There isn't really much of a connection between this and Bostrom's simulation argument. The simulation argument is about calculating the probability that we live in a simulated universe based on certain assumptions about human behavior and technological development. Bostrom's argument doesn't make any metaphysical claims other than assuming that consciousness is substrate independent.
I don't buy into metaphysical theories that claim to deduce the existence of worlds outside our own based on armchair reasoning. We know that the physical universe exists and we can explain everything that we experience in terms of quantum field theory and general relativity. Any theory that wants to challenge this view of the world needs to modify those existing theories, or design an experiment that shows why they aren't adequate to explain reality.
Modal Realism was the inspiration for the somewhat infamous, slightly tongue-in-cheek "Possible Girls" paper where Neil Sinhababu argues that people across different modal realities can fall in love with each other (and that explains imaginary relationships)
> we can explain everything that we experience in terms of quantum field theory and general relativity
Everything we experience, except experience itself. Conscious/qualia/whatever is still… well, none but God knows what it is, and I have no evidence for the existence of any god let alone that one.
This argument seems to mix up "existence" and "construction".
The number states do not magically appear in the physical universe merely by thinking up the construction. The numbers could be configured as (temporary) patterns in physical objects, such as brains, books, or in ink molecules on paper. But the states are not physical objects themselves.
Also, if our universe happens to be universal, in the sense that it encompasses all of existence, then how could a calculation device exist outside of it? I'm not saying this is necessarily the case, but it's an option that many simulation-believers overlook. The calculation device might be part of the existence, but it seems rather unlikely that it can then predict reality faster than it unfolds.
Much ink has been spilled by many a philosopher on the topic of whether or not numbers "magically exist." Plato was the obvious example of a philosopher who believed numbers "exist" independent of our universe. Though no one is saying they exist "in the physical universe", but it's not a given that they cna't possibly exist if not "within our universe."
Think of it this way. Graham's number is an absolutely enormous number, right? Let's assume for the sake of argument that nobody has ever computed the Graham's-number-th digit of pi. We know for certain that there is a Graham's-number-th digit of pi. And we know that if two people calculated it independently, they'd get the same digit. But (at least in this hypothetical) nobody has actually ever done the calculation to see what the Graham's-number-th digit of pi is. Given all I've said so far, the act of finding out the Graham's-number-th digit of pi seems more like an act of discovery of something that already existed than an act of invention of something that didn't already exist. So, it seems quite reasonable to many to conclude that numbers "exist."
Also, Iah's view does imply that our universe does not encompass all of existence. It also implies that no calculation device need exist anywhere.
In response to your second point, at a high level I believe the calculation device would exist inside _one_ universe but calculate another one... the idea that you could calculate your own universe and use that to predict future events does seem covered in paradoxes. For one, the universe you're predicting would (recursively) have to include the computer you're using to predict it.
... but that's different to what I've argued here. I'm not claiming the states are physical objects, but just the existing of the pattern, even if temporary or intangible, would feel real to the humans/actors inside it.
One one hand it's absurd (it means that everything that can be imagined and many more things exist).
On another hand the opposite (requiring a mapping from that computation to real-world objects) is absurd too, because for any sequence of numbers you can always find a mapping to physical objects (notice that you can make the mapping arbitrarily complex). So why require the extra steps?
My opinion is that it follows that asking about existence without specifying the domain in which sth exists is meaningless.
You can say that the number 42 exists in the domain of integers. You cannot say whether the number 42 exists in general. It wouldn't mean anything.
Similarly you can say that Harrison Ford exists in our universe but Han Solo doesn't. But you cannot say whether one or the other exist in general.
It seems to take a highly reductionist pathway: reality/experience can be simulated -> simulation is computation -> computation is mathematics -> mathematical objects exist regardless of whether anybody has discovered them.
This implies that all conceivable universes (including the ones where a lot of really bad things happen on an eternal loop) are possessed of the exact same reality as ours.
I believe so, yes. I think it's somewhat likely that mathematically minded people would come up with that idea independently -- it's essentially Platonism taken to its logical conclusion.
