perhaps the only self-consistent solution to the Fermi Paradox, one that doesn't require very unlikely propositions. https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/ https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/ All of the other suggestions require all intelligent life without any exceptions in our past light cone to behave in a consistent way, i.e. fail to build obvious megastructures, fail to come calling, etc, so as to leave everything with the appearance of being natural. The Fermi Paradox is more the Wilderness Paradox in nature. Given that a tiny faction within any sufficiently advanced civilization could on their own generate self-replicated probes that converts the observable universe to computronium, and that some portion of humanity will do that if not stopped, and that we appear in no way to have exceptional origins or be in an unusual region, that really suggests there is something fundamental that we don't yet understand.

masterleep 11y ago
An outside force converting everything to computronium at our early level of development wouldn't be good game design.
Eliezer 11y ago
Why simulate a very atypical world if the vast majority of intelligent-life developing worlds are much younger than ours?

pteredactyl 11y ago

Is there life after death?

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

Are we living in a computer simulation? No. Can I prove that? No. Is it false even though I can't prove it? Yes. Not everything that cannot be disproven should be taken seriously.

JohnLeTigre 11y ago

There is no such thing as a perfect computer that runs eternally or that can simulate something with an infinite degree of precision. If we lived in a computer simulation, we would have noticed unusual meta-physical glitches as discrepancies within the 'order of things'. For example, if the simulator used floating points, we would actually notice that numbers end up loosing precision after a certain amount of decimal points. We would probably have tons of theories about that and wonder why the metaphysical rules that are involved in counting suddenly change at specific precisions. etc. no glitches = no simulation There are many more problems with this premise but to me, these types of questions are a waste of intellectual energy so I'll leave it at that I guess, have fun.

djsumdog 11y ago
But the simulation doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be complete. Maybe only you and your friends are actually being simulated, and everything else is just a partial stub. Maybe only the relevant parts are rendered. I actually read Nick Bostrum's original paper and it's a pretty interesting read. Basically it looks at the long tail end of things. When you predict things waaay into the future, you tend to gain accuracy for macro predictions. For example: our sun will most likely run out of energy and die out one day. The plate border in East Africa will most likely break apart at some point causing that continent to split. The big one: humanity will one day go extinct. ... or...we'll expand to Mars and other parts of the solar system and thrive for millions of years. There are other options of course (we get blown back to the stone age, some humans survive and technology has to restart from a few thousand years ago...repeatedly...until we either leave this planet or go extinct). If our machine understanding continues to grow, we should be able to eventually make machines that can simulate parts of the world we're in. So either we've already done that (some other we), and we (you and I we) are the products of their simulation ... or we'll go extinct one day. ...or simulating this world, perfectly or imperfectly, isn't possibly at all. ... and we'll go extinct one day.
- aws_ls 11y ago
  >Maybe only you and your friends are actually being simulated Why waste so much resources, when it can be just You being simulated?

talles 11y ago

Is that Scientific American bringing up some sort of science/philosophy on a "creator" (a.k.a. God)?

justinlardinois 11y ago

So is there some super-universe version of HN where people are arguing about implementation details of our simulated reality?

aws_ls 11y ago
Yes. And they are all discussing beneath a 'Show HN' link with 500+ points. I am wondering if that show HN simulation demo is in JavaScript as well? Hopefully in WebAssembly by now (or by then, based on perspective)

rl3 11y ago

If we are simulated, it'd be interesting to know how optimized the simulation is. Maybe the simulation is reminiscent of The Matrix in that reality is essentially an elegant artificial abstraction that acts as glue tying together the perceptions of each simulation participant. Perhaps a proper, low-level simulation isn't computationally prohibitive, but simulating the rest of our universe is. In that case, the cosmos itself may be an illusion despite an otherwise interference-free simulation. Or, perhaps the entire cosmos is simulated just as we are—including the hundreds of billions of galaxies present in the observable universe. This would heavily imply that computational resources are not finite. I'd argue that regardless of whether we're in a simulation or not, the sheer vastness of the observable universe heavily suggests that space may in fact be infinite—which by extension creates the potential for simulations to exist at grand—or even infinite—scales.

