6 ms·

My money is on living in a simulation with lazy evaluation and constraints like maximum speed to prevent us from consuming too many resources. Intelligent speci

My money is on living in a simulation with lazy evaluation and constraints like maximum speed to prevent us from consuming too many resources. Intelligent species seem to love making simulations, so what are the chances we happen to be the first one outside of any?

rvba 3y ago
The question is: can we escape the simulation? Like some programs escape a virtual machine by escalating priviledges.
- danbruc 3y ago
  You can not even determine that you are in a simulation if the simulator does not want you to know.
  - rvba 3y ago
    Unless there are bugs? I read that the computer game Eve online (never played it) slows down when there are big battles with many players. Sounds a lot like black holes. Time slows there down too - too many calculations? Planck time is the tick rate of the universe? Can pauses happen?
    - danbruc 3y ago
      No. Because you have never seen a universe of which you are sure that it was a real universe, so you do not know how a real universe behaves, so you can not determine whether our universe behaves differently than a real universe. You are just postulating without justification that in a real universe time progresses uniformly and then conclude that our universe is not real because time does not progress uniformly. As I said in a different comment, even if the stars in the Milky Way suddenly rearranged themselves to spell out »You are in a simulation.« on the night sky, you could not tell for sure whether this is a message from the simulators in the outer universe or whether this is just some weird behavior arising from the laws of physics in a real universe.
    - danbruc 3y ago
      Or to stick with the software metaphor, you do not have a specification for real universe, so you can not tell whether the implementation is correct or has bugs. What you consider a potential bug might as well be a feature, impossible to tell without the specification.
      - rvba 3y ago
        But when we talk about computers: cant programs run away from the virtual machine and snoop around?
- mongol 3y ago
  Yes but you need to find a phone booth. Those are rare these days
- lm28469 3y ago
  "They" already know how to escape, they're even taunting us with it every day: https://i.imgur.com/1oZYfGI.png https://i.imgur.com/1oZYfGI.png
lloeki 3y ago
> lazy evaluation A common general pattern in games is to not process that which is not seen or known not to have any interaction - e.g there's no point in making NPCs/enemies move or think in the last room of a level (or a far away planet) when the player is at the beginning of it, there's no point in rendering what's outside the frustum, etc... which kind of echoes the deep philosophical questions of "do unobserved things exist?" or "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did it fall?", or quantum wave collapsing/Schrödinger's cat. Is there any game engine that does such general lazy evaluation based on the observation effect or are they all using ad-hoc hardcoded laziness rules?
- eru 3y ago
  Well, depends on how you draw the line between systematic and ad-hoc. Many side scrolling platformers have ad-hoc rules based on where the virtual camera is looking on the 2d level that are pretty close to what a systematic rule would be.
- fartsucker69 3y ago
  those things are not particularly similar. the tree that nobody can hear while it's falling still has a real and measurable impact on its environment in various ways, something where if if not simulated while nobody was around, the simulation would need to catch up on if an observer ever came near. this eventually amounts to processing work that is equal or even worse compared to just simulating it in full detail in the first place.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    An idea I had a long time ago (I think I posted about it on Slashdot back when that was the hot place to be rather than a shadow of its former self) which I'm sure was not original, was that where many games pop things in and out of existence and (re)generate them purely based on a statically seeded pseudo-random number generator or similar, and then maintain some minimal state, if you take time and decay into account you can do much better. E.g. Elite would bring ships into existence only when you entered a planetary system. If you then shot at police, it'd affect your reputation and impact others reaction to you even after ships have blipped out of existence. But the ships themselves retained no state. Minecraft, on the other hand, maintains state of objects "too well": Once you visited an area, the landscape goes static once you leave: While mobs disappear and are reinstantiated, nothing will grow or decay while you're away. If you want to make a realistic lazy simulation and you also want to minimise computation and storage, you could do this: * For any entity, you assign a function that computes its change over time, including being able to give a result that is effectively "reconverged to base-state of the map at time t". * When a user re-enters a map location, you 1) generate the map as per that time, which might include whatever effects you want to cause change over time, 2) you apply the functions for any user-affected objects that were present, and let them be affected by map changes since last time-step, 3) you purge any user-affected changes that will have re-converged to the base state of the map. E.g. clear an area of trees? If you come back soon, it'll still be clear; if you come back much later, it will have reverted to the freshly generated state of the biome affected by a time factor so it's not identical. Leave your farm for a while? A bit later it'll be ready to harvest. Too long, and it'll have fallen into disrepair. Build a house? Leave long enough, and there will be damage to it, and cobwebs etc. Leave for really long and it might be ruins when you return. Dug out a tunnel? Wait too long, and things might have fallen and started blocking them. Put another way: A good enough simulation could potentially short-circuit a lot of the need to retain state and simulate what has happened by applying pure function of time decay. You don't need to simulate the process of a house decaying, just the outcome at time t unless it's being observed at a given time. Incidentally, when people don't know/remember the details of something we've done, we're great at just making up the details - we know this from split brain experiments - so even if you instantiate simulations of people in this kind of scenario you could likely work your way around inconsistencies just by decay memories as well and letting people fill in the gaps in a way consistent with the effects they see. I fully agree with you that it won't always be worth it vs. just simulating the full detail in the first place, but I also think you can at least get far closer to realistic even with aggressively pruning what you actually fully simulate. To what extent you can get close enough is another question, and something that's fascinating to think about.
ifdefdebug 3y ago
OK, so you think a star was just a tiny point of visible light... until we developed telescopes. This is a antrophocentric world view by definition. I think you are taking us far too serious, we are not that important...
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  Yet you are a singularity.
