Ed Fredkin talked to my class at MIT in 1973. He was a proponent of simulation theory even back then. He said that perhaps miracles were examples of bugs in the simulation, and the reason that we have fewer miracles these days was that the simulation had been debugged.
He also made the wild and crazy prediction that some day the prices of memory would fall all the way down to a penny a bit.
I guess you might as well. I mean am I not God to the Simcity Sims I watch over?
People seem to be postulating that the “simulation” is being run by beings more or less like us, in a universe more or less that’s ours, using technology that we imagine to be similar to something out of Black Mirror, The Matrix, Star Trek, or Ready Player One. The assumption also seems to be that your brain and memories are not part of the simulation nor can they be altered by it.
I guess my point is that if you believe you are in a simulation, in the sense that someone or something has manufactured a reality for you to live in, how can you take anything you think you know about that reality for granted? Immediately everything becomes suspect.
And as you scale up the size of the “simulation” (i.e is it just you in here, hundreds or thousands of people, the Earth or our known Universe?) Philosophically, it also begs into question at one point is it no longer a “simulation” and that’s just how “reality” is?
[quote=“msmith537, post:222, topic:924042”]
People seem to be postulating that the “simulation” is being run by beings more or less like us, in a universe more or less that’s ours, using technology that we imagine to be similar to something out of Black Mirror, The Matrix, Star Trek, or Ready Player One. The assumption also seems to be that your brain and memories are not part of the simulation nor can they be altered by it.
I guess my point is that if you believe you are in a simulation, in the sense that someone or something has manufactured a reality for you to live in, how can you take anything you think you know about that reality for granted? Immediately everything becomes suspect.[/quote]
Nah, from my POV at least, when I kick around things like “maybe our simulation is a buggy or broken pirated version!” it’s mostly for humorous purposes, as analogies to what we have in our world.
Though on a serious note, there certainly are proponents of “simulation within a simulation” theories. After all, the argument that we are living in a simulation is based on the observation that simulations are cheap and easy to run in large scale, which observation is in turn based on our own “real world” technology reaching or approaching that point. So yeah, it could be “simulations all the way down!”
In any case, it does not or should not cause any kind of existential crisis in the way one lives one’s daily or normal life. Life as you know it is still the same as it ever was. It is an untestable and unverifiable theory, but one that addresses a lot of the Big Questions that religions tend to try to answer: why are we here, why does the Universe exist at all, where did it come from, is there a Big Purpose To It All, who is or are the agents of that Purpose and are they collaborative or at cross-purposes, and is there an End Game?
All previous generations of people have been born, wondered about these Big Questions, came to some conclusion about them (including shrugging and saying “I’ll find out when I get there, I guess, or not”), maybe changed those conclusions a few times, and then died. Why are we any different just because our technology has given us a new angle to look at them from?
If we’re living in a simulation, then that simulation must have been created by a being or beings far more advanced than us. So advanced that we might believe it/they are God-like.
And what does God need with a computer game?
What does he need with a universe?
I dunno. What do we need with simulation computer games? As a distraction from a reality we’d like to escape from? Or to play with things we’d like to see different about ourselves or around ourselves?
I’m pretty sure that nobody is postulating that we are people from outside the simulation who are playing the simulation like a video game. Such a person would inevitably remember their time in the ‘real world’, after all, and we don’t.
Well, I wasn’t postulating that, but now you come to mention it, perhaps that is a possibility. Human brains/minds have a mechanism that allows us to suspend disbelief while we are dreaming, and also allows us to forget most or all of the contents of our dreams. I suspect it would be possible at some point in the future to control and direct our dreams, so that we temporarily believe in counterfactual events and past histories.
Whatever mechanisms in our brains that allow us to dream without constantly thinking “No, this isn’t real” might also be available for outside manipulation.
Sure, sometimes we realise what is going on, and right in the middle of our dreams we think to ourselves ‘this isn’t real’; but for most of us, these ‘waking dreams’ are the exception. Once we have advanced brain-computer interfaces this sort of manipulation might be possible and as commonplace as smartphones. Some people would probably prefer to live in such a dream, especially if the real future itself turns out to be intrinsically boring.
That would provide an obvious justification for running the simulation - it’s a computer game. It also would grant us the ability to be neglectful in our simulation of unimportant areas like Alpha Centauri and France and the inside of your dryer (socknum error = ±1), but unfortunately would also require the whole thing to operate in real time, relative to the player.
If the beings in Sim City were self aware and had discovered logic, you might find them figuring out that they lived in a simulation due to the discrepancies you no doubt introduce.
The only thing I’m assuming is the simulation is in some way computational, and thus complex. It is the complexity (and energy usage) which is the issue. The “computer” doing the simulation could be build from logic gates, biological components or Legos. Makes no difference. And I’m certainly not assuming my brain isn’t being simulated.
At a certain level simulation theory is indistinguishable from brain in a jar. The difference is that advocates say that we being a simulation is not just possible but probable due to simulators all the way down. My point is that simulators all the way down lead to some big problems, and is thus not likely.
No one can prove we’re not brains in a jar. My negative reaction is suffering through a Theory of Knowledge class in college infested with two guys who brought this up all the damn time. If I were the professor their brains would have wound up literally in jars.
That’s quite an incorrect observation. When I worked at Sun we had a room with something like 10,000 CPUs running simulations 24/7. They weren’t simulating a universe, they were simulating a microprocessor and if in a few months of run time they simulated the processor running for the total of an hour I’d be surprised.
So neither cheap nor easy to run.
Sure an advanced civilization would have faster computers, but that’s not going to eliminate the complexity problem.