planck01 11y ago

I suspect that the proof against would be along the lines of: 'The theoretical minimum computer for simulating any 1 particle at realtime is at least X particles big. If it would be 1 particle it would not be a simulation. If it would take less it would not be able to capture all possible states. Eventually, every realistic simulation of a universe will either be orders of magnitude less complex than reality or will be orders of magnitude slower than realtime. In both cases realistic simulations of ones universe own past will never be possible and hardly worthwhile and thus we probably don't live in one.' This also says that computing power cannot grow indefinetely.

ljf 11y ago
Yes but how do we know they aren't just simulating your or my relevant particals and those around you/me?
outworlder 11y ago
This argument breaks down if we consider that we don't know anything about the "host" universe. It is as if Minecraft beings reasoned that it would be impossible to simulate them, as the redstone circuits required would be much larger than the observable universe. Which is fine, except we have nanoscale transistors.
- planck01 11y ago
  Minecraft is many orders of magnitude less complex than our universe. We could be in a simulation, but then the parent universe would be orders of magnitude more complex and we would not be a significant simulation of a civilization's past as the original argument goes. Of course we might be entertainment, but to explain this universe you would then have to explain the way more complex universe in which we run. We cannot proof this is not so, but now it seems pretty similar to the god hypothesis.
geoelectric 11y ago
That assumes our version of "particle" is the same as whatever the theoretical simulation exists in. Maybe ours are orders of magnitude less complex somehow. The other thing is that the way to represent an infinite fabric is by only calculating what you need (similar to functional languages with infinite series). Waveform collapse upon observation/interaction would seem to have some striking commonalities with a lazy-calculation approach at first glance.

snowwrestler 11y ago

I'm not a physics genius. But to me it seems like the enthusiasm for this theory is based on some very old cultural assumptions about man vs. nature. For example: > “If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical,” said Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.” Computers are not exempt from nature, of course. The reason a computer works is because the physical laws of our universe can be described mathematically. If quantum theory didn't work mathematically, then neither would a computer. So Tegmark is probably assigning the correlation the wrong way. A computer can only exist in a universe with mathematical physical laws; therefore the detection of mathematical laws doesn't tell us whether we're in a computer ourselves. Likewise: > Furthermore, ideas from information theory keep showing up in physics. “In my research I found this very strange thing,” said James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland. “I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? Information is also not exempt from nature; it is a physical thing that is subject to the same laws of the universe as anything else. And what we call information theory arose from our study of real physical systems, like telegraphs and telephones. Now, maybe information theory will turn out to be a better mathematical framework for describing the laws of the universe. But that does not mean that it is any more likely that we're living in a simulation. One mathematical framework is not more "natural" than another. And there are plenty of examples of where a math framework developed in one context became useful in another. We use computers, and I think we still see ourselves as somehow distinct from the rest of nature. This lends itself to a somewhat supernatural way of thinking, like "I use a computer to manage information, so therefore if everything is information, then there must be a super-me running a super-computer." But taking scientific theory at face value, a computer running SimCity is just as natural as a cat, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze. If our theory says that everything is information, then so are we, and so are our computers--so there is no need for anything else to explain that.

sjg007 11y ago

I thought the answer would be no because there are computable and non-computable functions. If we are in a simulation then we should not be able to reason about them. Also then p!=np.

