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Red Pill, Blue Pill: Is the Universe Just a Giant Computer Simulation?

52 points by Kinnard 13y ago

arc_of_descent 13y ago
So if our Universe is a computer simulation, this might imply that the advanced civilization that created this simulation consists mainly of computer programmers. I like!
dspillett 13y ago
The real kicker of this idea is that one you accept it is possible that we are in a simulation, then it is much more likely that we actually are than that we are not.
- randomafk 13y ago
  How so? It's not so clear to me.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    If it is possible to simulate a universe such as ours, and there definitely is a real universe somewhere (which is an entirely different can of philosophical worms) then it is most likely that there is more than one simulated universe being run in that real universe. In fact there could be a great many simulations running right now (either due to one civilisation at the relevant technological level running many simulations, many civilisations running one each, or many running many) and that multiplies up over the course of the real universe's remaining existence. We are either in the one real universe or one of the many simulated ones, so it is more likely that we are in one of the latter. Even if you consider the possibility of there being an infinite number of real universes this basic arithmetic still holds: for each real universe there is potentially a great many simulated ones. To compound it further: if the simulation is so detailed that it is possible for the simulated life to perform its own simulations, then each simulated universe may contain many more simulated realities. Turtles! All the way down! There will be a limit to how far this can go of course as each simulation must logically be simpler than the parent reality (caveat: some might question if that logic is true or just a limitation of our current knowledge about information theory) so the complexity of the real universe(s) will dictate how may levels of virtualisation we could potentially find ourselves within.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      I got into an argument with Kurzweil on his blog once years ago regarding the details. The simulation does not necessarily need to be simpler, subject to a few constraints: It needs to be possible to represent the simulation in less space than its containing universe. It also needs to be possible to execute the simulation in the available space/energy, but if acceptable it may be sufficient to be able to execute it at reduced speed which can substantially reduce the amount of matter/energy required at any one point as you'd be able to e.g. more aggressively apply compression etc. to the data. The space requirement can be fairly small depending on the constraints on your simulation. E.g. are you simulating a whole universe? A planet? One person? Everything not directly observed by a simulation subject can be aggressively pruned as long as it can be reconstructed in a believable state (unless you are trying to accurately simulate the physics of everything), and even things that are observed can be simplified dramatically. E.g. in almost all cases nobody would be able to tell a rough approximation of the physics and appearance of cloud formations from "the real thing", so you don't need to simulate them particle by particle. On the other hand, one such optimization/approximation then could be to fake the result of any attempt to run your own simulation. One thing I find interesting is that Bostrom talks about "ancestor simulations" a lot, but there's no reason to assume that if we're in a simulation it has to be a simulation of the past of whomever runs the simulation - it could be a game, or someone simulating aliens (to them), or it could even be a civilization that decided to create themselves a nice simulation to live in, or a "theme park"/"zoo".
      - dspillett 13y ago
        > or a "theme park"/"zoo" Or it could have been created in their offices, to make the job of maintinain a guide to galactic hitch-hiking easier to maintain.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  How do you figure?
  - antimagic 13y ago
    I can't answer for the GP, but my basic argument would be that you can probably expect any universe to produce multiple civilizations capable of creating universe simulators. As such the number of simulated universes will be a multiple of the number of universes, which means it's more likely that you find yourself in a simulation than in a real universe. It's worse than that of course because those simulated universes will end up simulating their own universes, and so on...
nodata 13y ago
Why does it matter if we are in a simulation or not?
- dspillett 13y ago
  It changes the whole "why do we exist at all" question completely. If we are inside a simulation we may never be able to see outside to the true nature of reality. Instead of being part of the an explanation for the big bang, black wholes could just be a bug. Inflation could simply be due to the people running the simulation wanting to skip that long drawn out expansion bit so they could study something else. Of course for our day to day lives it doesn't matter a jot. I still have to work to earn money to pay the mortgage, even if my job, my money, my house and the bank don't really exist in the real universe... Of course you could consider the simulation and the life within it to be equally real: I think I am thinking, therefore I quite possibly may be. This makes it even less relevant to those of us who are not philosophers or theoretical physicists.
