11 ms·

I probably don't understand the argument. My limited understanding is it's a thought experiment 1. We have GTA5 2. GTA5 will continue to improve until there a

I probably don't understand the argument. My limited understanding is it's a thought experiment 1. We have GTA5 2. GTA5 will continue to improve until there are actual A.I. NPCs in it 3. Those NPCs will not know they are living in a simulated world 4. Every PS2000 playing GTA5 = more simulated people than actual people. QED, odds are we're simulated people The problem I have with this is the basic premise. Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe? It seems impossible to me. The argument is supposed to be that like GTA5 only the parts being observed by the NPCs need to be simulated (actually GTA5 is only parts observed by the player). In either case that seems false. In order for the causality to work out when an NPC observes any part of the universe all causality for all atoms for the NPC's observation need to be calculated since they were last observed. I don't believe you can take shortcuts like a game does. Also, games rarely save the state of the entire game world, usually they reset any changes in few seconds. Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are impossible problems * You need more atoms in the universe to simulate a universe (so that means the outer universe has to be several orders of magnitudes larger than this one) * You can't actually take any shortcuts so you need insane processing power. More processing power than our entire universe. I seems like the basic premise, that it's obvious we'll eventually have universe simulators, is just flat out false. We could make a holodeck maybe, but it will have to be limited the same way games today are limited since otherwise it would require nearly infinite storage and computing power.

