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The Simulation Argument and the Simulation Barrier
- dboreham 7y agoI think this is saying that you can't simulate a VAX on a Z-80. But we know that you can, just not at full speed. But if time created by the simulator does that matter?
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agohttps://www.xkcd.com/505/ https://www.xkcd.com/505/
- mojuba 7y ago> But if time created by the simulator does that matter? It probably does for those who created the simulation. Not sure they have infinite patience to see the outcome of their experiment.
- michaelmrose 7y agoHow would you know how long it takes outside for a thousand years of internal time to pass or if there is any consistent ratio?
- guramarx11 7y agoI heard from someone about the relativity of spacetime, time is slowest near the center of a huge gravity source like blackhole so out here earth time is actually relatively fast and are speeding up due to expansion, as the further our galaxy/universe is flying apart the less mass and less gravity can slow them down So our relative spacetime scale of a billion years here, might just be a few hours inside some of those crazy dense SUPER MASSIVE blackholes And with that in mind and some loose sense our whole simulation might just took 1 second of the creator's relative time because...time is relative , just a loose assumption
- pizzaparty2 7y agoThe first time I heard of this being noticeable on a human timescale was the movie Interstellar. But I don't no think in real life there is that much of a difference between the rate at which time passes near a large mass. This answer on Quora says the rate at which time passes on Jupiter is only a few nanoseconds off compared to Earth. https://www.quora.com/Will-time-pass-slower-if-we-go-to-Jupiter-for-example https://www.quora.com/Will-time-pass-slower-if-we-go-to-Jupi...
- webnrrd2k 7y agoI read recently, I've forgotten where, that the cumulative time difference for the center of the earth (relative to the surface) is about four minutes.
- _0ffh 7y agoIIRC I read that for an outside observer everything that is sucked into a black hole does never actually pass "into" it. The closer it gets to the event horizon, the slower it's clock runs (from an outside perspective), and gradually stops upon approaching the horizon itself. [!] That seems like a rather large difference. [!] Disclaimer: I don't know if that interpretation is still considered valid. Edit: Formatting
- wruza 7y agoFast and slow are relative. We have planck time as a limit, but what if we were hundreds of orders of magnitude slower (and energy-capable)? Or there was no limit at all? A simulation running on small enough quants could be even faster than we could perceive. A single flash and the simulated universe is over. Repeat and try to get better pics of it, until you find something interesting in it. Or try it the other way: simulator’s universe has 13 time axis and they can fast-forward on one by slowing down on one of the others, then reporting final results to all dimensions (and putting sinful souls in a special eternal suffering simulation supervised by worst criminals ever¹³).
- pontifier 7y agoThis is actually a perfect intro to how I believe escape from simulation could work. There could be absolutely no feedback on the success or failure of an attempted escape until the post processing is complete (after the heat death of the universe). Escape might depend on some entity or automatic routine finding something interesting enough to warrant a second look. To escape, you'd litteraly have to cause a universe wide anomaly, then social engineer your way past the ones running the simulation.
- trevyn 7y agoAll of that seems more plausible than the possibility that whatever is “outside” is something that any of us would actually want or be able to escape to.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mentos 7y agoIf we were in a simulation and the time between steps was a million years we’d never know?
- willis936 7y agoCorrect. The time step is independent of the compute time.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y agoIt could be that by implementing the 26 constants, vast magnitudes of processing power and energy have been saved, which allows for good enough modelling and speed.
- tkmo 7y agoNot to mention massive optimisations may be possible. Does all the inner surface of the sun need to be simulated or just the external visible area?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- monktastic1 7y agoA VAX and Z-80 have essentially the same model of computation. The author is talking about simulating one metaphysics in a different metaphysics. If such a thing is possible, it seems all such analogies fail.
