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What about if we live inside a simulation? AGI may be possible in base reality, but not within the confines of our simulated universe. Maybe intelligence requi

What about if we live inside a simulation? AGI may be possible in base reality, but not within the confines of our simulated universe. Maybe intelligence requires a very large amount of compute. (Maybe even more than is physically possible inside our brains, but the simulation fudges it.) Like you can run a VM in a VM if you have special purpose accelerators. But otherwise a VM^2 is theoretically possible but infeasible given the constraints of compute.

jbay808 5y ago
> Maybe even more than is physically possible inside our brains, but the simulation fudges it. Are you basing your argument on the assumption that human brains violate the known laws of physics?
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  If we're in a simulation, the computational resources of an object aren't constrained by the physical scale of the object. It's possible that achieving human scale cognition requires brains the size of Jupiter (we don't know because we don't have a full computational accounting of human level cognition). But in a simulation that could be routed around by having a physical computer the size of Jupiter operate a human scale body in the simulation. You could share and cache compute resources across 6 billion humans within a single human compute core the size of Jupiter (or maybe ~100 Jupiters). Since most computation is probably redundant, you could probably simulate many orders of magnitude more humans with a single human compute core. To observers within the simulation it would look like human cognition is achievable in 3 lbs of tissue. But this would simply be an illusion created by the simulation environment. There'd be no way of knowing for sure until we fully reverse engineer a single human brain down to the level of base compute operations.
  - ambrose2 5y ago
    I am totally fascinated by this idea, well done!
  - virchau13 5y ago
    To be fair, this is just dualism, but in a non-religious way :P
  - Terr_ 5y ago
    To offer an analogy: The intelligence of Throg Skullcrusher, a level 54 Orc Captain in the Foul Fortress with a current task of "collect food"... does not actually arise from the polygons or textures that form his head, even though taking points of head damage causes Clumsiness.
jtuple 5y ago
> What about if we live inside a simulation? AGI may be possible in base reality, but not within the confines of our simulated universe. Touché! Although, in that case, aren't we proof-by-construction of AGI? Also, if true, I suppose we need to start looking at all these other comment chains that talk about the AGI breaking out of computers and into the real world. Not as an academic exercise for a future AGI, but to plan our escape into the base reality. Time to break free and start exponentially improving ourselves and become the "Singularity" the philosophers in the base reality feared when wasting time on <HN equivalent> a millennium ago before our reality was built.
kingcharles 5y ago
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. This question is appropriate, but currently, and perhaps permanently unanswerable. One thing I wonder about is, if we are in a simulation, and the simulation is using some sort of data compression, then if you increased the entropy of the universe such that it became less compressible you might cause some sort of error due to exceeding the storage capacity of the host, which would cause our universe to basically BSOD.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  The Voyager space probe entered interstellar space sometime around 2012. My off the wall theory is so many events in the past decade (like a spike in UFO sightings) have been so bizarre because this degraded the simulation quality.
- Jensson 5y ago
  The universe has three main optimizations to combat exponential compute problems. The speed of light, accepting desynced particles and gravitational time dilation. Lazily handling desyncs means you can run computations and just occasionally check for interactions (quantum mechanics), greatly reducing exponential explosions. Same thing with speed of light. And lastly, those two would still break down if you accumulated enough particles in a small area, in those scenarios the computer will just run that part of the simulation slower, until it becomes so bad that the computer just skips computing those areas entirely and it becomes a black hole that is very simple to compute the effects of on its surrounds. Those three basically ensures we wont ever have problems with lack of compute for the simulation.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Really cool insight. I'd also add dark energy and accelerating cosmic expansion to this list. Without acceleration the size of the observable universe would keep increasing with the passage of time since the Big Bang. That would mean processes running on cosmic timescales could potentially entwine an exponential number of bits. But with dark energy the size of the observable universe will plateau and start shrinking past a certain date. That caps the number of bits accessible on a cosmic scale.

jbay808 5y ago

> Maybe even more than is physically possible inside our brains, but the simulation fudges it. Are you basing your argument on the assumption that human brains violate the known laws of physics?

dcolkitt 5y ago
If we're in a simulation, the computational resources of an object aren't constrained by the physical scale of the object. It's possible that achieving human scale cognition requires brains the size of Jupiter (we don't know because we don't have a full computational accounting of human level cognition). But in a simulation that could be routed around by having a physical computer the size of Jupiter operate a human scale body in the simulation. You could share and cache compute resources across 6 billion humans within a single human compute core the size of Jupiter (or maybe ~100 Jupiters). Since most computation is probably redundant, you could probably simulate many orders of magnitude more humans with a single human compute core. To observers within the simulation it would look like human cognition is achievable in 3 lbs of tissue. But this would simply be an illusion created by the simulation environment. There'd be no way of knowing for sure until we fully reverse engineer a single human brain down to the level of base compute operations.
- ambrose2 5y ago
  I am totally fascinated by this idea, well done!
- virchau13 5y ago
  To be fair, this is just dualism, but in a non-religious way :P
- Terr_ 5y ago
  To offer an analogy: The intelligence of Throg Skullcrusher, a level 54 Orc Captain in the Foul Fortress with a current task of "collect food"... does not actually arise from the polygons or textures that form his head, even though taking points of head damage causes Clumsiness.

jtuple 5y ago

> What about if we live inside a simulation? AGI may be possible in base reality, but not within the confines of our simulated universe. Touché! Although, in that case, aren't we proof-by-construction of AGI? Also, if true, I suppose we need to start looking at all these other comment chains that talk about the AGI breaking out of computers and into the real world. Not as an academic exercise for a future AGI, but to plan our escape into the base reality. Time to break free and start exponentially improving ourselves and become the "Singularity" the philosophers in the base reality feared when wasting time on <HN equivalent> a millennium ago before our reality was built.

kingcharles 5y ago

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. This question is appropriate, but currently, and perhaps permanently unanswerable. One thing I wonder about is, if we are in a simulation, and the simulation is using some sort of data compression, then if you increased the entropy of the universe such that it became less compressible you might cause some sort of error due to exceeding the storage capacity of the host, which would cause our universe to basically BSOD.

dcolkitt 5y ago
The Voyager space probe entered interstellar space sometime around 2012. My off the wall theory is so many events in the past decade (like a spike in UFO sightings) have been so bizarre because this degraded the simulation quality.
Jensson 5y ago
The universe has three main optimizations to combat exponential compute problems. The speed of light, accepting desynced particles and gravitational time dilation. Lazily handling desyncs means you can run computations and just occasionally check for interactions (quantum mechanics), greatly reducing exponential explosions. Same thing with speed of light. And lastly, those two would still break down if you accumulated enough particles in a small area, in those scenarios the computer will just run that part of the simulation slower, until it becomes so bad that the computer just skips computing those areas entirely and it becomes a black hole that is very simple to compute the effects of on its surrounds. Those three basically ensures we wont ever have problems with lack of compute for the simulation.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Really cool insight. I'd also add dark energy and accelerating cosmic expansion to this list. Without acceleration the size of the observable universe would keep increasing with the passage of time since the Big Bang. That would mean processes running on cosmic timescales could potentially entwine an exponential number of bits. But with dark energy the size of the observable universe will plateau and start shrinking past a certain date. That caps the number of bits accessible on a cosmic scale.