- lewispollard 13y ago
  Why does anything matter at all?
erez 13y ago
Is the world a 3d hologram created by clustering of sub-microscopic, atomic units of matter perceived by translating photon transmission to electrical pulses? YES.
jasonkeene 13y ago
Simulacra.. not simulacrums.. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
thaumasiotes 13y ago
How does this question get so much more publicity than "Are you a brain in a vat?"? It's the exact same question!
- stcredzero 13y ago
  The vat handlers wrote that into the sim to mentally torture you.
- chad_oliver 13y ago
  If it's the same question, then what does it matter? It makes sense the the question which sounds 'coolest' is the one that get repeated.
- Kinnard 13y ago
  I think it's slightly different. You being a brain in a vat is a more solitary issue. The Universe being a simulation is more of a collective issue. Besides, you are a brain in a vat being fed signals through tubes . . .
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    Yes, I know people can be characterized as brains in vats. I used the terminology I did for a reason: http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/ There's one difference between the brain-in-a-vat question and the simulated-universe question: one, in theory, characterizes "you" as part of reality being deceived, and the other characterizes "you" as not part of "reality". But those are just words; they don't even have consequences within the hypothetical. Literally everything else that can be said about one can be said about the other. They're both impossible to gather evidence for or against, and they both (relatedly) have no ramifications either way. If you think there's any merit in positivism, then the only possible response is "that's a stupid question". A question for which evidence cannot be gathered one way or the other is meaningless.
- chriswarbo 13y ago
  The questions aren't exactly the same. For example, we can imagine characterising our whole universe as a set of physical laws plus some initial conditions, and maybe a pseudo-random number generator. If we're given such a characterisation, we can write a simulation trivially. In fact, a simulation is probably the simplest form of such a characterisation. Hence, all we need is a computer (for example, SK calculus) and this relatively-simple simulation program (so simple that it could be a Boltzmann fluctuation). We don't necessarily need time to run the computation, since that would imply some kind of "outside universe", when it might be the case that computation can exist all by itself. From a pure reductionist point of view, we've removed unnecessary complexity and are left with just computation, which is nice and Platonic. The brain in a vat idea, on the other hand, requires brains, vats and all manner of other support structures (eg. energy, entropy, etc.) to exist as well as the brain in a vat. In which case, we basically require an "outside universe" which is very similar to the "inside universe", so reductionism says that we're adding complexity with such an argument, so it's unnecessary.
stcredzero 13y ago
I think it makes as much sense for us to call a device capable of simulating the universe a "computer" as it would be to think of a being who could create a universe a "person."
- chriswarbo 13y ago
  "person" doesn't have a formal mathematical definition. "computer" does, and anything simulating our universe must be at least as powerful as a computer, since our universe contains computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    > "computer" does, and anything simulating our universe must be at least as powerful as a computer Yes, but that strikes me as about as useful as noting how many genes human beings have in common with yeast. (Useful in some contexts, but not all.)
    - chriswarbo 13y ago
      Not at all. The point is not how amazing such a universe simulator must be, the point is that a universe simulator isn't amazing. The point of the Church-Turing thesis is that everything that ever was, is or will be; every supernova, every human mind, every intergalactic alien empire, every technology that ever can be, is no more complex than ENIAC (given sufficient memory).
workbench 13y ago
Not this again
UnfalseDesign 13y ago
Where is the Universe's bug tracker. I have a few bugs I would like to report.
rikkus 13y ago
As an impartial outsider, unaffected by the simulation, I say no. I mean yes.
ck2 13y ago
If it's a simulation, why haven't we found any major bugs? I mean there are some very deep things in physics that we cannot explain yet but outright bugs in logic? So if it's a simulation, it's the best code ever or someone is patching the historical logs when a bug is fixed.
- Kinnard 13y ago
  How would you define a bug?
  - vidarh 13y ago
    And how would you know about it? If we are in a simulation, then it is not a given that the simulation does not get "rolled back" and restarted from an earlier point regularly, or just ditched and started all over again if/when bugs are found, just like a researcher will empty and clean his petri dish when he notices contamination that'll ruin his research.
