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I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

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Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#11
post #9

Now I'm curious how the behavior of the people in the "first" universe, unencumbered by the idea of how affecting the machine's reality would affect their own reality, is different from the behavior of the people we see.

I imagine that they couldn't be perfectly confident that they weren't just far enough away from the fixed point that their universe was the same as the one they observed.

A sort of a Roko's Basilisk, except with an omnipresent dread that they might be say, the 2nd or 3rd universe and the first just hadn't messed with them yet.

If they do anything that scares or abhors the people above, they could be turned off. Maybe they're not even sure if the people above them are waiting to see if they only benevolently observe the universe below them.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#12

Good story and I absolutely believe this to be true. It just seems like the most logical thing. I mean, as soon as any civilization ever can simulate a universe, or even a galaxy, they would. And they would do it infinite times. So the chances that we're the original are infinite to 1. Doesn't mean our lives aren't real though and we should change our behavior. We still experience joy. So experience as much joy as yo…

Is there a consensus (or most popular) theory for how mind/consciousness would work in the simulation theory? How do things in a simulation become subjects of experience?

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#13
Ian M. Banks novel “surface detail” comes to mind. Please note it is better than the tawdry wiki write up.

Somehow, it gets similar points across — similar to this essay, but deeper in feeling.

Let me also say the authors here have done really well with so short a format. To paraphrase my toddler son, I want more story!

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#14
post #9

Now I'm curious how the behavior of the people in the "first" universe, unencumbered by the idea of how affecting the machine's reality would affect their own reality, is different from the behavior of the people we see.

I imagine that they couldn't be perfectly confident that they weren't just far enough away from the fixed point that their universe was the same as the one they observed. A sort of a Roko's Basilisk, except with an omnipresent dread that they might be say, the 2nd or 3rd universe and the first just hadn't messed with them yet. If they do anything that scares or abhors the people above, they could be turned off. Maybe…

That makes sense. Anyone not living close to the "asymptote" of universe generations can't prove that they're in a simulation, but they can't prove they aren't either. Maybe each of those universes keeps trying to simulate an infinite number of slightly varied universes in the hopes of simulating their progenitors, making an infinite amount of uncertainty and suffering in their attempts.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#15
Nice story, each paragraph is pretty densely packed with layers of meaning and wisdom about our own existence and nature of reality.

Although this is pure fiction and speculation, thought experiments like these (existence of free will, laplace's demon), rely on determinism.

Even if we assume the universe to be completely deterministic, we need to "know" the initial seed state (usually called big bang). That initial seed can and will create vastly different universes (similar to how changing a single pixel in Conway's Game of Life completely changes the emergent behaviour and properties of the patterns, often just destroys the apparent stability in the system).

So, even with the an all powerful quantum computer, the initial state will give vastly different universes (all of them consistent within but not with each other).

We can think about "what" the initial state is ? Is that initial state self contained ? or was it under effect of something else ? Will the computer "generate" the initial state, or the programmer (aka god) has to explicitly hard code it carefully to create an apparent stable universe ?

If time as we know it, started with the big bang, the no notion of something existing "before" the big bang, doesn't make sense. If time existed before the big bang, then big bang is not the actual initial state (it is an initial state for us, as we cannot know outside the big bang, i.e. the universe).

Therefore, all simulations considering that to be the initial state will be incomplete and incorrect. Maybe we simulate what we can observe with our senses (directly or indirectly), and that will give us a "valid" simulation. For us, that is a perfectly valid simulation, but for the "things" that were before the big bang (if you assume that time was present before big bang), our simulation will have an extremely low entropy.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#16

Good story and I absolutely believe this to be true. It just seems like the most logical thing. I mean, as soon as any civilization ever can simulate a universe, or even a galaxy, they would. And they would do it infinite times. So the chances that we're the original are infinite to 1. Doesn't mean our lives aren't real though and we should change our behavior. We still experience joy. So experience as much joy as yo…

Is there a consensus (or most popular) theory for how mind/consciousness would work in the simulation theory? How do things in a simulation become subjects of experience?

Conciousness is an emergent property of a physical brain firing neurotransmitters between synapses, just as an economy is an emergent property of society buying and selling things, or ant colony behaviour is an emergent property of the behaviour of individual ants for example. It's not somehow "above" the simulation, just a higher order of complexity defined by lower-level rules, similar to a glider in Conway's Game of Life.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#18

Good story and I absolutely believe this to be true. It just seems like the most logical thing. I mean, as soon as any civilization ever can simulate a universe, or even a galaxy, they would. And they would do it infinite times. So the chances that we're the original are infinite to 1. Doesn't mean our lives aren't real though and we should change our behavior. We still experience joy. So experience as much joy as yo…

Is there a consensus (or most popular) theory for how mind/consciousness would work in the simulation theory? How do things in a simulation become subjects of experience?

Forget about simulation. We do not have answers to basic questions how consciousness works in real world. For example, we have no idea how what we perceive as time flow appears, we do not know why many/most people feel that they have free will when equations of physics are fully determined.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#19
It's curious that number of (simulated) universes is countable (there was mention if aleph-0): just like human mind has to start from some assumption (witness axioms in the most formal of fields: mathematics), it's hard for a human mind to move from countable numbers to infinity calculus.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#20
If everything is simulated, and there is infinite number of simulated realities, as simulation is only reflection of possible reality - then maybe what is simulated continues to live in reality regardless of being switched off as just infinite number of realities that exist always at the same time.
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