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Could you support the premise you can make an undetectable simulation? That's a key proposition and you don't support it at all. I find the idea highly questio

Could you support the premise you can make an undetectable simulation? That's a key proposition and you don't support it at all. I find the idea highly questionable.

danbruc 9y ago
Do you think a NPC in a game could figure out that he is just a character controlled by the game logic? Current games are obviously far away from having conscious NPCs but I neither see any fundamental problem with having NPCs controlled by artificial brains nor any obvious way how such a NPC could figure out that he lives within a game. Or what if, while you are asleep, someone essentially detaches your brain from your body and uses the signals your brain sends to control a simulation of your body in a virtual environment and feeds back the simulation output into your brain as what you see, hear, feel, and smell? How would you detect that you are no longer really in the real world when you wake up?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Yes, lots of ways: For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system. A character in Minecraft could build a cosmic ray detector, for instance. So yes, absolutely -- my expectation is that any intelligent structure in a computational "bubble" will be able to detect that it's in a bubble managed by some outside system. Is your argument entirely from lack of imagination in how it could be done?
  - AgentME 9y ago
    >For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system. Only because minecraft does a lot of things to save from doing extra work, like unloading chunks or skipping frames if it's under load. If you remove those optimizations (and add some error-correcting ram or a redundant process to double-check calculations to protect from cosmic-ray-induced errors), then it's easy to make a minecraft-like game that's deterministic across platforms and doesn't reveal details about whatever platform it's on. Take something like Ethereum's blockchain: it's not possible for an executable turing-complete contract to know what type of computer it's executing on, because the VM is strictly specified, and if there were any flaws that accidentally revealed information from the environment, then every nearly every node in the Ethereum p2p swarm would get different results and the blockchain would fork ridiculously and practically halt as all nodes desynchronized from each other until people updated the software to fix that bug.
  - danbruc 9y ago
    Is a redstone interferometer an actually thing, a quick search didn't turn anything up? But even if you could detect influences from the outer reality within the game world, how would you decide between them being part of the game mechanics and them being shadows of the outer world given that you have no ground truth knowledge of what the game is supposed to be like?
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      > Is a redstone interferometer an actually thing, a quick search didn't turn anything up? I'm probably using slightly different terminology than other people -- I haven't played much in a while. The basic idea is to use two quasi-connected redstone wires hooked up to a piston -- one providing an update signal but no power and one providing power but no update signal. The circuit is such that the two wires are actually branches off of a single redstone wire, using only redstone -- so you can detect if the left or right branch off of a redstone line updates first (within a single update cycle) based on if the piston extends: it only extends if the line carrying the update signal is updated after the line carrying the power signal. (If they come in the other order, it stays retracted because it updates before there's power available.) > how would you decide between them being part of the game mechanics and them being shadows of the outer world given that you have no ground truth knowledge of what the game is supposed to be like? You only have an operational model, just like us -- but it's eventually going to look like an extremely localized computation running their world that occasionally gets bumped by outside sources. That sounds like them discovering that their reality is a subregion hosted in another, richer reality. The question of "game mechanics" only has meaning to the people outside in their language for discussing their actions -- at the end of the day, there is no "game", there's only what the simulation does as a facet of reality. The people inside will accurately suss out a model that includes a structure that looks like them being run as a simulation. How they interpret that is likely to be different, but no more or less correct, than how we do.
indubitable 9y ago
Consider that your perception of reality is just that. What your brain tells you and what is really there are not necessarily the same thing. There was another excellent article on QuantaMagazine arguing that there's even an evolutionary imperative that would drive our brains to beneficially misrepresent reality: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga... That article is a bit of another very interesting tangent. The point is that reality is little more than what you experience. All that simulating a reality requires is that an individual's experiences are able to be constrained to within the controlled ream. Take a child, 'disable' all senses except sight - and install permanent VR goggles. That child, lacking outside interference, will believe in a reality that is not really real. Should it develop the cognition to wonder it will likely do as we do. Why do large bodies attract one another? We can explain the operation of this through perhaps the curvature of spacetime, but that then again one can ask then why is there spacetime? At some level the answer simply ends up being that because that is the way it is - a inherent facet of our universe.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  A child you made deaf like that would still discover sound as the vibrations that distorted the lenses on the eye once detection got sensitive enough. I dispute the very notion that it's possible to cut someone off from the basic nature of reality, because you must fundamentally have constructed the cage from that reality and thus their interaction with their cage will reveal its mechanics (and hence the mechanics of reality) to them. You can only make it take more time by suppressing noise, but eventually the "errors" will carry accurate information inside. (And someone inside can accelerate this process by causing noise in certain manners.) > lacking outside interference Depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is either impossible (Bohmian; maybe all of them) or insufficient (Copenhagen, MWI) -- in either case, small "errors" will reveal information about the actual nature of reality.
  - openasocket 9y ago
    If you didn't know, his example is just a re-hash of Plato's cave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

Could you support the premise you can make an undetectable simulation? That's a key proposition and you don't support it at all. I find the idea highly questionable.

danbruc 9y ago

Do you think a NPC in a game could figure out that he is just a character controlled by the game logic? Current games are obviously far away from having conscious NPCs but I neither see any fundamental problem with having NPCs controlled by artificial brains nor any obvious way how such a NPC could figure out that he lives within a game. Or what if, while you are asleep, someone essentially detaches your brain from your body and uses the signals your brain sends to control a simulation of your body in a virtual environment and feeds back the simulation output into your brain as what you see, hear, feel, and smell? How would you detect that you are no longer really in the real world when you wake up?