danbruc 11y ago

I am definitely in the this idea is nuts camp. It's the equivalent of a couple of cell in Conway's game of life trying to figure out what computer architecture the program is running on, who build the computer and what our universe looks like. Arguments like simulating ancestors and whatnot implicitly assume that the computer owners are in some sense similar to us which seems totally unjustified, we have certainly simulate way more things that are different from us than similar to us. What justification do we have that concepts like space and time and simulating something and ancestors even make sense in the outer universe? Or mathematics. Mathematics is of course good at describing our universe, we created it for that. Well, that is probably a bit too simplistic but anyway. And what would you expect the outer universe to be like? A structureless random mess without rules that could be described by mathematics? How would you make a simulation in such an environment? If you have some time to kill or want to write a science fiction novel, go ahead, think about it, but there are certainly more relevant problems to our existence than pondering whether we are one or a billion levels deep in a stack of simulations.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
All of which is true. But I think there's a more subtle problem: if you could simulate evolving creatures in a universe, how could you tell if they were truly sentient? Being sentient as an experience is completely different to appearing to show sentient behaviour. You can make a model of sentience that's as complicated as you can invent, and you'll still have no idea whether or not a modelled sentience is having a sentient experience of the universe around it, or whether it's faking its responses mechanically. The corollary is that having a model isn't enough to simulate a universe, You also need some way of knowing when sentience has been achieved. Nothing in our current technology is anywhere close to even beginning to understand how to do that.
- deciplex 11y ago
  > Being sentient as an experience is completely different to appearing to show sentient behaviour. You can make a model of sentience that's as complicated as you can invent, and you'll still have no idea whether or not a modelled sentience is having a sentient experience of the universe around it, or whether it's faking its responses mechanically. If you make a brain that is physically identical to an extant human brain (let's say, your brain) then the only way you can claim that brain isn't sentient is if you claim that the original brain is also not sentient. I mean, what do you think is going on in your head that doesn't count as "faking responses mechanically"?

droffel 11y ago

For those of you who haven't read this short story (universe simulation is the theme), I highly recommend it: https://qntm.org/responsibility https://qntm.org/responsibility

nickcano 11y ago

I love contemplating this idea, but really hate when people write about it. They always talk about "The Matrix" or being "Video Game Characters", which really muddies the water. Of course a lot of people will reject the idea when presented like this. The Matrix, for one, is real humans in a real universe being plugged into the simulation of the real universe, which seems absurd. The idea of being inside a video game detracts from people's inherent feeling of free will and self awareness, because it seems to imply they are either a pre-programmed NPC or a character being controlled by some consciousness outside of the simulation. I feel like this flawed first impression makes them less likely to entertain the idea. At least the way I think about it, these analogies are neither accurate to the theory nor necessary to explain it to the layman. Let's look at it academically. If our technology had the capacity to completely simulate any sort of universe, you can bet a least one research team would do just that. Well, if you, like me and many others, think of the intelligent mind simply as a very powerful and self-aware computer capable of learning and abstract thought, and if the so-called universe simulated by researchers has a model of matter capable of creating the logical gates needed to replicate such a computer, and the simulated universe contains natural processes by which these logical gates might evolve, then you must agree that it is possible intelligent life may emerge in such a simulated universe -- no matter how different, similar, big, or small it is in comparison to our own. Then, following the same reasoning, you must also agree that there is the slightest possibility that the nested universe may produce one or multiple collections of intelligence capable of the same thing. In this thought experiment, the simulation isn't imprisonment, doesn't violate a sense of self-awareness or free will, and doesn't even rule out the concept of a god or ultimate creator. It simply abstracts the container in which our universe lives from something mysterious to something relatively relatable to our current technology. Another interesting thought is if we ever become capable of simulating such a universe, it seems much more likely than not we're also a simulation, since there's a possibility for each simulation to produce it's own simulation or collection of simulations.

webkike 11y ago
Here's an interesting thought -- suppose the algorithm used to simulate our universe is not bound by the resources in the universe. Let's also say that our simulation results in the people in our simulation simulating our universe. In this case, who is simulating who? In every possible way you could observe them the two universes are identical.