Take a smaller example: weather on Earth. There are a LOT of particles, but still classically simulatable. Chaos ensures that we still cannot know all future states of the weather. This is a remarkable truth, and one should give it time to sink in.
Note that quantum modelling those effects go as O(a^N). If you want to hand-wave away exponential computational cost, then I cry foul: the details matter, and I posit that you cannot build a computer that is more powerful than the universe itself.
Sure, but this argument is for simulation theory... not what is described here.
What I'm suggesting is that the calculation never needs to be done, which means the complexity of it does not matter. Whether it's O(1) or O(a^N) they're both far smaller than the infinite number of potential states.
I think the author's premise would lead to the conclusions that you really are hungry and you really eat the pizza, but the former is not causal in the latter (they are just theorems of the formalism) and the latter is not causal in anything else.
I thought of the similar thing before, including all of the details they mention, and I agree. (Of course you still might not konw what it is unless a simulation can be made, but it can exist (mathematically) whether or not a simulation is made.)
Furthermore, I think that anything existence (including mathematics, physics, etc) are by relation to everything else that is existence; there is no such thing as an "existence" that is truly independently from everything else, including mathematics (and, the various possible mathematical structures, and physical universes), etc. (If it is truly independent, how can numbers be prime and composite, and how can objects collide with each other, and how can planets moving around the Sun by gravity, and how can people have ideas about the gods, etc?)
(However, there is then the consideration if such a simulation is being made which is then being interacted with by outside (e.g. as in Star Trek); in that case, it is I/O, so you can make "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis with I/O". This could be called as a kind of nondeterminism, I suppose; although, a constraint may be produced by their combination.)
[0] Boltzmann brains are cognitively unstable, because the logic leading to them says you should expect to be one, but also that they have exponentially increasingly false "memories" the further back they "remember", including the beliefs leading to the conclusion that you probably are one. If all maths is real, this is worse to at least the degree that Aleph one is bigger than Aleph null, possibly more.
The Boltzmann brain theory is not something I have heard before but have to say I love the idea.
The thing is if the universe is infinite and you believe that, then by default many other things also have to be true.
I do hope the universe is infinite which means I exist many times over in many different states of being, hopefully one such state where the Canadian housing market isn’t so crappy and I get to afford a house one day ;)
"The argument assumes that given one state of human existence, it is possible to calculate a distinct next state. And then a state after that. That is, if we had a powerful enough computer to store the state of every single atom, and calculate their interactions, we could play through time in that existence."
Why are you assuming this to be true? Due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it's impossible to perfectly know "one state of human existence". So the rest of the thought experiment seems moot.
It's also naive to think that everything can be calculated by a computer, at some point the calculations become so enormous that the energy requirement approaches infinity.
Is it moot though? The uncertainty principle makes it impossible for us to _measure_ both speed and position, but if you're simulating it that's not necessary.
Basically it's a question of whether math exists. If it exists then the states of the simulation exist and look like reality "from the inside".
I really like Iain M. Banks moral argument against universe being simulated. No intelligence capable of simulating it would be immoral enough to create something so horrible. Unless they are a total bastard. So it's not a 100%.
In science fiction it's common to have species that are so far advanced that humans are like ants to them. For all we know, our reality could be a petri dish sitting under the couch of an alien dorm room.
The actual performance of calculating in the OPs example is analogous to the passage of time, as expressed by entropic processes.
Op’s conjecture can be thought of as the same conjecture as proposing that things in the past and future still / already exist, a conjecture that I find compelling based on dimensional reductionist thought experimentation.
> That is, if we had a powerful enough computer to store the state of every single atom, and calculate their interactions, we could play through time in that existence. It would feel completely real to everyone in that simulation.
Telling persuasive stories can achieve essentially the same outcome, is much easier, and is already an accepted convention.
It's like saying buildings existed before it's been built because there's already drawings on it, so why build anything.
The missing component in the thesis is that it argues that consciousness is just an abstract, immaterial object that consists of states. That's not true because to be conscious you need matters.
Author should also look into complexity science, and its consequences that even if everything is determined, most information about next state quickly evaporates. If it's impossible to know most things about next state, does it even matter that it is deterministic/simulated?
