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Virtual Reality Poses the Same Riddles as the Cosmic Multiverse
- zitterbewegung 10y agoIf we live in a simulated universe and cant tell that the universe is simulated then what bearing does the question have when we can't answer it. The person that wrote this article is conflating the idea of VR technology and mixing it with the brain in a jar .
- bjelkeman-again 10y agoSomewhat related, but isn't saying "we live in a simulation" just another way to say "there is a god"?
- charles-salvia 10y agoMore or less yes - unless the simulation itself is auto-generated by some other mindless program. (In which case we can eventually find God recursively.)
- diminish 10y agoor unless we are the ones running the simulation and enjoying the experience of non virtual reality )
- ZeroFries 10y agoIf the simulation and programmer were both physical, most would not say the programmer was God, if thats what you mean.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoWhat if the programmer and the system performing the simulation are one and the same?
- tryrall 10y agoThis is not a very good article. SF authors have explored these fascinating concepts without falling into such holes in logic: such as presuming that a technology capable of simulating an incomprehensible volume of intelligence was simultaneously too lazy to leverage that intelligence to not cut corners in the simulation. That said, I do subscribe to the school that says we must conclude one of the following: a) civilization in the abstract generally does not progress to the point of being able to simulate itself, or b) we are the the first civilization ever, or c) we are a simulation
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- empath75 10y agoSf writers don't have the burden of having to create an internally consistent world. They're free to paper over plot holes however they like.
- bad_user 10y agoGiven our experience with actual simulators, the fact is that simulating a world populated with intelligent beings capable of simulating another world, going into a recursive loop, requires infinite processing capacity. My guess is that simulation indistinguishable from reality is never going to happen because it isn't possible, having nothing to do with how evolved we are.
- visarga 10y agoThe simulation doesn't have to run in full detail, there could be approximations made far away from sentients. Also, the speed of the simulation doesn't need to be 1:1.
- ibgib 10y ago> Also, the speed of the simulation doesn't need to be 1:1. This is what I think of when considering spacetime and relativistic effects. If you think of "matter" as being equivalent to processing power required, then the more processing required, the longer it takes to update the entire frame. So other things with less matter are updated more quickly relative to more massive segments.
- charles-salvia 10y ago> But if that’s the case, we run into a paradox. The argument for living in a simulation is based on the laws of physics and logic. But if we are living a simulation, we can’t trust those laws, so we have no basis to conclude we are living in a simulation. This is borderline nonsensical. The "laws of logic" (i.e. law of identity/non-contradiction, or propositional logic), are universal axioms that would not change regardless of whether we're in a simulation or not. The "laws of physics" could change, i.e. certain cosmological variables could be tweaked, but this wouldn't affect our ability to reason about things like this.
- jplasmeier 10y agoYou're right, but I disagree with your argument that: "the 'laws of logic' are universal axioms that would not change." Axioms are not universal and have been modified or discarded throughout the progression of mathematics [0],[1],[2]. I suppose one could argue that their definition wouldn't change and whether or not one chooses to accept an axiom or not is left to the individual, though. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(mathematics) [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Euclidean_geometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Euclidean_geometry [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice
- ibgib 10y ago> You're right, but I disagree with your argument that: "the 'laws of logic' are universal axioms that would not change." Axioms are not universal and have been modified or discarded throughout the progression of mathematics [0],[1],[2] I love that you point this out here. One of the interesting things is that even still today, as we speak, axioms and their utility are being debated. This stems from the second part of your reply: > I suppose one could argue... This is the fundamental reason I do not adhere to axiomatic systems in general. One could always argue any point, and so axioms from the get-go are "self-defeating". Fortunately with ibGib's logic, "self-defeating" is more equivalent to "in some given environment, some statement is not fit enough to survive." So any statement in environment X could conceivably be fit to survive in environment Y.
- sixQuarks 10y agoWhat's amazing to me is that this question of a simulated reality would not have even been possible to comprehend 150 years ago. Without our understanding of computers, networks, and virtual reality, a simulated universe theory would be very difficult to come about (not sure if someone actually did theorize this back then, but even if they did, the vast majority would have no idea what they were talking about). That being said, what possibilities are we neglecting now due to our limited knowledge? In 200 years, it may be obvious we're living in a totally different type of universe. In my opinion, we really won't have good idea of what kind of universe we're living in for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There will be many cycles of scientific consensus overthrown in the coming centuries as we discover new layers of reality and technology.
- charles-salvia 10y agoA Turing-machine based simulated reality certainly would have been incomprehensible, but pre-20th century philosophers have thought about the idea of the world not being "real" in some sense. I would even conjecture that the universal experience of dreaming, and the fact that we often can't tell when we're dreaming, would have probably inspired this line of thought going back possibly even pre-homo sapiens. Of course, Plato's cave is the most famous writing about the idea of a "simulated" reality from antiquity, in the sense that it discusses the idea that prisoners who spent their entire lives in a cave would assume that the cave they see is the only reality.