misthop 8y ago
But we could simulate (in theory) a smaller universe than our own. Maybe that is what is happening. We can also simulate alternate physical properties. Maybe the simulating universe has vastly different rules/requirements.
TomMarius 8y ago
Have you counted into your math that we're close (within 30 years I'd say) to more than 5 different computing revolutions?
sidcool 8y ago
Elon Musk did respond to a similar question that you have asked here. The entire Universe need not be simulated at the same time. It could be a generative program. The reality could be limited to just what we are observing.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  If you have enough resources to lazily simulate the entire observed universe, you probably have enough resources to consistently simulate the entire observable universe. I haven't kept up with the latest out-of-universe hardware upgrades, so I could be talking out of my ass here. With that said, why would you simulate something so ridiculously large and detailed if you only had the resources to run a small portion of it at a time? It's like buying an 8K 3D monitor and hoping your 3DFx Voodoo 2 will do the trick.
  - Vraxx 8y ago
    You might do this if you didn't have the computational power to simulate the thing you wanted in real time. Games are hard locked to require the computation to be performed within the frame time of the gameplay, but much more detailed and complex computations are done all the time to pregenerate an animated movie or video that can then be "played" in real time. The generation of the content often takes many times as long as the content actually is, but the purpose of doing it this way is to generate more detail per frame than you would be able to compute in the time between each frame when played at the ideal speed.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      What is "real time", though? Time is relative within the universe itself, what hope is there that it even exists outside of it? Using crude current metaphors: If I build a game, the concept of time within that game is, essentially, each tick of the game (a frame, for example, or a server-side tick). You can even have portions of the game world tick faster or slower relative to others. But those ticks mean nothing outside of the game. Yes, in "real time" the ticks are constant... but I can pause the game at any point, it stops progressing. I can step it one tick forward, and for the game one tick has passed, but for me, any amount of time can pass. In other words, there's no relation between time inside and outside the simulation, because it's a simulation.
21 8y ago
> Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are impossible problems Our universe has 10^70 atoms (or whatever). This is an arbitrary number. Maybe in the host universe there are 10^700000000 atoms, and 10^70 atoms are what fits inside a small "tenis ball" from that universe. BTW, we are already running pretty accurate physicals simulations, if only for extremely short periods of time and small spaces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD
- informatimago 8y ago
  Simulating a lot of atoms doesn't require more atoms, with quantum mechanics. You only need to compute the wave function! You need to instanciate atoms only when they're observed (and you can garbage collect them once they vanish again into the wave probability).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
blensor 8y ago
Who says that the simulation has to be done in realtime? Without any outside reference the NPCs inside the simulation have no way to know that one second in the simulation has taken them for example a year in real-life.
- informatimago 8y ago
  It is not done in real time, it is done in relative time!
nine_k 8y ago
Please note how the simulated world in GTA5 is based not on atoms, but on entirely different concepts which allow modeling "large" amounts of in-world physics using a "small" amount of out-of-world atoms. As long as we don't suppose that the simulated world copies all the features of the simulator-running world, there should not be a problem of needing more outer-world stuff to simulate a given amount of in-simulation stuff. They can just be quite different. There's still an information-theoretic argument that the complexity of a simulated world cannot exceed the complexity of the outer "true real" simulator-running world. We still could see "more complex" activity of a simulated world by spending more "real" time to model "simulated" time, and having the simulated world to more often and more evenly fill various parts of its phase space, as opposed to the outer, simulator-running world.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  > note how the simulated world in GTA5 is based not on atoms That's actually my point. GTA5 doesn't work on atoms but the simulation of our actual universe would have to. Any NPC in our simulated universe can turn any building into rubble, turn any sand into glass, empty any lake, divert any river, put any drop of water under a microscope, mix any chemicals and watch their reactions, put any atoms in a particle accelerator, draw an animated stick figure with an electron microscope. I'm arguing we can never simulate a universe because we'd need a computer larger than the entire universe to do it. I'm arguing that the thought experiment of "simulations will continue to get better until we can put A.I NPCs in a simulation of our universe and it will be impossible for them to tell the difference" is itself impossible. The argument for why it's "likely" we are in a simulation is because it's argued it's inevitable we'll create such simulations ourselves. In doing that there will be more simulated people than not. It a huge assumption that "it's inevitable we'll create such simulations ourselves". If that is not inevitable then the likelihood we're in one drops dramatically. A counter argument is we'll simulate a smaller universe for our NPCs but that argument doesn't really hold as it would argue that every universe is a simulation running in a larger universe to infinity. That would require infinite complexity
  - cylon13 8y ago
ChrisLomont 8y ago
>Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe? For you to be a simulation doesn't require the entire universe be simulated. It only requires simulation of you and the inputs you receive. Scale that and you can simulate a population to see how they react, all without needing to simulate every unobserved event to the finest detail. It's how we can simulate all sorts of things now that relate to the physical world without having to simulate the physical world in it's entirety.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  you need to simulate unobserved events when they are observed. I'm not looking at the Nile river right now but when I look at in again in 50 years it better look correct for the 50 years that passed. For it to look correct requires simulating everything about it, everything feeding into it, everything it affects, from the moment I stopped looking at it until I looked at it again.
  - stevenhuang 8y ago
    I'm not sure what you said refutes his point. It still doesn't require the entire universe to be simulated. If you observe the Nile, then yes it becomes an input, so that then would need to be simulated. This could take however long is necessary to do. It still does not necessitate simulating the entire universe down to the minutiae. Perhaps if the people in the simulation purposefully set out to "observe" somehow their entire universe in one timestep, in such way that _necessitates_ the complete simulation of their universe (like, say, running an experiment that involves all atoms interacting with all other atoms in their universe), then maybe it will be a problem. Then again, maybe the parent universe just has more atoms & computing power to throw at it, or it will generate a simulation that is "close enough" to the real thing that the people in the simulation will not be able to distinguish.
  - ChrisLomont 8y ago
    >For it to look correct requires simulating everything about it, everything feeding into it, everything it affects, from the moment I stopped looking at it until I looked at it again. No, it only needs to at the two points you take inputs provide answers that satisfy your understanding on what the inputs should be, and your understanding is formed by other inputs you've been fed, making the entire thing much easier. Satisfying you is probably much easier than satisfying someone who really studies rivers. Neither you nor an expert needs simulating it much at all while you're not looking at it. And I doubt there's any case to simulate to any atomic or subatomic level. The gravitational pull of Neptune can likely be ignored. Neutrinos that may scatter from Antartic ice may hit it, but can probably ignored. And on and on. You're inspection is no where detailed enough to check if these things were taken into account for a decade while you were away. All of this detail is irrelevant. It may well be possible to do a good job with a very rough simulation of water and time, all of which could be computed on demand. So really all that needs stored is enough state to simulate in case you look at it again, and no work needs done on it between those looks. And this is a trivial amount of storage and computation to satisfy your two causal glances when compared to needing to simulate an entire universe down to all 10^120 subatomic particles.
TuringTest 8y ago
I think there are deeper problems in the argument than merely "it would take a lot of resources". I'm concerned by arguments in the form "I can imagine that something is true, therefore it is true". From this perspective, I see the argument like this: 1) (Assume that) we can create a simulation with intelligent beings in it. 2) Therefore, it is not impossible that someone has created a simulation in which we are the simulated intelligent beings. 3) Therefore, it is highly likely that we live in a simulation. I simply don't get the logical implication between 2 and 3 from "not impossible" to "highly likely". I have the same concerns with the ontological argument for the existence of God: 1) I can imagine a being that is perfect and all-powerful. 2) This being therefore exists, because if it didn't it wouldn't be perfect nor all-powerful. In both cases I see an extreme case of begging the question.
- dubya23 8y ago
  I don't think you are representing the argument accurately. The logic is as follows: 1. Assuming any rate of improvement of simulations there will reach a point where a simulation is indistinguishable from reality 2. Advanced species have reached this point and are interested in running simulated universes. 3. There are likely to be many more simulated universes than real ones 4. Given the previous 3 it is more likely that we are in a simulated universe than a real one. Read the original paper from Bostrom for yourself. https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    By the same argument the people in the outer universe are in a simulation of the outer-outer universe and the people in the outer-outer universe are simulations in the outer-outer-outer universe, etc to infinity. In other words the theory requires infinite complexity.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      The argument says that there is a very high probability, not that it's for sure.
lossolo 8y ago
> Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe? In quantum mechanics there is something called collapse of wave function, which takes place when observer is making an observation on certain object. When there is no observer state goes into superposition which means it is one and zero at same time. So basically this means that object can exist and doesn't exist at same time. That's why Einstein said he likes to think that moon exist even if no one is watching. This looks similar to mechanism we use in rendering games today, you only load and render the view that players is looking at and the stage/level that player is in. Of course it's a lot more simplified in case of games. You can save resources using those methods while making huge scale simulations.
gameswithgo 8y ago
to simulate our universe perfectly and in real time would take a computer the same mass as the universe.
ColanR 8y ago
I wonder if by the time we solve a 'theory of everything' (or understand by some other means the basic mechanisms of our universe), we'll be able to efficiently, procedurally, generate a simulated universe. Also, the Fermi paradox could be a solution - we don't see any other alien life forms because we're running in a computationally limited simulator, and everything outside our (relatively easy to simulate) solar system is running on minimum resolution (so to speak).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