One useful way to think of the halting problem is that the future is not computable. There is no shortcut to finding out what will happen other than actually running the computer. I think all computational theories sweep this issue under the rug. Even if the universe is a computer (quantum or otherwise) it makes no difference to how people should approach their decisions. There are no royal roads so regardless of how much a situation is analyzed by symbolic simulations at the end if the day you still have to act of your own volition to actually find out what will happen.
That coincides with my belief. If the next state exists mathmatically, it exists.
The "simulation not required" hypothesis eliminates the inconvenience of infinite regress: what simulator runs the simulator, and what runs that one ...
I believe that you are more real than Donald Duck if and only if the future is not yet determined.
In philosophy, theories of time are categorized in A- and B- theories [1].
In B-theoretic time, the difference between past, present and future is only subjective. Objectively, all points in time exist and are equally real. I view this to mean that there isn't any particular difference in the degree of reality between our reality and any mathematical model or imagined reality. Only with A-theoretic time are you objectively more real than Donald Duck.
One of the similarities between philosophy and art is that in both fields, non experts seem to think they are qualified to give their own opinions. Unfortunately this means the public discourse becomes more about what people enjoy than what is actual.
We're building digital twins of much of the universe around ourselves at different scales. We're even building digital twins of ourselves.
We're improving the technology that enables that twinning quite rapidly.
We're improving the technology that allows for emulating a virtual environment.
And in fact, there's a remarkable overlap in how we are running those virtual environments and the fundamental building blocks we've experimentally validated in our own universe.
The part that I think people get caught up in is the assumption that we'd need to ourselves calculate a 1:1 copy for us to be in a calculated copy.
But at macro scales the universe behaves as if things are continuous, not discrete/quantized. And the mechanics of quantization remains incompatible with the mechanics of continuous theories like GR.
The nuances of that quantization map to how we fudge fidelity in our own virtual representations.
So we need not create a 1:1 copy for us to be in a copy any more than one would need to create Minecraft at a 1:1 scale within Minecraft for Minecraft to exist.
Additionally, looking at mechanics isn't the only way to investigate whether we are in a virtual copy. For example, in many copies we make, there's some acknowledgement of that state woven into the world lore.
Indeed, in our own world in antiquity was a set of beliefs attributed to one of the most well known figures in history that espoused that we were in a copy of an original world in which an original humanity came to exist spontaneously and then brought forth the creator of this copy within light with us in their archetype before they ultimately perished. The full text at the heart of these beliefs was lost for centuries before being found again the same month as ENIAC ran its first computer program.
This text claimed the proof for what it said about a creator of light would be found in motion and rest (the domain now called Physics), and the group following it claimed that the ability to find an indivisible point within bodies would only be possible in the non-physical.
That's quite the coincidence in an age when we are moving towards putting the AI emulating our digital twins literally into light with optoelectronics and are very focused on the discovery of indivisible points within the domain of study of motion and rest.
(The name of the text is literally translated as "the good news of the twin" and its main point is that if one understands its content they will not fear death or worry about the soul's dependence on a physical body.)
fasterik|2 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism
There isn't really much of a connection between this and Bostrom's simulation argument. The simulation argument is about calculating the probability that we live in a simulated universe based on certain assumptions about human behavior and technological development. Bostrom's argument doesn't make any metaphysical claims other than assuming that consciousness is substrate independent.
I don't buy into metaphysical theories that claim to deduce the existence of worlds outside our own based on armchair reasoning. We know that the physical universe exists and we can explain everything that we experience in terms of quantum field theory and general relativity. Any theory that wants to challenge this view of the world needs to modify those existing theories, or design an experiment that shows why they aren't adequate to explain reality.
pringk02|2 years ago
https://philpapers.org/archive/SINPG
It's a fun read
TheBlight|2 years ago
Dark matter would like a word.
ben_w|2 years ago
Everything we experience, except experience itself. Conscious/qualia/whatever is still… well, none but God knows what it is, and I have no evidence for the existence of any god let alone that one.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
smokel|2 years ago
The number states do not magically appear in the physical universe merely by thinking up the construction. The numbers could be configured as (temporary) patterns in physical objects, such as brains, books, or in ink molecules on paper. But the states are not physical objects themselves.
