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> But, why must we say such anomalies lead to "we are living in a simulation"? That is not the main argument that we are living in a simulation. The main argum

> But, why must we say such anomalies lead to "we are living in a simulation"? That is not the main argument that we are living in a simulation. The main argument is the following disjunction (from wikipedia). Either: * human civilization is unlikely to reach a level of technological maturity capable of producing simulated realities, or * a comparable civilization reaching this technological status will likely not produce a many simulated realities for any of a number of reasons, such as, diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc., or * any entities with our general set of experiences are almost certainly living in a simulation. Personally I think the biggest prima facie weakness in this argument is that while we will probably reach a point where simulating a human mind is feasible, and we will probably do so when that time comes, it may take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person. Thus, any recursive simulations would get smaller and smaller in terms of the number of thinking entities in them.

nikbackm 13y ago
> it may take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person It might be sufficient to simulate one person. The rest of the universe (including all other humans) just serve as inputs in the simulation.
- mistercow 13y ago
  If each simulated universe can only contain one actual person, then the simulation argument doesn't hold up, since the vast majority of people would still be living outside of simulations.
platz 13y ago
The main argument as you state it doesn't describe any relation with (nor does it mention) the actual measurements performed. I think it's fine to consider such an argument in it's own right. Where I take issue is the subsequent attempt at validation of the conjecture, with the previously mentioned physical experiment.
mistercow 13y ago
I would say it probably doesn't take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person. We're each doing it right now with a glob of meat the size of a grapefruit, and that's just what evolution was able to come up with. So simulating a universe where minds are a low-level primitive, and everything else is simulated lazily and using lots of shortcuts is reasonably plausible. But that's not the kind of world we find ourselves in. Our minds appear to be constructed of the same stuff as the rest of the world. If we're to accept the simulation argument, then our definition of "simulated reality" must imply a physics implementation that is high enough fidelity to support minds as high level structures - you have to actually be able to build compact working brains in the simulation. Alternatively, we'd have to suppose that a brain is actually just a very convincing facade, usually sitting inert until someone observes it, at which point it reflects the inner workings of the person's mind at whatever level of detail is necessary to convince the observer that it is the mechanism behind the mind. Both of these seem far less plausible.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  > But that's not the kind of world we find ourselves in. Our minds appear to be constructed of the same stuff as the rest of the world. If we're to accept the simulation argument, then our definition of "simulated reality" must imply a physics implementation that is high enough fidelity to support minds as high level structures - you have to actually be able to build compact working brains in the simulation. Devils advocate, but there could simply be level-of-detail heuristics, where the mind is explainable in terms of physics, but not implemented that way (unless you look). Similarly, for people who take damage to their brains, the model for that person's new brain could simply be derived during that simulation step and substituted. That's just a high level view of how a lazy simulation could still produce minds that appear to by implemented using physics.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    That's what I was saying in the "Alternatively, ..." part. But this does suggest an avenue of testing the simulation hypothesis that might be more useful than looking at purely physical anomalies. The physics engine might be simplified, but edge cases will likely be subtle and difficult to distinguish from gaps in our theories of physics. But if the simulation is using heuristics to gauge whether a brain is being observed, and making it correlate to the mind primitive backing it as needed, then we should eventually be able to construct scenarios where those heuristics are wildly inaccurate. If we could, for example, trick the simulation into presenting a completely inactive brain while its was conscious, that would be informative.
nitrogen 13y ago
Thus, any recursive simulations would get smaller and smaller in terms of the number of thinking entities in them. I'm glad this flaw in the simulation argument is well known. The simulation argument reminds me of Anselm's ontological argument in a way. I wonder if anyone has tried to create a set of "Laws of Simulation" analogous to the laws of thermodynamics, which would define a limit to how much pseudoreality can be simulated by a given amount of "true" reality.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Well, it's not so much a flaw as something that bears empirical testing, someday. If we find that we can easily simulate a perceptual volume of the universe in a relatively smaller amount of physical space, this part of the argument will be sound.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    You're right. I think "unstated, untested assumption" would be better than "flaw" in that context. If indeed it turns out that a simulation can be more compact in its host universe, then maybe everything really is a simulation, and it's simulations all the way down to infinity. But this would defy my intuitive sense of the nature of reality (derived from things like the conservation of matter and energy, and the geometric idea that four inches of space won't fit within three inches of space), and would effectively allow infinite computation within a finite space.
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Well, I'm fairly certain that what we know about physics so far bars 1:1 simulation of this universe at 1:1 speed using anything less than all the atoms in this universe (not much of a simulation then, eh?) But we might be able to devise a simpler physics that still supports intelligent life. :)
      - rbanffy 13y ago
        You could make some approximations. That's pretty much the core of the argument. It's somewhat implicit that the true nature of the containing universe is not granular like ours.
Archaeoculus 13y ago
>it may take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person I don't understand much of what's going on here, but couldn't it possibly take virtually no computational mass in order to simulate a person? I mean, if you tie the whole system together such that if you simply switch the smallest of switches from 0 to 1 that sends out desired changes rippling out through the rest of the system, it wouldn't matter how much mass it took. Why does it have to take a lot of mass to simulate a person - does what's outside necessarily have to be more complex than what's on the inside?

nikbackm 13y ago

> it may take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person It might be sufficient to simulate one person. The rest of the universe (including all other humans) just serve as inputs in the simulation.

mistercow 13y ago
If each simulated universe can only contain one actual person, then the simulation argument doesn't hold up, since the vast majority of people would still be living outside of simulations.

platz 13y ago

The main argument as you state it doesn't describe any relation with (nor does it mention) the actual measurements performed. I think it's fine to consider such an argument in it's own right. Where I take issue is the subsequent attempt at validation of the conjecture, with the previously mentioned physical experiment.

mistercow 13y ago

I would say it probably doesn't take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person. We're each doing it right now with a glob of meat the size of a grapefruit, and that's just what evolution was able to come up with. So simulating a universe where minds are a low-level primitive, and everything else is simulated lazily and using lots of shortcuts is reasonably plausible. But that's not the kind of world we find ourselves in. Our minds appear to be constructed of the same stuff as the rest of the world. If we're to accept the simulation argument, then our definition of "simulated reality" must imply a physics implementation that is high enough fidelity to support minds as high level structures - you have to actually be able to build compact working brains in the simulation. Alternatively, we'd have to suppose that a brain is actually just a very convincing facade, usually sitting inert until someone observes it, at which point it reflects the inner workings of the person's mind at whatever level of detail is necessary to convince the observer that it is the mechanism behind the mind. Both of these seem far less plausible.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
> But that's not the kind of world we find ourselves in. Our minds appear to be constructed of the same stuff as the rest of the world. If we're to accept the simulation argument, then our definition of "simulated reality" must imply a physics implementation that is high enough fidelity to support minds as high level structures - you have to actually be able to build compact working brains in the simulation. Devils advocate, but there could simply be level-of-detail heuristics, where the mind is explainable in terms of physics, but not implemented that way (unless you look). Similarly, for people who take damage to their brains, the model for that person's new brain could simply be derived during that simulation step and substituted. That's just a high level view of how a lazy simulation could still produce minds that appear to by implemented using physics.
- mistercow 13y ago
  That's what I was saying in the "Alternatively, ..." part. But this does suggest an avenue of testing the simulation hypothesis that might be more useful than looking at purely physical anomalies. The physics engine might be simplified, but edge cases will likely be subtle and difficult to distinguish from gaps in our theories of physics. But if the simulation is using heuristics to gauge whether a brain is being observed, and making it correlate to the mind primitive backing it as needed, then we should eventually be able to construct scenarios where those heuristics are wildly inaccurate. If we could, for example, trick the simulation into presenting a completely inactive brain while its was conscious, that would be informative.

nitrogen 13y ago

Thus, any recursive simulations would get smaller and smaller in terms of the number of thinking entities in them. I'm glad this flaw in the simulation argument is well known. The simulation argument reminds me of Anselm's ontological argument in a way. I wonder if anyone has tried to create a set of "Laws of Simulation" analogous to the laws of thermodynamics, which would define a limit to how much pseudoreality can be simulated by a given amount of "true" reality.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
Well, it's not so much a flaw as something that bears empirical testing, someday. If we find that we can easily simulate a perceptual volume of the universe in a relatively smaller amount of physical space, this part of the argument will be sound.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  You're right. I think "unstated, untested assumption" would be better than "flaw" in that context. If indeed it turns out that a simulation can be more compact in its host universe, then maybe everything really is a simulation, and it's simulations all the way down to infinity. But this would defy my intuitive sense of the nature of reality (derived from things like the conservation of matter and energy, and the geometric idea that four inches of space won't fit within three inches of space), and would effectively allow infinite computation within a finite space.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Well, I'm fairly certain that what we know about physics so far bars 1:1 simulation of this universe at 1:1 speed using anything less than all the atoms in this universe (not much of a simulation then, eh?) But we might be able to devise a simpler physics that still supports intelligent life. :)
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      You could make some approximations. That's pretty much the core of the argument. It's somewhat implicit that the true nature of the containing universe is not granular like ours.

Archaeoculus 13y ago

>it may take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person I don't understand much of what's going on here, but couldn't it possibly take virtually no computational mass in order to simulate a person? I mean, if you tie the whole system together such that if you simply switch the smallest of switches from 0 to 1 that sends out desired changes rippling out through the rest of the system, it wouldn't matter how much mass it took. Why does it have to take a lot of mass to simulate a person - does what's outside necessarily have to be more complex than what's on the inside?