  - ifdefdebug 3y ago
    So is a whirl in a fast river. Doesn't mean it's important or long lasting.
    - pyinstallwoes 3y ago
      A whirl doesn't exist, the river does. The river whirls.
- monkeycantype 3y ago
  Maybe telescopes were already invented when then level loaded, maybe the simulation is only simulating the last 12 minutes
- vidarh 3y ago
  You can rephrase that to an assumption that maybe everything other than those entities being simulated has no existence at all other than the bare minimum required for the observation. Whether or not the person you're responding to then exists at all as a subject of the simulation or are just another lazily instantiated entity that only exists to the point you interact with them is then an open question. In other words, maybe you're the only subject. Or maybe I am. Or maybe all that exists are isolated "snapshots" and that we only assume time passes because we process a single momentary "image" of memories that includes the sensation of it passing. The problem, of course, is that we can not possible ever know. And so we mostly discard this notion because absent someone pulling us through a door and letting us observe it from the outside, we're stuck inside a room and trying to infer the outside shape of the building without having any idea how much of the interior we have access to.
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
The last part of your question has guided me towards many contemplations. The chances that we exist at the first time for anything is pretty unlikely.
monkeycantype 3y ago
My hope is that the double slit experiment is what happens if you do lazy evaluation with unevaluated dependencies
- aydyn 3y ago
  I'm not sure why you're downvoted because that's a hilariously accurate description of quantum mechanics.
  - monkeycantype 3y ago
    thank you aydyn
    - monkeycantype 3y ago
      I assume there is no double slit diffraction pattern until it is observed, and when that observation occurs - the universe has no information on which slit the photon or electron went through - it was not observed - it went through neither/both. My use of programming terms to describe this is both a nod to 'gosh this game engine has great memory management and algorithmic efficiency' but also me thinking about the relationship between the fundamentals of programming and the fundamental nature of information. When programming we understand that time is simply a matter of cycles of information processing, and that space in a rendered 3d game is not real, but a representation of relationships between data structures, and it's interesting to think about what computers - machines built in this universe from the stuff of this universe - are revealing about the nature of this universe. I know that it is easy to mock computer metaphors as the next iteration of the universe is a clockwork, but the people who thought the universe was a clockwork were not wrong, they were taking a small step forward. They had a new metaphor which gave them additional insight that they had not had before - a model built in this universe from the stuff of this universe that shed new light on the nature of the stuff of the universe. This is what a computer is, it is an object built of the stuff of this universe that has given us new insight in the nature of the stuff of this universe.
dboreham 3y ago
My theory is that it will turn out that a) everything about Physics will be consistent with it being a simulation and b) it won't be possible to determine if it is or isn't. Put another way: reality will always appear to be the result of a simulation and that's just how things are.
danbruc 3y ago
If you really think about the simulation hypothesis a bit, you will realize that it is a stupid idea.
vidarh 3y ago
My favourite thought on this is that if I wanted to build a large scale simulation of a universe, then one reasonable way of approaching it if with the assumption it'd need to be distributed without running into massive synchronisation issues is to impose a computational budget on every entity per time step of the simulation. If moving through space then involves computation to e.g. check for interactions with other entities in the simulation, then the amount of computation will be affected by velocity, and hence subjective time will be affected by velocity as an inherent property of the simulation. This of course proves nothing, and I'm absolutely not suggesting it's evidence of anything. But it's fascinating when possible design tradeoffs for a simulation might fairly neatly line up with how things actually work in our universe. (At least from a science fiction POV; I have a couple of story ideas I intend to write that makes use of that notion) I do share your thought that it's harder and harder to dismiss some variant of the simulation argument - especially as the original one is far too constrained (which made sense in as much as you want to cut away as much as possible that might make people casually dismiss it)
- danbruc 3y ago
  Any reasoning you do about the simulation hypothesis has one gigantic problem - the only thing you know anything about is the universe we observe. You have never seen a real universe and you have never seen a simulated universe, so you have nothing to compare our universe against in order to decide whether ours is real or simulated. Imagine we have a really close look at space and discover that it is made out of small voxels. Simulated universe! No! Who said that real universes are not made out of small voxels? It could be the other way around, the real universe could be made out of voxels but a voxel-based simulation does not fit into memory, so they assigned a real position vector to every object in order to approximate the real voxel universe. In that case it would be wrong to conclude that our universe is real because it is continuous and a flawed analogy with our own computer simulations suggests that simulations must be discretized in some way. [1] So no matter what you observe in our universe, you have no idea if it is indicative of a real or simulated universe. Maybe if the stars in the Milky Way would suddenly rearrange themselves and spell out »You are in a simulation.« on the night sky, that could be a good hint that we are indeed in a simulation. But even then, maybe that is just how real universes behave, spelling out messages on the night sky from time to time might just be part of the laws of physics. Admittedly, if that actually ever happened, I would also consider the simulation hypothesis the better explanation. [1] This is just an illustrative example, whether this is realistic or even possible is besides the point.
Tao3300 3y ago
I used to feel that way until they found the Higgs boson. No one would implement that. Too much effort and risk compared to just hardcoding the relevant masses. Ancestor simulation programmers have deadlines.
- lgas 3y ago
  > Ancestor simulation programmers have deadlines. There's no reason to believe this, and (I would argue that) any civilization creating ancestor simulations has, in fact, likely reached a post-scarcity economy where it's entirely possible that the "programmers" are doing it for the love of programming, the love of simulation, the love of understanding, etc. Or that they are trying a very large number of simulations with different setups at one time. And the Higgs boson fits perfectly well into any or all of that.