Also, if our universe happens to be universal, in the sense that it encompasses all of existence, then how could a calculation device exist outside of it? I'm not saying this is necessarily the case, but it's an option that many simulation-believers overlook. The calculation device might be part of the existence, but it seems rather unlikely that it can then predict reality faster than it unfolds.
AntiMS|2 years ago
Think of it this way. Graham's number is an absolutely enormous number, right? Let's assume for the sake of argument that nobody has ever computed the Graham's-number-th digit of pi. We know for certain that there is a Graham's-number-th digit of pi. And we know that if two people calculated it independently, they'd get the same digit. But (at least in this hypothetical) nobody has actually ever done the calculation to see what the Graham's-number-th digit of pi is. Given all I've said so far, the act of finding out the Graham's-number-th digit of pi seems more like an act of discovery of something that already existed than an act of invention of something that didn't already exist. So, it seems quite reasonable to many to conclude that numbers "exist."
Also, Iah's view does imply that our universe does not encompass all of existence. It also implies that no calculation device need exist anywhere.
iahwrites|2 years ago
... but that's different to what I've argued here. I'm not claiming the states are physical objects, but just the existing of the pattern, even if temporary or intangible, would feel real to the humans/actors inside it.
ajuc|2 years ago
On another hand the opposite (requiring a mapping from that computation to real-world objects) is absurd too, because for any sequence of numbers you can always find a mapping to physical objects (notice that you can make the mapping arbitrarily complex). So why require the extra steps?
My opinion is that it follows that asking about existence without specifying the domain in which sth exists is meaningless.
You can say that the number 42 exists in the domain of integers. You cannot say whether the number 42 exists in general. It wouldn't mean anything.
Similarly you can say that Harrison Ford exists in our universe but Han Solo doesn't. But you cannot say whether one or the other exist in general.
russdill|2 years ago
dustyduster|2 years ago
jl6|2 years ago
It seems to take a highly reductionist pathway: reality/experience can be simulated -> simulation is computation -> computation is mathematics -> mathematical objects exist regardless of whether anybody has discovered them.
This implies that all conceivable universes (including the ones where a lot of really bad things happen on an eternal loop) are possessed of the exact same reality as ours.
antonkar|2 years ago
Trasmatta|2 years ago
codeflo|2 years ago
For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
iahwrites|2 years ago
I hadn't heard of it before, and will need to do some more reading, but at a high-level it does look to be the same line of thinking.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
javajosh|2 years ago
Note that quantum modelling those effects go as O(a^N). If you want to hand-wave away exponential computational cost, then I cry foul: the details matter, and I posit that you cannot build a computer that is more powerful than the universe itself.
iahwrites|2 years ago
What I'm suggesting is that the calculation never needs to be done, which means the complexity of it does not matter. Whether it's O(1) or O(a^N) they're both far smaller than the infinite number of potential states.
m000|2 years ago
mannykannot|2 years ago
lacrimacida|2 years ago
zzo38computer|2 years ago
Furthermore, I think that anything existence (including mathematics, physics, etc) are by relation to everything else that is existence; there is no such thing as an "existence" that is truly independently from everything else, including mathematics (and, the various possible mathematical structures, and physical universes), etc. (If it is truly independent, how can numbers be prime and composite, and how can objects collide with each other, and how can planets moving around the Sun by gravity, and how can people have ideas about the gods, etc?)
(However, there is then the consideration if such a simulation is being made which is then being interacted with by outside (e.g. as in Star Trek); in that case, it is I/O, so you can make "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis with I/O". This could be called as a kind of nondeterminism, I suppose; although, a constraint may be produced by their combination.)
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
ben_w|2 years ago
https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematica...
[0] Boltzmann brains are cognitively unstable, because the logic leading to them says you should expect to be one, but also that they have exponentially increasingly false "memories" the further back they "remember", including the beliefs leading to the conclusion that you probably are one. If all maths is real, this is worse to at least the degree that Aleph one is bigger than Aleph null, possibly more.
