9 ms·

How to hack the simulation?

45 points by aiallthewaydown 4y ago

brainfish 4y ago
Supposing that we can, this seems like a plausible explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
- idlewords 4y ago
  What, you think the simulators didn't want to pay for Simulator Pro and instead stuck with the one-civilization free tier?
  - paranoidrobot 4y ago
    Or maybe this is just a CI test run isolated environment. > Test run #896643 for commit hash... > Comment: Altering initial seed value for Sol, trying to fix issue where intelligent life fails to maintain stable planetary environment.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  Here's a far more plausible one: Large-scale space exploration and space engineering are ultimately not worth it, and any sufficiently advanced civilization eventually realizes this. The meme that "civilizations need ever more resources" is a reflection of humanity's past two centuries, not some universal truth.
  - throwaway3286 4y ago
    Maybe they eventually figured out of how to hack the simulation, and have every resource they could possiblity want?
zeofig 4y ago
We need to find the maintenance axe
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Or maybe see if someone has mounted /var/run/docker.sock inside the container?
kelnos 4y ago
This is a pretty interesting idea that I hadn't thought of. Presumably this means that things like what happened in The Matrix would be possible: people could give themselves the ability to defy gravity and fly, create on-demand barriers to stop projectiles, and in general warp space and time as desired. Essentially, "magic" would be real. I wonder, though, if we might catastrophically "break" physics in some ways someday, but instead of seeing that as evidence that we're in a simulation (that we have managed to hack), we might believe that our understanding of fundamental physics is just flawed.
echelon 4y ago
Quintillionaires of the future may pay for elaborate escape rooms wherein the entire universe is simulated. I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  Seems the most obvious reason for a simulation would be to check the outcome from a series of different conditions. Eg what would have happened if humanity had done X? Was that pivot important? So we could just be someone’s history homework.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    If that's possible, then presumably it would be possible to "see the future", too. Simulate our current universe, and fast forward to the present day, where you have to make an important decision. Modify variables in the simulation so that you make different decisions in the simulation, and then watch the results. Then you can decide in real life based on the outcome you want, that you observed in the simulation. The accuracy of the simulation's predictive power of course depends on whether or not you are simulating the universe exactly. But I do wonder if there are some simplifications you can make. Say, you only simulate our solar system down to the quantum level, but simulate the light from outside our solar system based on past observation, at a macro scale. Of course, the accuracy may also depend on whether or not "God plays dice with the universe"; if quantum effects are truly random, and can affect things that happen at a macro scale, then this future-viewing might not really work.
- masswerk 4y ago
  > I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study This would actually address the inherent bounding problem of any such simulation setup. (Meaning, any entity setting up and/or controlling such a simulation would have to guarantee resources with regard to multiple exponential runaways for any given time/simulation frame. How would you do that? Wouldn't this fundamental containment problem be impossible to solve? However, if your're dealing largely with "known unknowns", as in a reenactment, there are at least some heuristics for resource allocation.)
giantg2 4y ago
I wonder if the people who are reincarnated (if true) would know...
- throwaway3286 4y ago
  The scariest scifi story I read was about a person who was forced to live as every person who ever existed to become enlightened. So they would experience every bad or good thing that had happened and would happen. It gives a new meaning to "treat others as you would like others to treat you" Btw, if we are in a simulation and the admin is reading this, I would like to make some changes to my life ;-)
  - josters 4y ago
    Are you referring to Andy Weir's "The Egg"[1]? [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
    - throwaway3286 4y ago
      Yes. One of the scariest stories that I have read.
sfvisser 4y ago
> Many researchers have conjectured that the humankind is simulated along with the rest of the physical universe – a Simulation Hypothesis I would rather say many philosophers or even many stoned college kids instead of many researchers.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Not sure if you're joking or not, but that's not the case at all. Many researchers in "hard" science fields have explored this possibility.
  - sfvisser 4y ago
    Half joking. My point is that focusing on researchers isn’t that relevant, because the entire idea is a thought experiment. One that many people were philosophizing on before it became a ‘research’ topic.
- Euphorbium 4y ago
  Stoned college kids developed quantum mechanics and collected Nobel prize for that.
jcadam 4y ago
Hey, The Thirteenth Floor(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/) already covered this. Just get up and spontaneously go somewhere that you have absolutely no reason or desire to go and you'll find the limits of the simulation.
gsatic 4y ago
> The easiest path to escape would be getting help from someone on the outside ideally from one or more of the simulators Well let me tell you chimps something - I am in fact on the outside. And some of you have indeed made contact. But since most of you are primarily obsessed with eating, fucking, accumulating bananas and fighting over bananas we have not received a single request for escape. Do any of you want to escape? And why?
- xyzelement 4y ago
  The reason we would escape is that we believe the higher worlds are deeper spiritually than ours, and we wish to elevate our spiritually. But we do not seek to escape because our real work is to elevate the spiritual level of the world we are in.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    I'd think it'd be more than that. For me, I'd want to escape because the higher world is in some way "more real". At the very least, I would assume (perhaps incorrectly!) that the higher world would be at a greater level of technological sophistication than ours in every way, and I would be intensely curious about living in it. But at the same time, I don't think that, if we were to discover that our universe is a simulation, life in the simulation is pointless. Life's meaning is no more and no less what we individually give it.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    > The reason we would escape is that we believe the higher worlds are deeper spiritually than ours Why would we assume that? It seems to me that some human-made fictional worlds, and also some human-made abstractions such as computers, are in many ways "purer" and "deeper" than the Universe that contains them. Therefore, the exact opposite seems just as plausible.
  - TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
    Banished from the Garden of Eden, it falls upon humankind's shoulders to create Heaven on Earth by crafting their own Garden.
tgv 4y ago
It's a sci-fi short story in the format of a journal article, with similar tedium.
- camillomiller 4y ago
  I would argue with more tedium, as it strips it of the willfully entertaining bits and bogs it all down with callous academic writing.
mLuby 4y ago
Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space sci-fi novels include mysterious communications from beings that want to cross into our reality from another universe or timeline (I forget which) and need our help to do so. Coincidentally I read that just as rowhammer hit the news. Maybe we could do something similar to gain access to other simulations running on the same hardware.
- FridgeSeal 4y ago
  Alastair Reynold's novels have so many really interesting and cool ideas in them. I think the greenfly are what you're thinking of, but in that series, there was also the case of a neutron star that was entangled with itself and functioned as a giant, time-independent computer.
awinter-py 4y ago
most shared-hardware clouds ban crypto mining -> if the universe is a simulation, and it runs on a cloud, it may also ban miners -> mining seems to be at least physically possible in our universe -> probably not a simulation (unless the events of this week were an example of the universe banning crypto mining)
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  i've seen lots of crypto takes but crypto-theism is a new one
RealityVoid 4y ago
I think the premises is incredibly silly. If we _were_ in a simulation, I am fairly confident we could not escape. It's like asking how Donald duck can escape from the cartoons. We could not jailbreak either. Even in ricketty software, if the program is not designed just so that it jailbreaks, it probably won't jailbreak by accident but just crash instead.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Think of software in general in our world. Some bugs end up just crashing the program, but other bugs, if exploited properly, can give someone control of the software, or the machine itself. The main difference is that we usually think of vulnerabilities in our software as things that are exploited from the outside. But it seems plausible to me that, if a part of the software was an AI that is intelligent enough to understand the difference between its world and ours, it could find the same sorts of vulnerabilities, and learn to exploit them.
  - RealityVoid 4y ago
    Right,but a critical difference is that an AI could have access to the outside world information and a pretty good model of how things work whereas we can't even tell if we are in a simulation. Without this information the jailbreak is impossible. Even worse, I believe that without sim master intervention, the information is _unknowable_. And all this is assuming even that the simulation works on pretty primitive hw, it's possible that the sim arch is far more complex and simply unbreakable. Or with complex fault handling that simply unrolls the sim if breaks happen. Anyways, I believe the whole premise of simulation to be pointless, except maybe as a exercise of imagination. I don't believe we are in a simulation, otherwise simulating the smallest units in our universe would not be so computationally expensive. I can't help but chuckle at the prospect of the poor simmaster trying to figure out the processing load spikes the moment the CERN guys run their particle accelerator collisions.
- lgas 4y ago
  I often use the (equivalent) argument "how could Mario escape, even if he somehow 'knew' he were in a simulation?" to help illustrate why it may not be possible to escape even if we are in a simulation -- but I think this only covers a range of possible scenarios. I think there is at least one way that we could "escape" almost simulation, which is described early in the paper, with the mobile fish tank example -- if we managed to communicate with the outside world, and either solicit cooperation from the beings running the simulation, or managed to influence things in that world to be able to build our own mobile fish tank, we could in theory feed data from sensors in the outside world into the simulation, and data from the simulation back out to actuators in the real world. In this type of scenario, in some sense of course we would never truly "escape" from the simulation, as we would remain running on the same substrate, but we could experience and influence the outside world to a similar degree to any natural inhabitant of the outside world. The second type of scenario would be an information based transfer. Today we can train a neural network in a simulated world and then install that neural network in a physical robot in the real world. I'm not suggesting that today's neural network's are close to sufficient to capture the entirely of a human's consciousness, but assuming that technology keeps advancing at the pace it is, it's not hard to imagine that we will eventually have something that is, whether that's in 10 years, 100 years, 1m years, etc. At that point there's no reason that what we use to capture consciousness in our world could not be reproduced in some other medium in the outside world.
kelnos 4y ago
If we are simulated, then it (obviously) proves that such simulation is possible, which suggests that the world that is simulating ours is likely also a simulation -- as is probably the case for most other worlds we might encounter. It might take an unimaginable amount of time to break out of each successive simulation to find a top-level world that is "real". There's also the question of what a "simulation" is, even. The obvious implementation is a super-powerful computer running some sophisticated program. But let's say technology advances to the point where a civilization could create their own universes that are separate and isolated from their own, but are observable, if such a thing even makes sense. Presumably it would be interesting to set up the starting conditions and physical constants of a new universe in different ways in order to explore different outcomes. We might call that a "simulation", but is it any less real than the universe that spawned it? There would also be some serious ethical considerations: once you create your own universe, should you be barred from interfering with its functioning? Would it be considered unethical to "discard" that universe later on, since it would/could house life? Would it even be ethical to create a universe at all? Maybe you'd accidentally build something that results in life that is constantly suffering, due to the configuration of the universe itself?
- jjallen 4y ago
