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It’s also a little silly for the same reasons discussions of theoretical computability often are: time and space requirements. In practice the Universe, even if

It’s also a little silly for the same reasons discussions of theoretical computability often are: time and space requirements. In practice the Universe, even if computable, is so complex that simulating it would require far more compute than physical particles and far more time than remaining until heat death.

FabHK 10mo ago
Yes, is that (obvious) point being addressed in the paper? At first skimming, it just says that a "sufficiently souped up laptop" could, in principle, compute the future of the universe (i.e. Laplace's daemon), but I haven't seen anything about the subsequent questions of time scales.
- qingcharles 10mo ago
  Computing the future is cool, but computing the past state is also really cool as it essentially allows time travel into (a copy of) the past.
Borg3 10mo ago
Hehe yeah.. For me, its just inverted search for the God. There must be somethink behind it, if its not God, then it must be simulation! Kinda sad, I would expect more from scientist. The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions...
- mensetmanusman 10mo ago
  You expect scientists to not ask :‘what is behind all this?’ Ha
- Aerroon 10mo ago
  >The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions... Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy, because for all the order we create we just create more disorder. Conway's game of life has very simple rules (laws of nature) and it ends up very complex. The universe doing the same thing with much more complicated rules seems pretty natural.
  - estearum 10mo ago
    Yeah, agreed. The actual real riddle is consciousness. Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and energy zap into existence something that actually (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.
    - A_D_E_P_T 10mo ago
      I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious: (1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input. (2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment. (3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally extended self-model. (4) It uses these models with self-derived agency to generate and evaluate counterfactuals: Predictions of alternative futures under alternative actions. (i.e. a general predictive function.) (5) It has control channels through which those evaluations shape its future trajectories in ways that are not trivially reducible to a fixed reflex table. This would also indicate that Boltzmann Brains are not conscious -- so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains, which would otherwise be very surprising -- and that P-Zombies are impossible by definition. I've been working on a book about this for the past three years...
      - jsenn 10mo ago
        If you remove the terms "self", "agency", and "trivially reducible", it seems to me that a classical robot/game AI planning algorithm, which no one thinks is conscious, matches these criteria. How do you define these terms without begging the question?
        A_D_E_P_T 10mo ago
        If anything has, minimally, a robust spatiotemporal sense of itself, and can project that sense forward to evaluate future outcomes, then it has a robust "self." What this requires is a persistent internal model of: (A) what counts as its own body/actuators/sensors (a maintained self–world boundary), (B) what counts as its history in time (a sense of temporal continuity), and (C) what actions it can take (degrees of freedom, i.e. the future branch space), all of which are continuously used to regulate behavior under genuine epistemic uncertainty. When (C) is robust, abstraction and generalization fall out naturally. This is, in essence, sapience. By "not trivially reducible," I don't mean "not representable in principle." I mean that, at the system's own operative state/action abstraction, its behavior is not equivalent to executing a fixed policy or static lookup table. It must actually perform predictive modeling and counterfactual evaluation; collapsing it to a reflex table would destroy the very capacities above. (It's true that with an astronomically large table you can "look up" anything -- but that move makes the notion of explanation vacuous.) Many robots and AIs implement pieces of this pipeline (state estimation, planning, world models,) but current deployed systems generally lack a robust, continuously updated self-model with temporally deep, globally integrated counterfactual control in this sense. If you want to simplify it a bit, you could just say that you need a robust and bounded spatial-temporal sense, coupled to the ability to generalize from that sense.
- vasco 10mo ago
  > The big riddle of Universe is, how A lot of people are more interested in the Why of the Universe than the How, though. How is an implementation detail, Why is "profound". At least that's how I think most people look at it.
  - Borg3 10mo ago
    Yeah I guess... But such question is not really intereseting.. Answer is simple, there is nothing behind it.. and people arent confortable with that answer. Hence "How" is more interesting and scientific..
- nick__m 10mo ago
  For me the biggest riddle is: why something instead of nothing ? That's the question that prevent me from being atheist and shift me to agnosticism.
  - morpheos137 10mo ago
    There is both in superposition.
  - helf 10mo ago
    [dead]
Traubenfuchs 10mo ago
The real universe might be different and far more complex than our simulated reality. Maybe a species that can freely move within 4 or 5 dimensions is simulating our 3D + uni directional time reality just like we „simulate“ reality with Sim City and Sims.
- mrwrong 10mo ago
  but then we don't have a universe simulating itself, but simulating a low-fi imitation
vidarh 10mo ago
The issue with that in terms of the simulation argument, is that the simulation argument doesn't require a complete simulation in either space or time.
- TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
  It also doesn't require a super-universe with identical properties and constraints. There's no guarantee their logic is the same as our logic. It needs to be able to simulate our logic, but that doesn't mean it's defined or bound by it.
skeledrew 10mo ago
You're predicating on particles, heat death, etc as you understand it being applicable to any potential universe. Such rules are only known to apply in this universe. A universe is simply a function, and a function can be called multiple times with the same/different arguments, and there can be different functions taking the same or different arguments.