14|2 years ago
prng2021|2 years ago
Why are you assuming this to be true? Due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it's impossible to perfectly know "one state of human existence". So the rest of the thought experiment seems moot.
nntwozz|2 years ago
iahwrites|2 years ago
scotty79|2 years ago
I really like Iain M. Banks moral argument against universe being simulated. No intelligence capable of simulating it would be immoral enough to create something so horrible. Unless they are a total bastard. So it's not a 100%.
psunavy03|2 years ago
Based on what just the human race has demonstrated across history, this claim is arguable at best.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
e_y_|2 years ago
Andrex|2 years ago
What if the intelligence doesn't even know we're here? Or that we are (or believe ourselves to be) conscious?
Do you feel guilty playing The Sims?
Ycombigatorz|2 years ago
[deleted]
K0balt|2 years ago
Op’s conjecture can be thought of as the same conjecture as proposing that things in the past and future still / already exist, a conjecture that I find compelling based on dimensional reductionist thought experimentation.
mistermann|2 years ago
Telling persuasive stories can achieve essentially the same outcome, is much easier, and is already an accepted convention.
Charon77|2 years ago
The missing component in the thesis is that it argues that consciousness is just an abstract, immaterial object that consists of states. That's not true because to be conscious you need matters.
qrian|2 years ago
haltist|2 years ago
titzer|2 years ago
1.) It doesn't appear computationally feasible to simulate general relativity
2.) Quantum mechanics is described by probability distribution equations that don't have "states" but superpositions of states
seventhtiger|2 years ago
kazinator|2 years ago
The "simulation not required" hypothesis eliminates the inconvenience of infinite regress: what simulator runs the simulator, and what runs that one ...
mannykannot|2 years ago
I'm not sure, but I think it leads to infinite recursion instead:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37451144
axelsvensson|2 years ago
In philosophy, theories of time are categorized in A- and B- theories [1].
In B-theoretic time, the difference between past, present and future is only subjective. Objectively, all points in time exist and are equally real. I view this to mean that there isn't any particular difference in the degree of reality between our reality and any mathematical model or imagined reality. Only with A-theoretic time are you objectively more real than Donald Duck.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#TheoBTheo
injeolmi_love|2 years ago
philipswood|2 years ago
kromem|2 years ago
We're building digital twins of much of the universe around ourselves at different scales. We're even building digital twins of ourselves.
We're improving the technology that enables that twinning quite rapidly.
We're improving the technology that allows for emulating a virtual environment.
And in fact, there's a remarkable overlap in how we are running those virtual environments and the fundamental building blocks we've experimentally validated in our own universe.
The part that I think people get caught up in is the assumption that we'd need to ourselves calculate a 1:1 copy for us to be in a calculated copy.
But at macro scales the universe behaves as if things are continuous, not discrete/quantized. And the mechanics of quantization remains incompatible with the mechanics of continuous theories like GR.
The nuances of that quantization map to how we fudge fidelity in our own virtual representations.
So we need not create a 1:1 copy for us to be in a copy any more than one would need to create Minecraft at a 1:1 scale within Minecraft for Minecraft to exist.
Additionally, looking at mechanics isn't the only way to investigate whether we are in a virtual copy. For example, in many copies we make, there's some acknowledgement of that state woven into the world lore.
Indeed, in our own world in antiquity was a set of beliefs attributed to one of the most well known figures in history that espoused that we were in a copy of an original world in which an original humanity came to exist spontaneously and then brought forth the creator of this copy within light with us in their archetype before they ultimately perished. The full text at the heart of these beliefs was lost for centuries before being found again the same month as ENIAC ran its first computer program.
This text claimed the proof for what it said about a creator of light would be found in motion and rest (the domain now called Physics), and the group following it claimed that the ability to find an indivisible point within bodies would only be possible in the non-physical.
That's quite the coincidence in an age when we are moving towards putting the AI emulating our digital twins literally into light with optoelectronics and are very focused on the discovery of indivisible points within the domain of study of motion and rest.
(The name of the text is literally translated as "the good news of the twin" and its main point is that if one understands its content they will not fear death or worry about the soul's dependence on a physical body.)
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
fdhfdjkfhdkj|2 years ago
[deleted]
paint|2 years ago
[deleted]