
Red Pill, Blue Pill: Is the Universe Just a Giant Computer Simulation? - Kinnard
http://techland.time.com/2012/12/13/red-pill-blue-pill-is-the-universe-just-a-giant-computer-simulation/
======
redacted
Put very well by Iain M. Banks in The Hydrogen Sonata,

“Most problems, even seemingly really tricky ones, could be handled by
simulations which happily modelled slippery concepts like public opinion or
the likely reactions of alien societies by the appropriate use of some
especially cunning and devious algorithms… nothing more processor-hungry than
the right set of equations…

But not always. Sometimes, if you were going to have any hope of getting
useful answers, there really was no alternative to modelling the individuals
themselves, at the sort of scale and level of complexity that mean they each
had to exhibit some kind of discrete personality, and that was where the
Problem kicked in.

Once you’d created your population of realistically reacting and – in a
necessary sense – cogitating individuals, you had – also in a sense – created
life. The particular parts of whatever computational substrate you’d devoted
to the problem now held beings; virtual beings capable of reacting so much
like the back-in-reality beings they were modelling – because how else were
they to do so convincingly without also hoping, suffering, rejoicing, caring,
living and dreaming?

By this reasoning, then, you couldn’t just turn off your virtual environment
and the living, thinking creatures it contained at the completion of a run or
when a simulation had reached the end of its useful life; that amounted to
genocide.”

~~~
mcintyre1994
That is really nicely put, but by that same logic is who/whatever is
responsible for simulating us somewhat responsible for genocide caused by
humans since they, by necessity, gave us free will? What about the extinction
of the dinosaurs, assuming the asteroid theory? Perhaps it was necessary to
their simulation for a large asteroid/comet to be able to hit Earth, but are
they somewhat responsible for wiping out life?

I guess these questions are very strongly parallel to those that can be asked
about God, which is perhaps a better definition than computer for something
that simulates our universe anyway.

~~~
thret
Not parallel, identical. The Judeo-Christian God only makes sense if the
universe is a simulation and he designed it.

The delightful thing about the simulation hypothesis is that it allows us to
hope for some type of afterlife. Maybe we get to play a different level, or we
get to play the same game again. Any fantasy we tell to children becomes
possible.

~~~
Shorel
> Any fantasy we tell to children becomes possible.

It makes it nothing more than any other religion.

------
thaumasiotes
How does this question get so much more publicity than "Are you a brain in a
vat?"? It's the _exact same question_!

~~~
chriswarbo
The questions aren't exactly the same. For example, we can imagine
characterising our whole universe as a set of physical laws plus some initial
conditions, and maybe a pseudo-random number generator. If we're given such a
characterisation, we can write a simulation trivially. In fact, a simulation
is probably the simplest form of such a characterisation. Hence, all we need
is a computer (for example, SK calculus) and this relatively-simple simulation
program (so simple that it could be a Boltzmann fluctuation). We don't
necessarily need time to run the computation, since that would imply some kind
of "outside universe", when it might be the case that computation can exist
all by itself. From a pure reductionist point of view, we've removed
unnecessary complexity and are left with just computation, which is nice and
Platonic.

The brain in a vat idea, on the other hand, requires brains, vats and all
manner of other support structures (eg. energy, entropy, etc.) to exist _as
well_ as the brain in a vat. In which case, we basically _require_ an "outside
universe" which is very similar to the "inside universe", so reductionism says
that we're adding complexity with such an argument, so it's unnecessary.

~~~
thaumasiotes
The questions are exactly the same. All they do is point out that if all your
information is routed through an intermediary, you'll never be able to prove
that the intermediary is telling you the truth.

Whether you describe that in terms of a meat brain being suspended in
nutritive solution and hooked up to cables, or in terms of an electronic
circuit receiving input from other electronic circuits, has no bearing on
that.

~~~
chriswarbo
I wasn't proposing that a computer running our universe is based on electronic
circuits; rather, I was proposing that computation itself is all that's needed
to simulate our universe. Since an 'outside' universe doesn't need to bear any
relation to our 'inside' universe, it can be vastly simpler. Maybe it's a rule
110 cellular automaton; maybe it's a 2,3 turing machine; maybe its an iota
evaluator; it could even be just some abstract computational essence, distinct
from implementation. That's enough to run a simulation.

