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A Type of Simulation Which Some Experimental Evidence Suggests We Don't Live In [pdf]
- politician 8y ago> A paper by O’Gorman et al [1] describes (p. 46) the following experiment and its results. A total of 864 modules were first run on the second floor of a two-story building for 4,671 hours, during which time, 24 soft errors were detected. Then, the same 864 modules were run for 5,863 hours in a nearby vault shielded by about 20m of rock, during which time, zero soft errors were detected. Interesting, but there's no guarantee that time moves at the same rate both inside the simulation and outside of it -- indeed there's a good chance that the simulation runs much faster than the external environment. A 25% increase in observation time seems way too low to draw any kind of conclusion.
- optimuspaul 8y agoThere are also no guarantees that the environment outside of the simulation has anything in common with the environment inside of it. Perhaps that universe doesn't have particles at all. Maybe they are simulating this universe because they are curious about what a universe like ours would be like.
- xamuel 8y agoAssuming external-soft-error-proneness and x-x and uni-directionality, we can think of a "space" of possible simulations we might live in, thought of as quadrant 1 of an x-y plane where x represents "how many seconds pass in our simulation for each second in the real universe" and y represents "frequency with which soft errors occur in the simulating computer". Different experiments would rule out different parts of that plane with different probability.
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- cgriswald 8y agoI doubt you can map the time at all. At best, you can probably make the case that the internal time of the simulation is bookended by the external start and end times of the simulation.
- jepler 8y agoI don't really follow the argument. If the number of errors in the vault were nonzero, it would most likely indicate that the vault did not screen some ("real", "physical") effect that could cause errors. For instance, you could have errors due to radioisotope decay, low-probability interactions with neutrinos, etc.
- aeosynth 8y agoThey acknowledge that: > Without additional technology, we are unable to tell which soft errors were external and which were internal. ... > Perhaps this paper’s most interesting conclusion is just that a non-contrived simulation hypothesis is falsifiable in a concrete way.
- User23 8y agoThe simulation conjecture is a funny way to get around to Intelligent Design.
- kerbalspacepro 8y agoI don't see how that follows.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoIf we're in a simulation, it must be running on a simulator. That simulator is presumably not just a natural feature of the universe - that's just "laws of nature deeper than we have discovered so far", which I take as something different from "simulator". In fact, the simulator (by my definitions) has to be an artificial construction - that is, created by an intelligence for a purpose. That doesn't necessarily get you intelligent design of life, but it does get you intelligent design of the universe. I, too, find it amusing that we've decided that God doesn't exist, that the natural universe is all that exists. And then some people decide that we're in a simulation, that the universe is an artificial construction created by someone outside of it (but who totally is not God). I'd find it even more amusing if I thought that the simulator people had a reasonable position. (To me, "you can't prove me wrong" does not imply "therefore I'm probably right".)
- resource0x 8y agoCuriously, parallel to this thread, there's another one on HN, which discusses (the lack of) exceptions in golang. And the reasoning starts out with "we don't need exceptions", so we throw them out the door, but then, after a couple of intermediate steps, they come back through the window. Same door-window scenario is playing out here :)
- logfromblammo 8y agoGod wants you to set a breakpoint, read out some locals, and put a watch on one of them.
- zellyn 8y ago(a) Maybe the simulator uses ECC RAM (b) Maybe the simulator's world is as similar to our world as the Game of Life is to Earth.
- xamuel 8y agoAuthor here. The type of simulation ruled out is "external-soft-error-prone simulation with (two other properties)". If the simulator uses ECC RAM, then the simulation is not external-soft-error-prone. You might say: "But surely the simulator does use ECC RAM!" Yes, but that's speculation. It's nice (and surprising) that a concrete experiment can empirically support it.
- shaded-enmity 8y agoHow exactly would the 1:1 bit correspondence work in practice? What is the binding between simulated and external bit? Wouldn't we need to operate at the edge of Landauer's principle to really rule out this possibility?
- xamuel 8y agoImagine if you were to program a video game in which players could interact with in-game computers, which were implemented as genuine full-feature emulations of working computers. It seems plausible that a memory-bit in one of the in-game computers would have its value stored in a memory-bit in the real computer on which the game was running.
- nofunsir 8y agoIt's equally plausible that our single bit is far too high-level of an object for them. Why not just simulate everything that makes up our bits? (germanium atoms, etc)
- xamuel 8y agoTrue. The paper doesn't rule out such a simulation. (Unless maybe the experiment could be run with memory-bits so hyper-sensitive that a single germanium atom could cause a macroscale bit-flip? Just kidding)
- mkagenius 8y agoI think we are not in a simulation. Though our world is pretty close in principle to a simulation -- there are certain (small number of) building blocks which contruct this complex world. That should be it.