- morelisp 7y agoThe crux of this article appears to be: > it seems reasonable to allow that simulations, as experienced by their inhabitants, could have entirely different models of math, physics, and even consistency. Which is a (shallow, informal) restatement of Hilary Putnam's work on externalism and its many responses. Just read some of that instead. Software developers (or worse, tech entrepreneurs) often assume they have something to add to the discussion of simulationism just because computation is the simulation substrate du jour in Bostrom's work. But the philosophical discussion goes back directly to Descartes and indirectly even further. It's broad, complex, and not something a dilettante can just jump into after a teenage diet of scifi. (This doesn't apply to Bostrom himself - the article's objection is a subset of his #2 option. If the "necessary overlap in metaphysics" is impossible or prohibitively expensive future civilizations are not likely to run them.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gfodor 7y agoThis type of dismissive comment reeks of elitism. Einstein was a patent clerk. Big, important ideas can come from anyone. They usually come from outsiders connecting the dots between different areas. This isn’t me defending the writer of this article’s argument.
- morelisp 7y agoIt's not elitism to say this article is bad, go read about that instead. When Einstein was a patent clerk he organized a reading group to study Poincare and Mach. His annus mirabilis was six years after his first published paper. It's not impossible to for someone to swoop in and revolutionize a field with no background knowledge, but it's vanishingly rare in one as old as philosophy of mind, and Einstein is not an example of such a thing in physics. This isn't an outsider connecting the dots; like most responses to Bostrom from non-philosophers it's barely on the right side of crankery. It's 13 years after "dabblers and blowhards" and this site still hasn't developed the requisite self-awareness.
- aaron-santos 7y agoWhat does a blue pill attack look like in this scenario?
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoI have an inherent problem with these discussions: I'm not convinced a simulation can be conscious. There's an xkcd comic titled "A Bunch of Rocks" at https://www.xkcd.com/505/ https://www.xkcd.com/505/. Could dropping rocks in the sand to simulate a turing machine produce a conscious being? If not, why can a computer?
- larnmar 7y agoThere’d be no reason to suspect anything could be conscious, if it weren’t for the observation that a pile of meaty goo can be conscious. Given that meaty goo can be conscious, and assuming that this arises from physical properties rather than some form of actual magic, it is reasonable to guess that the consciousness arises from what the goo does rather than from other properties such as pinkness or gooiness, so if we can cause another physical system to do the same things then it’s likely to have the same subjective experiences while doing it.
- haxiomic 7y agoI love the bunch of rocks example and think about it a lot. If a simulation cannot produce consciousness, what is special about life that makes it unrepresentable with physics? Where is the boundary between a conscious system and a non-conscious one? Conscious minds certainly seem bound by their physicality, you can figure out how feelings and experiences are represented molecularly and electrochemically and affect those feelings and experiences experimentally. So far we've not found anything that cannot be broken down into physics (not to say we won't), but if we assume there's nothing else _but_ physics – then I think we're left with: - The physics consciousness relies upon is fundamentally uncomputable - Consciousness _is_ computable and all the weird consequences that follow (like sand computers) are true I lean towards the second option, but I struggle to understand it in any intuitive sense. What are your thoughts on why a simulation cannot be conscious?
- IC4RUS 7y agoI think you're missing another possibility (and some other posters are too): maybe it is the case that a simulation can produce consciousness, by simulating a brain for example, but that it takes a sufficiently powerful model of computation to do so. So, consciousness being computable may not necessarily imply that any given computer could do so. One potential way for this to be the case is if consciousness is tied to some form of hypercomputation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation), which can provide outputs that are not turing-computable. This would mean that a traditional computer couldn't simulate consciousness, but that another hypothetical machine might be able to.
- hprotagonist 7y agoAnselm’s Ontological Argument, redux.