Now, the question is 'why simulate the universe when you could just simulate a
brain'? This is basically the Boltzmann Brain argument. In terms of bits (see
Kolmogorov complexity) the universe is simpler to describe (physics + initial
conditions) than a whole brain (neurons, synapses, hormones, etc.). Basically,
the universe can unfold from a tiny core (the big bang), whereas a single
brain can't (it could unfold from a fertilised egg, but that's already huge,
and requires all kinds of matter and physics to work which the big bang would
have used anyway). In that case, a random program running on an 'outside'
computer is much more likely to be a universe than a brain. By the anthropic
principle, we could ask if our universe is the simplest which can support
life, in terms of the number of bits required to encode the laws of physics as
a program.

------
confluence
I've come to the conclusion that the universe probably is a simulation (via
the axioms provided by the simulation hypothesis). But it really doesn't
matter either way now then does it? Whether or not we live in the "root"
universe or one of the underlying simulations is really quite irrelevant to
our daily lives as it is to the lives of simulated characters in video games.
We can't do anything about it. Furthermore, since we are probably unable to
change the simulation, we might as well accept it to be reality. Some might
reply to this with the "Allegory of the Cave":

> _Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the
> wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch
> shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind
> them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato 's
> Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality.
> He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from
> the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up
> reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the
> mere shadows seen by the prisoners._

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave)

I rebut this by stating that if we do happen to live in a simulation, then it
is highly unlikely that we will ever be able to unchain ourselves from our
shadow wall. Hence, we might as well go forward with the assumption that the
shadow wall is in fact reality, because thinking otherwise would be a fairly
pointless exercise (pragmatically).

------
6ren
It's a cute argument, based on the number of universe simulations - if there
are heaps of them, the odds are ours is one.

But this argument misses something - what about the number of _people_ being
simulated? If there are many more than actual people, the same argument
applies. You are likely simulated.

But, you may object, if you simulate a person, don't you need to simulate a
universe? Well, yes, but only the bits the person can see. Like in a fps, it
doesn't render the entire world from every possible perspective - just one.
Much easier (and, dare I say it, more likely than simulating an entire
universe). This is just Descartes systematically deceiving demon + how many
there are.

A second objection is that it would be more efficient to share the same world
across many simulated people. This might be true, but the underlying question
remains: to determine how likely _you_ are simulated, we need to consider the
simulated vs real people ratio, not the simulated vs real universes.

PS: If we're going all Vishnu's dream, all bets are off. Why should it in
anyway be bound by the observations we have gathered? For example, why assume
the simulation must be finite - any justification that we can generalise from
our own observations is parochial and anthropocentric.

Of course, it is simpler to imagine (and probably, to do), if it's a
simulation of the actual universe. So let's use the argument again: of all the
simulated universes, how many will be of the true universe, and how many will
be bizarre variations (which ours would be)? Of course, we cannot hope to
estimate these probabilities for an arbitrarily different parent universe -
even less so than to predict what that parent universe would be like! But it
seems pointless to simulate an exact copy... for us, iteration-like
variations, or of fiction seem more likely.

~~~
archivator
As soon as I saw the title, I knew Nick Bostrom would be involved. And therein
lies chaos.

First, to clarify something from the article - Bostrom's "posthuman"
civilization is not strictly about the singularity but about almost unbounded
capabilities. Building computers out of planets would be within reach for such
a civilization. Think Culture, not Neuromancer.

The ratio of simulated people vs people in the actual universe was "addressed"
in one of Bostrom's subsequent papers but in a completely ad hoc if-you-do-
this-then-you-prove-my-point way. Here's some arguments against it -
[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Calculating...](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Calculating_the_Probability_of_Simulation_with_the_Bostrom_Equation)

All in all, the SimArg is a nice thought but it's so easy to poke holes
without first becoming a posthuman civilization that it loses what little
stability it might have had.

~~~
snowwrestler
I feel like Bostrom uses his first 2 conditions to constrain probabilities
until the 3rd seems likely. Is this insightful or a trick? I would argue it's
a lot closer to a trick, since conditions 1 and 2 are futures we hope for
(that we survive and become technologically advanced)--so we tend to
overestimate their actual probability.

Think of it this way: the total probability that we are in a simulation should
be the sum of all future states in which our descendents create adequate
simulations, _divided by the total number of all possible future states_
\--which is nearly infinite. Therefore the probability that we are in a
simulation now is actually nearly zero.

~~~
archivator
I think calling it a trick is unfair. It's not just P(C3), it's really P(C3 |
!C1 && !C2), where C1 and C2 are really big events, so the fact they haven't
occurred narrows the search space quite a bit.

Remember, he's not just talking about any conciousness simulations but a
specific type - ancestor simulations, which allows him to pull more rabbits
out of his hat than might normally be able to hide in there.

------
stcredzero
I think it makes as much sense for us to call a device capable of simulating
the universe a "computer" as it would be to think of a being who could create
a universe a "person."