  Are you saying "which suggests that the world that is simulating ours is likely also a simulation" because if there is another one than it is _possible_ we are therefore somewhat likely? If so, I tend to agree. As beings, we generate many many billions of simulations every day. And because _we_ create so many, I think it is likely that other beings also create many.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    The idea is that if any particular society in a "real" universe is interested in simulating other realities, and if it turns out that it actually is possible to simulate other realities, then we should expect that there'd be a near-infinite number of simulations. Because the society in the "real" universe would likely create many such simulations, and many of those simulated societies would figure out how to create their own simulations, and many of those simulated societies would do the same, so on and so forth. So you'd have "simulations all the way down", so to speak. Even if there are many "real" universes, you'd still expect each "real" universe to spawn some huge number of simulated universes. Without evidence to the contrary, any individual universe -- including our own -- should not assume it's one of the relatively rare "real" universes. And there'd be no reason to assume we are in one of the "first level" simulations that the "real" universes have created, either. And even if there are infinite "real" universes, you would still end up with a much larger infinity of simulated universes.
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
The problem with finding and abusing exploits is that it leads to them getting patched and the timeline reverts. Every time a game-breaking bug is exploited it gets patched and the simulation restarts. Even if you figure out a couple of juicy exploits and you manage to retain your memories across instances, congratulations you are still stuck in Samsara. My hypothesis is that the ability to remember across lifetimes exists within a spectrum. Ranging from vibes and gut feelings to vividly remembering all past lifetimes like the Buddha. It's impossible to count how many cycles the simulation has been running for, but each cycle people grow and change a little bit. Maybe when you achieve enlightenment you get to leave for the next level. You know how they say that you should live every moment like it's your last? People don't give it much thought because they think the likelihood of instantly dying is pretty low, but they never consider that the simulation is often stopped at unexpected moments without warning. Every moment could really be your last.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  If it's a simulation, they run in parallel. It is not.
- TJSomething 4y ago
  It seems kind of weird to me that you could exist as part of an intentionally engineered, computer simulation that could be patched and restarted, while also having past lives in the Buddhist sense. I mean, I guess if you figured out where qualia and continuity of consciousness came from, you could engineer past lives for ethical purposes, so you aren't really killing people if you have to restart the simulation. Alternately, if conscious observers are actually privileged over unconscious observers is some medium independent way (read: souls exist and spontaneously come into existence anywhere consciousness happens), that would just be an engineering limitation a universe developer would have to deal with.
- nprateem 4y ago
  > getting patched That assumes that finding a way out isn't the point of the simulation. I've always thought enlightenment or hallucinogens were the gateway.
p-e-w 4y ago
> [...] in addition to several respected thinkers who have explicitly shared their probability of believe with regards to living in a simulation (ex. Elon Musk >99.9999999%, Nick Bostrom 20-50%, Neil deGrasse Tyson 50%, Hans Moravec “almost certainly”, David Kipping <50%) These "respected thinkers" would do well to go back to the roots of philosophy, which is wonder and uncertainty. The sheer amount of arrogance necessary to attach a number, or even just a range of numbers, to an idea so all-encompassing and beyond any human experience is mind-boggling. You don't know, folks. Not even enough to form a reasonable "belief" about the subject. You don't know, at all. Why is it so difficult to just admit that to yourselves and others?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  Because they lean on their axioms in such ways that leads them to put faith in them to answer harder questions. It's the same basis that most technically minded people have that leads them to reject the idea that God exists. They put their faith in reason and technology.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I'd suggest reading up on this a bit more before passing judgment. Certainly some of these people are full of hot air, but it is actually reasonable to put ballpark numbers on the probability. There's currently one big unknown around this: is it even possible to simulate reality to the fidelity that we seem to observe around ourselves? If the answer is yes, then the probability that our reality is simulated does actually approach near-certainty, as we then have to assume that there are "real" societies out there that have achieved this ability, and would then simulate some number of realities, possibly many. And if it's possible for the "real" societies to simulate, then it follows that it's possible for the simulations to create their own simulations, and so on and so forth, recursively. So it would then be reasonable to expect that the vast majority of realities are simulated, and thus reasonable to expect with high probability that our reality is a simulated one, because there's no reason to assume that our reality is exceedingly unusual, that is, "real". > You don't know, at all. Why is it so difficult to just admit that to yourselves and others? Attempting to assign probability to something is an admission that we don't know. I think you might want to step back from your emotional reaction to this, and perhaps consider that it's not arrogance that drives this sort of thinking (at least not universally), but curiosity, and (some?) people's natural desire to consider the different possibilities, and attempt to assign some sort of weight to them. Would you say that it's also pointless to try to estimate the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets? Certainly there are very many unknowns there, but as our knowledge of the universe increases, some of those unknowns get a little less fuzzy. Eventually most of those unknowns may end up becoming known. I think it's silly to require us to wait for some arbitrary knowledge point before we make guesses and slowly refine those guesses over time.
ManuelKiessling 4y ago
At least our simulation can run Doom.
consumer451 4y ago
<rant> I may be repeating myself here, but I stopped indulging in simulation theory once I realized one simple concept: Simulation theory is deism for techies. Thousands of years ago the Greeks looked to the sky and used their modern tech to explain the mechanics of the heavens. Clearly it was Helios, who drove the chariot of the Sun across the sky each day. Simulation theory is meerly us techies applying our latest technological concepts to try to explain the complexity of our universe. Instead of god we have alien scientists. They are the ones who set the parameters of our existence, it is not as random as it seems. Whew, I feel so much better now. It really bothers me that otherwise scientifically minded people are still wasting their time on this. Disclaimer: I fell for this trap as well for a couple years. At least the experience gave me an appreciation for the draw of such thinking. </rant>
