Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

scottaaronson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 285 posts

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#81

Post by Swizec »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #68
moxious wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be the case that we are being simulated by a far superior alien species. It could also be that invisible pink unicorns in the 15th dimension control all of our thoughts and only want us to believe this. Without being tongue in cheek, I'll observe that the empirical evidence for both of these ideas is equal in quantity. We don't know for sure that these things aren't true. But to ask that question is to inapp…

There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven, though different people have different interests. Questions about society and human nature are worth considering, for example, but it's difficult to do controlled experiments. There's some truth to "watch out for wishful thi…

The part where "is this a simulation" becomes an uninteresting question is when you ask "Does it matter?". Would answering the question of whether we're in a simulation have any impact on your behavior, thoughts, and actions? Probably not. So what does it matter?

My high school physics teacher once said that, if we ever find something that is outside the universe, then we will obviously be smart enough to call that the universe also. Because "universe" is a definition that means "everything".

Similarly, if we ever find a reality beyond reality, we'll just call it reality. Because that's how it's defined. It means "everything".

Or put another way: Of course we live in a simulation. Your experience of the world is just an emergent property of how your senses and neural system interact. There's no real reality. You're already trapped in a dark box doing fly-by-instruments using signals processing to interpret what your nervous system is detecting.

Is that not already a simulation anyway? Maybe not. Maybe it depends on how you define "you".

Fundamentally, would knowing that you're in a simulation change anything?

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#82

Post by egeozcan »

tazjin wrote: post #75

I experienced a series of extremely unlikely coincidences recently and one of my first thoughts was that if The Sims was a sufficiently advanced game I'd be doing those sorts of things to the characters.

I used to take writing lessons and the teacher always said that the coincidences only happen in real life, not in stories because that wouldn't be realistic.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#83

Post by js8 »

I don't understand why is simulation even necessary. Simulation argument says that our universe and consciousness is pretty much just some sort of mathematical structure, that is being manipulated according to some simple laws as it evolves through what we call time.

But then, isn't the only requirement for beings inside this structure to perceive it as such that the structure exists? Do you need to really physically manipulate it?

To put it differently, what if the designers of the simulation could come up with some theorem that would let them correctly skip hundreds of years of simulating something. Would beings in those hundreds of years still existed, even though it wasn't actually executed? What if they just calculated the final answer? Would we then exist?

So, to me, either this is nonsense, and we are not in simulation, or, any kind of mathematical structure that can possibly exist somehow "exists" and no "creator" is needed. But neither of those two options is a good argument for existence of simulation creator.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#84

Post by okket »

daveguy wrote: post #71
okket wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all we know, a hypothetical simulation must take part somewhere far below the atomic/quantum level, maybe around the Planck scale. Upwards from that we that we understand a lot of what happens through observation and derived theories. We have no evidence so far that anything or anyone has interfered with the rules above that level in the last 10+ billions years. Therefore, it does not matter if this universe is a…

> For all we know, a hypothetical simulation must take part somewhere far below the atomic/quantum level, maybe around the Planck scale. And the whole concept of "planck scale" could be simulated. When you get into the realm of "simulated universe" you may as well say "God did it". It requires equal levels of evidence for proof and provides the same level of evidence.

If something or someone is simulating this granular level, it has to go through quantum uncertainties to reach our observable macroscopic reality. From this point of view it is totally opaque and does not matter. Traditional simulation/god hypothesis usually work on the macroscopic scale, which is IMHO not compatible with our knowledge/observations.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#85

Post by mb_72 »

MrQuincle wrote: post #46
leni536 wrote: post #26

The statement "we live in a simulation" is not falsifiable. For me this question is simply not interesting.

It might help on an existential level. + In the space of all possible universes it is unlikely that we live in the most probable one, but it is likely that we live in a probable one. + When I feel existentially lost, I'd like to think that if we look deep into math we will see the necessity of our universe's existence. + Our universe is a probable sequence hidden like primes within natural numbers. It exists forever,…

Indeed; the 'simulation universe' possibility I find (oddly I know!) comforting, and this has provided me with a way of understanding to some degree the comfort offered by religion to many people, while at the same time I still can't understand the religious aspect itself.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#86

Post by Insanity »

I am not sure what to make of the whole universe-is-a-simulation argument. The problem is that, this is as far as I know, not an hypothesis we could ever hope to prove. Not any more than we can proof that a diety exists outside of this world.