- scythe 7y agoThere is a lack of consistency between an implicit premise in Bostrom's argument and one in Feather's critique: >any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); [emphasis added] >This lack of necessary overlap in metaphysics between the world that creates a simulation and the simulation itself could be called the simulation barrier. [emphasis added] Why would there be a lack of necessary overlap in metaphysics between the world an evolved organism inhabits and a simulation of its own evolutionary history? Bostrom's reasoning for why these simulations would exist in the first place clearly depends on extrapolating from various aspects of human behavior, so his argument necessarily posits that the beings running the simulations are at least in this way (and probably in others) similar to humans. The similarity of the Universe, largely, follows. Furthermore, the simulation argument fails to be really different from the dream argument when we omit Bostrom's motivation argument. If we can be in a simulation within matryoshkaed simulations thousands of layers deep, then surely we might be in a dream within a dream thousands of layers deep. We can provide all of the necessary metaphysical computational capacity to the dreamer that we would a simulator, can't we? The whole bit where creatures are motivated to simulate themselves seems, to me, to be crucial.
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- Frunkdrank 7y agoIf we are in a sim, most likely we are part of the sim program and not plugged in Matrix style.What differences could there be between reality and sim? I cannot see any plausible reason for a conscious dimension in actual reality, but we see lots of evidence for the conscious dimension interacting with reality in the quantum, quantum computing especially should not really be possible unless you are accessing processing power from else where,it seems to me very likely we are in a sim that's designed to produce intelegent life, big bang is someone turning the on switch that produces through the Hawking inflation theroy infinite combinations for intelegent life to exist within there created framework, where the sim computer only needs to collapse the quantum wave function and render what is percived where there is inteligence, we evan may be an attempt by AI to create conscious but if so our worlds history remains intact and genuine, but as musk says what's outside the sim,who created and programed it may have came from a very different universe than we can imagine, and what is there consciousness like? Would we call that a creator ?
- 3pt14159 7y agoA long time ago I wrote a blog post called "Statistical Immortality" that led others to recommend the concept of lazy immortality and the book "Permutation City" which I highly recommend. And the very end of the day you have to take something on faith and proceed. Solipsism is internally inconsistent because it presupposes a mind that can evaluate a truth whilst simultaneously taking the argument that existence isn't knowable. Empiricism presupposes that our senses and mind can be relied upon to some degree. Theocratic foundations for selfhood are rooted in faith in a higher power. So in a limited sense I agree with this article's argument. Once you allow that the simulation argument may be true you invalidate that your mind is capable of determining if this is likely.
- trevyn 7y agoI think you’re straw-manning solipsism.
- krageon 7y agoAs far as I'm aware solipsism only has a core tenet that nothing but you exists. That is certainly how I was introduced to it when I studied it in class and the only real overarching principle I could find when reading different viewpoints on it. That said, unless you believe your mind can evaluate what is true it has to be (as far as I can tell) a faith-based stance. That isn't much different from a religious world-view, except there's not a higher power. There's only you.
- wruza 7y agoThe whole existence thing is flawed imo. Does an iron ladder exist? It is just a configuration of elements that are perceived as such. The conception lays on “our” plane but not on the lower. We use a latin word for it, but it is still “our” word. We separate things, not things themselves. What bugs me in philosophy is that you can read theories and ideas (good ones), but no one asks if base terms are too much human to be important. Is there a school that doesn’t ob/subjectivize “items” and thinks as a whole?
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- cy6erlion 7y agoIf we are in a simulation it will be difficult to know that we are in a simulation because what we use to identify the simulation (mind) is itself simulated, our notion of simulation is acquired within the simulation. We are in this black box and are trying to see outside.
- mistermann 7y agoSince we're talking crazy stuff, what if similar to how we control matter a super advanced entity could control souls (say, like a form of slavery, or laboratory testing on animals), gathering them into batches and injecting them into simulations, that they control, without having control over the subjects? I'm not proposing this as the situation, but if we're talking simulations, it's fun to think about.
- bitL 7y agoEven more fun is to think that we are a class project of some sophomore at some university in "outer outside". That would explain a lot of things. Instead of a super advanced entity just some junior students creating their first universes.