~~~
chriswarbo
"person" doesn't have a formal mathematical definition. "computer" does, and
anything simulating our universe must be at least as powerful as a computer,
since our universe contains computers.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine)

~~~
stcredzero
_> "computer" does, and anything simulating our universe must be at least as
powerful as a computer_

Yes, but that strikes me as about as useful as noting how many genes human
beings have in common with yeast. (Useful in some contexts, but not all.)

~~~
chriswarbo
Not at all. The point is _not_ how amazing such a universe simulator must be,
the point is that a universe simulator _isn 't_ amazing. The point of the
Church-Turing thesis is that everything that ever was, is or will be; every
supernova, every human mind, every intergalactic alien empire, every
technology that _ever can be_ , is no more complex than ENIAC (given
sufficient memory).

------
ck2
If it's a simulation, why haven't we found any major bugs?

I mean there are some very deep things in physics that we cannot explain yet
but outright bugs in logic?

So if it's a simulation, it's the best code ever or someone is patching the
historical logs when a bug is fixed.

~~~
Kinnard
How would you define a bug?

~~~
stef25
Maybe we are the bug. A while back this guy discovered that his Quake bots
that had been running for 4 years found the perfect strategy to survival,
which was to stop fighting. In contrast, look at what humanity is doing.

Assuming the purpose of life is not to self destruct then we most certainly
have a bug in our system. Whoever wrote Quake wrote better code than "God".

~~~
telephonetemp
> A while back this guy discovered that his Quake bots that had been running
> for 4 years found the perfect strategy to survival, which was to stop
> fighting.

That sounds fascinating but also a bit hard to believe. Can you give a link to
that story?

~~~
whopa
You're right to be skeptical. It made the rounds last month, but it turned out
to be a hoax:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/01/quake-3-arena-
wor...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/01/quake-3-arena-world-
peace_n_3529082.html)

------
erez
Is the world a 3d hologram created by clustering of sub-microscopic, atomic
units of matter perceived by translating photon transmission to electrical
pulses?

YES.

------
tlarkworthy
Quantum mechanics is a manifestation of lazy simulation. Decide states with a
coin flip when necessary.

~~~
coldcode
Dice rolls per Einstein.

------
UnfalseDesign
Given that this is a simulation, it would meant that it is based on an actual
reality with physics that either match or are limited below our own. Given the
technology it would take to simulate life, the Designers would have to live in
a reality where they have harnessed some form of energy. The question is how
much energy would it take to simulate nearly seven billion people? Even if you
didn't have to process those that were sleeping, that's still a lot of energy
being consumed by the simulation. Either the Designers are using massive
amounts of energy to run the simulation or they have a completely different
set of physics and are running a simulation to test alternative physics.

~~~
vidarh
Or they are not simulating nearly seven billion people.

Or they are "cheating" a lot (most people aren't nearly as original as we like
to think).

Or they are simulating it at a massively reduced speed.

Or all of the above.

------
snowwrestler
It's possible that our universe is a simulation being run by intelligent
beings in a more complex universe.

It's not possible that our universe is a simulation of our universe by our
descendents, because you cannot simulate a universe accurately within itself.
It would be like saying that you can embed a 100k JPG losslessly within
another, existing 100K JPG. You can't do it without discarding a lot of
information.

And the information would be missed fairly quickly because chaos theory shows
that even perfectly deterministic systems can vary wildly over time based on
very very small differences in initial conditions.

~~~
icodestuff
Who says they're simulating it accurately?

------
UnfalseDesign
Where is the Universe's bug tracker. I have a few bugs I would like to report.

------
dspillett
The real kicker of this idea is that one you accept it is possible that we are
in a simulation, then it is _much_ more likely that we actually are than that
we are not.