wanda 11y ago

The premise is absurd if considered superficially and irrelevant if discussed in detail. The further you pursue such possibilities, the less significant they become, because you reach the boundaries of human epistemology. The difference between simulated and "real" reality is beyond the scope of the senses and deduction. We would have to be outside the world to know the truth, and this is of course impossible.

aws_ls 11y ago
"epistemology" -- every time I see this word (normally in @nntaleb's tweets) I look up google for meaning of this word, get a sense, and then soon forget :-)

vinceguidry 11y ago

Our entire universe can be represented as a collection of bits of information. The real question is whether that information can be compressed or not. If it can be, that means you could store our universe digitally, if it can't, that means it has to exist in analog. If you can store it digitally, then it almost certainly is somewhere. I remember reading about how NES and other cartridge game systems are harder to emulate than disc-based systems like the PSX. The reason is that cartridges are more than just flat data storage, they have chips and other electronics on them that screw with the emulation. I'm inclined to believe (and I believe it's actually been proven) that quantum information is incompressible, that would make any algorithm that would simulate it to have the same time and space requirements as the physical system.

Yaa101 11y ago

If we do, then it's a very advanced one. But does it really matter? does REAL free will really exist?

deleted 11y ago

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ciokan 11y ago

For me it is clear that we will be doing our own simulations in the future. In short here's how I see our path in relationship with technology and it's rapid advancement: human > transhuman > energy (in the grid): immortality at this stage > long period of answers about our universe, research and exploration > boredom > nostalgia > depression > take part in simulations where you dive in but to fully enjoy the "animalic" experience you have to forget who you were and start fresh. There are some experiences that only in relationship with death (and knowing that your existence is short) produce really positive effects. This story can get long and is filled with "ifs" but I don't dismiss the idea...at all.

jqm 11y ago

No but we are living in a mental simulation.

orionblastar 11y ago

You have to wonder about this. If it is a computer simulation then there is a God that is running the universe in a computer. Evolution is based on object oriented programming where one object inherits the class of the last object but modified in some way. Did God run Bingbang.exe or some other program to create the universe simulation. Then things all fell into place and sped up for God until life developed on one planet. If it is a computer simulation it has more storage than any computer he have now because of all the galaxies of stars and their own solar systems to keep track of. Does life exist on some other planet? We don't know until we get better telescope technology to get a better look at planets. I do think we live in a computer simulation because there are so many things in the universe that can kill us, yet we survive to an old age for most of us. That means there is some unknown force that prevents most of us from dying. Everything in the universe can be simulated using Math for the laws of physics and other sciences. Very much like a computer uses math for video game simulations. It could be that we exist in this universe and our real bodies are in a different universe Matrix style and when we die we wake up in the other universe, and this universe is like training for the other universe that we can't see because all around us is this simulated universe.

jjman 11y ago

One way to prove this, is for us to create a simulated world smart enough that can discover itself and make its own simulated versions.

maxander 11y ago

> “What happens,” Tyson said, “if there’s a bug that crashes the entire program?” What if there's a bug in the simulation, and the whole computer goes up in flames- but then the experimenter restores from a backup, fixes the bug, and re-runs the simulation with the same random seed. Things proceed again exactly as before, and pass the bug-triggering point without incident. Do we notice anything happened?