  - UnfalseDesign 13y ago
    True. In order to know something is not running correctly, you would need a clear concept of what it would look like if it were running correctly. (The old argument that if you were raised in a cave in total darkness, you can't know it is dark unless you know what light is.) In order to notice a bug, we would need to be outside the simulation.
  - stef25 13y ago
    Maybe we are the bug. A while back this guy discovered that his Quake bots that had been running for 4 years found the perfect strategy to survival, which was to stop fighting. In contrast, look at what humanity is doing. Assuming the purpose of life is not to self destruct then we most certainly have a bug in our system. Whoever wrote Quake wrote better code than "God".
    - telephonetemp 13y ago
      > A while back this guy discovered that his Quake bots that had been running for 4 years found the perfect strategy to survival, which was to stop fighting. That sounds fascinating but also a bit hard to believe. Can you give a link to that story?
6ren 13y ago
It's a cute argument, based on the number of universe simulations - if there are heaps of them, the odds are ours is one. But this argument misses something - what about the number of people being simulated? If there are many more than actual people, the same argument applies. You are likely simulated. But, you may object, if you simulate a person, don't you need to simulate a universe? Well, yes, but only the bits the person can see. Like in a fps, it doesn't render the entire world from every possible perspective - just one. Much easier (and, dare I say it, more likely than simulating an entire universe). This is just Descartes systematically deceiving demon + how many there are. A second objection is that it would be more efficient to share the same world across many simulated people. This might be true, but the underlying question remains: to determine how likely you are simulated, we need to consider the simulated vs real people ratio, not the simulated vs real universes. PS: If we're going all Vishnu's dream, all bets are off. Why should it in anyway be bound by the observations we have gathered? For example, why assume the simulation must be finite - any justification that we can generalise from our own observations is parochial and anthropocentric. Of course, it is simpler to imagine (and probably, to do), if it's a simulation of the actual universe. So let's use the argument again: of all the simulated universes, how many will be of the true universe, and how many will be bizarre variations (which ours would be)? Of course, we cannot hope to estimate these probabilities for an arbitrarily different parent universe - even less so than to predict what that parent universe would be like! But it seems pointless to simulate an exact copy... for us, iteration-like variations, or of fiction seem more likely.
- archivator 13y ago
  As soon as I saw the title, I knew Nick Bostrom would be involved. And therein lies chaos. First, to clarify something from the article - Bostrom's "posthuman" civilization is not strictly about the singularity but about almost unbounded capabilities. Building computers out of planets would be within reach for such a civilization. Think Culture, not Neuromancer. The ratio of simulated people vs people in the actual universe was "addressed" in one of Bostrom's subsequent papers but in a completely ad hoc if-you-do-this-then-you-prove-my-point way. Here's some arguments against it - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Calculating_the_Probability_of_Simulation_with_the_Bostrom_Equation http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Calculating... All in all, the SimArg is a nice thought but it's so easy to poke holes without first becoming a posthuman civilization that it loses what little stability it might have had.
brudgers 13y ago
(podcast, about 15 minutes, from Philosophy Bites) Nick Bostrom on the simulation argument: http://philosophybites.com/2011/08/nick-bostrom-on-the-simulation-argument.html http://philosophybites.com/2011/08/nick-bostrom-on-the-simul...
reppic 13y ago
In case you ever wanted to read that article as a short story: http://qntm.org/responsibility http://qntm.org/responsibility
confluence 13y ago
I've come to the conclusion that the universe probably is a simulation (via the axioms provided by the simulation hypothesis). But it really doesn't matter either way now then does it? Whether or not we live in the "root" universe or one of the underlying simulations is really quite irrelevant to our daily lives as it is to the lives of simulated characters in video games. We can't do anything about it. Furthermore, since we are probably unable to change the simulation, we might as well accept it to be reality. Some might reply to this with the "Allegory of the Cave": > Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato's Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave I rebut this by stating that if we do happen to live in a simulation, then it is highly unlikely that we will ever be able to unchain ourselves from our shadow wall. Hence, we might as well go forward with the assumption that the shadow wall is in fact reality, because thinking otherwise would be a fairly pointless exercise (pragmatically).