- tryrall 10y agoIndeed, what I find much more fascinating is that these ideas are not new at all, but each generation frames it in a new technological light. It's like how the brain used to be an ocean, then it was a windmill, then it was a steam engine, then it was a computer, and now it's a GPU cloud. I wonder what will come first: humans finally understanding what a brain is, or making one.
- sixQuarks 10y agoTrue, the dream world makes sense as an analogy. They just wouldn't know how it was technically possible to create a "virtual dream" world.
- cagenut 10y agoI have to assume this has been well trod elsewhere, but nothing that I've seen, and this is the second or third recent HN article about the whole "maybe we're in a simulation" thing, so I'm going to ask in good faith: How is this not just... religion?
- ZeroFries 10y agoIf its a falsifiable claim its not religion. Supposedly its a falsifiable claim.
- beefield 10y agoHow do you think that could be falsified? (Honest question, I have tried to come up with a way to falsify this theory, but haven't figured out anythig.)
- bad_user 10y agoNo, it's not falsifiable. Santa Claus is actually more believable since there are many children who can swear they've seen him.
- charles-salvia 10y agoBecause the word "religion" has different semantic connotations. Just because I propose a question that has no falsifiable answer does not mean I have suddenly invented a religion. If I start actually marketing my non-falsifiable answers to you, then you could say I am on the road to making it into a religion.
- ZeroFries 10y agoI dont understand the simulation argument. If I have a quantum computer, dont I have to use at least N particles to simulate an N particle system? What am I gaining by using a physical system to simulate a physical system?
- charles-salvia 10y agoNo you could use more coarse grained representations of distant objects or less frequently observed objects. If our Universe is a simulation, for example, given that the speed of information is limited, there's no reason to completely simulate, say, whatever is happening in the Andromeda galaxy right now. If we send an observer there, the simulation could just lazily produce more fine-grained renderings.
- ZeroFries 10y agoOk so that might apply one level deep, but not 2+ levels, which I think the simulation argument is mostly based on (the more levels the higher the probability your universe is a nested universe).
- dave_sullivan 10y agoSay you had a computer operating near planck scale (or some max bound on physical density of a computer system), could you use that to represent more information than would fit in the physical space? The simulation argument is "If we ever create a simulation, we'll create more, so we're probably in one of those simulations, unless we were first or are unique at cosmic scales." Would lazy loading make it harder to simulate our own universe at similar scales (harder to build a simulation in a simulation?) At some point, unless we're living in a limited simulation that can itself not be fully simulated, aren't we getting something for nothing? And if it is in fact limited, how do you show that? Edit: basically what zerofries said...
- charles-salvia 10y agoI think you're asking, if we took all the matter in the Universe and converted it into a giant computer, would we be able to fully simulate our own Universe? I think the answer is that if our Universe is currently, say, nested N levels deep in a simulation hierarchy, the Universe we currently observe may appear much more vast than it actually is, but since the speed of information is limited, we could never prove this. So while the number of estimated atoms in the observable Universe is something like 4×10^79, the actual number of simulated particles may be far, far less. Certainly, the information that comes to us via the light from distant galaxies is incredibly coarse grained and time-lagged, and if we're in a simulation it may well be that no finer grained representation actually exists (assuming there are no observers in those galaxies). I don't actually know if I believe the simulation argument, and all of this is currently (perhaps forever) non-falsifiable. By the time we're able to even send an observer to some distant galaxy ~5 billion light years away, the Universe would have expanded even more, making the galaxy even further away. But the limitations imposed on the speed of information via light cones seems to make it very computationally feasible to simulate a Universe that appears much larger and detailed than it actually is. So in other words, the inhabitants of Universe at level N of the simulation hierarchy should be able to simulate a lower-entropy coarse approximation of their Universe at level N + 1, that would be indistinguishable from Universe N to the simulated inhabitants of N + 1, provided that sufficient restrictions on the speed of information and the number of observers is enforced. But intuitively it seems there should be a limitation here, in that as N increases the level of nested computational resources available would need to decrease, until you hit a low entropy "leaf Universe". But that doesn't really affect the probabilistic angle of the simulation argument.
- ibgib 10y ago> any given person should rationally conclude he or she is made of ones and zeros rather than flesh and blood This statement presumes that "flesh and blood" are already not "ones and zeros". It also relates to my view that the conflation of "information" and 1s and 0s is very misleading. 1s and 0s are a view of information. The things on my hard drive are not 1s and 0s, otherwise what would I call corrupted locations?