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You are living in a computer simulation.

  
 
Lurid Archive
10:31 / 19.05.04
These articles by philosopher Nick Bostrom argue that we should seriously consider the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation, perhaps as a historical record for some posthuman civilisation. Here, posthuman is used to mean a state of techonological advancement that realises anything we can presently show to be theoretically plausible. I think.

The idea is that the brain-in-a-vat arguments are not simply some philosophical game of extreme scepticism, but present a very plausible description of the nature of reality. This is because, if you accept that we will reach the posthuman stage and that AI and human simulation is possible, then the chances are that some kid is running a game of 21st century Earth for her history homework and you are the result. Since simulations will outnumber "real" people, you should bet that you are part of an advanced artificial algorithm.

The argument comes down to considering a trichotomy,

(1) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small

(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours

(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation.


which I don't find that convincing, since the nature of the assumptions make any probabilistic arguments extremely suspect. But then, thats the way I was coded.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
11:43 / 19.05.04
Yikes.

I found an even stranger article with a similar theme Here, though this guy, despite having some impressive credentials, single-handedly redefines the term 'whackjob'.
 
 
Charlie's Horse
22:24 / 19.05.04
The idea is that the brain-in-a-vat arguments are not simply some philosophical game of extreme scepticism, but present a very plausible description of the nature of reality. - Lurid Archive

Not to act obstinate, but how does this actually change the way you play this day? What actually changes? Do you take more risks? Do you follow the essay, How to Live in a Simulation, with its New Agey suggestions of 'live for today,' 'be entertaining,' and 'keep the famous people you know happy' - or do you simply run more red lights and play in traffic? I don't see how the world's reality or lack thereof changes what you do at all. I could still be tripping on the first hit of acid I ever took - so what? I still have to take out the trash and pay bills. Getting kicked out of my apartment and going through a completely accurate simulation of homelessness would still suck.

I suppose this belief structure could exist as a system of working magick, but it really strikes me as a dead end, even for that. Say you accept this. Ok, so what now? You can't prove this assertion, nor can you disprove it: a psychic place-holder, rather than an idea with feet and wings. This concept cannot evolve in any significant way that I understand. But hey, try me.

This honestly reminds me of a thing various Zen masters delt with. Occasionally a disciple would come up to the Zen master and state, "Reality does not exist" or "Reality is an illusion." The Zen master would be like, "Oh really?" and then chuck the student into a pool of mud, or hit the solipsist with a stick and ask if it really fucking hurt or not.

Still Bruised from That One -
Keflexive
 
 
Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey
00:18 / 20.05.04
This boils down to the old 'Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack' argument.

If we're in a simulation, the programming constraints will pretty much be geared to completely disallow any possibilty of us ever discovering 'reality'. If there is no simulation and this is reality, then same goes - we're never going to discover that we're in a simulation.

Interesting, intriguing and, just as Keflexive says, a total dead end.

It's like the 'What if our Universe is an atom in the fingernail of a giant being?' postulation. Fun to consider, but with no intrinsic worth.

Still, I'd love to play the video games this post-human society has. They must rock like a motherfucker...
 
 
Perfect Tommy
04:11 / 20.05.04
In some ways, this isn't very useful at all, for Cloned Christ's dead-end reasons. However, we've already discussed Stephen Wolfram; even if we don't worry about whether or not there are programmers, we've got the idea of the universe as a program running everywhere simultaneously, which could be fruitful somehow. I also like the idea of wondering whether you're a 'simulation.' Sometimes we become cognizant that we're running on subroutines, when our emotions and responses become predictable to us; however, since it is possible to observe this in yourself, it's a little like being a player aware of the limitations of hir avatar. (Not to be construed as an argument in favor of a homunculus driving us around, y'understand.)
 
 
Lord Morgue
10:29 / 20.05.04
INFLICT DAMAGE GAIN EXP!
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:52 / 22.05.04
Umm... Phex, I think you'll find that's JR "Bob" Dobbs... or Smilin' Bob, as we Subgenii like to call him.

Everything he says is true.