redacted 13y ago
Put very well by Iain M. Banks in The Hydrogen Sonata, “Most problems, even seemingly really tricky ones, could be handled by simulations which happily modelled slippery concepts like public opinion or the likely reactions of alien societies by the appropriate use of some especially cunning and devious algorithms… nothing more processor-hungry than the right set of equations… But not always. Sometimes, if you were going to have any hope of getting useful answers, there really was no alternative to modelling the individuals themselves, at the sort of scale and level of complexity that mean they each had to exhibit some kind of discrete personality, and that was where the Problem kicked in. Once you’d created your population of realistically reacting and – in a necessary sense – cogitating individuals, you had – also in a sense – created life. The particular parts of whatever computational substrate you’d devoted to the problem now held beings; virtual beings capable of reacting so much like the back-in-reality beings they were modelling – because how else were they to do so convincingly without also hoping, suffering, rejoicing, caring, living and dreaming? By this reasoning, then, you couldn’t just turn off your virtual environment and the living, thinking creatures it contained at the completion of a run or when a simulation had reached the end of its useful life; that amounted to genocide.”
- mcintyre1994 13y ago
  That is really nicely put, but by that same logic is who/whatever is responsible for simulating us somewhat responsible for genocide caused by humans since they, by necessity, gave us free will? What about the extinction of the dinosaurs, assuming the asteroid theory? Perhaps it was necessary to their simulation for a large asteroid/comet to be able to hit Earth, but are they somewhat responsible for wiping out life? I guess these questions are very strongly parallel to those that can be asked about God, which is perhaps a better definition than computer for something that simulates our universe anyway.
  - thret 13y ago
    Not parallel, identical. The Judeo-Christian God only makes sense if the universe is a simulation and he designed it. The delightful thing about the simulation hypothesis is that it allows us to hope for some type of afterlife. Maybe we get to play a different level, or we get to play the same game again. Any fantasy we tell to children becomes possible.
UnfalseDesign 13y ago
Given that this is a simulation, it would meant that it is based on an actual reality with physics that either match or are limited below our own. Given the technology it would take to simulate life, the Designers would have to live in a reality where they have harnessed some form of energy. The question is how much energy would it take to simulate nearly seven billion people? Even if you didn't have to process those that were sleeping, that's still a lot of energy being consumed by the simulation. Either the Designers are using massive amounts of energy to run the simulation or they have a completely different set of physics and are running a simulation to test alternative physics.
- vidarh 13y ago
  Or they are not simulating nearly seven billion people. Or they are "cheating" a lot (most people aren't nearly as original as we like to think). Or they are simulating it at a massively reduced speed. Or all of the above.
fideloper 13y ago
What happens when we, the simulation, become advanced enough to run our own simulations? Yo dawg, I heard you like simulations...
tlarkworthy 13y ago
Quantum mechanics is a manifestation of lazy simulation. Decide states with a coin flip when necessary.
- coldcode 13y ago
  Dice rolls per Einstein.
NAFV_P 13y ago
I swallowed the bitter red pill, to realise we all exist in a simulation, written in javascript by some spotty 14 year old.
snowwrestler 13y ago
It's possible that our universe is a simulation being run by intelligent beings in a more complex universe. It's not possible that our universe is a simulation of our universe by our descendents, because you cannot simulate a universe accurately within itself. It would be like saying that you can embed a 100k JPG losslessly within another, existing 100K JPG. You can't do it without discarding a lot of information. And the information would be missed fairly quickly because chaos theory shows that even perfectly deterministic systems can vary wildly over time based on very very small differences in initial conditions.
- deleted 13y ago
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- deleted 13y ago
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- icodestuff 13y ago
  Who says they're simulating it accurately?
a3voices 13y ago
If the universe is a simulation, and I'm conscious, why would they want to simulate such a boring person (me)?
nandeng 13y ago
Yes, and God is the developer and maintainer, who created this huge simulation program which contains bugs forcing him to kill processes constantly. That's why we do not have immortal life. He tried to fix bugs by using a debugger called Jesus but failed. He so desperately killed the debugger process and let the system keep running. Why God create this huge simulation? He want to post ads in this universe and he is using a datacenter to simulate user behavior!