~~~
randomafk
How so? It's not so clear to me.

~~~
dspillett
If it is possible to simulate a universe such as ours, and there definitely is
a real universe somewhere (which is an entirely different can of philosophical
worms) then it is most likely that there is more than one simulated universe
being run in that real universe. In fact there could be a great many
simulations running right now (either due to one civilisation at the relevant
technological level running many simulations, many civilisations running one
each, or many running many) and that multiplies up over the course of the real
universe's remaining existence.

We are either in _the one_ real universe or _one of the many_ simulated ones,
so it is more likely that we are in one of the latter.

Even if you consider the possibility of there being an infinite number of real
universes this basic arithmetic still holds: for each real universe there is
potentially a great many simulated ones.

To compound it further: if the simulation is so detailed that it is possible
for the simulated life to perform its own simulations, then each simulated
universe may contain many more simulated realities. Turtles! All the way down!
There will be a limit to how far this can go of course as each simulation must
logically be simpler than the parent reality (caveat: some might question if
that logic is true or just a limitation of our current knowledge about
information theory) so the complexity of the real universe(s) will dictate how
may levels of virtualisation we could potentially find ourselves within.

~~~
vidarh
I got into an argument with Kurzweil on his blog once years ago regarding the
details.

The simulation does _not_ necessarily need to be simpler, subject to a few
constraints: It needs to be possible to _represent_ the simulation in less
space than its containing universe. It also needs to be possible to _execute_
the simulation in the available space/energy, but if acceptable it may be
sufficient to be able to execute it at reduced speed which can substantially
reduce the amount of matter/energy required at any one point as you'd be able
to e.g. more aggressively apply compression etc. to the data.

The space requirement can be fairly small depending on the constraints on your
simulation. E.g. are you simulating a whole universe? A planet? One person?
Everything not directly observed by a simulation subject can be aggressively
pruned as long as it can be reconstructed in a believable state (unless you
are trying to accurately simulate the physics of everything), and even things
that _are_ observed can be simplified dramatically. E.g. in almost all cases
nobody would be able to tell a rough approximation of the physics and
appearance of cloud formations from "the real thing", so you don't need to
simulate them particle by particle. On the other hand, one such
optimization/approximation then could be to fake the result of any attempt to
run your own simulation.

One thing I find interesting is that Bostrom talks about "ancestor
simulations" a lot, but there's no reason to assume that if we're in a
simulation it has to be a simulation of the past of whomever runs the
simulation - it could be a game, or someone simulating aliens (to them), or it
could even be a civilization that decided to create themselves a nice
simulation to live in, or a "theme park"/"zoo".

~~~
dspillett
_> or a "theme park"/"zoo"_

Or it could have been created in their offices, to make the job of maintinain
a guide to galactic hitch-hiking easier to maintain.

------
nandeng
Yes, and God is the developer and maintainer, who created this huge simulation
program which contains bugs forcing him to kill processes constantly. That's
why we do not have immortal life. He tried to fix bugs by using a debugger
called Jesus but failed. He so desperately killed the debugger process and let
the system keep running.

Why God create this huge simulation? He want to post ads in this universe and
he is using a datacenter to simulate user behavior!

------
nodata
Why does it matter if we are in a simulation or not?

~~~
dspillett
It changes the whole "why do we exist at all" question completely. If we are
inside a simulation we may never be able to see outside to the true nature of
reality. Instead of being part of the an explanation for the big bang, black
wholes could just be a bug. Inflation could simply be due to the people
running the simulation wanting to skip that long drawn out expansion bit so
they could study something else.

Of course for our day to day lives it doesn't matter a jot. I still have to
work to earn money to pay the mortgage, even if my job, my money, my house and
the bank don't _really_ exist in the real universe...

Of course you could consider the simulation and the life within it to be
equally real: I think I am thinking, therefore I quite possibly may be. This
makes it even less relevant to those of us who are not philosophers or
theoretical physicists.

------
brudgers
(podcast, about 15 minutes, from _Philosophy Bites_ )

Nick Bostrom on the simulation argument:

[http://philosophybites.com/2011/08/nick-bostrom-on-the-
simul...](http://philosophybites.com/2011/08/nick-bostrom-on-the-simulation-
argument.html)

------
jasonkeene
Simulacra.. not simulacrums..
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation)

------
arc_of_descent
So if our Universe is a computer simulation, this might imply that the
advanced civilization that created this simulation consists mainly of computer
programmers. I like!

------
reppic
In case you ever wanted to read that article as a short story:
[http://qntm.org/responsibility](http://qntm.org/responsibility)

------
fideloper
What happens when we, the simulation, become advanced enough to run our own
simulations? Yo dawg, I heard you like simulations...

------
NAFV_P
I swallowed the bitter red pill, to realise we all exist in a simulation,
written in javascript by some spotty 14 year old.

------
rikkus
As an impartial outsider, unaffected by the simulation, I say no. I mean yes.

------
a3voices
If the universe is a simulation, and I'm conscious, why would they want to
simulate such a boring person (me)?