But not to be taken seriously.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
09:02 / 22.05.04
Wow, I'm getting serious deja vu on this thread, haven't we had a similar discussion before? Maybe it's a blip in the Matrix...

Does anyone know what happened to those teenagers (not the Columbine pair) who shot a few people a year or so back and their defense in court was that they believed they were in a Matrix-like simulation? I would have liked to have seen the court get weird at them, demanding their proof that people being simulations gave them the right to harm them, or locking them up and telling them they'd be allowed to leave jail only when they'd managed to rewrite reality's code and escape.
 
 
TeN
14:16 / 22.05.04
"Not to act obstinate, but how does this actually change the way you play this day? What actually changes? Do you take more risks?"

good point. the truth is... it doesn't. if the simulation is an accurate representation of reality, then it makes no difference, as any actions we take in a simulation will have the same effects as if they were taken in reality.
 
 
Tom Coates
10:05 / 23.05.04
On the other hand, there's always the possibility that it's not an accurate representation of reality. After all there's pretty much no reason to make a totally accurate model of reality - by which I mean the physics might be accurate but you'd be wanting to test what happened in different circumstances not just replaying the world. Given that, the liklihood would seem to be that the reality that we're living in - if indeed it is a simulation - is a divergent simulation in some way from the UR-reality. Therefore it's not unreasonable to consider that we might have a different perspective from our creators. And I don't buy the 'we could have no awareness of our simulated status' - it's incredibly difficult to predict the behaviour of any system with more than a few actors in it with total accuracy - chaos comes into play - and I doubt that any simulation of the scale of this one would be able to function effectively with crude blocks being placed around the place to stop certain eventualities coming to pass - and if they were placed, it would seem to me eminently likely that at some point we'd come to evolve past them anyway (at least if there was any advantage in doing so).

I'm not sure I buy it as a theory because of the computing power. I'm not sure I believe that an entire coherent universe that responded in exactly the same way as our own could be constructed using less material than exists in the universe itself. After all, you would eventually be modelling the behaviour of quarks and sub-atomic particles. There would be an absolute limit for datastorage for a start (ie. a quark can have only so many states, but each one of those would have to be modelled for every quark in a simulated universe, and you couldn't store that data in anything 'smaller' than a quark).

On the other hand, we've read models of quantum computing which suggest that the reason the calculations can be completed so quickly is because every single possibility that could occur, does occur in a parallel world. This expands the scope of our computer enormously, making it slightly more plausible as an eventuality (although what happens to the worlds used for computational purposes isn't entirely clear to me).

If it is plausible, then there would seem to me to be a need for certain amounts of compression - and that we might discover absolute limits to knowledge that are a function of our environment that perhaps our 'creators' don't experience. These things are bound to change our perspective on our world. More interestingly skill is the technical question that if someone could effectively model the universe completely accurately, then people within that universe could presumably do the same thing, and on and on recursively ad infinitum. I'm not convinced that entropy would allow us to do that with the same data integrity all the way down, but I'm quite prepared to be proven wrong...
 
 
TeN
15:36 / 23.05.04
well, if the simulation was not an acurate representation of reality, then it's universe may be far smaller than the actual universe... or perhaps the simulation ends after the milky way galaxy, and everything beyond that is "painted on the ceiling" so to speak.

the thing is though, would this really change anything? I mean what's the difference between an entire universe being created by a race of super intelligent beings, and an entire universe being created by a single, super intelligent diety known as God? as far as we're concerned, living in a simulation is no different whatsoever than living in the real world, only because we have no knowledge of what the "real world" is like.

suppose heaven is the real world and God has created a "computer simulation" for us to live in. that brings up many more questions... like how is it that when we die we ascend to heaven? if heaven is the "real world" then how can a simulation enter it? there is no matter for our minds/souls to enter. maybe our consciences are inserted into robots? or maybe "matter" doesn't exist outside of the simulation, so (as most religions describe it) our conciences are left to "float freely"? and what of Jesus? is he a sort of "computer programmer" sent to correct "glitches or bugs"? or is he more of an "online moderator" sent to regulate the actions of the players?
 
