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> I’m not putting it forward as a scientific hypothesis right now. It’s a thought experiment for how reality could be. This is a key point. The simulated unive

> I’m not putting it forward as a scientific hypothesis right now. It’s a thought experiment for how reality could be. This is a key point. The simulated universe is unfalsifiable, meaning that there is no experiment we can (currently, perhaps forever) perform that could prove it true or false. Even if we could conceive of such an experiment, simulation advocates could argue that the simulation was set up to produce the results we see. Also, it's worth bearing in mind that simulation is really hard and computationally expensive: we cannot yet model a single human neuron at the atomic level, let alone at the quark level. You can try to get around this detail by saying that the simulation focusses computation / resolution on where we are looking, but this again seems to be moving the goalposts. I would like a simulation proponent to propose a credible laws of physics for the host universe, as well as making some comments about how computation (i.e. simulation) works in that universe. For example, is the host computation subject to the same theoretical constraints that our computers are, e.g. the halting problem, and P versus NP. [Edit] minor rewording for clarity.

bmitc 5y ago
> Also, it's worth bearing in mind that simulation is really hard and computationally expensive With computation as we know it. Is our computation universal? Also, nature "computes" in some way, whether it's simulated or not. Somehow it "knows" how to manage everything, across billions of light years.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  > With computation as we know it. Hence my next point , where I'm looking for more detail about how the host universe actually supports and runs the simulation.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    You don't really need more detail. Just consider (hypothetically, if you wish) one of our own simulations. Were there conscious, reasoning agents within it, who developed access to computation, the resources that they would have to create their own simulations would necessarily be limited by the scale and scope of the simulation we created. It would be almost inconceivable to most of them that it could be possible to "simulate" their entire world, given their understanding of physics and computation within the bounds we set up. Then there's the matter of time. It doesn't matter very much in a discrete universe whether or not time runs "fast" or "slow" ... each discrete state is the same either way (because there is no "in between"). Just as right now it would task vast computational resources for us to simulate anything remotely like the universe we seem to live in, and it would likely not run "real time", nothing inside the simulation would be aware of the computational costs and duration in our world.
colordrops 5y ago
I was with you until here: > it's worth bearing in mind that simulation is really hard and computationally expensive This is like ants saying "building mounds is resource intensive. We need our entire civilization working together to build one. You can try to get around this detail but..." This carries the implicit assumption that if there is indeed a simulation then it is limited to human capability, which would almost certainly be wrong.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  > the implicit assumption that if there is indeed a simulation then it is limited to human capability, which would almost certainly be wrong. Yes, totally. But the danger then is that if we say "it is more complicated than we can understand", then the simulation hypothesis essentially becomes a faith-based argument, where 'simulation' essentially means 'god', and then all the bets are off.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Ok, but we shouldn't artificially limit what would be likely if it were the case just because it results in outcomes undesirable to you. It's already faith based at this point anyway. Most religion is basically a simulation hypothesis.
- rcxdude 5y ago
  When it comes to quantum computations, the difficulty is exponential with a truely ridiculous exponent. You are very plausibly just better off manipulating the matter directly once you get to any reasonable size, and there's extremely likely no way around this.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    You are still just arbitrarily limiting what is possible to current human understanding. I find it extremely unlikely that the understanding we have of nature at this arbitrary point billions of years into the universe's development and ~10k into our development just happens to be the exact point where we have a clear understanding of the fundamental nature of reality and what is possible. The other problem is that if this were a simulation, quantum mechanics might not be a fundamental mechanism of reality but rather arbitrary rules executed by the simulation.
sdwr 5y ago
It's ultimately a question of intention, of directionality. Do you live to eat, or eat to live? The scientific view is that there is a pre-existing world out there, and a Way Things Work, and if we observe and struggle enough we can understand it. The religous/simulation approach gives primacy to the soul/consciousness, and has the world as a driver of plot. It's top-down vs bottom-up. Do we need to simulate a trillion trillion neurons to model a single brain, or is a neuron a concept that gives scientists something to talk about?
- robwwilliams 5y ago
  Good one: we eat to live to reproduce more who will eat to live to reproduce. Merely 100 billion neurons; but the real computational compartment is the synapse and its dendritic pond. That gets you up to 10 trillion miniature analog circuits operating “concurrently” in a human brain. But all almost miraculously running without a base oscillator for para-synchrony of compute. Figure that one out and we can then start talking about general AI and simulating Neo all over again again.
  - drsnow 5y ago
    "But all almost miraculously running without a base oscillator for para-synchrony of compute" Would you elaborate on this a little for those of us who don't know what a base oscillator is or what it does for a para-synchronous compute?
    - robwwilliams 5y ago
      Sure: almost all computation needs a method to time and synchronize operations. The synchronization in digital systems is driven by an oscillators/clocks/crystals. The precision of synchronization is never perfect—hence the new term “parasynchrony” or “good enough synchrony” to compute. Analog circuits also need a time frame (phase) for computation although it is not discretized. So where in the brain—a fancy mixed bag of salty cellular neurons and glia—is there anything analogous to an oscillator or clock? Answer: there isn’t! Para-synchrony is learned gradually by living and moving in a world. It is the root of the emergence of coordination of movements and eventually, of semantic sequence. The first years of life are about building “clock systems” into neural systems by tweaking synaptic weight and connection latencies to achieve coordinated movement (a hard compute) and accurate/useful perceptions (another hard compute). Movements, sensations, perceptions are all coupled closely and share DYNAMIC modulated meta-clock systems. We eventually control these meta-clock systems to some modest degree—and that modest degree allows us to steer attention recursively. Hofstadter makes this point in Gödel, Escher, Bach toward the end. Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists, and even philosophers (including Heidegger) take Time with a capital T, as a given. They are fixated on Representation. Even Piaget takes “Time” as a given. But time or synchrony as we experience it is very much a neural construct that takes years to build and fine-tune. Piaget got very close but in the end the question and the problem eluded him like a ghost. In “The Child and Reality”, he writes on page 15 (Rosin translation): “the action of looking, of following with the eyes, the action of bringing an object to the mouth, etc.—but they all lack coordination with each other.” Yet he forgets to ask why they lack coordination. The answer is that infants have very low and slow parasynchrony across their sensory-motor systems. More on this topic @robwilliamsiii