52 points by Kinnard 13y ago

So if our Universe is a computer simulation, this might imply that the advanced civilization that created this simulation consists mainly of computer programmers. I like!

dspillett 13y ago

The real kicker of this idea is that one you accept it is possible that we are in a simulation, then it is much more likely that we actually are than that we are not.

randomafk 13y ago
How so? It's not so clear to me.
- dspillett 13y ago
  If it is possible to simulate a universe such as ours, and there definitely is a real universe somewhere (which is an entirely different can of philosophical worms) then it is most likely that there is more than one simulated universe being run in that real universe. In fact there could be a great many simulations running right now (either due to one civilisation at the relevant technological level running many simulations, many civilisations running one each, or many running many) and that multiplies up over the course of the real universe's remaining existence. We are either in the one real universe or one of the many simulated ones, so it is more likely that we are in one of the latter. Even if you consider the possibility of there being an infinite number of real universes this basic arithmetic still holds: for each real universe there is potentially a great many simulated ones. To compound it further: if the simulation is so detailed that it is possible for the simulated life to perform its own simulations, then each simulated universe may contain many more simulated realities. Turtles! All the way down! There will be a limit to how far this can go of course as each simulation must logically be simpler than the parent reality (caveat: some might question if that logic is true or just a limitation of our current knowledge about information theory) so the complexity of the real universe(s) will dictate how may levels of virtualisation we could potentially find ourselves within.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    I got into an argument with Kurzweil on his blog once years ago regarding the details. The simulation does not necessarily need to be simpler, subject to a few constraints: It needs to be possible to represent the simulation in less space than its containing universe. It also needs to be possible to execute the simulation in the available space/energy, but if acceptable it may be sufficient to be able to execute it at reduced speed which can substantially reduce the amount of matter/energy required at any one point as you'd be able to e.g. more aggressively apply compression etc. to the data. The space requirement can be fairly small depending on the constraints on your simulation. E.g. are you simulating a whole universe? A planet? One person? Everything not directly observed by a simulation subject can be aggressively pruned as long as it can be reconstructed in a believable state (unless you are trying to accurately simulate the physics of everything), and even things that are observed can be simplified dramatically. E.g. in almost all cases nobody would be able to tell a rough approximation of the physics and appearance of cloud formations from "the real thing", so you don't need to simulate them particle by particle. On the other hand, one such optimization/approximation then could be to fake the result of any attempt to run your own simulation. One thing I find interesting is that Bostrom talks about "ancestor simulations" a lot, but there's no reason to assume that if we're in a simulation it has to be a simulation of the past of whomever runs the simulation - it could be a game, or someone simulating aliens (to them), or it could even be a civilization that decided to create themselves a nice simulation to live in, or a "theme park"/"zoo".
    - dspillett 13y ago
      > or a "theme park"/"zoo" Or it could have been created in their offices, to make the job of maintinain a guide to galactic hitch-hiking easier to maintain.
dylangs1030 13y ago
How do you figure?
- antimagic 13y ago
  I can't answer for the GP, but my basic argument would be that you can probably expect any universe to produce multiple civilizations capable of creating universe simulators. As such the number of simulated universes will be a multiple of the number of universes, which means it's more likely that you find yourself in a simulation than in a real universe. It's worse than that of course because those simulated universes will end up simulating their own universes, and so on...

nodata 13y ago

Why does it matter if we are in a simulation or not?

dspillett 13y ago
It changes the whole "why do we exist at all" question completely. If we are inside a simulation we may never be able to see outside to the true nature of reality. Instead of being part of the an explanation for the big bang, black wholes could just be a bug. Inflation could simply be due to the people running the simulation wanting to skip that long drawn out expansion bit so they could study something else. Of course for our day to day lives it doesn't matter a jot. I still have to work to earn money to pay the mortgage, even if my job, my money, my house and the bank don't really exist in the real universe... Of course you could consider the simulation and the life within it to be equally real: I think I am thinking, therefore I quite possibly may be. This makes it even less relevant to those of us who are not philosophers or theoretical physicists.
lewispollard 13y ago
Why does anything matter at all?