FabHK 10mo ago

Yes, is that (obvious) point being addressed in the paper? At first skimming, it just says that a "sufficiently souped up laptop" could, in principle, compute the future of the universe (i.e. Laplace's daemon), but I haven't seen anything about the subsequent questions of time scales.

qingcharles 10mo ago
Computing the future is cool, but computing the past state is also really cool as it essentially allows time travel into (a copy of) the past.

Borg3 10mo ago

Hehe yeah.. For me, its just inverted search for the God. There must be somethink behind it, if its not God, then it must be simulation! Kinda sad, I would expect more from scientist. The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions...

mensetmanusman 10mo ago
You expect scientists to not ask :‘what is behind all this?’ Ha
Aerroon 10mo ago
>The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions... Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy, because for all the order we create we just create more disorder. Conway's game of life has very simple rules (laws of nature) and it ends up very complex. The universe doing the same thing with much more complicated rules seems pretty natural.
- estearum 10mo ago
  Yeah, agreed. The actual real riddle is consciousness. Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and energy zap into existence something that actually (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.
  - A_D_E_P_T 10mo ago
    I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious: (1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input. (2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment. (3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally extended self-model. (4) It uses these models with self-derived agency to generate and evaluate counterfactuals: Predictions of alternative futures under alternative actions. (i.e. a general predictive function.) (5) It has control channels through which those evaluations shape its future trajectories in ways that are not trivially reducible to a fixed reflex table. This would also indicate that Boltzmann Brains are not conscious -- so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains, which would otherwise be very surprising -- and that P-Zombies are impossible by definition. I've been working on a book about this for the past three years...
    - jsenn 10mo ago
      If you remove the terms "self", "agency", and "trivially reducible", it seems to me that a classical robot/game AI planning algorithm, which no one thinks is conscious, matches these criteria. How do you define these terms without begging the question?
      - A_D_E_P_T 10mo ago
        If anything has, minimally, a robust spatiotemporal sense of itself, and can project that sense forward to evaluate future outcomes, then it has a robust "self." What this requires is a persistent internal model of: (A) what counts as its own body/actuators/sensors (a maintained self–world boundary), (B) what counts as its history in time (a sense of temporal continuity), and (C) what actions it can take (degrees of freedom, i.e. the future branch space), all of which are continuously used to regulate behavior under genuine epistemic uncertainty. When (C) is robust, abstraction and generalization fall out naturally. This is, in essence, sapience. By "not trivially reducible," I don't mean "not representable in principle." I mean that, at the system's own operative state/action abstraction, its behavior is not equivalent to executing a fixed policy or static lookup table. It must actually perform predictive modeling and counterfactual evaluation; collapsing it to a reflex table would destroy the very capacities above. (It's true that with an astronomically large table you can "look up" anything -- but that move makes the notion of explanation vacuous.) Many robots and AIs implement pieces of this pipeline (state estimation, planning, world models,) but current deployed systems generally lack a robust, continuously updated self-model with temporally deep, globally integrated counterfactual control in this sense. If you want to simplify it a bit, you could just say that you need a robust and bounded spatial-temporal sense, coupled to the ability to generalize from that sense.
vasco 10mo ago
> The big riddle of Universe is, how A lot of people are more interested in the Why of the Universe than the How, though. How is an implementation detail, Why is "profound". At least that's how I think most people look at it.
- Borg3 10mo ago
  Yeah I guess... But such question is not really intereseting.. Answer is simple, there is nothing behind it.. and people arent confortable with that answer. Hence "How" is more interesting and scientific..
nick__m 10mo ago
For me the biggest riddle is: why something instead of nothing ? That's the question that prevent me from being atheist and shift me to agnosticism.
- morpheos137 10mo ago
  There is both in superposition.
- helf 10mo ago
  [dead]

Traubenfuchs 10mo ago

The real universe might be different and far more complex than our simulated reality. Maybe a species that can freely move within 4 or 5 dimensions is simulating our 3D + uni directional time reality just like we „simulate“ reality with Sim City and Sims.

mrwrong 10mo ago
but then we don't have a universe simulating itself, but simulating a low-fi imitation

vidarh 10mo ago

The issue with that in terms of the simulation argument, is that the simulation argument doesn't require a complete simulation in either space or time.

TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
It also doesn't require a super-universe with identical properties and constraints. There's no guarantee their logic is the same as our logic. It needs to be able to simulate our logic, but that doesn't mean it's defined or bound by it.

skeledrew 10mo ago

You're predicating on particles, heat death, etc as you understand it being applicable to any potential universe. Such rules are only known to apply in this universe. A universe is simply a function, and a function can be called multiple times with the same/different arguments, and there can be different functions taking the same or different arguments.