rvba 3y ago

The question is: can we escape the simulation? Like some programs escape a virtual machine by escalating priviledges.

danbruc 3y ago
You can not even determine that you are in a simulation if the simulator does not want you to know.
- rvba 3y ago
  Unless there are bugs? I read that the computer game Eve online (never played it) slows down when there are big battles with many players. Sounds a lot like black holes. Time slows there down too - too many calculations? Planck time is the tick rate of the universe? Can pauses happen?
  - danbruc 3y ago
    No. Because you have never seen a universe of which you are sure that it was a real universe, so you do not know how a real universe behaves, so you can not determine whether our universe behaves differently than a real universe. You are just postulating without justification that in a real universe time progresses uniformly and then conclude that our universe is not real because time does not progress uniformly. As I said in a different comment, even if the stars in the Milky Way suddenly rearranged themselves to spell out »You are in a simulation.« on the night sky, you could not tell for sure whether this is a message from the simulators in the outer universe or whether this is just some weird behavior arising from the laws of physics in a real universe.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    Or to stick with the software metaphor, you do not have a specification for real universe, so you can not tell whether the implementation is correct or has bugs. What you consider a potential bug might as well be a feature, impossible to tell without the specification.
    - rvba 3y ago
      But when we talk about computers: cant programs run away from the virtual machine and snoop around?
mongol 3y ago
Yes but you need to find a phone booth. Those are rare these days
lm28469 3y ago
"They" already know how to escape, they're even taunting us with it every day: https://i.imgur.com/1oZYfGI.png https://i.imgur.com/1oZYfGI.png

lloeki 3y ago

> lazy evaluation A common general pattern in games is to not process that which is not seen or known not to have any interaction - e.g there's no point in making NPCs/enemies move or think in the last room of a level (or a far away planet) when the player is at the beginning of it, there's no point in rendering what's outside the frustum, etc... which kind of echoes the deep philosophical questions of "do unobserved things exist?" or "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did it fall?", or quantum wave collapsing/Schrödinger's cat. Is there any game engine that does such general lazy evaluation based on the observation effect or are they all using ad-hoc hardcoded laziness rules?