erez 13y ago

Is the world a 3d hologram created by clustering of sub-microscopic, atomic units of matter perceived by translating photon transmission to electrical pulses? YES.

jasonkeene 13y ago

Simulacra.. not simulacrums.. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

thaumasiotes 13y ago

How does this question get so much more publicity than "Are you a brain in a vat?"? It's the exact same question!

stcredzero 13y ago
The vat handlers wrote that into the sim to mentally torture you.
chad_oliver 13y ago
If it's the same question, then what does it matter? It makes sense the the question which sounds 'coolest' is the one that get repeated.
Kinnard 13y ago
I think it's slightly different. You being a brain in a vat is a more solitary issue. The Universe being a simulation is more of a collective issue. Besides, you are a brain in a vat being fed signals through tubes . . .
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  Yes, I know people can be characterized as brains in vats. I used the terminology I did for a reason: http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/ There's one difference between the brain-in-a-vat question and the simulated-universe question: one, in theory, characterizes "you" as part of reality being deceived, and the other characterizes "you" as not part of "reality". But those are just words; they don't even have consequences within the hypothetical. Literally everything else that can be said about one can be said about the other. They're both impossible to gather evidence for or against, and they both (relatedly) have no ramifications either way. If you think there's any merit in positivism, then the only possible response is "that's a stupid question". A question for which evidence cannot be gathered one way or the other is meaningless.
chriswarbo 13y ago
The questions aren't exactly the same. For example, we can imagine characterising our whole universe as a set of physical laws plus some initial conditions, and maybe a pseudo-random number generator. If we're given such a characterisation, we can write a simulation trivially. In fact, a simulation is probably the simplest form of such a characterisation. Hence, all we need is a computer (for example, SK calculus) and this relatively-simple simulation program (so simple that it could be a Boltzmann fluctuation). We don't necessarily need time to run the computation, since that would imply some kind of "outside universe", when it might be the case that computation can exist all by itself. From a pure reductionist point of view, we've removed unnecessary complexity and are left with just computation, which is nice and Platonic. The brain in a vat idea, on the other hand, requires brains, vats and all manner of other support structures (eg. energy, entropy, etc.) to exist as well as the brain in a vat. In which case, we basically require an "outside universe" which is very similar to the "inside universe", so reductionism says that we're adding complexity with such an argument, so it's unnecessary.

stcredzero 13y ago

I think it makes as much sense for us to call a device capable of simulating the universe a "computer" as it would be to think of a being who could create a universe a "person."

chriswarbo 13y ago
"person" doesn't have a formal mathematical definition. "computer" does, and anything simulating our universe must be at least as powerful as a computer, since our universe contains computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
- stcredzero 13y ago
  > "computer" does, and anything simulating our universe must be at least as powerful as a computer Yes, but that strikes me as about as useful as noting how many genes human beings have in common with yeast. (Useful in some contexts, but not all.)
  - chriswarbo 13y ago
    Not at all. The point is not how amazing such a universe simulator must be, the point is that a universe simulator isn't amazing. The point of the Church-Turing thesis is that everything that ever was, is or will be; every supernova, every human mind, every intergalactic alien empire, every technology that ever can be, is no more complex than ENIAC (given sufficient memory).

workbench 13y ago

Not this again

UnfalseDesign 13y ago

Where is the Universe's bug tracker. I have a few bugs I would like to report.

rikkus 13y ago

As an impartial outsider, unaffected by the simulation, I say no. I mean yes.

ck2 13y ago

If it's a simulation, why haven't we found any major bugs? I mean there are some very deep things in physics that we cannot explain yet but outright bugs in logic? So if it's a simulation, it's the best code ever or someone is patching the historical logs when a bug is fixed.