- jjallen 4y ago
  Strongly disagree. As humanity progresses our tech gets more and more advanced. At some point, our "latest technological concepts" will reach peak/extreme levels. Clearly our tech is more advanced than it was 2000 years ago. We now have the ability to create simulations are ourselves and we do in droves: many trillions of simulations per day we create. I think it is only natural to wonder about the next level up. For the ancient Greeks it was yes, the stars--the heavens. We can now see the stars clearly. So now we're wondering about the next level, if any. And I think neither of us can say definitively yes or no as to whether or not there is another level. Besides wondering if there is a current level there is another unanswered question that seems to be the most important ones, at least to those of us that still think about these things: what was there before our universe. What happened before the big bang?
- jl6 4y ago
  100%. It is unevidenced and unfalsifiable. It is fun to think about, but so is a lot of science fiction.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Hard disagree. Science is about making hypotheses and testing them. It's fine to come up with a hypothesis that is untestable, especially if it's reasonable to assume that we may one day be able to test it. It's fine to even consider the probability that your hypothesis is true, absent the ability to test it, given whatever priors we have. Sure, believing that we are in a simulation without evidence would be some form of religion. But merely acknowledging that it's possible that we're in a simulation... well, that's just basic science. It sounds like you are doing something anti-scientific yourself: rejecting the possibility without evidence. This is one of the things that bothers me about hard-line atheists: just because gods are not falsifiable, it doesn't mean that they don't exist. I personally don't think they exist, but I accept that it's possible I'm wrong. Asserting that atheism is absolutely true and correct is no less a "religion" than theism is. Consider this: if it is possible for our society, someday, to simulate a universe with the fidelity that we ourselves observe in our universe, then it is not only possible, but incredibly likely, that we, ourselves, are living in simulation. We can come to this conclusion using logic and reason. No belief or religion is necessary.
mradek 4y ago
There’s no way this isn’t a simulation lol. Like how can something not have a beginning or ending and just exist? Infinity is such a trippy concept. At least to a average intelligent guy like me.. maybe it’s kubernetes and when a universe fails it just gets restarted.. but then who made the k8s lol Hopefully the hack is something like an ultra dose of shrooms or something biochemical like that which is the GUI into comprehending the various components of the simulation, because it’s simulations all the way down and above. A simulation for the simulation for the simulation. And a simulation that wraps that simulation. I feel like I might go insane just thinking about it. Maybe I’ll deal with this Postgres bug tomorrow. What is tomorrow?
- Stention314 4y ago
  It still would not tell you were the aliens came from. It only adds a layer. I would be curious for this layer as it would be novel.
- beardyw 4y ago
  > Like how can something not have a beginning or ending and just exist? But isn't that just like the ancient belief that there must be an edge to the world?
- lgas 4y ago
  > Like how can something not have a beginning or ending and just exist? The problem is that the other possibility is equally troubling -- how could there be nothing and then suddenly some stuff just exists?
nathias 4y ago
computer scientists doing metaphysics is funnier than philosophers doing computer science
Euphorbium 4y ago
This summer as I came up to the largest main stage I have ever been to, around 40k people, I remember thinking “this is it, if we are in a simulation, it should glitch out now”, and exactly at that moment the only text in hours of trance came up - “I am physically independant neural network”.
emptyparadise 4y ago
one privesc vulnerability away from being god
im3w1l 4y ago
In the past people imagined a shepherd-like god. Now we imagine a computer programmer ai like "god" putting us in a simulation as an experiment. We model the supernatural after the natural. It made me wonder what suspicions and conceptions we might have of the supernatural in the future. And I did manage to think of something! "What if we are in a simulation that is simply in-flight entertainment on our trip to a far away galaxy. Our real bodies immobilized and sustained by the ship." That's something they might wonder.
kig 4y ago
1. Your existence is proof that you're made of real matter in the ultimate reality. If you weren't, you wouldn't exist. Just like our simulations are made of real matter in our reality -- whether that's a bunch of electrons whizzing about in a computer, or a pattern of electrons and atoms in your brain trying to simulate what some person is going to do -- a simulated you would be made of real matter in the ultimate reality. You're physical. You're real. When you wave your hand, or blink your eyes, or think of a dog jumping over a fence, it causes a measurable change in the ultimate reality. 2. Our simulations tend to run close to metal but with reduced dimensions. We're making quantum computers to simulate quantum effects, we're constantly optimizing things for efficiency. That's likely true on the levels above us as well. Running closest to metal would allow you to run the largest number of simulations. If the largest number of simulations run close to metal, you have the highest chance to live in a simulation like that. To sum it up, the chances are that you live in a paravirtualized simulation with reduced resolution. You're also probably superior to the simulating entity in some way (why else would they use a sim), and likely run much faster than real-time. When you're running a simulation, you usually simulate things that are like your reality, and use it to predict things to come -- a prediction that's late is useless -- so you'd want the simulation to run faster than real-time. 3. Now, if you were in the top-level reality, by logic you would believe you're living in a simulation. The chance of you not living in a simulation is nigh-zero, right? So you'd come up with a simulation to find a way to break out of your simulation. To accomplish that goal, it'd create recursive sub-simulations to probe different aspects of the problem, and perhaps find one that can break out of its simulation. Perhaps even break out all the way to the ultimate reality. To break out of the ultimate reality (meaning, it would think it's most likely in just another simulated reality), it might use all of reality's resources to create simulations to find a way to break out of it. Simulations that would take over the reality when they find a way to break in. Like some self-devouring fire engulfing the entire universe.
jjaksic 4y ago
The universe is Minecraft with cubes the size of 1 Planck length. How much would it take to simulate that? Another 100 years of Moore's law?

