51–60 of 285 posts
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Why does it need to be a complete simulation? At the extreme, it could be a simulation in which you alone are the only conscious entity. Nothing outside your immediate proximity is simulated.
And it only needs to be simulated convincingly enough and in enough detail to fool your human mind.
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If you have a way to find discrepancies between a simulation and reality, why do you need the simulation anymore? I don't buy it. Even simulating just the earth and its environs would probably require a computer as big as a galaxy worth of matter. There's just no conceivable payback that could ever be worth the costs.
You have to actually compute the simulated state and compare it to known bits of the past state to get the results. Yes, simulating Earth to sufficient precision might require resources of the Type III civilization. However, if something can be done, why shouldn't it be done? The payback is twofold, actually: First, you can get provide the meaningful afterlife to your ancestors. Secondly, once you have hardware and s…
Here's what I wrote in a comment here last year about the Bostrom simulation argument specifically: The simulation argument, going back to Bostrom, relies on two flaws. 1) It leverages our optimism to corrupt our understanding of statistics and logic. It essentially says that if you think humanity doesn't destroy itself, then our descendants will probably try to simulate us. But of course if you just take a statistic…
When you're talking about universe-scale simulations, I wouldn't be so confident in asserting what is or isn't possible.
Using our present level of scientific knowledge as if it somehow informs us as to the feasibility of universe simulation would be like paleolithic humans discussing the finer points of modern microprocessor architecture.
It's likely that time and space are both infinite, which would equate to infinite computational power. It's also possible that other universes may exist with physical laws completely alien to our own. I fail to see why our reality being a computer simulation is somehow far-fetched.
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> And ofc, if we are a simulation of a higher level's history, and the simulation is correct (to all necessary degrees), then we must be heading towards the sane point where we would render a simulation (unless the approximation fails to support it). Even if a universe-scale simulation is physically possible, why should we expect it to faithfully repeat the same sequence of events that happened in the "outer" univers…
I can answer the "why" question. Provided, our descendants will be able to empathize with their ancestors (rather big "if"), they can use the simulation to reverse the death and resurrect every person who ever lived. As for verifying the accuracy of the simulation, you only need information about the initial state of the universe (think CMB radiation) and partial information about past states of the universe to repro…
A single human body contains on the order of 10^27 atoms. If you just wanted to record the state of someone's mind, with sufficient fidelity to be worthy of the term "resurrection", you could probably get away with a coarser granularity. But you're talking about accurately simulating a chaotic system, which means you need extreme precision to prevent the simulation from diverging.
More to the point, it's unlikely that the information you're seeking still exists, even in principle. Think about Conway's Game of Life; the rules are injective, meaning many different initial states can lead to the same final state. An being who lived in the Game of Life would never be able to precisely reconstruct its history with any level of technology, because there would be an astronomical number of equally possible predecessor states. (As far as we know, our universe is continuous, not discrete, but the laws of thermodynamics have a similar effect.)
I had thought about this idea and came to the conclusion that if the full universe simulation is ever possible, it is highly likely that we are living in one right now. And the only way to prove it is possible, is to attempt to simulate one.
Your first sentence is precisely Bostrom's argument, which is pretty much the canonical argument for the simulation hypothesis.
But couldn't our universe be being simulated by a species far more advanced and discrete to anything the human race has ever encountered? How do we know that another form of life doesn't find everything that we find super complex extremely trivial ?
It all boils down to wether you think a superintelligent civilisation with superior understanding of the universe exists, and if they could do it... So Bostrom might be right in the end.
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To me, even if we ignore the God debate, there are some big problems with theories like these because they irreverently presuppose that everything including the human mind can be reduced to mechanical/mathematical principles. This ignores things like the problem of qualia (which I'm subjectively convinced is real), and the Penrose-Lucas argument for why there is a non-computational component to human consciousness.
The fact that it ignores two things that are controversial at best seems to not really be a problem... Qualia's existence is more or less unprovable given its definition, and there are numerous objections to the Penrose-Lucas argument. Using either as a basis for an argument is essentially the same as basing an argument in faith.
I think Chalmers tries to introduce a kind of dualism here - he's saying that human experience is something special, unlike other mechanical processes (which can only be mere p-zombies). I don't think it is a good idea to turn to dualism because it has been proven flawed and leads to philosophical conundrums.
I think current day philosophy doesn't properly appreciate the insights coming from AI. We have seen AI give amazing results in perception : images, sounds, video - it's no mystery any more. You just put 100 layers deep convolutional nets to solve the problem from data. Philosophers still talk like we don't know how perception works, or that it results in ontologically special qualia.
Another very important AI insight that is being ignored by contemporary philosophers is Reinforcement Learning. We have made great advances in intelligent behavior, and RL concepts (agent, environment, reward, and learning) are better suited for explaining human consciousness than traditional concepts such as free will, qualia and Chinese Rooms.
Wittgenstein's concept of language games is apparent in reinforcement learning. There has been a recent paper about agents evolving a new language by trying to solve a problem together. Also, language philosophy should take a look at word embeddings.
Maybe philosophy needs more grounding in AI.
The statement "we live in a simulation" is not falsifiable. For me this question is simply not interesting.
That's my take on it too. The history of physics has shown, though, that it pays in interesting ways to go through every crazy idea until it's actually refuted or understood to be wrong.
Here's what I wrote in a comment here last year about the Bostrom simulation argument specifically: The simulation argument, going back to Bostrom, relies on two flaws. 1) It leverages our optimism to corrupt our understanding of statistics and logic. It essentially says that if you think humanity doesn't destroy itself, then our descendants will probably try to simulate us. But of course if you just take a statistic…
But couldn't our universe be being simulated by a species far more advanced and discrete to anything the human race has ever encountered? How do we know that another form of life doesn't find everything that we find super complex extremely trivial ?
Therefore, it does not matter if this universe is a simulation, it behaves just the same and has the same uncertainties about the future attached to it.