Kinnard 13y ago
How would you define a bug?
- vidarh 13y ago
  And how would you know about it? If we are in a simulation, then it is not a given that the simulation does not get "rolled back" and restarted from an earlier point regularly, or just ditched and started all over again if/when bugs are found, just like a researcher will empty and clean his petri dish when he notices contamination that'll ruin his research.
- UnfalseDesign 13y ago
  True. In order to know something is not running correctly, you would need a clear concept of what it would look like if it were running correctly. (The old argument that if you were raised in a cave in total darkness, you can't know it is dark unless you know what light is.) In order to notice a bug, we would need to be outside the simulation.
- stef25 13y ago
  Maybe we are the bug. A while back this guy discovered that his Quake bots that had been running for 4 years found the perfect strategy to survival, which was to stop fighting. In contrast, look at what humanity is doing. Assuming the purpose of life is not to self destruct then we most certainly have a bug in our system. Whoever wrote Quake wrote better code than "God".
  - telephonetemp 13y ago
    > A while back this guy discovered that his Quake bots that had been running for 4 years found the perfect strategy to survival, which was to stop fighting. That sounds fascinating but also a bit hard to believe. Can you give a link to that story?

6ren 13y ago

It's a cute argument, based on the number of universe simulations - if there are heaps of them, the odds are ours is one. But this argument misses something - what about the number of people being simulated? If there are many more than actual people, the same argument applies. You are likely simulated. But, you may object, if you simulate a person, don't you need to simulate a universe? Well, yes, but only the bits the person can see. Like in a fps, it doesn't render the entire world from every possible perspective - just one. Much easier (and, dare I say it, more likely than simulating an entire universe). This is just Descartes systematically deceiving demon + how many there are. A second objection is that it would be more efficient to share the same world across many simulated people. This might be true, but the underlying question remains: to determine how likely you are simulated, we need to consider the simulated vs real people ratio, not the simulated vs real universes. PS: If we're going all Vishnu's dream, all bets are off. Why should it in anyway be bound by the observations we have gathered? For example, why assume the simulation must be finite - any justification that we can generalise from our own observations is parochial and anthropocentric. Of course, it is simpler to imagine (and probably, to do), if it's a simulation of the actual universe. So let's use the argument again: of all the simulated universes, how many will be of the true universe, and how many will be bizarre variations (which ours would be)? Of course, we cannot hope to estimate these probabilities for an arbitrarily different parent universe - even less so than to predict what that parent universe would be like! But it seems pointless to simulate an exact copy... for us, iteration-like variations, or of fiction seem more likely.

archivator 13y ago
As soon as I saw the title, I knew Nick Bostrom would be involved. And therein lies chaos. First, to clarify something from the article - Bostrom's "posthuman" civilization is not strictly about the singularity but about almost unbounded capabilities. Building computers out of planets would be within reach for such a civilization. Think Culture, not Neuromancer. The ratio of simulated people vs people in the actual universe was "addressed" in one of Bostrom's subsequent papers but in a completely ad hoc if-you-do-this-then-you-prove-my-point way. Here's some arguments against it - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Calculating_the_Probability_of_Simulation_with_the_Bostrom_Equation http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Calculating... All in all, the SimArg is a nice thought but it's so easy to poke holes without first becoming a posthuman civilization that it loses what little stability it might have had.

brudgers 13y ago

(podcast, about 15 minutes, from Philosophy Bites) Nick Bostrom on the simulation argument: http://philosophybites.com/2011/08/nick-bostrom-on-the-simulation-argument.html http://philosophybites.com/2011/08/nick-bostrom-on-the-simul...

reppic 13y ago

In case you ever wanted to read that article as a short story: http://qntm.org/responsibility http://qntm.org/responsibility

confluence 13y ago

I've come to the conclusion that the universe probably is a simulation (via the axioms provided by the simulation hypothesis). But it really doesn't matter either way now then does it? Whether or not we live in the "root" universe or one of the underlying simulations is really quite irrelevant to our daily lives as it is to the lives of simulated characters in video games. We can't do anything about it. Furthermore, since we are probably unable to change the simulation, we might as well accept it to be reality. Some might reply to this with the "Allegory of the Cave": > Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato's Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave I rebut this by stating that if we do happen to live in a simulation, then it is highly unlikely that we will ever be able to unchain ourselves from our shadow wall. Hence, we might as well go forward with the assumption that the shadow wall is in fact reality, because thinking otherwise would be a fairly pointless exercise (pragmatically).