bmitc 5y ago

> Also, it's worth bearing in mind that simulation is really hard and computationally expensive With computation as we know it. Is our computation universal? Also, nature "computes" in some way, whether it's simulated or not. Somehow it "knows" how to manage everything, across billions of light years.

KineticLensman 5y ago
> With computation as we know it. Hence my next point , where I'm looking for more detail about how the host universe actually supports and runs the simulation.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  You don't really need more detail. Just consider (hypothetically, if you wish) one of our own simulations. Were there conscious, reasoning agents within it, who developed access to computation, the resources that they would have to create their own simulations would necessarily be limited by the scale and scope of the simulation we created. It would be almost inconceivable to most of them that it could be possible to "simulate" their entire world, given their understanding of physics and computation within the bounds we set up. Then there's the matter of time. It doesn't matter very much in a discrete universe whether or not time runs "fast" or "slow" ... each discrete state is the same either way (because there is no "in between"). Just as right now it would task vast computational resources for us to simulate anything remotely like the universe we seem to live in, and it would likely not run "real time", nothing inside the simulation would be aware of the computational costs and duration in our world.

colordrops 5y ago

I was with you until here: > it's worth bearing in mind that simulation is really hard and computationally expensive This is like ants saying "building mounds is resource intensive. We need our entire civilization working together to build one. You can try to get around this detail but..." This carries the implicit assumption that if there is indeed a simulation then it is limited to human capability, which would almost certainly be wrong.