- setr 7y agoIn that case, we're probably being started from a snapshot provided by the teacher
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- guramarx11 7y agoWhile I fancy simulated reality, Bostrom's hypothesis placed constraints and assumptions that "human" must exist in the least and sim's purpose are about their "ancestors" and "we" are the reason that ever more simulations will continue to co-exist But why must it be post-human from future? why not a "pre-human-ancestor" from "relatively ages ago" that may have created a simulation to peek into simulated future?(so they can learn and won't make the same mistakes we did) You may notice a contradiction in my example is IF the creator are instead from the past? How can they even be a human at all if they had to exist before human does? The thing is chicken and egg "only" if we assume our creator themselves must be human, on the other hand Today, we are designing/training artificial intelligence life form barely resembling us in simulations and most of their purposes are generally "forecast/solution/learning/gaming" With the penultimate goal to create ASI to solve problems in nature, perhaps the reality is our universe may just be one of the branches as a result of such humble "exploration" OBTW are you aware "I AM AI" a slogan favored by Nvidia is a cute palindrome itself that can also be rearranged to "AI AM I", "AM I AI", "AI I AM", "I A I AM" :D
- Frunkdrank 7y agoIf we are in a sim it seems it render's what is percived by "intelegence" to stop any inconsistencies revealing themselfs to the observer ( Maybe to save on processing power, to estimate the overall picture only giving answers to the very small details when observed). We should look for limitations of this system that show up these inconsistencies such as Wigner's superposition thought experiment and many other quantum peculiarities. Could we hack such a system? maybe using quantum computers is a start? getting past the construct and utilising the vast processing power that would be needed to create the sim, getting past the rules of rendering to the observer by seemingly not looking, If Im in a sim id like to think we could hack the hell out of it, or at least try.
- kybernetikos 7y agoThe impossibility of being sure of the rules of the parent reality is why I find all arguments that we can't be in a simulation because it would take too long to calculate certain aspects of our reality to be unconvincing. The computational complexity hierarchy could be different in a parent universe. I do wonder though what things might have to be the same. I would be very surprised if any reality that allowed intelligent life forms able of creating and running simulations didn't have causality. What about the concept of number, or certain parts of logic? I think there may well be reasonable assumptions that can be made about a parent universe, even if they don't reach the level of complete confidence.
- gorgoiler 7y agoWhat would it take to simulate a conscious mind? Several orders of magnitude more processing power than is needed to perform the simple tasks we currently ask of AGI, I believe. For example, in another part of biology, DNA seems to be a very inefficient as a data structure and tool for genetic replication. But you’d expect and forgive that from a system that self organized through chance, iteration, and a vast amount of time. Evolution has short horizons and lacks the long term planning required to be economical. Human engineered systems are by contrast far more efficient with their resources. You can now sift through photos of cats and not_cats with a GPU and a few decades of collective technological progress. To get to the stage where a mind, artificial or natural, has self awareness, I can completely believe that it would require the level of processing only made available by a naturally inefficient evolution process. We have minds that are focused on hunting, gathering, procreating, toolmaking, and surviving. Humans have succeeded at doing these things by growing vast brains that only accidentally became good at spotting incoming lions and finding mates. We are lucky that our complex brains evolved in such a way[1] as to allow conscious thought to emerge as a side effect. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
- eteos 7y agoThe theory is that the required technological advancement to create such a simulation is plausible to be achieved in x amount of time, as long as we keep progressing. Could be a thousand or a million years.
- simonh 7y agoA counter-theory is that technology will always be constrained by the physical limitations of energy and matter. Given the material resources of a solar system, there's only so much you can do no matter how advanced your technology. Given that constrained matter/energy budget, how much of those resources are going to be devoted to ancestor simulations? Possibly not enough for it to matter. Ok, you can assume an interstellar hegemonic civilization that can consume the resources of a galaxy, but if such a thing were possible how come we haven't already been absorbed by one yet? Ergo such a thing seems to be unlikely to be possible.