 
Lurid Archive
08:46 / 24.05.04
Along with everyone else, I don't think this argument has any implications for the way we live. I think I was more interested to see how people would assess the argument itself, whether this rather strong form of AI is generally accepted or whether it was rejected by referencing the Chinese Box.

Tom makes a good point about the size of a simulation. If it is perfect, does it have to be as "big" as the original? I don't know, but unless we can do things with quantum computers, I think that sounds like a strong argument. One could try to cut down on the computing power needed by redesigning fundamental physics, perhaps. I have no idea whether that is at all plausible, but if compression works with mp3s, why not reality? You lose perfection, sure, but how could you the difference if you had nothing to compare it to?
 
 
LVX23
21:24 / 24.05.04
"Are you also mentally divergent, friend?"
 
 
astrojax69
22:08 / 24.05.04
this probably should have been in 'creations', but i was caused to write this after a lecture on 'the metaphysics of the matrix', which examined this thread's central thesis more broadly than just the film, though with many references - it was a free lecture by a visiting fellow, after all - one needs publicity! [the lecturer's conclusion was that we are entitled to hold 'justified true beliefs' even if we are in the matrix. it isn't mine.]



exegesis on morality


god is a geek:
the experience of existence extending
as lines, welts raised across an expanse of sand
one horizon towards forever
the other never and the binary choice –
on or off? this place a program settling
inside the skin of the universe
smoothing out kludges, quashing qualia
and cruel fingerprints of Him
embedding themselves in the breath of a tree…

there is no god:
“… or was it yesterday? i can’t be sure.”
believing, frame by frame, that it matters
that certainty may elude like smiles
meant for others,
yet a smile in a butterfly net
is beautiful, let it go!
that fiction might slide like faith
and dress the day with its intention
projecting possibility into a solid phantom;
trusting that bowel…

sleep, for god sleeps:
somniloquy resonates morpheus-quiet,
raging against the waters deep, fathom
the solitude of ignorance is a single plane,
only one face and that identical to yours –
there is no escape through eternity,
no escape…
 
 
Perfect Tommy
06:47 / 25.05.04
Tom makes a good point about the size of a simulation. If it is perfect, does it have to be as "big" as the original?

Hm. I just realized that perhaps a simulation we made would have to be as large as our universe-simulation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it would have to be as large as the non-simulation universe out there beyond our substrate.
 
 
.
09:41 / 25.05.04
Well, whether or not the universe is a simulation, I am not a simulation (since I have consciousness, agency, qualia, however you want to put it - that internal nature) so the question remains as to how I arrived in this simulated universe, and where(?) I was before I was here.
 
 
.
09:45 / 25.05.04
On another note, there's nothing particular new about this as a theory, it's been knocking about since, well, Bishop Berkeley (if we're all ideas in the mind of God), or potentially even Plato (if we take our ectypical bodies to be mere simulations of the perfect archetypal forms)...
 
 
Henningjohnathan
20:26 / 02.06.04
Currently I've seen some theories that suggest we are in fact computational. There's a John A. Wheeler theory about black holes that suggests the universe is in fact two-dimensional and the three dimensions we imagine we experience is actually a hologram based on the interaction of the the 2D data. This was an article in Scientific American and Warren Ellis is using this theory in his comic book PLANETARY.
Then there was a slate magazine article that seemed to suggest God was a computer hacker and that the information in the universe is suggestive of computer code.
However, as I pointed out on the Wolfram thread, I also get the sense that the percievable universe seems to follow informational rules because our minds are hardwired to percieve information. In the end, the computer model universe may just describe how we perceive reality, but there could be another imperceptible reality outside the limites of our perceptions.
 