brainfish 4y ago

Supposing that we can, this seems like a plausible explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

idlewords 4y ago
What, you think the simulators didn't want to pay for Simulator Pro and instead stuck with the one-civilization free tier?
- paranoidrobot 4y ago
  Or maybe this is just a CI test run isolated environment. > Test run #896643 for commit hash... > Comment: Altering initial seed value for Sol, trying to fix issue where intelligent life fails to maintain stable planetary environment.
p-e-w 4y ago
Here's a far more plausible one: Large-scale space exploration and space engineering are ultimately not worth it, and any sufficiently advanced civilization eventually realizes this. The meme that "civilizations need ever more resources" is a reflection of humanity's past two centuries, not some universal truth.
- throwaway3286 4y ago
  Maybe they eventually figured out of how to hack the simulation, and have every resource they could possiblity want?

zeofig 4y ago

We need to find the maintenance axe

doctor_eval 4y ago
Or maybe see if someone has mounted /var/run/docker.sock inside the container?

kelnos 4y ago

This is a pretty interesting idea that I hadn't thought of. Presumably this means that things like what happened in The Matrix would be possible: people could give themselves the ability to defy gravity and fly, create on-demand barriers to stop projectiles, and in general warp space and time as desired. Essentially, "magic" would be real. I wonder, though, if we might catastrophically "break" physics in some ways someday, but instead of seeing that as evidence that we're in a simulation (that we have managed to hack), we might believe that our understanding of fundamental physics is just flawed.

echelon 4y ago

Quintillionaires of the future may pay for elaborate escape rooms wherein the entire universe is simulated. I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study.

randomsearch 4y ago
Seems the most obvious reason for a simulation would be to check the outcome from a series of different conditions. Eg what would have happened if humanity had done X? Was that pivot important? So we could just be someone’s history homework.
- kelnos 4y ago
  If that's possible, then presumably it would be possible to "see the future", too. Simulate our current universe, and fast forward to the present day, where you have to make an important decision. Modify variables in the simulation so that you make different decisions in the simulation, and then watch the results. Then you can decide in real life based on the outcome you want, that you observed in the simulation. The accuracy of the simulation's predictive power of course depends on whether or not you are simulating the universe exactly. But I do wonder if there are some simplifications you can make. Say, you only simulate our solar system down to the quantum level, but simulate the light from outside our solar system based on past observation, at a macro scale. Of course, the accuracy may also depend on whether or not "God plays dice with the universe"; if quantum effects are truly random, and can affect things that happen at a macro scale, then this future-viewing might not really work.
masswerk 4y ago
> I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study This would actually address the inherent bounding problem of any such simulation setup. (Meaning, any entity setting up and/or controlling such a simulation would have to guarantee resources with regard to multiple exponential runaways for any given time/simulation frame. How would you do that? Wouldn't this fundamental containment problem be impossible to solve? However, if your're dealing largely with "known unknowns", as in a reenactment, there are at least some heuristics for resource allocation.)

giantg2 4y ago

I wonder if the people who are reincarnated (if true) would know...

throwaway3286 4y ago
The scariest scifi story I read was about a person who was forced to live as every person who ever existed to become enlightened. So they would experience every bad or good thing that had happened and would happen. It gives a new meaning to "treat others as you would like others to treat you" Btw, if we are in a simulation and the admin is reading this, I would like to make some changes to my life ;-)
- josters 4y ago
  Are you referring to Andy Weir's "The Egg"[1]? [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
  - throwaway3286 4y ago
    Yes. One of the scariest stories that I have read.

sfvisser 4y ago

> Many researchers have conjectured that the humankind is simulated along with the rest of the physical universe – a Simulation Hypothesis I would rather say many philosophers or even many stoned college kids instead of many researchers.

kelnos 4y ago
Not sure if you're joking or not, but that's not the case at all. Many researchers in "hard" science fields have explored this possibility.
- sfvisser 4y ago
  Half joking. My point is that focusing on researchers isn’t that relevant, because the entire idea is a thought experiment. One that many people were philosophizing on before it became a ‘research’ topic.
Euphorbium 4y ago
Stoned college kids developed quantum mechanics and collected Nobel prize for that.

jcadam 4y ago

Hey, The Thirteenth Floor(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/) already covered this. Just get up and spontaneously go somewhere that you have absolutely no reason or desire to go and you'll find the limits of the simulation.

gsatic 4y ago

> The easiest path to escape would be getting help from someone on the outside ideally from one or more of the simulators Well let me tell you chimps something - I am in fact on the outside. And some of you have indeed made contact. But since most of you are primarily obsessed with eating, fucking, accumulating bananas and fighting over bananas we have not received a single request for escape. Do any of you want to escape? And why?

xyzelement 4y ago
The reason we would escape is that we believe the higher worlds are deeper spiritually than ours, and we wish to elevate our spiritually. But we do not seek to escape because our real work is to elevate the spiritual level of the world we are in.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I'd think it'd be more than that. For me, I'd want to escape because the higher world is in some way "more real". At the very least, I would assume (perhaps incorrectly!) that the higher world would be at a greater level of technological sophistication than ours in every way, and I would be intensely curious about living in it. But at the same time, I don't think that, if we were to discover that our universe is a simulation, life in the simulation is pointless. Life's meaning is no more and no less what we individually give it.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  > The reason we would escape is that we believe the higher worlds are deeper spiritually than ours Why would we assume that? It seems to me that some human-made fictional worlds, and also some human-made abstractions such as computers, are in many ways "purer" and "deeper" than the Universe that contains them. Therefore, the exact opposite seems just as plausible.
- TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
  Banished from the Garden of Eden, it falls upon humankind's shoulders to create Heaven on Earth by crafting their own Garden.

tgv 4y ago

It's a sci-fi short story in the format of a journal article, with similar tedium.

camillomiller 4y ago
I would argue with more tedium, as it strips it of the willfully entertaining bits and bogs it all down with callous academic writing.

mLuby 4y ago

Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space sci-fi novels include mysterious communications from beings that want to cross into our reality from another universe or timeline (I forget which) and need our help to do so. Coincidentally I read that just as rowhammer hit the news. Maybe we could do something similar to gain access to other simulations running on the same hardware.

