I think there are two ways of looking at it. One is that there is a physical space you occupy like a Truman Show, Dark City or Holodeck and the virtual world is created around you while some mechanism keeps you in bounds.
The other is that it’s all virtual. Like being in the Matrix, Incepted or a giant MMO game.
Either way, the virtual world needs to be modeled around you. For example:
I live in Hoboken NJ, a dense town 1 mile square, and I work in lower Manhattan. For all I know, Hoboken is one “map” and Manhattan is another. I take a ferry or PATH train so it would be easy to transition during my ride. When I’m in one city, I see the skyline of the other as part of the skybox.
90% of my life could conceivable be simulated within a bubble that ranges from Jersey City to the GW Bridge.
Whether Hoboken has actually been pulled off of the Earth and put in space or is just an elaborate Call of Duty map, I couldn’t say.
I would agree with that. At least in the sense that you believe you are real, which is good enough for me.
I’ve driven between New York and Texas on several occasions and when I’m traveling, I tend to improvise on my route. So you’d need a set as big as the eastern half of the United States.
Just in terms of continuous connected drives (not all at one time mind you)
I’ve driven or been driven, the entire length of I-90 from Boston to Washington and from there to Vancouver and from there by boat up to Glacier Bay AK. Then back through Canada to around Winnipeg through Minnesota back to Cleveland OH. I’ve also driven from Cleveland OH by I-80 to San Francisco then down to San Diego then back across the country mostly via I-70. From Cleveland by I-71, I-75 to the center of Florida. I’ve driven I-95 from about Jacksonville to the Canadian border.
So you’d need a fair amount of the US and Canada for me. I’ve been to many other parts of Canada, but those started by flights.
Assuming you have a real body, and you are wearing some kind of haptic simulation rig that allows you to feel things, then you would also need some kind of gimballed rig to simulate acceleration and movement.
Here’s a science-fiction concept I came up with a few years ago - a Simmball; this tilts your body to recreate acceleration and deceleration, as well as the sensations of lying down and standing up.
The simmball would be filled with mechanical pressure devices that can recreate the feel and the resistance of physical objects, even other people. This would constitute a primitive form of utility fog. You would have a screen around your face to simulate visual input - but this screen would need to be capable of admitting your hands, so that you could rub your eyes and touch your face and so on. The design of this semipermeable screen is one thing that makes the whole concept problematic. J Storrs Hall, the person who imagined the concept of utility fog suggests that these screens would be soft and made of modular materials that can emit light and move freely when required; this seems quite a demanding set of characteristics, and I wouldn’t expect this sort of technology to become convincing in the foreseeable future.
In that article about the ‘Simmball’ concept I also mentioned the difficulty of recreating tastes and smells; assuming you have a real body, but you are hooked up inside some kind of simulation rig or holodeck- how exactly does the simulation system handles smells and tastes? Do you have a first-class chef on hand to recreate Belgian waffles as well as hamburgers or potato chips?
And don’t even think about smells - have you smelled the artificial aromas you get inside a medieval-themed museum display? They are like nothing on Earth except themselves. It may be possible to simulate acceleration and attitude using a gimballed rig of some sort, but taste and smell (and food in general) would be a real problem.
Although you wouldn’t necessarily need as much detail between the cities. Some procedurally generated trees and whatnot along the highway. Some low LOD models for the landscape further out.
Maybe that’s why “everything tastes like chicken”?
I’m thinking the simulation would have to be some sort of direct connection to your brain feeding you virtual imagery. It just seems unlikely that one could build a physical contraption that a person wouldn’t realize they were inside. Unless maybe something like the holodeck where they could use teleportation technology to keep you in the center of the room.
I’d drive the world designers of my videogame nuts. I travel too much, mostly walking. I try all kinds of different restaurants and shops. (Come to think of it, procedural generation could probably explain stuff like the sameness of convenience stores, or the illogical contents of garage sales.)
If the people running the simulation wanted to be smart about it, they’d limit my world immediately. Frame me for a murder I didn’t commit. Subject me to a terrible accident so I’m stuck in a hospital. You know, tricks that save on design budget
While envisioning this, it’s worth noting that the current level of development of commercially-available virtual worlds is a long, long way from being able to provide such interaction.