OK, I was exaggerating the statement of “approaching” the ability to run universe level simulations, obviously. The whole premise of the hypothesis is that one could imagine the technology (both hardware and software) existing along a finite path of progression from what we already know is possible, to something that could do so.
At the same time, remember, we aren’t talking the ability to simulate the complexity of our own universe. Just as the 1990 Sim City game simulated only certain specific aspects of building a city over time, any given simulation is going to be modeling a finite set of parameters as input defined by its creators, which surely would be a subset of parameters actually experienced by those creators.
And for constructs that exist completely within the boundaries of that simulation, we would not really know “we should have more parameters than this, don’t you think?”. At best, only suspect.
And if there were “simulation within a simulation” nesting going on, each layer could be said to experience “signal degradation” as parameters are reduced in number, approximated heuristically, or even filled in with arbitrary fixed constant assumptions for things that would otherwise be variable in the original universe.
I dunno, things like the speed of light, maybe that’s some developer’s kid’s birthday in a higher dimension, haha.
Ha.
ha?
Oh and yes of course, the simulation hypothesis is about as untestable as the brain in a jar hypothesis.
i just like it because as a computer programmer, it makes so much sense to think of inexplicable things not with mystical “God has a plan” type explanations, but ones i can personally relate to.
Like using “temporary” constants to plug in now with a comment about needing to hook up to another function or service layer later (“// TODO: lgtspeed API not stable, use 299792458 meters/sec (Gino’s Pizza)”
That’s the thing - if the simulation was for us, I’d expect a smaller and younger universe. Pretty much the same as those who say God created the universe for us. If that were so, the Sun would be among one of the first stars with planets with the right materials for life, not billions of years later. It would seem more likely that he created the universe for someone else and we just popped up given that a universe that creates one planet suitable for life would create many.
As a programmer (I’m one also) you know that no one ever paid you to write code that takes ten times as long to execute as it could. I don’t think that’s culturally specific.
I’m sure you’ve had people give you requirements that sound trivial to them but are really very hard to implement. As a simulation writer, that’s what the simulation hypothesis seems like to me.
Not so! It could also be that that aspect of the simulation is part of the “given parameters” - i.e., it has to match what happened in their original universe for verisimilitude.
As for not building something more expensive/complex than is necessary, why do you think the boundaries of our knowledge keep having more corner cases? As we understand atoms, we get quarks… As we see further into space beyond our Solar System, we discover strange new things… The more we learn about our own evolutionary past, the more surprises we find.
Sounds like “Just In Time” type generation, right? Or software patches/version upgrades with new features? Like when Newton figured out “classical” mechanics, quantum mechanics were added in to push the boundaries for our little simfolk scientists!
Or when bones of Denisovans or other prehistoric hominid ancestors are found in a cave in Russia or South Africa, not newly revealed caves but ones known to people for hundreds or thousands of years. How were they missed after all this time? Well, maybe they have been there for tens of thousands of years… Since they were patched in last week!
That reminds me of The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (the book, not the useless movie).
“It’s all so strange,” he concluded. “A wish comes into my head, and then something always happens that makes the wish come true. I haven’t made this up, you know. I wouldn’t be able to. I could never have invented all the different night plants in Perilin. Or the colors of Goab—or you! It’s all much more wonderful and real than anything I could have made up. But all the same, nothing is there until I’ve wished it.”
“That,” said the lion, “is because you’re carrying AURYN, the Gem.”
“But does all this exist only after I’ve wished it? Or was it all there before?”
“Both,” said Grograman.
“How can that be?” Bastian cried almost impatiently. “You’ve been here in Goab, the Desert of Colors, since heaven knows when. The room in your palace was waiting for me since the beginning of time. So, too, was the sword Sikanda. You told me so yourself.”
“That is true, master.”
“But I—I’ve only been in Fantastica since last night! So it can’t be true that all these things have existed only since I came here.”
“Master,” the lion replied calmly. “Didn’t you know that Fantastica is the land of stories? A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.”
“Then Perilin, too, must always have been there,” said the perplexed Bastian.
“Beginning at the moment when you gave it its name,” Grograman replied, “it has existed forever.”
“You mean that I created it?”
The lion was silent for a while. Then he said: “Only the Childlike Empress can tell you that. It is she who has given you everything.”
Remember, my objection is only to a simulation where we are the stars. If they start the simulation at t = 8 billion years, the consistency problems I mentioned before spring up. If they start at t = 0, they are basically on hold for 8 billion years. Not even DMV does that to me.
You are assuming the scale of time outside the simulation is anything like our own.
First, they should have been able to construct a self-consistent universe ending before quarks, or before strings if that turns out to be the right answer. These aren’t corner cases, they are different hierarchical levels. And you’d have to be careful that nothing in your simpler simulation contradicts things in your complex simulation. For instance, maybe you don’t have c being a constant before Einstein, but you had better not leave around any evidence of information propagating faster than c in the old universe.
Much easier to do it right the first time.
Our DNA is spaghetti code, but the laws of the universe don’t seem to be.
Simulations at the detailed level we’re talking about here are always slower than real time, never faster. Sure you can advance the timing wheel by whatever you want, but then you get all sorts of issues that we don’t see in our universe, simulated or not.
Now, one of our simulated hours might be one of their real weeks - in that sense of different time scales definitely.
An example: in high school I learned to program on this ancient LGP-21. In graduate school I did microprogramming on a Lockheed Sue mini, and wrote a simulator for it on a PDP-11. I wrote an emulator for the LGP21 which ran on the simulated model of the SUE which ran on the PDP-11 - and it ran faster than the original hardware. But it was a high level model - I didn’t simulate a lot of the internal hardware. That’s the kind of situation where you can run faster than reality.