eru 3y ago
Well, depends on how you draw the line between systematic and ad-hoc. Many side scrolling platformers have ad-hoc rules based on where the virtual camera is looking on the 2d level that are pretty close to what a systematic rule would be.
fartsucker69 3y ago
those things are not particularly similar. the tree that nobody can hear while it's falling still has a real and measurable impact on its environment in various ways, something where if if not simulated while nobody was around, the simulation would need to catch up on if an observer ever came near. this eventually amounts to processing work that is equal or even worse compared to just simulating it in full detail in the first place.
- vidarh 3y ago
  An idea I had a long time ago (I think I posted about it on Slashdot back when that was the hot place to be rather than a shadow of its former self) which I'm sure was not original, was that where many games pop things in and out of existence and (re)generate them purely based on a statically seeded pseudo-random number generator or similar, and then maintain some minimal state, if you take time and decay into account you can do much better. E.g. Elite would bring ships into existence only when you entered a planetary system. If you then shot at police, it'd affect your reputation and impact others reaction to you even after ships have blipped out of existence. But the ships themselves retained no state. Minecraft, on the other hand, maintains state of objects "too well": Once you visited an area, the landscape goes static once you leave: While mobs disappear and are reinstantiated, nothing will grow or decay while you're away. If you want to make a realistic lazy simulation and you also want to minimise computation and storage, you could do this: * For any entity, you assign a function that computes its change over time, including being able to give a result that is effectively "reconverged to base-state of the map at time t". * When a user re-enters a map location, you 1) generate the map as per that time, which might include whatever effects you want to cause change over time, 2) you apply the functions for any user-affected objects that were present, and let them be affected by map changes since last time-step, 3) you purge any user-affected changes that will have re-converged to the base state of the map. E.g. clear an area of trees? If you come back soon, it'll still be clear; if you come back much later, it will have reverted to the freshly generated state of the biome affected by a time factor so it's not identical. Leave your farm for a while? A bit later it'll be ready to harvest. Too long, and it'll have fallen into disrepair. Build a house? Leave long enough, and there will be damage to it, and cobwebs etc. Leave for really long and it might be ruins when you return. Dug out a tunnel? Wait too long, and things might have fallen and started blocking them. Put another way: A good enough simulation could potentially short-circuit a lot of the need to retain state and simulate what has happened by applying pure function of time decay. You don't need to simulate the process of a house decaying, just the outcome at time t unless it's being observed at a given time. Incidentally, when people don't know/remember the details of something we've done, we're great at just making up the details - we know this from split brain experiments - so even if you instantiate simulations of people in this kind of scenario you could likely work your way around inconsistencies just by decay memories as well and letting people fill in the gaps in a way consistent with the effects they see. I fully agree with you that it won't always be worth it vs. just simulating the full detail in the first place, but I also think you can at least get far closer to realistic even with aggressively pruning what you actually fully simulate. To what extent you can get close enough is another question, and something that's fascinating to think about.

ifdefdebug 3y ago

OK, so you think a star was just a tiny point of visible light... until we developed telescopes. This is a antrophocentric world view by definition. I think you are taking us far too serious, we are not that important...

pyinstallwoes 3y ago
Yet you are a singularity.
- ifdefdebug 3y ago
  So is a whirl in a fast river. Doesn't mean it's important or long lasting.
  - pyinstallwoes 3y ago
    A whirl doesn't exist, the river does. The river whirls.
monkeycantype 3y ago
Maybe telescopes were already invented when then level loaded, maybe the simulation is only simulating the last 12 minutes
vidarh 3y ago
You can rephrase that to an assumption that maybe everything other than those entities being simulated has no existence at all other than the bare minimum required for the observation. Whether or not the person you're responding to then exists at all as a subject of the simulation or are just another lazily instantiated entity that only exists to the point you interact with them is then an open question. In other words, maybe you're the only subject. Or maybe I am. Or maybe all that exists are isolated "snapshots" and that we only assume time passes because we process a single momentary "image" of memories that includes the sensation of it passing. The problem, of course, is that we can not possible ever know. And so we mostly discard this notion because absent someone pulling us through a door and letting us observe it from the outside, we're stuck inside a room and trying to infer the outside shape of the building without having any idea how much of the interior we have access to.

pyinstallwoes 3y ago

The last part of your question has guided me towards many contemplations. The chances that we exist at the first time for anything is pretty unlikely.