KineticLensman 5y ago
> the implicit assumption that if there is indeed a simulation then it is limited to human capability, which would almost certainly be wrong. Yes, totally. But the danger then is that if we say "it is more complicated than we can understand", then the simulation hypothesis essentially becomes a faith-based argument, where 'simulation' essentially means 'god', and then all the bets are off.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Ok, but we shouldn't artificially limit what would be likely if it were the case just because it results in outcomes undesirable to you. It's already faith based at this point anyway. Most religion is basically a simulation hypothesis.
rcxdude 5y ago
When it comes to quantum computations, the difficulty is exponential with a truely ridiculous exponent. You are very plausibly just better off manipulating the matter directly once you get to any reasonable size, and there's extremely likely no way around this.
- colordrops 5y ago
  You are still just arbitrarily limiting what is possible to current human understanding. I find it extremely unlikely that the understanding we have of nature at this arbitrary point billions of years into the universe's development and ~10k into our development just happens to be the exact point where we have a clear understanding of the fundamental nature of reality and what is possible. The other problem is that if this were a simulation, quantum mechanics might not be a fundamental mechanism of reality but rather arbitrary rules executed by the simulation.

sdwr 5y ago

It's ultimately a question of intention, of directionality. Do you live to eat, or eat to live? The scientific view is that there is a pre-existing world out there, and a Way Things Work, and if we observe and struggle enough we can understand it. The religous/simulation approach gives primacy to the soul/consciousness, and has the world as a driver of plot. It's top-down vs bottom-up. Do we need to simulate a trillion trillion neurons to model a single brain, or is a neuron a concept that gives scientists something to talk about?

robwwilliams 5y ago
Good one: we eat to live to reproduce more who will eat to live to reproduce. Merely 100 billion neurons; but the real computational compartment is the synapse and its dendritic pond. That gets you up to 10 trillion miniature analog circuits operating “concurrently” in a human brain. But all almost miraculously running without a base oscillator for para-synchrony of compute. Figure that one out and we can then start talking about general AI and simulating Neo all over again again.
- drsnow 5y ago
  "But all almost miraculously running without a base oscillator for para-synchrony of compute" Would you elaborate on this a little for those of us who don't know what a base oscillator is or what it does for a para-synchronous compute?
  - robwwilliams 5y ago
    Sure: almost all computation needs a method to time and synchronize operations. The synchronization in digital systems is driven by an oscillators/clocks/crystals. The precision of synchronization is never perfect—hence the new term “parasynchrony” or “good enough synchrony” to compute. Analog circuits also need a time frame (phase) for computation although it is not discretized. So where in the brain—a fancy mixed bag of salty cellular neurons and glia—is there anything analogous to an oscillator or clock? Answer: there isn’t! Para-synchrony is learned gradually by living and moving in a world. It is the root of the emergence of coordination of movements and eventually, of semantic sequence. The first years of life are about building “clock systems” into neural systems by tweaking synaptic weight and connection latencies to achieve coordinated movement (a hard compute) and accurate/useful perceptions (another hard compute). Movements, sensations, perceptions are all coupled closely and share DYNAMIC modulated meta-clock systems. We eventually control these meta-clock systems to some modest degree—and that modest degree allows us to steer attention recursively. Hofstadter makes this point in Gödel, Escher, Bach toward the end. Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists, and even philosophers (including Heidegger) take Time with a capital T, as a given. They are fixated on Representation. Even Piaget takes “Time” as a given. But time or synchrony as we experience it is very much a neural construct that takes years to build and fine-tune. Piaget got very close but in the end the question and the problem eluded him like a ghost. In “The Child and Reality”, he writes on page 15 (Rosin translation): “the action of looking, of following with the eyes, the action of bringing an object to the mouth, etc.—but they all lack coordination with each other.” Yet he forgets to ask why they lack coordination. The answer is that infants have very low and slow parasynchrony across their sensory-motor systems. More on this topic @robwilliamsiii