Anyone who has an interest in this subject should absolutely watch the 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate. The subject: Is the universe a simulation?
This article caught me eye today:
Remember, it is not necessary to fully simulate all of the complex interactions of outer space in real time all the time. It only has to be simulated when it is being observed. The rest of the time, the movements of the stars, the occasional supernova etc. can all be run with algorithms. Sort of like a massive virtual orrery. Most humans’ (or characters’) viewpoints would be from somewhere on earth, and so mostly only the earth would have to be simulated in detail. The number of active telescopes on earth at any one time is finite, and they are capable of, so far, limited resolution. There is no need to actually depict something in full detail unless someone is actually lookung at it. Even then, the computing power required for “looking at” something I expect is far less than the computing power required for “interacting with” something. It’s not as if each one of us was in a different galaxy with a fleet of starships and lots of complicated alien extras.
P:ersonally, I had a creeping suspicion that this reality may be a simulation; lately that suspicion is not so much creeping, as breathing down my neck. Think Plato’s Cave.
It doesn’t even have to be simulated; the observation itself can be simulated!
That is: the big simulation routine, that runs our brains, can just command us to believe we have observed, say, the moons of Jupiter. There isn’t any need for a routine, like an orrery, to model the moons of Jupiter, just an ephemeris listing of what people are supposed to see when they look.
Or, even nastier, an illusion of an illusion: our brains are told to “be satisfied that you saw something,” without our ever actually seeing it at all. The memory is as false as the world. You can tell your friends, “I was looking at the moons of Jupiter,” and believe it to be true, but you never even did.
Once you start down this rabbit hole, you fall through the center of the earth!
About 20 years ago the CEO of a successful Silicon Valley software startup was convinced that space aliens provided all the technology that went into microprocessors and VLSI. He wasn’t as rich as Musk, but not all successful businessmen are rational (cough cough). I was working at Intel at the time, and saw no space aliens anywhere. If they did give us the technology, they sure could have done a better job at getting it to work the first time.
But the more things that are faked like this, the more it affects the original premise.
Anything faked is not really part of the simulation; it’s just baked data fed in. So why is this simulation being run?
Are we just simulating human minds? Why? What’s so interesting about the biologically-evolved human brains of 2016 that are probably laughably crude compared to AI minds that the entities running the simulation could make instead?
(and massively-redundant…so much of the skills and knowledge of each mind is duplicated in other minds).
If the purpose of this world is as a playground or game it seems to be a extremely-poorly designed one: it’s a pretty mundane and predictable environment, with limited possibilities everywhere you look…
That’s what the simulation simulated.
Late to the thread. But the OP sorta nailed it. We might be a simulation. We’re probably not. It’s mental masturbation (at best) to think about it much beyond that.
The folks just up-thread who pointed out you don’t need to simulate the universe, just the observed parts while being observed inadvertently went all Earth-centric on us.
When our explorations of our simulation eventually uncover the other inhabited worlds suddenly the volume of stuff to simulate will explode. So odds are those things are already being simulated. For those other inhabitants of our universe. The observed-artifacts-only cheat heuristic doesn’t work.
My largest argument against this being a simulation is two-fold:
1: The observed characteristics of the universe are pretty subtle and pretty intricate. It’d be tough to do that right a priori. The Principle of Mediocrity runs smack up against the Anthropic Principle in trying to evaluate whether we’re in the 1 in 10[sup]1000[/sup] experimental universes whose parameter space didn’t collapse early in the game’s evolution.
2: A simulation inherently takes more processing power than the corresponding real world. IOW, virtual is less efficient. It takes more matter to build a memory to store the state of every molecule in that matter. Said the other way, the matter itself is a more concise form of storage.
Unless our observed simulated universe is a tiny, tiny 10[sup]-100[/sup] fraction of the “real” universe, it won’t work. As a matter of information theory, not a matter of our youthful primitive tech.
That seems … implausible.
Carrying that last idea farther along, the resource-lite way to run a simulation is to run the real thing. If you’re willing to accept the possibility our creators are advanced enough to build a simulator of us that we’re now experiencing, there’s no reason to not also believe they’re advanced enough to build a real universe to spec and set it in motion. Which we are now experiencing.
IOW, this universe is real, but it’s artificial.
Pretty soon it’s turtles all the way up and all the way down. While Occam’s Razor shouts “BS!!!” from the rooftops. Therefore this universe is THE Universe and it’s both real and not artificial.
Again, you are assuming “we” and not “you” with respect to the simulation.
As an interesting exercise, how big of a Truman Show set would most people need to live in before they hit the border of their “world”? Mine could easily be less than 10 miles incorporating Hoboken, Jersey City and lower Manhattan. AFAIK, when I occasionally drive to my in-laws or family beach house on Long Island, the car actually stays in place. The 4 hour “drive time” is just reloading a new map. Like an old videogame.
But as many have noted, most recently msmith537, you don’t need to simulate every molecule. Lots of molecules aren’t being observed right now. Vast portions of the Pacific Ocean could be blank right now, and, right here in my house, anything smaller than a tenth of a millimeter doesn’t have to be coded.
A decent PC-based flight simulator doesn’t need to account for every air molecule – or for air at all. It just simulates the characteristics of flight.
Okay, at the risk of looking like a looneytunes, and for the sake of some of you who find the more daunting part to be not so much the how, but the why, I’ll tell you my theory about it:
You remember that episode of ST:TNG where Picard interacts with a strange space beacon, falls unconscious, and ends up living an entire lifetime in his head? The idea of a future society simulating their ancestors for research or “because they can” doesn’t seem that likely to me…
but a simulated life in a created world for recreational purposes? I can see that. Maybe we’ll all wake up in an arcade somewhere in a world we can’t imagine now.
Hmm so this whole thing is to be simulated for the minds of simulated creatures for the amusement of whom?
An arcade? Why would an advanced civilization simulate 1985? I mean other than because it’s awesome.
Seriously though. “Recreational” would likely be a main, if not THE main reason for creating a simulated reality. How many games are out there now that create virtual open world sandboxes for people to play in? It’s not a difficult stretch to imagine creating one of those worlds several orders of magnitude larger and more detailed with an interface that is seamless enough that you might not know if you are in a virtual world or the real one.
A common theme throughout “simulated reality” media like Westworld, Inception, The Matrix, Dark City, The Truman Show, and so on is that it is impossible for the subjects of the simulation to understand the motivations and reasons of the simulators. Why would they be able to? They are only aware of the reality they’ve been presented with.
I mean people have a hard enough time grasping actual reality, let alone some hidden behind the scenes reality outside their view.
As msmith537 notes, how would we ever be able to know?
From our viewpoint, within the simulation, we can only make guesses on the basis of our understanding of reality.
One good reason to simulate a person’s mind would be to study mental illness. The sim could introduce various failures in cognition, and study – scientifically – how the subject reacts. We already do this, in real life, with accident and stroke victims, in an uncontrolled way: we study what happens to them when parts of their brains are damaged. We can also do controlled direct brain stimulation experiments.
The same could apply to a simulated society. Imagine how many advances we could make in sociology if we had access to two identical cities, and then could introduce only one difference between the two. (Say, bringing in a major sports team.) We could know that the resulting changes in the society are only caused by that one experimental change.