monkeycantype 3y ago

My hope is that the double slit experiment is what happens if you do lazy evaluation with unevaluated dependencies

aydyn 3y ago
I'm not sure why you're downvoted because that's a hilariously accurate description of quantum mechanics.
- monkeycantype 3y ago
  thank you aydyn
  - monkeycantype 3y ago
    I assume there is no double slit diffraction pattern until it is observed, and when that observation occurs - the universe has no information on which slit the photon or electron went through - it was not observed - it went through neither/both. My use of programming terms to describe this is both a nod to 'gosh this game engine has great memory management and algorithmic efficiency' but also me thinking about the relationship between the fundamentals of programming and the fundamental nature of information. When programming we understand that time is simply a matter of cycles of information processing, and that space in a rendered 3d game is not real, but a representation of relationships between data structures, and it's interesting to think about what computers - machines built in this universe from the stuff of this universe - are revealing about the nature of this universe. I know that it is easy to mock computer metaphors as the next iteration of the universe is a clockwork, but the people who thought the universe was a clockwork were not wrong, they were taking a small step forward. They had a new metaphor which gave them additional insight that they had not had before - a model built in this universe from the stuff of this universe that shed new light on the nature of the stuff of the universe. This is what a computer is, it is an object built of the stuff of this universe that has given us new insight in the nature of the stuff of this universe.

dboreham 3y ago

My theory is that it will turn out that a) everything about Physics will be consistent with it being a simulation and b) it won't be possible to determine if it is or isn't. Put another way: reality will always appear to be the result of a simulation and that's just how things are.

danbruc 3y ago

If you really think about the simulation hypothesis a bit, you will realize that it is a stupid idea.

vidarh 3y ago

My favourite thought on this is that if I wanted to build a large scale simulation of a universe, then one reasonable way of approaching it if with the assumption it'd need to be distributed without running into massive synchronisation issues is to impose a computational budget on every entity per time step of the simulation. If moving through space then involves computation to e.g. check for interactions with other entities in the simulation, then the amount of computation will be affected by velocity, and hence subjective time will be affected by velocity as an inherent property of the simulation. This of course proves nothing, and I'm absolutely not suggesting it's evidence of anything. But it's fascinating when possible design tradeoffs for a simulation might fairly neatly line up with how things actually work in our universe. (At least from a science fiction POV; I have a couple of story ideas I intend to write that makes use of that notion) I do share your thought that it's harder and harder to dismiss some variant of the simulation argument - especially as the original one is far too constrained (which made sense in as much as you want to cut away as much as possible that might make people casually dismiss it)

danbruc 3y ago
Any reasoning you do about the simulation hypothesis has one gigantic problem - the only thing you know anything about is the universe we observe. You have never seen a real universe and you have never seen a simulated universe, so you have nothing to compare our universe against in order to decide whether ours is real or simulated. Imagine we have a really close look at space and discover that it is made out of small voxels. Simulated universe! No! Who said that real universes are not made out of small voxels? It could be the other way around, the real universe could be made out of voxels but a voxel-based simulation does not fit into memory, so they assigned a real position vector to every object in order to approximate the real voxel universe. In that case it would be wrong to conclude that our universe is real because it is continuous and a flawed analogy with our own computer simulations suggests that simulations must be discretized in some way. [1] So no matter what you observe in our universe, you have no idea if it is indicative of a real or simulated universe. Maybe if the stars in the Milky Way would suddenly rearrange themselves and spell out »You are in a simulation.« on the night sky, that could be a good hint that we are indeed in a simulation. But even then, maybe that is just how real universes behave, spelling out messages on the night sky from time to time might just be part of the laws of physics. Admittedly, if that actually ever happened, I would also consider the simulation hypothesis the better explanation. [1] This is just an illustrative example, whether this is realistic or even possible is besides the point.

Tao3300 3y ago

I used to feel that way until they found the Higgs boson. No one would implement that. Too much effort and risk compared to just hardcoding the relevant masses. Ancestor simulation programmers have deadlines.

lgas 3y ago
> Ancestor simulation programmers have deadlines. There's no reason to believe this, and (I would argue that) any civilization creating ancestor simulations has, in fact, likely reached a post-scarcity economy where it's entirely possible that the "programmers" are doing it for the love of programming, the love of simulation, the love of understanding, etc. Or that they are trying a very large number of simulations with different setups at one time. And the Higgs boson fits perfectly well into any or all of that.