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Yes, lots of ways: For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system. A character in Minecraft could build a cosmic ray detector, for instance. So yes, absolutely -- my expectation is that any intelligent structure in a computational "bubble" will be able to detect that it's in a bubble managed by some outside system. Is your argument entirely from lack of imagination in how it could be done?
- AgentME 9y ago
  >For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system. Only because minecraft does a lot of things to save from doing extra work, like unloading chunks or skipping frames if it's under load. If you remove those optimizations (and add some error-correcting ram or a redundant process to double-check calculations to protect from cosmic-ray-induced errors), then it's easy to make a minecraft-like game that's deterministic across platforms and doesn't reveal details about whatever platform it's on. Take something like Ethereum's blockchain: it's not possible for an executable turing-complete contract to know what type of computer it's executing on, because the VM is strictly specified, and if there were any flaws that accidentally revealed information from the environment, then every nearly every node in the Ethereum p2p swarm would get different results and the blockchain would fork ridiculously and practically halt as all nodes desynchronized from each other until people updated the software to fix that bug.
- danbruc 9y ago
  Is a redstone interferometer an actually thing, a quick search didn't turn anything up? But even if you could detect influences from the outer reality within the game world, how would you decide between them being part of the game mechanics and them being shadows of the outer world given that you have no ground truth knowledge of what the game is supposed to be like?
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    > Is a redstone interferometer an actually thing, a quick search didn't turn anything up? I'm probably using slightly different terminology than other people -- I haven't played much in a while. The basic idea is to use two quasi-connected redstone wires hooked up to a piston -- one providing an update signal but no power and one providing power but no update signal. The circuit is such that the two wires are actually branches off of a single redstone wire, using only redstone -- so you can detect if the left or right branch off of a redstone line updates first (within a single update cycle) based on if the piston extends: it only extends if the line carrying the update signal is updated after the line carrying the power signal. (If they come in the other order, it stays retracted because it updates before there's power available.) > how would you decide between them being part of the game mechanics and them being shadows of the outer world given that you have no ground truth knowledge of what the game is supposed to be like? You only have an operational model, just like us -- but it's eventually going to look like an extremely localized computation running their world that occasionally gets bumped by outside sources. That sounds like them discovering that their reality is a subregion hosted in another, richer reality. The question of "game mechanics" only has meaning to the people outside in their language for discussing their actions -- at the end of the day, there is no "game", there's only what the simulation does as a facet of reality. The people inside will accurately suss out a model that includes a structure that looks like them being run as a simulation. How they interpret that is likely to be different, but no more or less correct, than how we do.

indubitable 9y ago

Consider that your perception of reality is just that. What your brain tells you and what is really there are not necessarily the same thing. There was another excellent article on QuantaMagazine arguing that there's even an evolutionary imperative that would drive our brains to beneficially misrepresent reality: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga... That article is a bit of another very interesting tangent. The point is that reality is little more than what you experience. All that simulating a reality requires is that an individual's experiences are able to be constrained to within the controlled ream. Take a child, 'disable' all senses except sight - and install permanent VR goggles. That child, lacking outside interference, will believe in a reality that is not really real. Should it develop the cognition to wonder it will likely do as we do. Why do large bodies attract one another? We can explain the operation of this through perhaps the curvature of spacetime, but that then again one can ask then why is there spacetime? At some level the answer simply ends up being that because that is the way it is - a inherent facet of our universe.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
A child you made deaf like that would still discover sound as the vibrations that distorted the lenses on the eye once detection got sensitive enough. I dispute the very notion that it's possible to cut someone off from the basic nature of reality, because you must fundamentally have constructed the cage from that reality and thus their interaction with their cage will reveal its mechanics (and hence the mechanics of reality) to them. You can only make it take more time by suppressing noise, but eventually the "errors" will carry accurate information inside. (And someone inside can accelerate this process by causing noise in certain manners.) > lacking outside interference Depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is either impossible (Bohmian; maybe all of them) or insufficient (Copenhagen, MWI) -- in either case, small "errors" will reveal information about the actual nature of reality.
- openasocket 9y ago
  If you didn't know, his example is just a re-hash of Plato's cave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave