All of which make me wonder, if we are living in a simulation, a holodeck, the matrix, what is the point of the simulation? Am I, or are you, a player character, or a part of the background of NPCs. What strategy should we be pursuing?
So far I’m trying to keep my life interesting and convoluted enough that the game keeps being played.
There’s nothing illogical about the simulation hypothesis. I take issue, though, with the idea that the simulation is specifically for us humans as you suggest with the game idea. Well, it could be an ancestor simulation run by us far in the future. But we could also just be in a truly huge physics simulator that is only running a set number of physical laws on the vast number of particles in the universe.
Thinking along these lines, I would guess that whoever is running the simulation does not know we exist due to the tiny tiny amount of matter, space, and energy we take up. Maybe if we make a big enough impact on the universe, it would show up on their computer screens and the simulators could then start interacting with us in what would literally be a god-like capacity.
I would guess finding a way to transmute one galaxy into antimatter and colliding it with a second ought to do the trick.
The first few reasons to simulate a universe would be:
To prove that abiogenesis is possible.
To develop true AI
More importantly, these two would be the leading reasons for developing a universe that seemed to be fully random. I.e. because the people writing the simulation don’t know how to go about accomplishing these tasks except by brute force recreation of the sort of chemistry and physical processes that lead to their own existence.
In a designed/game universe, most of the universe wouldn’t be empty, you wouldn’t see a normal curve when you looked at variations in nature, and you wouldn’t have quantum uncertainty. Human beings wouldn’t need complicated innards that actually function together–it’s much easier to just create a “dough” creature made out of some particular material that was consistent throughout and just happened to move like it had bones and joints and so on. You would expect much less space devoted to mundane things like potato farms, garbage dumps, or suburbia and more space devoted to regions where you could always enjoy yourself. The output of the sun would be static. Etc. etc.
That could be relative, though. In games we make, there’s still a certain amount of space devoted to potato farms - just usually less than in reality. So, maybe our simulators come from a universe with an even higher potato farm:person ratio, and this is the more-interesting version.
Plus, if you made people as dough-creatures, we wouldn’t explode as nicely. Someone out there put a lot of effort into our gibbing routines.
What’s so statistically odd about Roy Sullivan or Tsutomu Yamaguchi, anyway?
Personally, I think that the EPR paradox, and quantum mechanics’ violation of the Bell Inequality, is the strongest evidence for the simulation hypothesis. The violation of the Bell Inequality looks to me like exactly the sort of thing you’d get if the implementors decided that a sensible local-hidden-variable system was too difficult, and decided to fudge it instead on the notion that nobody would ever be able to tell the difference, anyway. It’s like 3D computer games where the computer doesn’t bother to render anything that’s out of sight of any players, and only draws the results the first time anyone sees it. Except that the implementors weren’t clever enough, and didn’t realize that it is possible to distinguish between our Universe and one based on local hidden variables.
Isn’t this idea basically countered by the same thing that counters solipsism? Occams Razor: for all intents and purposes the universe as we know it appears as if we are real and alive and not simulations, so there’s no real reason to assert otherwise.
If there were more computing power devoted to Grand Theft Auto, I’d be able to run through the apartment of one of those random people on the street. Now, I can’t, but I should be able to. Maybe Lobohan’s whole life is just - being, on the off chance that hotflungwok needs to steal his car.
You’re right, I ought to have said ‘outliers’, and their only point in this arguement is that they were brewing with the other issues. They make me think about those times in a game when you try to play in such a way as to explore the parameters of the game. Y’know, like swimming to the edge of the Liberty City space, or avoiding killing anyone in an FPS. I can see myself playing ‘Earth, Milky Way Galaxy’ and trying to get hit by lightning seven times.
Oh, yeah, it’s a solipsism, but the fact that it can’t be distinguished from the real world doesn’t make the question uninteresting. Besides, if you and I wake up from the game at the 9th dimensional equivalent of a LAN party, I’m gonna laugh.
Well sure, it’s very easy to code up a universe simulator by allowing random selection to do it. A version of Conway’s game of life ran on a terribly large field for highly immense periods of time could produce our universe (though perhaps a version limited to 2D?) That’s very easy to code up, but it doesn’t create something that would be obviously entertaining to an ordinary gamer.
…Assuming that my response matched what you said. Your tech lingo was beyond me.
I don’t think it actually qualifies as solipsism. It doesn’t after all claim that there is no real world; it just claims that we are wrong about it. Nor is a simulation really the same as an illusionary world that’s just the product of our imagination. A simulation does have an independent existence from us. Nor is the simulation hypothesis incompatible with the idea that other people are really there; independently conscious and not just illusion.
Occam’s Razor does mandate that we put it in the “interesting idea, but there’s no reason to believe it” pile. At least unless and until evidence for it appears; anything from some bugs in the system being discovered we can detect/manipulate, to giant fiery letters in the sky announcing “PROGRAM CONCLUDED. SYSTEM SHUTTING DOWN. AND NO, WE AREN’T SAVING YOU TO DISC.”
The universe wouldn’t appear any different if it was a simulation. There’s no question that we are “alive” by any meaningful definition of the word, even if we are simulations. In fact, there’s more than a few tough questions that disappear when you assume a simulated universe, like why is there something instead of nothing? Why does the universe have a resolution, or “pixel size”? Why are things unpredictable and seemingly random, on a quantum level? Why does the universe seem to spontaneously develop characteristics as those characteristics are observed? If quantum mechanics works the way Shroedinger taught us, the universe knows when it’s being watched, and doesn’t bother to resolve situations until we observe the resolution. Why would it do that? One explanation could be that collapsing the wavelength and resolving the conditions everywhere all the time would take an infinite amount of calculating power, but if the simulator only has to make those calculations when someone’s looking, it suddenly becomes finite.
I’ve also heard the argument that, if it’s at all possible to simulate a universe, then chances are pretty good that there are more simulated universes than real ones. In that case, the odds are against this universe being the ‘real’ one.
I think that the simulationist arguments are sufficiently compelling that I am somewhat surprised that they aren’t attracting more philosphical and theological attention than they seem to be. I certainly don’t thing that we definitely (or even probably) living in a simulation, but the whole concept seems to be to me one of the most interesting idea’s that very few people seem to talk about.
Of course the fact that they don’t often could be a very bad sign
I’m disappointed nobody has commented on my idea of attempting to gain the attention of our universe simulators via an extreme release of energy. Nobody else is looking forward to welcoming our new alien physics grad student overlords?
You’d be programmed not to. I imagine it would be rather like a dream state, where all sorts of weird stuff is happening, but you just take it all for granted.
Kind of like, if the brain were so simple we could understand it, we’d be so simple we couldn’t.
I figure you have to assume you’re a player, although I also wonder about top-or-the-world people like Bill Gates, or Beckham - are they players who’re doing very well, or are they bosses?
So far, my strategy has been to be as interesting as possible, in case I’m an NPC. If we’re PC’s the question remains: What is the purpose of the game? What is a win? What is the meaning of life.
The PC / NPC question also has ethical ramifications - if we’re all PC’s, a hell of a lot of people are playing the ‘starve in poverty’ game. Do I score by helping them? If only the lucky few are PC’s, then can you blow off the tribulations of the suffering masses as the manipulations of an AI?