themartorana 11y ago
Sigh... Deja vu.
a_small_island 11y ago
ah, reminds me of http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
deleted 11y ago
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vaibhavkul 11y ago
Who (and where) is this experimenter? What if he (and his world) is also simulated? What is real?
- User2048 11y ago
  >Who is this experimenter? The Creator. >Where is this experimenter? Right here. Right now. Everywhere. All time. No time. Outside this Universe. Inside this Universe. We are inside of him. The universe is just a small part of him. He has no definable form. This Universe, and all these things that exist in the present moment, are part of his form. All things that have existed, and all things that will exist, that's just a small part of his form. Even things that don't exist are another small part of his form. Time is a restriction that he puts on this universe. Time is just another part of him, a part of him where he chose to limit and restrict himself to the rules of time that he himself made up. He has no restrictions, no limits. >What if he (and his world) is also simulated? He is already everything and nothing. Nothingness is already part of him. There's no world where he lives in, because that already is a part him. There is nothing beyond him. Because that nothingness beyond him, is also part of him. The things that exist are part of him. The things that don't exist are also part of him. He encomapss everything and nothing, all of infintity and all of the void, all of extistance and all of non-existance. All time and all space. No time and no space. All those things are just parts of him. He is sum the whole of all those finite, infinite, time, timeless, outside, inside, everywhere, nowhere. He is not limited in anyway. He is unlimited every everyway. He is the most foundemental of all. Everything existed because he pretend that it does. Earth exist because he pretended that billions of years ago, star dust gather to form a planet called Earth. Earth goes around the sun because he pretend that Earth follows a rule he made up called Gravity. When an object push another object, he: 1. Pretend that there are two objects there. 2. Pretend that one object is pushing on another object. 3. Pretend that the other object have moved according to a made up rule that he made up: Newtown Force. 4. Pretend that there's a scintist and pretend that the scientist "did" see and measured those object moved. Most of all, he: 5. Pretend that there's a guy here typing this out. 6. Pretend that this guy typing this out have conscious and free will. In other word, I am just something he made up and pretend to exist. My free will is just him pretending I have free will. I am only typing this because he is pretending that I am. It is him who actually have free will. Free will and conciousness are fundenmental. It's just like when you're a little kid, and you have a toy soldier, and you pretend that he's a Knight. You pretend that he as a sword and a shield. You pretend that there's a dragon and you pretend that the dragon is attacking a pretend village. Then you pretend that he fight and slayed the dragon with his pretend sword. And the pretend village made him into a pretend king. Everything is just him pretending. Nothing really exist. He just acts like it exist. And everything have to act like everything exist. Just like the toy solder have to act like a dragon exist, because you act pretend that the dragon exist.

evo_9 11y ago

Whenever I see an article that has much lower upvotes than comments I wonder why HN doesn't just automatically upvote an article when someone makes an initial comment (if they haven't already upvoted the article). If you are interested enough to post a comment then you probably should upvote the article, even if you don't agree with it. Why? Because it's likely generating a good and interesting discussion. This article is a great example of this phenomenon.

tzakrajs 11y ago

Are we living in a computer simulation that is running atop another computer simulation and so on in regress ad infinitum? Does asking questions like this even mean anything? Maybe.

duncan_bayne 11y ago

Meta: as per usual, I'm finding the HN discussion far more stimulating than the original article.

reddog 11y ago

I love it. Tyson just said that there is a 50% chance that the intelligent design people are right.

tomc1985 11y ago

Surely the energy demands for such a simulation would be... astronomical.

jsnider3 11y ago
If that wasn't a pun, it was an accurate point.
- tomc1985 11y ago
  Both? :)

visarga 11y ago

If we are, then it means computer simulations aren't infused only with computing power, but also consciousness, as we are self evident proof of. It's a simulation with consciousness, a completely different thing than what we usually simulate (weather, proteins, old software on emulation)

onion2k 11y ago
We might be a bug.

bingobob 11y ago

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/

tempodox 11y ago

Seriously? I can't believe the SciAm actually published this article.

FloNeu 11y ago

hmm... hail you mighty big creators of the simulation I live in - please provide me with some cheat codes so i can get some more money, women and toys - also to unleash the wrath of gozilla on a random city of sim earth :D Sounds like a fine religion to me :)

zardo 11y ago

If I play out a few steps of Conway's game of life by hand on a go board, is that little universe any more real for my moving the stones around? I think the only thing running the simulation does is let me, an outside observer, see it. If sentiant gliders show up at some time step, they are there thinking their pre-determined thoughts whether I get to that point or not. They exist in the rules and initial conditions, not in the stones and grid lines. So if we could be living in a simulation, I don't see the need for a computer, the program is all you need.