misthop 8y ago

But we could simulate (in theory) a smaller universe than our own. Maybe that is what is happening. We can also simulate alternate physical properties. Maybe the simulating universe has vastly different rules/requirements.

TomMarius 8y ago

Have you counted into your math that we're close (within 30 years I'd say) to more than 5 different computing revolutions?

sidcool 8y ago

Elon Musk did respond to a similar question that you have asked here. The entire Universe need not be simulated at the same time. It could be a generative program. The reality could be limited to just what we are observing.

scrollaway 8y ago
If you have enough resources to lazily simulate the entire observed universe, you probably have enough resources to consistently simulate the entire observable universe. I haven't kept up with the latest out-of-universe hardware upgrades, so I could be talking out of my ass here. With that said, why would you simulate something so ridiculously large and detailed if you only had the resources to run a small portion of it at a time? It's like buying an 8K 3D monitor and hoping your 3DFx Voodoo 2 will do the trick.
- Vraxx 8y ago
  You might do this if you didn't have the computational power to simulate the thing you wanted in real time. Games are hard locked to require the computation to be performed within the frame time of the gameplay, but much more detailed and complex computations are done all the time to pregenerate an animated movie or video that can then be "played" in real time. The generation of the content often takes many times as long as the content actually is, but the purpose of doing it this way is to generate more detail per frame than you would be able to compute in the time between each frame when played at the ideal speed.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    What is "real time", though? Time is relative within the universe itself, what hope is there that it even exists outside of it? Using crude current metaphors: If I build a game, the concept of time within that game is, essentially, each tick of the game (a frame, for example, or a server-side tick). You can even have portions of the game world tick faster or slower relative to others. But those ticks mean nothing outside of the game. Yes, in "real time" the ticks are constant... but I can pause the game at any point, it stops progressing. I can step it one tick forward, and for the game one tick has passed, but for me, any amount of time can pass. In other words, there's no relation between time inside and outside the simulation, because it's a simulation.

