Are you living in a computer simulation? [pdf]

I do not fully believe we are in a computer simulation but more so multiple realities exist based on your choices. Your existence is the variable, life is the constant. And life is rendered based on the variables and constants you give it.

Brains are the computer of the human, dummy shells we live in. The skeleton, bones and joints are the mechanical elements, as like the engine, axel and wheels is to a car. We know we can make alterations to our computer with drugs which can access the control port. Whether it being LSD or Caffeine. The same as you can with a car by adding a turbo or an induction kit.

If you take my understanding of of quantum computing where a state can either be 0 or 1, 0 can be 1 and 1 can be 0, what's there not to say that alternate realities can't exist at the same time?

Does even behind me even exist? If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

As a thought experiment: I want to head to the supermarket. I can either take route A by turning left out of my apartment, or I can either take route B, turning right out of my apartment.

What happens on route A happens because I am there to witness and what would of taken place on route B, I do not know. Would the same set of events of occurred on that route if I had taken route B instead of route A?

Does myself being a variable alter the constants? Would the guy with the red jacket who walked route B, when I took route A, still be walking route B if I had taken route B initially? Or is it because I chose route A they appeared in route B?

I do believe you can live in two realities, not at the same time as you can only be one of yourself, sort-of; but that you can be part of both.

This was just a ramble to pass thirty minutes of my time so I can finish working from home. But if I actually worked those thirty minutes rather then writing a loose HN comment theory, would I later tonight do something different then what I am going to do now. Even though I am sitting at my desk, in the same location. If I hadn't of written this comment would the tracks in my shuffled playlist be different to the ones I've just listened too?

Searle is definitely not a materialist, but a dualist. His take on the simulation argument is that simulations cannot be built (possibility #1 in Bostrom's argment).

> I feel like a lot of these arguments do a bad job of explaining what utility these ancestor simulations would be to the future civilizations, and basically say something like “it will be so easy to create such a simulation, members of the future society will just create them on a whim for amusement.”

Why do people run the sims game today? Isn't that a waste of time even by modern standards? Would future humans not waste time with entertainment? Look at how much time people spend on analyzing Conway's Game of Life to find new constructions. Isn't it plausible that future humans might play with what parameters would have had Trump lose in 2016?

Which leads to: ancestor simulations would have significant historical importance. How many historians today would love to simulate what would have happened had Hitler won? Or what would have happened had one of the plots against Alexander the Great succeeded?

Ancestor simulations would also have economic importance. We already simulate toy economic models. However, we also know that humans aren't prefectly rational. If one day we understand the algorithms driving human brains, why wouldn't you run your economic simulations with real human minds for more precision?

I could go on, but I think the point is clear. We have no reason to suppose any of these values would change in "post-humans". They would still have incomplete information about the world, but they would be able to handle substantially more complexity, at the very least because of the simulations they have available to them.

> But given that Moore’s law has run out and there are no pathways we can see to faster computation

There are many, many pathways forwards that are being explored (optical computing, amorphous computing, reversible computing, etc.). Our current architectures are in fact quite inefficient. We could be making much more use of parallelism, for instance.

> I'm not convinced that simulating an infinitesimal portion of the universe is sufficient.

Being not convinced is not an unreasonable position to hold, but it hardly counts as an argument that renders the premise a nonstarter.

I am pretty sure that one can estimate approximately how much information would be needed to simulate a minimal universe consistent with everthing that humanity currently thinks it has been able to verify - in fact, I have a vague memory that Scott Aaronson presented something like that in one of his blog posts.

Then there are the uncomfortable gaps in our physical knowledge - the incomaptibility of relativity and QM, our inability to test, and choose between, string theories: suppose they cannot be resolved? I am not proposing that this is likely, but if it were, it would not mean that the universe could not continue, whether simulated or not.

I have read a bunch of "this is obviously wrong" claims, and one frequently-occurring aspect is that of begging the question somewhere, by assuming that something or other in what we seem to know about the universe is necessarily so. To be fair, proponents of the simulation belief sometimes also do this.

Personally, I don't have an opinion as to whether I am in a simulation; I put Bostrom's paper away in the file containing metaphysical solipsism, p-zombie arguments, and ontological proofs of the existence of God, as evidence for the futility of trying to reason oneself to ultimate truths.

I admit to not having read his book and I think his argument is technically "airtight". I will grant that. But the real problem, besides me strongly believing 1 and 2 are true, is that Bostrom (or more charitably, his fans) are conflating several concepts:

"a computer simulation"

"a universe simulation"

"an ancestor simulation in which the lived experience is indistinguishable from our current experience, which necessarily won't be able to simulate the entire universe nor anything at a high level of fidelity and so requires constant tricks to convince the inhabitants things are real"

The last one is required for this argument to work and I think that's what's being slipped in. Sure, everybody loves computer simulations. We run them all the time. Video games are computer simulations, so look at that. We all love them.

We're talking about a very, very specific type of simulation and the more specific you define it, the less likely it is anyone will ever build one.

"Sensory deprivation tank" isn't absurd. That seems to be what we're talking about here. I suppose I will have to read the book because the noise argument you are presenting seems bizarre to me. Do you think your lived experience can be characterized as sensory noise? I absolutely do not understand how you can just simulate minds without an environment unless we are talking about dreams or hallucination.

I don't think scaling down the fidelity in certain places works. Humans expect natural processes to occur even when they're not looking. The evidence will be there long afterwards. There is no particular place that we wouldn't look for such evidence.

>Furthermore, such an advanced simulation would have knowledge of what its simulated objects are, rather than the constitution of their matter requiring a simulation of its physics.

No I don't think so. The number of possible "simulated objects" is infinite. Even the most advanced simulation you imagine would not be written in such a way to account for them.

>Advanced humans with knowledge of what algorithms constitute a human mind would simply need to track the inferences minds make in order to avoid seeing through the simulation.

Not convinced on this point either, but anyway this would conflict with reality considering a great many people already believe with certainty that they are living in a simulation.