- fyp 7y agoCan someone help me imagine what a world with different math is like? It’s easy enough to imagine a world with different physics (such as in video games). But math is just a list of rules/axioms and the results of following those rules. They might find different axioms more applicable but our math should still work in their universe even if it’s considered pure math with no applications.
- sudosysgen 7y agoI believe that due to our environment being based on "our type of math" and thus our thinking processes essentially running on that mathematical substrate in a way any mathematics you could imagine would just be an extension of our math and thus either there is no other math or we just can't imagine it. As for axioms and assumptions, it can work but it would probably be possible to formulate them in terms of existing math.
- monktastic1 7y agoIt's tricky because "world" already makes us imagine a reality whose fundamental operation works like it does here. In fact, "reality" and "operation" already come with that baggage. The very mechanism that we know as "mind" (or at least, intellect) may be incapable of imagining other possibilities. On the other hand, very strong psychedelic experiences (a la DMT) or meditation can certainly give the impression that other possibilities exist. The problem is, you can't bring those possibilities back here via memory.
- gnode 7y agoMathematics generally may not be a property of the universe or "world", but the world may constrain what mathematics may be understood or computed within it. The choice of axiomatic system limits what is provable in mathematics, as demonstrated by Godel's theorem in the case of natural number arithmetic. The world may limit that choice of axiomatic system or the computability of theorems. There may be mathematical theories which are true but we can not prove within the physical bounds of our universe.
- root_axis 7y agoWhat bothers me about the idea of an ancestor simulation is the suggestion that a computer which exists inside the universe could simulate the universe with enough fidelity that it could actually serve as a useful ancestor simulation. An ancestor simulation seems to be a contradiction, like a box that contains itself within.
- sudosysgen 7y agoIt's still possible, but you will have statistical inaccuracies. If your analysis shows that say almost all events in this area can be abstracted up to this value without losing a significant amount of accuracy that makes the inner box smaller. Factor in our limited speed of travel and the one way nature of causality relative to us on the cosmic scale, you get a theoretically feasible simulation.
- simonh 7y agoIt _may_ be possible, and the inaccuracies in such a simulation _might_ be useful to meet some goal, if a valuable use could be determined that would justify the costs involved, but there's nothing inevitably true about any of those propositions. It's a bit like the Drake equation, reasonable people can assign different probability values to the various factors and come to radically different conclusions. For example if I think there's a very low chance a valuable enough use for such a simulation could be found, and there's a low chance such a simulation would meet the criteria to be useful, and that there's a low chance such a simulation would need to be so accurate as to have actually conscious simulated inhabitants to meet those goals, then the chance that we are in a simulation comes to be vanishingly small.
- afpx 7y agoI didn’t read the paper, only the blog post. But, why does the simulation have to exist within the same universe? Also, wouldn’t a procedurally-generated universe alleviate the need for high-fidelity?
- root_axis 7y ago
- pmontra 7y agoAll the axioms the argument is based on can be false. It's still interesting to debate but not necessarily close to reality.
- gnode 7y agoThe simulation argument in my mind arises from thinking about the universe in terms of computation. The concept of computing and tractability comes from limitations and phenomena we see in the universe: energy and the arrow of time. Yet, the arrow of time doesn't appear to be fundamental to the constitution of the universe (with the laws of physics being identical in reverse), but only an emergent property of entropy. Like a human-inspired sentient creator, the simulation is the most in-reach explanation of creation for a given perspective. We could look beyond the limitations of thermodynamics, and consider that the contents of spacetime may just exist in the same way as the contents of pi or the Mandelbrot set exists. Why must the universe be "created" at all by computation, when computation doesn't even seem to be a fundamental, but only an emergent property of it?
- biolurker1 7y agoSo basically the author did not bother to read the pdf he had referenced at the bottom. It is short and quite clear.