- palisade 8y agoAnother thing no one considers. If the simulator or maintainers of the simulation identify that the individuals being simulated are aware of or close to determining they are in a simulation, they may alter the observations in the minds of the individuals being simulated to indicate there is no simulation.
- decebalus1 8y agoPerhaps the maintenance has been outsourced to h̷̞́̓̚o̴̲͉̳̝̖͆͛̈́̈́̔̉̕͘͠r̷̡̘̞͇͖̔̆͆̎̎͂̈͒͐̌ͅz̷̹̺͎̼̗̬̥̜͌̏ḧ̶̯͈́͌͋̑͛̈́̀̄̎̈́̆͋͊̚͝l̵̗̜͎͈̄̂ and the business impact of the simulated becoming aware isn't too bad to mandate the extra Y̸̞̰͆̌͜ͅK̷̨̛̲̣͕̙̪̮͋̃͆̊͂̾̏̇̏^̷̛͖̻͔̞̠̰̩̳̳̀͊͐͝ͅͅ}̴͈͓͚̲̳͚̳͔̮́̄̄̈́̏͂̓͌g̵͚͓̭͓͎͊͑̄͑͐͛̄̇͠ḥ̵̹͎̜́̐̊̇*̴̙̥͚̠̔̆̂͒́̅̂̐͂͒̽͜4̵̧̭̦̣̱͚̲͖̻̳̏̃v̷̪̄͛͠ţ̷̛̛͍̣̦̤̠̜̤̲̹̰̘̔͒̅͋͆̔̈͋̏̕͜͝ͅ>̴̛̛̻͖͔̘̱̠̙͍͇̻̣̪̼̍̌̍͗̒͌̊͠ͅF̶̛̰̣̝̞͔̠̦̘̜̺̎̏̅͜/̴̖̜͇̋̓̄͆̍̊̃̾̓̚͠?̵̢̢̡͈̦͚̞̝̘̫̺͕̺̰̇̑̃̿͆̃̋̍̍̇̌̕͝R̶̥͓̓̌ required to pay for the alterations.
- bcoates 8y agoYour zalgo convinced my chrome that half the sentences on this page needed translated from English to Vietnamese. Impressive.
- dang 8y agoCould you please not do that here? HN is a text-only site.
- gnulinux 8y agoThese sort of cheap jokes really do harm the conversation. They're net negative.
- anyfoo 8y agoThat’s possible. If we are simulated, it’s also possible that we emerged in this simulated universe and the maintainers of the simulation don’t understand the human mind well enough, similar to how we don’t. It’s also possible “they” don’t know we’re there in some random corner of their simulation. On the other hand it’s possible that the entity who would run this is aware and can manipulate our minds, or rewind time. The problem is that if we just assert that we live in a simulation, anything imaginable or, if you allow for the outside universe to have completely different laws of nature, anything unimaginable as well. I’m not a proponent of any simulation theories at all (they’re fun to think about, though), but I’d imagine that just like in “ordinary” science, people are interested in only testing falsifiable theories about the kind of simulation that we could understand and retain knowledge about. Assuming for example that time can be restarted to prevent an insightful experiment to happen won’t ever give any meaningful result to begin with. As a corollary it’s never possible to disprove “simulation”, as a fuzzy term, in general. Scientists can however assume a much more constrained simulation that is maybe closer to how we would do it, and construct experiments that at least allow us to refute whether the alleged simulation seems to have those simpler properties or not. In this case, it seems their simple model does not hold, and the simulation might be different. There can still also be no simulation, but we can never be certain.
- empath75 8y ago> Suppose we live in a computer simulation with the following x-xˆ property: for each memory-bit x in any computer in our world, there is a memory-bit ˆx in the simulating computer such that ˆx is used to store which value is stored in x. Then any such x is subject to two different types of soft errors: One thing I've never understood about the simulation theory is that if we live in a simulation, we have almost know basis for making any assumptions at all about the nature of the reality in which we're being simulated. If you assume it's like ours in every way, then it's also equally likely to be a simulation, and on to infinity.
- sarah180 8y agoThe suggestion that we live in a simulation is really not a "theory" in any meaningful way at this time. It doesn't explain anything that we can't explain otherwise and it doesn't predict any behavior we haven't yet observed. It is, at present, effectively unfalsifiable and not much different from a claim that "God made all of this." It's just a different notion of God. This is not an argument that we shouldn't pursue this line of thinking, but we shouldn't call it a theory until it makes new predictions that we can confirm or disprove.