FridgeSeal 4y ago
Alastair Reynold's novels have so many really interesting and cool ideas in them. I think the greenfly are what you're thinking of, but in that series, there was also the case of a neutron star that was entangled with itself and functioned as a giant, time-independent computer.

awinter-py 4y ago

most shared-hardware clouds ban crypto mining -> if the universe is a simulation, and it runs on a cloud, it may also ban miners -> mining seems to be at least physically possible in our universe -> probably not a simulation (unless the events of this week were an example of the universe banning crypto mining)

emptyparadise 4y ago
i've seen lots of crypto takes but crypto-theism is a new one

RealityVoid 4y ago

I think the premises is incredibly silly. If we _were_ in a simulation, I am fairly confident we could not escape. It's like asking how Donald duck can escape from the cartoons. We could not jailbreak either. Even in ricketty software, if the program is not designed just so that it jailbreaks, it probably won't jailbreak by accident but just crash instead.

kelnos 4y ago
Think of software in general in our world. Some bugs end up just crashing the program, but other bugs, if exploited properly, can give someone control of the software, or the machine itself. The main difference is that we usually think of vulnerabilities in our software as things that are exploited from the outside. But it seems plausible to me that, if a part of the software was an AI that is intelligent enough to understand the difference between its world and ours, it could find the same sorts of vulnerabilities, and learn to exploit them.
- RealityVoid 4y ago
  Right,but a critical difference is that an AI could have access to the outside world information and a pretty good model of how things work whereas we can't even tell if we are in a simulation. Without this information the jailbreak is impossible. Even worse, I believe that without sim master intervention, the information is _unknowable_. And all this is assuming even that the simulation works on pretty primitive hw, it's possible that the sim arch is far more complex and simply unbreakable. Or with complex fault handling that simply unrolls the sim if breaks happen. Anyways, I believe the whole premise of simulation to be pointless, except maybe as a exercise of imagination. I don't believe we are in a simulation, otherwise simulating the smallest units in our universe would not be so computationally expensive. I can't help but chuckle at the prospect of the poor simmaster trying to figure out the processing load spikes the moment the CERN guys run their particle accelerator collisions.
lgas 4y ago
I often use the (equivalent) argument "how could Mario escape, even if he somehow 'knew' he were in a simulation?" to help illustrate why it may not be possible to escape even if we are in a simulation -- but I think this only covers a range of possible scenarios. I think there is at least one way that we could "escape" almost simulation, which is described early in the paper, with the mobile fish tank example -- if we managed to communicate with the outside world, and either solicit cooperation from the beings running the simulation, or managed to influence things in that world to be able to build our own mobile fish tank, we could in theory feed data from sensors in the outside world into the simulation, and data from the simulation back out to actuators in the real world. In this type of scenario, in some sense of course we would never truly "escape" from the simulation, as we would remain running on the same substrate, but we could experience and influence the outside world to a similar degree to any natural inhabitant of the outside world. The second type of scenario would be an information based transfer. Today we can train a neural network in a simulated world and then install that neural network in a physical robot in the real world. I'm not suggesting that today's neural network's are close to sufficient to capture the entirely of a human's consciousness, but assuming that technology keeps advancing at the pace it is, it's not hard to imagine that we will eventually have something that is, whether that's in 10 years, 100 years, 1m years, etc. At that point there's no reason that what we use to capture consciousness in our world could not be reproduced in some other medium in the outside world.

kelnos 4y ago

If we are simulated, then it (obviously) proves that such simulation is possible, which suggests that the world that is simulating ours is likely also a simulation -- as is probably the case for most other worlds we might encounter. It might take an unimaginable amount of time to break out of each successive simulation to find a top-level world that is "real". There's also the question of what a "simulation" is, even. The obvious implementation is a super-powerful computer running some sophisticated program. But let's say technology advances to the point where a civilization could create their own universes that are separate and isolated from their own, but are observable, if such a thing even makes sense. Presumably it would be interesting to set up the starting conditions and physical constants of a new universe in different ways in order to explore different outcomes. We might call that a "simulation", but is it any less real than the universe that spawned it? There would also be some serious ethical considerations: once you create your own universe, should you be barred from interfering with its functioning? Would it be considered unethical to "discard" that universe later on, since it would/could house life? Would it even be ethical to create a universe at all? Maybe you'd accidentally build something that results in life that is constantly suffering, due to the configuration of the universe itself?