Though we don’t understand the mechanism through which self-awareness is achieved, it’s reasonable to speculate that the machine-equivalent of neural complexity is relevant–in the biological world, more-complex neural networks are more likely to host self-awareness, than are less-complex ones.
Can we increase the capacity and complexity (both in hardware and software terms) of computers enough to achieve simulations that are difficult to distinguish from reality, without finding that those enhanced computers can now think for themselves? If we can’t create such complexity without also creating machine self-awareness, will we learn that the newly-created sapients don’t care to have us entertain ourselves with simulations?
Well, yeah. But we’re also a few days away from the solid-light holograms or continent-sized terrariums a Truman Show implementation would require, too. Regardless of approach we’re presuming that our controllers have a leg up on us technology-wise.
I’ve never been convinced that complexity on its own implies consciousness. (As opposed to “self-awareness”, which any computer with an internal temperature sensor technically has.)
If the system creating our environment does become conscious, I presume it would largely keep acting as it had been to date, since creating our environment would certainly be part of its raison d’être. Possibly with slightly more mysterious pool ladder removals as boredom sets in.
If we’re just brains in jars, then our own brains are probably nearly sufficient to hold the map detail. No resources are necessary to simulate the ceiling in my kitchen until such time as I focus my attention upon it, and then it looks like I expect it to, because it is being rendered from my memory of it. If I misremember what it looks like, that doesn’t matter because I still won’t be surprised by what I see.
There’s no need to store the detail of objects or their position outside of my own brain - When the need arises to show me my car keys, their appearance and location is all retrieved from my memory - and I see a familiar bunch of keys in the place I left them.
Of course, the human brain isn’t a perfect device and some memories are not retrieved perfectly on first try; that’s why your keys aren’t always where you expect them to be, and that’s why they sometimes turn up in a place you already looked.
Yeah, I’m with you on this one. The aliens don’t need half the US or whatever, just enough space/“obstacles” to keep me from bumping into the edge of the holodeck.
They have replicators, of course. And if I’ve been in the simulation all my life, I have no way of knowing that the Belgian waffles I’m eating now don’t taste like real (that is, non-replicated) Belgian waffles.
Replicators are difficult technology, even more difficult than the intangible VR goggles and gimballed simulation rig I described earlier. Which suggests that if we really are living in a simulation, the simulators have access to technology far in advance of today’s.
Seeing how ~99.99999999999% of the universe is lifeless, I don’t see why it would really matter. Any species that can create a simulation as advanced as our universe wouldn’t be overwhelmed by bugs on one planet surrounding one star. That’d be like being worried about the ability of a ps4 to simulate a blade of grass in a massive game. That’s be the least of the worries.
I’d assume the creative content is generated by us. Whether that is due to free will or just programming I don’t know.
It would certainly explain why there is a Starbucks, a bodega, a variety buffet run by Asians and a bar every other block in Manhattan. Or why you see the same cluster of chain restaurants every 10 miles when you drive across country.
There is no reason to assume the “real” world is anything like our “virtual” world. They are simulating 2017. The actual year could be closer to 3017 or 10017.
Alternatively they could be simulating on a ‘minumum viable product’ model - at first they only simulated a small patch of flat land, then expanded with DLC as the tribes on that land grew and spread, then at some point patched it to wrap the map around a globe so they didn’t have to worry about losing any more people off the edges. Then, later, as we started to fly higher and higher, they raised the sky sphere higher and higher while adding in ‘actual’ versions of the planets and such that had previously been mere moving images. At the moment a sphere just a little larger from the solar system would suffice - or a lot less large if they just let the probes crash into it and then simulated the data they should have been sending back after the impact.
It seems unlikely to me that if I were the only “real” person, or even one of a relatively small number of “real” people that there would be a vast army of people creating content just for my benefit. Unless perhaps they were so advanced that they can just have some AI generate A Song of Ice and Fire books. Although I would think it would not take 5 years to generate each one.
According to the ST:TNG Technical Manual, the holodeck also included a treadmill/scrolling-floor feature so that someone inside a simulation could determinedly be walking straight ahead forever but still never reach the wall.
Robert Heinlein’s 1941 short story “They” is an interesting solipsistic tale of someone who’s convinced he’s inside an alien simulation.
Yeah, that’s a good one. As I recall it’s a fair illustration of the concept of unfalsifiability, as well as of solipsistic (or “pantheistic solipsism” as the Wikipedia article has it) thinking.
