You’re talking about alien civilizations in our universe. If our universe is a simulation, how can we use it to draw conclusions about the number of alien civilizations in the real universe?
Just to note, I’m agreeing with you here. I’d just like to add some other conclusions with you:
As for the ‘Logical’, we can’t also just assume true artificial intelligence is or can be a reality, in the same way our brains produce the profound nature of an I, or royally an us. There’s something at work in our minds and sense of self that is holistic and we don’t even have a good theory for how sapience or consciousness works.
So, imagining we are just programmed automatons is handwaving away this aspect we know to be a part of our reality and to ignore it doesn’t address these deeper issues with the whole concept. Whether or not QM says freewill is an illusion, the illusion or true freewill endures and must be accounted for.
As for the ‘Gut-Feeling’, my gut would proceed from the assertion that true AI is in fact a reality and if we are a simulation, the Big Bang could be proverbially seen as the programmer hitting ‘EXECUTE’ with his finger, holding HoloCoffee in his other hand, sipping it carefully as his simulation of our universe crunches its 10^80 bits or so, on one HELL of a CPU/GPU to suss out from fundamental variables the formation we see today.
For all he knew, it might be a cosmological simulation for pure academia, his thesis or his version of the Nobel Prize, and the fact artificial intelligent life emerged from the simulation could be a complete surprise, be evidence for his hypothesis, fully expected but either found or not found amongst the galaxies of information, etc.
If something akin to that is the case, it can explain why a Universe Simulator would be run without cutting all the fat we see in our cosmos.
I think what the general argument is here, is that if simulating a universe IS possible AND inevitable amongst sufficiently advanced civilizations, then the chances of you being a true denizen in the Real, Daddy Universe is infinitesimally small.
Indeed, we could well be an emulation, within an emulation, within an emulation to the nth degree within the Daddy Universe.
We’re talking crazy, scary, big numbers and power here, but fuck… we are here. Where ever here is.
This might also mean that blackholes are where the Great Programmer hit “command-Z”.
But assumption number 1 (of two) in the OP was “There are, or were other intelligent alien civilizations”.
From this two possible conclusions are imagined: effectively, either those aliens have created universe simulations or they haven’t. It’s clearly an attempt to draw conclusions about a proposed “real” universe using “evidence” from our universe.
It appears to be a similar cycle of logic, based on faulty assumptions and biases, that is used by people who genuinely think they can reason their way into proving the existence of God.
Precisely. Likewise, either there is a God or there isn’t.
However this particular “faith” does nothing to attempt to resolve any First Cause, which many religions and/or faiths do.
This merely proposes that if it is possible and inevitable, chances are, we’re a sim.
Nah, just where they commented out the print stts for debug.
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Bostrom’s argument is an either/or; either we are in a simulation or we aren’t. The argument against a simulation is that advanced civilisations do not, for some reason, build simulations, perhaps for the simple reason that they do not exist. That is fine, and supported by what we see in the sky; a universe full of advanced simulations might be expected to be full of Matrioshka Brains, each busily running untold trillons of simulations. We don’t see that.
But of course in a simulated universe the simulators could model all the stars as being free of computational substrate. So that particular observation means nothing. Note, however that this would work as a solution to the Fermi Paradox (and is included in several recent lists of such solutions).
Most versions of the simulism hypothesis have it that they do not really simulate every particle of a universe. They just simulate enough to perform whatever function the simulation is for and/or fool any sentient beings living within.
Sentient life being just an emergent feature is difficult to square with that. As is my bedroom habits being unimportant to the simulation.
If we’re talking about genuinely simulating the properties of every particle at every planck time…that’s a somewhat different hypothesis, and I would have different reasons for rejecting it.
This reminds me of why I became a Christian. You see, I realized that with the size of the universe there must be billions of Alien civilizations. Given that number, there must be at least a few million with god like powers. So out of that few million you got to figure at least one of those millions is kind of like the Christian god. Therefore, the Christian god is real.
Prove me wrong people, prove me wrong!
It gets interesting when you figure God into the equation. God might be considered to be congruent with the simulating entity or entities, since the simulator has exactly the same sort of control over fate and reality as most conceptions of a deity. Whereas the simulating entity or entities would presumably live in a completely separate continuum, one which itself may or may not be a simulation. There could be an infinite regression of such simulations, each bigger than the one before; some of them including entities which appear consistent with the Abrahamic god. Any number of those gods might consider themselves to be the prime cause, but they would be wrong.
Which is fine. I’ve only taken a cursory look at the idea myself. I find it intriguing but far-fetched beyond belief.
Assuming then, we are talking about genuinely simulating every particle, how would your reasoning differ?
Well at that point we’re talking about the computer running the simulation needing to be universe-sized.
We’re used to the idea that, say, a laptop could simulate a planetary orbit, but of course such algorithms are models of what is happening, they don’t actually simulate the quantum state of every particle, which would require at least as many particles to do.
A counter-argument to this would be that there are patterns in nature; you don’t need to actually compute every bit of data, it can be compressed.
I don’t know enough about information theory, or the laws of our universe, to fully evaluate that, but it would be an extra assumption in the simulist argument.
Also, I would still consider it a kind of “faked” simulation, as the sentient beings in such a universe would still need to be fed fake data when they use an electron microscope.
Fair enough, and certainly addresses the technical ramifications.
But say, perhaps the real universe, of which ours is being simulated within, is exponentially bigger than ours by a factor of 100. And these beings decide its worth the effort or space to run a simulation of a universe with different fundamental variables then their own. Maybe even many times over, across many simulations. That’s how big their sandbox is.
I realize, again, this is in the domain of Big, Crazy! Scary Numbers and Power, yet either it could be, or it can’t.
Take for instance using voxels to do fluid dynamics simulations. There are algorithms and other techniques to create approximate sims of such things, but if you correctly model the very quantum foam, you need not program all these very complex laws of nature of their own accord. They would arise systemically out of the simulation, along with other novel and perhaps unpredictable outcomes—such as life itself.
This would be a reason for attempting a “Big Bang” Simulation from the bottom-up, rather than just running a bunch of algorithms to model those you’ve cherry-picked and optimized for your own universe from the top-down.
True, but with any hypothesis, once we start having to stack ad hoc assertions, it starts to get a bad smell.
I’m not trying to be dismissive of the whole notion. I’m actually quite interested in virtual worlds, and how we define reality. I think it’s inevitable that humans will spend most of their time in VR; living and working.
(And, while there are plenty of reasons for apprehension, I think it will herald a vast leap in quality of life).
But Simulism doesn’t seem as reasonable to me as it does to proponents for the reasons given. Whether it’s a “smoke and mirrors” universe or a true low-level simulation, both hypotheses have issues.
This pretty much hits the Achilles Heel of the argument. Even if you assume the two premises are true, you are basing that truth on a potentially simulated world, so they don’t apply to the “real” world in which these simulations are embedded.
One could argue that “simulated” means “a true copy of all relevant aspects of the real world”, but that is a third premise, and one that is much harder to justify