3 ms·

The thing I always found perplexing about the idea of an ancestral simulation is - how do you initialize that? E.g. suppose we are in the year 3,000 and we have

The thing I always found perplexing about the idea of an ancestral simulation is - how do you initialize that? E.g. suppose we are in the year 3,000 and we have super advanced computers and I'd like to simulate the year 2017. How do I lay out all the humans/their brains/animals/trees/rocks/etc, without access to the snapshot of the state? And some attempts at patching this, e.g. by simulating physics backwards from a current state because the laws of physics are reversible is not likely due to 1) entropy/chaos when going backward, 2) the difficulty of taking a simultaneous high-fidelity particle-level-accurate snapshot in the year 3,000, and 3) missing boundary conditions.

deleted 10y ago
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jobigoud 10y ago
It doesn't have to be historically accurate. Just believable by the simulated.
AnonNo15 10y ago
1) you start from Big Bang and go forward. 2) you can at any state check the difference between the simulated state and historical record 3) if your simulation converges, that is the closer to present day, the less the uncertainty, then you are on a right track. 4) if you simulation diverges you go to step 1 and tweak the initial conditions 5) you don't run a single simulation - you run many in parallel and select the best match at each step.
deepnet 10y ago
If a simulation contains minds is it not equivalent Dennet's "Brain in a vat" [1] model of consciousness ? In "Consciousness Explained" Dennet postulates that a conscious mind perceiving a thing-in-the-world need not have perfect rich input data but merely a neuron that responds yes to the question: Am I seeing that thing ? [1] Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennet, page 8, [ Prelude, Hard Hallucination Problem ]: "...intervene somewhere along the chain (anywhere on the optic nerve, ...between the eyeball and consciousness), tugging just right on the nerves would produce exactly the chain of events that would be caused by a normal veridical perception of something, ...producing, at the receiving end in the mind, exactly the effect of such a conscious perception."

deleted 10y ago

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jobigoud 10y ago

It doesn't have to be historically accurate. Just believable by the simulated.

AnonNo15 10y ago

1) you start from Big Bang and go forward. 2) you can at any state check the difference between the simulated state and historical record 3) if your simulation converges, that is the closer to present day, the less the uncertainty, then you are on a right track. 4) if you simulation diverges you go to step 1 and tweak the initial conditions 5) you don't run a single simulation - you run many in parallel and select the best match at each step.

deepnet 10y ago

If a simulation contains minds is it not equivalent Dennet's "Brain in a vat" [1] model of consciousness ? In "Consciousness Explained" Dennet postulates that a conscious mind perceiving a thing-in-the-world need not have perfect rich input data but merely a neuron that responds yes to the question: Am I seeing that thing ? [1] Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennet, page 8, [ Prelude, Hard Hallucination Problem ]: "...intervene somewhere along the chain (anywhere on the optic nerve, ...between the eyeball and consciousness), tugging just right on the nerves would produce exactly the chain of events that would be caused by a normal veridical perception of something, ...producing, at the receiving end in the mind, exactly the effect of such a conscious perception."