I highly doubt that there is a higher creature, whether that would be a God of some kind, or a whole civilization outside of our universe that somehow simulates us.

But let's for entertainment suppose that we are in fact a simulation. Would that not immediatly raise the question "why"? If we are a simulation I would really like to know the reason for being simulated. What do they hope to reach with simulating a life like ours?

I fear we could never find a satisfactory answer to these questions. I also agree with the statement that this brings us back to a more mythological explanation of the universe and life around us. It'd make more sense to try and explain our universe without that hypothesis to me.

Another argument that I'd like to raise against the universe-simulation hypothesis is the following. Humans like to see the world around them in terms of the technology that, at that moment, is considered modern and which they like. For example, Freud compared the human brain to the steam engine, which at that point was modern technology. Today, we compare the brain to a computer, and we even go as far as to consider the whole universe might be similated in one. Maybe just because that is what we consider 'modern' at the moment?

In 1000 years from now, humans might think it's silly to think of the brain as a computer and rather think of it in terms of technology X, and the universe is technology Y.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#87

Post by NetMonkey »

rl3 wrote: post #53
snowwrestler wrote: post #6

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 it is impossible to completely simulate a system from inside that system--that's basic thermodynamics. 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 moder…

It seems far more likely that the universe is a computer game rather than a simulation. A simulation implies that it tries to simulate everything accurately - if it's a computer game, we can expect that the creators cheated in multiple ways to keep computations way down.

Obvious ways to cheat:

- Only the things you are directly experiencing and seeing is simulated to a high degree.

- If you ever came close to discovering the true state of the universe, the game might simply erase those thoughts or twists things to make them fit again.

- People who really study physics and have access to detecting whether the universe is a simulation are all NPCs :)

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#88

Post by deepnet »

karpathy wrote: post #59
snowwrestler wrote: post #6

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…

The thing I always found perplexing about the idea of an ancestral simulation is - how do you initialize that? E.g. suppose we are in the year 3,000 and we have super advanced computers and I'd like to simulate the year 2017. How do I lay out all the humans/their brains/animals/trees/rocks/etc, without access to the snapshot of the state? And some attempts at patching this, e.g. by simulating physics backwards from a…

If a simulation contains minds is it not equivalent Dennet's "Brain in a vat" [1] model of consciousness ?

In "Consciousness Explained" Dennet postulates that a conscious mind perceiving a thing-in-the-world need not have perfect rich input data but merely a neuron that responds yes to the question: Am I seeing that thing ?

[1] Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennet, page 8, [ Prelude, Hard Hallucination Problem ]:

"...intervene somewhere along the chain (anywhere on the optic nerve, ...between the eyeball and consciousness), tugging just right on the nerves would produce exactly the chain of events that would be caused by a normal veridical perception of something, ...producing, at the receiving end in the mind, exactly the effect of such a conscious perception."

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#89

Post by TelmoMenezes »

Something that most people never consider in these discussions:

If you accept the hypothesis that mind is generated by a computation, and that this computation is finite, then the same computation that produces "you" can be performed in different places and at different times. The same computation can be performed inside a simulation, inside a simulation inside a simulation and so on.

Whatever environment around you can be included in this computation.

As long as the computation is finite the larger and/or more temporally extended the universe is, the higher the probability that the computation that is generating this current moment for you is being executed more than once. If the universe is infinite in some sense, this probability converges to 1.

And yet you would have no way of knowing that this is happening.

So I claim that, if you assume that mind is generated by a computation, then then question of wether we are in a simulation or not can be replied with "both" or "it doesn't matter".

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#90

Post by gambiting »

okket wrote: post #60
planetjones wrote: post #24

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 ?

For all we know, a hypothetical simulation must take part somewhere far below the atomic/quantum level, maybe around the Planck scale. Upwards from that we that we understand a lot of what happens through observation and derived theories. We have no evidence so far that anything or anyone has interfered with the rules above that level in the last 10+ billions years. Therefore, it does not matter if this universe is a…

If you enjoy Sci-Fi books about the topic, I would really recommend "Permutation City" by Greg Egan, as it explores exactly this topic.
Post reply on HN