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The solipsistic argument says that I can't ever really tell if you are really a conscious being or just a simulation of a conscious being. I can't tell if the

The solipsistic argument says that I can't ever really tell if you are really a conscious being or just a simulation of a conscious being. I can't tell if the real world actually exists, or if I am a brain in a jar being fed simulated sensory data. And we don't need the experience of having breakfast if we have the memory of having breakfast. If you copied one memory of me having breakfast, randomized a few variables, and replayed it to me later, it would be unlikely to impact any of the impactful decisions I make later. Since you're running a simulation, you can choose whether or not my breakfast needs to be simulated in detail or elided over after identifying a decision node that might be significantly impacted by my breakfast. I honestly probably wouldn't do anything differently if you swapped gravlax and bagels for eggs and toast. So you can usually replay a partially memoized breakfast sequence as it happens, and revise the simulation, overwriting my memory and that of all witnesses, if it turns out later that my breakfast might have an impact on something else. So every day, I have memoized breakfast routine. At 3 PM one day, there is a potential for a hangry conversation at work that might get me fired. Now you can backtrack, copy all my variables from this morning into the breakfast simulator engine, and this time everything is simulated in detail. Then you patch the detail results over the rough results, and I can't tell the difference, other than the fact that I can now remember significant details of my breakfast, rather than a blur of things I usually eat in the morning. You might not be able to skip Lincoln's breakfast, but you could skip a few million other breakfasts. So that leads to the existential horror. Do I actually still exist if I'm not doing something meaningful to an external observer right now? Maybe most of me is just a slipshod model of a generic person, that exists solely to produce some initialization variables for a detailed simulation of some-guy-on-the-Internet replying to you, and then after I'm done, I'll just go back to being an NPC with no personality of my own.

cgriswald 8y ago
Any shortcut you take you are no longer running an ancestor simulation. The reason you don't memoize breakfast is because the entire point of the simulation is the simulation of the conscious beings you are simulating. If you memoize away their decisions and actions, you take that away. And I strongly suspect retrofitting reality to match countless decisions is going to be more expensive than simply running it in the first place. > I honestly probably wouldn't do anything differently if you swapped gravlax and bagels for eggs and toast. That is unknowable. Maybe in making the eggs and toast, you leave the house a second later, and a driver that ran a stop sign that would have hit you passes in front of you instead. You're not wrong that you can skip breakfast and take all these short cuts. You can do whatever you want in the simulation. But if you do, you're not running the type of simulation that is called an 'ancestor simulation'.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  > Maybe in making the eggs and toast, you leave the house a second later, and a driver that ran a stop sign that would have hit you passes in front of you instead. This is likely unimportant to answer the questions that the simulator is supposed to answer, which means that no one would ever bother running one ancestor simulation--as you define it--when they could instead run multiple trials of a different kind of simulation for the express purpose of eliminating such confounding "want of a nail" moments. "We ran this ancestor simulation for 10 million years to find out what logfromblammo would eat for lunch on 13 August, 2018, and the results were ruined when the simulated logfromblammo was killed in traffic that very morning, just before the entire simulator planet was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. We'll check the budget to see if we can reset for another run." Maybe the other driver also had a breakfast that delayed their departure by one second, and now they hit me again. In one ancestor simulation, you won't know all the various circumstances that contribute to the causation of an event. If you do cut corners, you can say that there is an X% chance on any given day that I get involved in a traffic collision. So an ancestor simulation--as you define it--is functionally identical to walling off a piece of your own universe, rearranging matter inside it to conform to initial conditions, and then watching it to see what happens. If your universe is itself a simulation, how does the parent universe detect the difference between someone running a simulation and Magrathean-scale engineering projects? If I commission a planet that is a perfect copy of Earth on the day before Lincoln was assassinated, and black-bag Booth an hour before he shows up at the theater, is that an ancestor simulation? Do I need to wrap it in a perfectly black shell and project sunlight and starlight through it from time-appropriate locations? That only requires that the star you use for energy is a bit more energetic than the sun. If you simulate a planet that predates astronomy, perhaps to see what would happen if dinosaur-like creatures hadn't been wiped out, you wouldn't even need to do that. Your total energy requirements for the lifetime of the simulation are the delta-v required to build an Earth-like planet with a Moon-like moon and move it into an Earth-like orbit around a Sol-like star. We wouldn't be able to detect if our planet is a simulation by dinosaurs, to see what would have happened if their planet had suffered an extinction-level event before they launched themselves into space. How do you tell the difference between a naturally-formed and artificially-constructed planet? Likewise, how do you distinguish between someone trying to compute an ancestor simulation and someone just running an immersive MMORPG? If you did create a single ancestor simulation larger than a few interacting atoms, it rapidly loses its scientific power, due to all the variables you intentionally did not constrain. How is that not just an amusement park?