- tlb 8y agoIt's really an umbrella term for a class of theories, some of which do make testable predictions (like anisotropy of space or, in this case, a minimum bound on memory error rate with zero radiation.) It's like the term "string theory". One thing that all simulation theories predict is that our universe is interesting. It's an alternative to anthropic theories to explain why our universe is one with life and not one that re-collapsed to a singularity or expanded out into a thin hydrogen plasma. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Anthropic_explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Anthro... for one reason why it's only a small range of possible universes that are interesting.
- cgriswald 8y agoI wrote a paper arguing that 'ancestor' simulations are effectively impossible. Part of that argument was that, in order for the simulations to be meaningful, the world had to work largely the same way as our own. (Otherwise, it's not an 'ancestor simulation'. Other types of simulations could work.) You could, for instance, just project a 'video' of the sky every night to save some energy costs. Until the simulated people gain the ability to, say, practice photometry. Then your have to spend a bit more energy simulating the actual physics. So, as time progresses in your simulation, energy costs rise. Eventually, your simulated beings develop the ability to compute. There are some things you'll be better at optimizing, but over time the simulated beings will get closer and closer to the optimal way of doing an operation; at which point any operation they do is an operation you are doing. Until they generate a simulation of their own. That's when it all falls apart. At the point they make their own simulations, now you're paying in energy for your simulations, plus all their simulations and their simulations' simulations in an infinite chain. Voila. Infinite energy requirement. (There's some caveats here... some simulations may result in a dead world, but presumably every successful simulation would run more than one successful simulation of its own.) So, your options are: 1. End the simulation when the simulation becomes capable of running its own simulation. Useful, perhaps, but not very for a very old civilization. It's not clear that humanity 1 million years will be that interested in simulating the first X00,000 years of humanity. 2. Dumb down the simulation. However, this would have to be done "just so" so that the energy use limit converges as the depth of simulations approaches infinity. This also provides a mechanism for a simulation to detect that it is a simulation (I forget why, it's been awhile), making the entire exercise not useful as an ancestor simulation. 3. Prevent simulations from running their own simulations. Like (2), this potentially allows the simulation to discover that it is a simulation. It also may make the results of that simulation less useful. If you, for instance, wanted to know what the world might be like if event X happened differently, you could change that event and let the simulation run, but as soon as you got to the point where they would have run their own simulations, you can't be sure of your results.
- idlewords 8y agoThis paper is assuming the simulating universe has things like "particles" and "cosmic rays". The properties of the simulating universe, including foundational things like rules of logic and mathematics, could be literally unimaginable (by design or accident) within the simulation.
- anyfoo 8y agoAs I wrote in another comment, you can still come up with theories for certain types of simulation, and test whether their properties hold or not. I suspect no one in the “simulation community” ever expects to disprove a simulation completely, but as the authors did you can try to come up with a likely simulation model (maybe close to how we would do it) and try to refute that.
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- FLUX-YOU 8y ago>The properties of the simulating universe, including foundational things like rules of logic and mathematics, could be literally unimaginable (by design or accident) within the simulation. This could be the quadrillionth iteration by which point they'd be pretty confident though.
- neolefty 8y ago> The properties of the simulating universe ... could be literally unimaginable ... within the simulation. Totally. This is an area that religion claims to address—believers in a religion [1] could frame God as The Simulator and a divine revelation as a message from the simulator, perhaps regarding the purpose of the simulation—that otherwise there is no way to know. The author of the paper describes a limitation of this line of inquiry: > The type of simulation ruled out is very specific. Perhaps that is the price one must pay to make any kind of Popperian progress. It reminds me of this: > For were I to praise [God] ... I would find that my praise of Thee can befit only such as are like unto me, who are themselves Thy creatures, and who have been generated through the power of Thy decree ... It's an area that's inherently challenging to explore from inside the simulation! [1] Disclaimer: Baha'i here, watch out [2] Baha'u'llah — http://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/prayers-meditations/#f=f4-396 http://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/p...
- edoo 8y agoThe computer could have enough error correction where it doesn't matter.
- ozy 8y agoI think compute power is what matters, not amount of simulations. Compute power available in simulated realities vs base reality will always be significantly in favor or root reality. And parsimonious simulation won't work, or would be even easier to detect than what this paper was talking about.
- honoredb 8y agoI love this title and abstract; we need more of this kind of plain speaking and rigor when dealing with mysticism-adjacent areas.