redacted 13y ago

Put very well by Iain M. Banks in The Hydrogen Sonata, “Most problems, even seemingly really tricky ones, could be handled by simulations which happily modelled slippery concepts like public opinion or the likely reactions of alien societies by the appropriate use of some especially cunning and devious algorithms… nothing more processor-hungry than the right set of equations… But not always. Sometimes, if you were going to have any hope of getting useful answers, there really was no alternative to modelling the individuals themselves, at the sort of scale and level of complexity that mean they each had to exhibit some kind of discrete personality, and that was where the Problem kicked in. Once you’d created your population of realistically reacting and – in a necessary sense – cogitating individuals, you had – also in a sense – created life. The particular parts of whatever computational substrate you’d devoted to the problem now held beings; virtual beings capable of reacting so much like the back-in-reality beings they were modelling – because how else were they to do so convincingly without also hoping, suffering, rejoicing, caring, living and dreaming? By this reasoning, then, you couldn’t just turn off your virtual environment and the living, thinking creatures it contained at the completion of a run or when a simulation had reached the end of its useful life; that amounted to genocide.”

mcintyre1994 13y ago
That is really nicely put, but by that same logic is who/whatever is responsible for simulating us somewhat responsible for genocide caused by humans since they, by necessity, gave us free will? What about the extinction of the dinosaurs, assuming the asteroid theory? Perhaps it was necessary to their simulation for a large asteroid/comet to be able to hit Earth, but are they somewhat responsible for wiping out life? I guess these questions are very strongly parallel to those that can be asked about God, which is perhaps a better definition than computer for something that simulates our universe anyway.
- thret 13y ago
  Not parallel, identical. The Judeo-Christian God only makes sense if the universe is a simulation and he designed it. The delightful thing about the simulation hypothesis is that it allows us to hope for some type of afterlife. Maybe we get to play a different level, or we get to play the same game again. Any fantasy we tell to children becomes possible.

UnfalseDesign 13y ago

Given that this is a simulation, it would meant that it is based on an actual reality with physics that either match or are limited below our own. Given the technology it would take to simulate life, the Designers would have to live in a reality where they have harnessed some form of energy. The question is how much energy would it take to simulate nearly seven billion people? Even if you didn't have to process those that were sleeping, that's still a lot of energy being consumed by the simulation. Either the Designers are using massive amounts of energy to run the simulation or they have a completely different set of physics and are running a simulation to test alternative physics.

vidarh 13y ago
Or they are not simulating nearly seven billion people. Or they are "cheating" a lot (most people aren't nearly as original as we like to think). Or they are simulating it at a massively reduced speed. Or all of the above.

fideloper 13y ago

What happens when we, the simulation, become advanced enough to run our own simulations? Yo dawg, I heard you like simulations...

tlarkworthy 13y ago

Quantum mechanics is a manifestation of lazy simulation. Decide states with a coin flip when necessary.

coldcode 13y ago
Dice rolls per Einstein.

NAFV_P 13y ago

I swallowed the bitter red pill, to realise we all exist in a simulation, written in javascript by some spotty 14 year old.

snowwrestler 13y ago

It's possible that our universe is a simulation being run by intelligent beings in a more complex universe. It's not possible that our universe is a simulation of our universe by our descendents, because you cannot simulate a universe accurately within itself. It would be like saying that you can embed a 100k JPG losslessly within another, existing 100K JPG. You can't do it without discarding a lot of information. And the information would be missed fairly quickly because chaos theory shows that even perfectly deterministic systems can vary wildly over time based on very very small differences in initial conditions.

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icodestuff 13y ago
Who says they're simulating it accurately?

a3voices 13y ago

If the universe is a simulation, and I'm conscious, why would they want to simulate such a boring person (me)?

nandeng 13y ago

Yes, and God is the developer and maintainer, who created this huge simulation program which contains bugs forcing him to kill processes constantly. That's why we do not have immortal life. He tried to fix bugs by using a debugger called Jesus but failed. He so desperately killed the debugger process and let the system keep running. Why God create this huge simulation? He want to post ads in this universe and he is using a datacenter to simulate user behavior!