21 8y ago

> Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are impossible problems Our universe has 10^70 atoms (or whatever). This is an arbitrary number. Maybe in the host universe there are 10^700000000 atoms, and 10^70 atoms are what fits inside a small "tenis ball" from that universe. BTW, we are already running pretty accurate physicals simulations, if only for extremely short periods of time and small spaces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD

informatimago 8y ago
Simulating a lot of atoms doesn't require more atoms, with quantum mechanics. You only need to compute the wave function! You need to instanciate atoms only when they're observed (and you can garbage collect them once they vanish again into the wave probability).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

blensor 8y ago

Who says that the simulation has to be done in realtime? Without any outside reference the NPCs inside the simulation have no way to know that one second in the simulation has taken them for example a year in real-life.

informatimago 8y ago
It is not done in real time, it is done in relative time!

nine_k 8y ago

Please note how the simulated world in GTA5 is based not on atoms, but on entirely different concepts which allow modeling "large" amounts of in-world physics using a "small" amount of out-of-world atoms. As long as we don't suppose that the simulated world copies all the features of the simulator-running world, there should not be a problem of needing more outer-world stuff to simulate a given amount of in-simulation stuff. They can just be quite different. There's still an information-theoretic argument that the complexity of a simulated world cannot exceed the complexity of the outer "true real" simulator-running world. We still could see "more complex" activity of a simulated world by spending more "real" time to model "simulated" time, and having the simulated world to more often and more evenly fill various parts of its phase space, as opposed to the outer, simulator-running world.

tokyodude 8y ago
> note how the simulated world in GTA5 is based not on atoms That's actually my point. GTA5 doesn't work on atoms but the simulation of our actual universe would have to. Any NPC in our simulated universe can turn any building into rubble, turn any sand into glass, empty any lake, divert any river, put any drop of water under a microscope, mix any chemicals and watch their reactions, put any atoms in a particle accelerator, draw an animated stick figure with an electron microscope. I'm arguing we can never simulate a universe because we'd need a computer larger than the entire universe to do it. I'm arguing that the thought experiment of "simulations will continue to get better until we can put A.I NPCs in a simulation of our universe and it will be impossible for them to tell the difference" is itself impossible. The argument for why it's "likely" we are in a simulation is because it's argued it's inevitable we'll create such simulations ourselves. In doing that there will be more simulated people than not. It a huge assumption that "it's inevitable we'll create such simulations ourselves". If that is not inevitable then the likelihood we're in one drops dramatically. A counter argument is we'll simulate a smaller universe for our NPCs but that argument doesn't really hold as it would argue that every universe is a simulation running in a larger universe to infinity. That would require infinite complexity
- cylon13 8y ago

ChrisLomont 8y ago

>Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe? For you to be a simulation doesn't require the entire universe be simulated. It only requires simulation of you and the inputs you receive. Scale that and you can simulate a population to see how they react, all without needing to simulate every unobserved event to the finest detail. It's how we can simulate all sorts of things now that relate to the physical world without having to simulate the physical world in it's entirety.