cgriswald 8y ago

Any shortcut you take you are no longer running an ancestor simulation. The reason you don't memoize breakfast is because the entire point of the simulation is the simulation of the conscious beings you are simulating. If you memoize away their decisions and actions, you take that away. And I strongly suspect retrofitting reality to match countless decisions is going to be more expensive than simply running it in the first place. > I honestly probably wouldn't do anything differently if you swapped gravlax and bagels for eggs and toast. That is unknowable. Maybe in making the eggs and toast, you leave the house a second later, and a driver that ran a stop sign that would have hit you passes in front of you instead. You're not wrong that you can skip breakfast and take all these short cuts. You can do whatever you want in the simulation. But if you do, you're not running the type of simulation that is called an 'ancestor simulation'.

logfromblammo 8y ago
> Maybe in making the eggs and toast, you leave the house a second later, and a driver that ran a stop sign that would have hit you passes in front of you instead. This is likely unimportant to answer the questions that the simulator is supposed to answer, which means that no one would ever bother running one ancestor simulation--as you define it--when they could instead run multiple trials of a different kind of simulation for the express purpose of eliminating such confounding "want of a nail" moments. "We ran this ancestor simulation for 10 million years to find out what logfromblammo would eat for lunch on 13 August, 2018, and the results were ruined when the simulated logfromblammo was killed in traffic that very morning, just before the entire simulator planet was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. We'll check the budget to see if we can reset for another run." Maybe the other driver also had a breakfast that delayed their departure by one second, and now they hit me again. In one ancestor simulation, you won't know all the various circumstances that contribute to the causation of an event. If you do cut corners, you can say that there is an X% chance on any given day that I get involved in a traffic collision. So an ancestor simulation--as you define it--is functionally identical to walling off a piece of your own universe, rearranging matter inside it to conform to initial conditions, and then watching it to see what happens. If your universe is itself a simulation, how does the parent universe detect the difference between someone running a simulation and Magrathean-scale engineering projects? If I commission a planet that is a perfect copy of Earth on the day before Lincoln was assassinated, and black-bag Booth an hour before he shows up at the theater, is that an ancestor simulation? Do I need to wrap it in a perfectly black shell and project sunlight and starlight through it from time-appropriate locations? That only requires that the star you use for energy is a bit more energetic than the sun. If you simulate a planet that predates astronomy, perhaps to see what would happen if dinosaur-like creatures hadn't been wiped out, you wouldn't even need to do that. Your total energy requirements for the lifetime of the simulation are the delta-v required to build an Earth-like planet with a Moon-like moon and move it into an Earth-like orbit around a Sol-like star. We wouldn't be able to detect if our planet is a simulation by dinosaurs, to see what would have happened if their planet had suffered an extinction-level event before they launched themselves into space. How do you tell the difference between a naturally-formed and artificially-constructed planet? Likewise, how do you distinguish between someone trying to compute an ancestor simulation and someone just running an immersive MMORPG? If you did create a single ancestor simulation larger than a few interacting atoms, it rapidly loses its scientific power, due to all the variables you intentionally did not constrain. How is that not just an amusement park?