 
Henningjohnathan
14:04 / 04.06.04
Big Lab Experiment
holographic universe

These are the articles that I mentioned. I was thinking about this again yesterday and I started wondering how we could prove that we are or are not simulations. Basically, I hypothesized that eventually we'll be ableto create simulations as intelligent as we are, something like a super sim-city. I wondered, "How would an intelligent Sim character in a computer program be able to perceive our influence? How would a Sim be able to realize that it was the result of processed information? How would it perceive the silicon transistor in the microchip that processed its universe?" I think that if we could answer how one of our simulations could determine its true nature then we could perhaps develop methods to determine if our universe was or was not a simulation. I think the first question we'd have to ask is "what is the essential difference between our consciousness and artificial consciousness?" What makes us different from a very sophisticated multilevel computer program? One drawback may be that even if the matter of our brains is "real", it's possible that our minds are not really very different from self processing emergent computer programs. Therefore it may be impossible for us to perceive or at least quantify anything that is outside our computational range EVEN THOUGH it may still affect us, just as a Sim may never be able to perceive that it is one of our programs even though the user determines a large portion of the fictional character's fate.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
13:43 / 13.06.04
Does this make magic(k) the ability to recode yer own lil portion of the superscript, in that case?...
 
 
Irony of Ironies
14:20 / 13.06.04
There are a couple of problems that I can immediately see with this, based on the assumption of the existence of "posthumans". Post-humans are, necessarily, not human: it's therefore a mistake to assume they have human motives, human methods, and human attributes (curiosity about their ancestors, for example).

Secondly, there's the assumption that computational methods remain fundamentally the same, and that computation power remains important. We are as far removed from these putative post-humans as someone born four thousand years ago is from us, and "computation" as we currently understand is completely removed from the experience of such an ancestor of ours. Yet, Bostrum assumes that post-human computational methods can easily be grasped by us. Isn't it as likely that a post-human culture will consist of a single "Childhood's End" style overmind, carrying the sum of all past human knowledge - and therefore in no need of simulations in order to comprehend their ancestors. There are, in fact, an infinite number of "post-human" scenarios that can be posited that could end with them either having no interest in the past or no reasons to do simulations of the past in order to learn about it. The important point that he misses is that we simply cannot know the number of post-human civilisations that would be interested in running simulations: the alternatives are possibly items of conjecture, but not knowledge.

I'm fairly sure you could construct an argument which leads to the conclusion that the only kind of civilisation which would have an interest in constructing such a simulation would be our own, and there's no evidence that any more advanced one would do so.

There are of course a lot of other assumptions that Bostrum makes that are, at the very least, questionable - mostly about the nature of consciousness and limits of computation. But they're secondary.
 
 
Henningjohnathan
20:02 / 14.06.04
I like the Magick connection. I'm also reminded of John Keel's (THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES) "Ultra"-terrestrials.

back to my question of the Sim's: of course, if we consider it possible that we are simulations, then, in essence, we are saying that our universe is designed by something outside us. Just as the Sim would conjecture that there may be an intelligent design to its world. Now, the great point above is that we should NOT be able to communicate with whatever designed us IN THEIR TERMS. That last bit is the distinction. As an abductee scientist acquaintance of mine pointed out, there should be no common ground between us and the ET's, therefore, there should be no way we can communicate. Applying his theories of ET communication to this problem, he believes that the ET are a kind of hive mind (as best we can approximate the truer concept) and that they (the aliens) are attempting to modify the human nervous system so that we can communicate. Of course, his natural paranoi has produced some very malicious body-snatcher scenarios (ala Icke ala Lovecraft), but the essential theories are quite interesting.
If we regard this world as a simulation, then EVEN THOUGH we cannot understand or communicate with the designers on their terms (being outside our universe, they are also outside our full comprehension), we may assume or predict that they can in some way understand us and our world on our terms SINCE THEY DESIGNED IT. This would be very similar to a programmer looking at the codework of a Sim in progress or going back and debugging a very complex section of the algorithm interaction.
Now, here's the interesting part. We can't really fully understand the Sims. Just as in the Wolfram thread, we can discern the computation of an emergent phenomenon, but we can't break it down beyond the basic computation (we can't express it with mathematical precision in other words; perhaps our supposed designers have the same sort of problem with the complexity of our "programming." Therefore, they can discern when we attempt to communicate with them, but their replies are based on a perceptual approximation of our conversations. Perhaps when they attempt to communicate with us (via angels, demons, the mothman) they are actually responding to the interplay of our programming, but we interpret it in these mythical ways.
All conjecture of course.
 
  
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