tokyodude 8y ago
you need to simulate unobserved events when they are observed. I'm not looking at the Nile river right now but when I look at in again in 50 years it better look correct for the 50 years that passed. For it to look correct requires simulating everything about it, everything feeding into it, everything it affects, from the moment I stopped looking at it until I looked at it again.
- stevenhuang 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you said refutes his point. It still doesn't require the entire universe to be simulated. If you observe the Nile, then yes it becomes an input, so that then would need to be simulated. This could take however long is necessary to do. It still does not necessitate simulating the entire universe down to the minutiae. Perhaps if the people in the simulation purposefully set out to "observe" somehow their entire universe in one timestep, in such way that _necessitates_ the complete simulation of their universe (like, say, running an experiment that involves all atoms interacting with all other atoms in their universe), then maybe it will be a problem. Then again, maybe the parent universe just has more atoms & computing power to throw at it, or it will generate a simulation that is "close enough" to the real thing that the people in the simulation will not be able to distinguish.
- ChrisLomont 8y ago
  >For it to look correct requires simulating everything about it, everything feeding into it, everything it affects, from the moment I stopped looking at it until I looked at it again. No, it only needs to at the two points you take inputs provide answers that satisfy your understanding on what the inputs should be, and your understanding is formed by other inputs you've been fed, making the entire thing much easier. Satisfying you is probably much easier than satisfying someone who really studies rivers. Neither you nor an expert needs simulating it much at all while you're not looking at it. And I doubt there's any case to simulate to any atomic or subatomic level. The gravitational pull of Neptune can likely be ignored. Neutrinos that may scatter from Antartic ice may hit it, but can probably ignored. And on and on. You're inspection is no where detailed enough to check if these things were taken into account for a decade while you were away. All of this detail is irrelevant. It may well be possible to do a good job with a very rough simulation of water and time, all of which could be computed on demand. So really all that needs stored is enough state to simulate in case you look at it again, and no work needs done on it between those looks. And this is a trivial amount of storage and computation to satisfy your two causal glances when compared to needing to simulate an entire universe down to all 10^120 subatomic particles.

TuringTest 8y ago

I think there are deeper problems in the argument than merely "it would take a lot of resources". I'm concerned by arguments in the form "I can imagine that something is true, therefore it is true". From this perspective, I see the argument like this: 1) (Assume that) we can create a simulation with intelligent beings in it. 2) Therefore, it is not impossible that someone has created a simulation in which we are the simulated intelligent beings. 3) Therefore, it is highly likely that we live in a simulation. I simply don't get the logical implication between 2 and 3 from "not impossible" to "highly likely". I have the same concerns with the ontological argument for the existence of God: 1) I can imagine a being that is perfect and all-powerful. 2) This being therefore exists, because if it didn't it wouldn't be perfect nor all-powerful. In both cases I see an extreme case of begging the question.

dubya23 8y ago
I don't think you are representing the argument accurately. The logic is as follows: 1. Assuming any rate of improvement of simulations there will reach a point where a simulation is indistinguishable from reality 2. Advanced species have reached this point and are interested in running simulated universes. 3. There are likely to be many more simulated universes than real ones 4. Given the previous 3 it is more likely that we are in a simulated universe than a real one. Read the original paper from Bostrom for yourself. https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
- tokyodude 8y ago
  By the same argument the people in the outer universe are in a simulation of the outer-outer universe and the people in the outer-outer universe are simulations in the outer-outer-outer universe, etc to infinity. In other words the theory requires infinite complexity.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    The argument says that there is a very high probability, not that it's for sure.

lossolo 8y ago

> Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe? In quantum mechanics there is something called collapse of wave function, which takes place when observer is making an observation on certain object. When there is no observer state goes into superposition which means it is one and zero at same time. So basically this means that object can exist and doesn't exist at same time. That's why Einstein said he likes to think that moon exist even if no one is watching. This looks similar to mechanism we use in rendering games today, you only load and render the view that players is looking at and the stage/level that player is in. Of course it's a lot more simplified in case of games. You can save resources using those methods while making huge scale simulations.

gameswithgo 8y ago

to simulate our universe perfectly and in real time would take a computer the same mass as the universe.

ColanR 8y ago

I wonder if by the time we solve a 'theory of everything' (or understand by some other means the basic mechanisms of our universe), we'll be able to efficiently, procedurally, generate a simulated universe. Also, the Fermi paradox could be a solution - we don't see any other alien life forms because we're running in a computationally limited simulator, and everything outside our (relatively easy to simulate) solar system is running on minimum resolution (so to speak).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]