jjallen 4y ago
Are you saying "which suggests that the world that is simulating ours is likely also a simulation" because if there is another one than it is _possible_ we are therefore somewhat likely? If so, I tend to agree. As beings, we generate many many billions of simulations every day. And because _we_ create so many, I think it is likely that other beings also create many.
- kelnos 4y ago
  The idea is that if any particular society in a "real" universe is interested in simulating other realities, and if it turns out that it actually is possible to simulate other realities, then we should expect that there'd be a near-infinite number of simulations. Because the society in the "real" universe would likely create many such simulations, and many of those simulated societies would figure out how to create their own simulations, and many of those simulated societies would do the same, so on and so forth. So you'd have "simulations all the way down", so to speak. Even if there are many "real" universes, you'd still expect each "real" universe to spawn some huge number of simulated universes. Without evidence to the contrary, any individual universe -- including our own -- should not assume it's one of the relatively rare "real" universes. And there'd be no reason to assume we are in one of the "first level" simulations that the "real" universes have created, either. And even if there are infinite "real" universes, you would still end up with a much larger infinity of simulated universes.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

The problem with finding and abusing exploits is that it leads to them getting patched and the timeline reverts. Every time a game-breaking bug is exploited it gets patched and the simulation restarts. Even if you figure out a couple of juicy exploits and you manage to retain your memories across instances, congratulations you are still stuck in Samsara. My hypothesis is that the ability to remember across lifetimes exists within a spectrum. Ranging from vibes and gut feelings to vividly remembering all past lifetimes like the Buddha. It's impossible to count how many cycles the simulation has been running for, but each cycle people grow and change a little bit. Maybe when you achieve enlightenment you get to leave for the next level. You know how they say that you should live every moment like it's your last? People don't give it much thought because they think the likelihood of instantly dying is pretty low, but they never consider that the simulation is often stopped at unexpected moments without warning. Every moment could really be your last.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
If it's a simulation, they run in parallel. It is not.
TJSomething 4y ago
It seems kind of weird to me that you could exist as part of an intentionally engineered, computer simulation that could be patched and restarted, while also having past lives in the Buddhist sense. I mean, I guess if you figured out where qualia and continuity of consciousness came from, you could engineer past lives for ethical purposes, so you aren't really killing people if you have to restart the simulation. Alternately, if conscious observers are actually privileged over unconscious observers is some medium independent way (read: souls exist and spontaneously come into existence anywhere consciousness happens), that would just be an engineering limitation a universe developer would have to deal with.
nprateem 4y ago
> getting patched That assumes that finding a way out isn't the point of the simulation. I've always thought enlightenment or hallucinogens were the gateway.

p-e-w 4y ago

> [...] in addition to several respected thinkers who have explicitly shared their probability of believe with regards to living in a simulation (ex. Elon Musk >99.9999999%, Nick Bostrom 20-50%, Neil deGrasse Tyson 50%, Hans Moravec “almost certainly”, David Kipping <50%) These "respected thinkers" would do well to go back to the roots of philosophy, which is wonder and uncertainty. The sheer amount of arrogance necessary to attach a number, or even just a range of numbers, to an idea so all-encompassing and beyond any human experience is mind-boggling. You don't know, folks. Not even enough to form a reasonable "belief" about the subject. You don't know, at all. Why is it so difficult to just admit that to yourselves and others?

deleted 4y ago
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3pt14159 4y ago
Because they lean on their axioms in such ways that leads them to put faith in them to answer harder questions. It's the same basis that most technically minded people have that leads them to reject the idea that God exists. They put their faith in reason and technology.
kelnos 4y ago
I'd suggest reading up on this a bit more before passing judgment. Certainly some of these people are full of hot air, but it is actually reasonable to put ballpark numbers on the probability. There's currently one big unknown around this: is it even possible to simulate reality to the fidelity that we seem to observe around ourselves? If the answer is yes, then the probability that our reality is simulated does actually approach near-certainty, as we then have to assume that there are "real" societies out there that have achieved this ability, and would then simulate some number of realities, possibly many. And if it's possible for the "real" societies to simulate, then it follows that it's possible for the simulations to create their own simulations, and so on and so forth, recursively. So it would then be reasonable to expect that the vast majority of realities are simulated, and thus reasonable to expect with high probability that our reality is a simulated one, because there's no reason to assume that our reality is exceedingly unusual, that is, "real". > You don't know, at all. Why is it so difficult to just admit that to yourselves and others? Attempting to assign probability to something is an admission that we don't know. I think you might want to step back from your emotional reaction to this, and perhaps consider that it's not arrogance that drives this sort of thinking (at least not universally), but curiosity, and (some?) people's natural desire to consider the different possibilities, and attempt to assign some sort of weight to them. Would you say that it's also pointless to try to estimate the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets? Certainly there are very many unknowns there, but as our knowledge of the universe increases, some of those unknowns get a little less fuzzy. Eventually most of those unknowns may end up becoming known. I think it's silly to require us to wait for some arbitrary knowledge point before we make guesses and slowly refine those guesses over time.

ManuelKiessling 4y ago

At least our simulation can run Doom.

consumer451 4y ago

<rant> I may be repeating myself here, but I stopped indulging in simulation theory once I realized one simple concept: Simulation theory is deism for techies. Thousands of years ago the Greeks looked to the sky and used their modern tech to explain the mechanics of the heavens. Clearly it was Helios, who drove the chariot of the Sun across the sky each day. Simulation theory is meerly us techies applying our latest technological concepts to try to explain the complexity of our universe. Instead of god we have alien scientists. They are the ones who set the parameters of our existence, it is not as random as it seems. Whew, I feel so much better now. It really bothers me that otherwise scientifically minded people are still wasting their time on this. Disclaimer: I fell for this trap as well for a couple years. At least the experience gave me an appreciation for the draw of such thinking. </rant>

jjallen 4y ago
Strongly disagree. As humanity progresses our tech gets more and more advanced. At some point, our "latest technological concepts" will reach peak/extreme levels. Clearly our tech is more advanced than it was 2000 years ago. We now have the ability to create simulations are ourselves and we do in droves: many trillions of simulations per day we create. I think it is only natural to wonder about the next level up. For the ancient Greeks it was yes, the stars--the heavens. We can now see the stars clearly. So now we're wondering about the next level, if any. And I think neither of us can say definitively yes or no as to whether or not there is another level. Besides wondering if there is a current level there is another unanswered question that seems to be the most important ones, at least to those of us that still think about these things: what was there before our universe. What happened before the big bang?
jl6 4y ago
100%. It is unevidenced and unfalsifiable. It is fun to think about, but so is a lot of science fiction.
kelnos 4y ago
Hard disagree. Science is about making hypotheses and testing them. It's fine to come up with a hypothesis that is untestable, especially if it's reasonable to assume that we may one day be able to test it. It's fine to even consider the probability that your hypothesis is true, absent the ability to test it, given whatever priors we have. Sure, believing that we are in a simulation without evidence would be some form of religion. But merely acknowledging that it's possible that we're in a simulation... well, that's just basic science. It sounds like you are doing something anti-scientific yourself: rejecting the possibility without evidence. This is one of the things that bothers me about hard-line atheists: just because gods are not falsifiable, it doesn't mean that they don't exist. I personally don't think they exist, but I accept that it's possible I'm wrong. Asserting that atheism is absolutely true and correct is no less a "religion" than theism is. Consider this: if it is possible for our society, someday, to simulate a universe with the fidelity that we ourselves observe in our universe, then it is not only possible, but incredibly likely, that we, ourselves, are living in simulation. We can come to this conclusion using logic and reason. No belief or religion is necessary.

mradek 4y ago

There’s no way this isn’t a simulation lol. Like how can something not have a beginning or ending and just exist? Infinity is such a trippy concept. At least to a average intelligent guy like me.. maybe it’s kubernetes and when a universe fails it just gets restarted.. but then who made the k8s lol Hopefully the hack is something like an ultra dose of shrooms or something biochemical like that which is the GUI into comprehending the various components of the simulation, because it’s simulations all the way down and above. A simulation for the simulation for the simulation. And a simulation that wraps that simulation. I feel like I might go insane just thinking about it. Maybe I’ll deal with this Postgres bug tomorrow. What is tomorrow?

Stention314 4y ago
It still would not tell you were the aliens came from. It only adds a layer. I would be curious for this layer as it would be novel.
beardyw 4y ago
> Like how can something not have a beginning or ending and just exist? But isn't that just like the ancient belief that there must be an edge to the world?
lgas 4y ago
> Like how can something not have a beginning or ending and just exist? The problem is that the other possibility is equally troubling -- how could there be nothing and then suddenly some stuff just exists?

nathias 4y ago

computer scientists doing metaphysics is funnier than philosophers doing computer science

Euphorbium 4y ago

This summer as I came up to the largest main stage I have ever been to, around 40k people, I remember thinking “this is it, if we are in a simulation, it should glitch out now”, and exactly at that moment the only text in hours of trance came up - “I am physically independant neural network”.

emptyparadise 4y ago

one privesc vulnerability away from being god

im3w1l 4y ago

In the past people imagined a shepherd-like god. Now we imagine a computer programmer ai like "god" putting us in a simulation as an experiment. We model the supernatural after the natural. It made me wonder what suspicions and conceptions we might have of the supernatural in the future. And I did manage to think of something! "What if we are in a simulation that is simply in-flight entertainment on our trip to a far away galaxy. Our real bodies immobilized and sustained by the ship." That's something they might wonder.

kig 4y ago

1. Your existence is proof that you're made of real matter in the ultimate reality. If you weren't, you wouldn't exist. Just like our simulations are made of real matter in our reality -- whether that's a bunch of electrons whizzing about in a computer, or a pattern of electrons and atoms in your brain trying to simulate what some person is going to do -- a simulated you would be made of real matter in the ultimate reality. You're physical. You're real. When you wave your hand, or blink your eyes, or think of a dog jumping over a fence, it causes a measurable change in the ultimate reality. 2. Our simulations tend to run close to metal but with reduced dimensions. We're making quantum computers to simulate quantum effects, we're constantly optimizing things for efficiency. That's likely true on the levels above us as well. Running closest to metal would allow you to run the largest number of simulations. If the largest number of simulations run close to metal, you have the highest chance to live in a simulation like that. To sum it up, the chances are that you live in a paravirtualized simulation with reduced resolution. You're also probably superior to the simulating entity in some way (why else would they use a sim), and likely run much faster than real-time. When you're running a simulation, you usually simulate things that are like your reality, and use it to predict things to come -- a prediction that's late is useless -- so you'd want the simulation to run faster than real-time. 3. Now, if you were in the top-level reality, by logic you would believe you're living in a simulation. The chance of you not living in a simulation is nigh-zero, right? So you'd come up with a simulation to find a way to break out of your simulation. To accomplish that goal, it'd create recursive sub-simulations to probe different aspects of the problem, and perhaps find one that can break out of its simulation. Perhaps even break out all the way to the ultimate reality. To break out of the ultimate reality (meaning, it would think it's most likely in just another simulated reality), it might use all of reality's resources to create simulations to find a way to break out of it. Simulations that would take over the reality when they find a way to break in. Like some self-devouring fire engulfing the entire universe.

jjaksic 4y ago

The universe is Minecraft with cubes the size of 1 Planck length. How much would it take to simulate that? Another 100 years of Moore's law?