
We are living in someone else's computer simulation - mhb
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?ex=1344744000&en=22bfff4070a81187&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
======
euccastro
42\.

Yes, guys, it was me all around. Funny that it took you so long to find out. I
kickstarted this big simulation as a weekend hack and let it evolve for a
month, so I could come and play as Warren Beatty.

Can we now, as a universe, move on?

    
    
     * * *
    

This is not science; it's religion, philosophy, or abuse of language. You
could never prove anything about this kind of stuff either way, and IMHO
throwing around probabilistic estimates is 'not even wrong'. The scientist
quoted in the article admits such estimates are only 'hunches', so I guess
only the reporter is to blame for placing this stuff under a 'Science' header.

Now, I'm not protesting that _we_ talk this. It's fascinating stuff. It's
funny to recognize in this thread some of the same crazy ideas that would get
people shuffling away from me at parties, like 'what if our whole known
universe is but an atom inside other universe, which in turn [...]?'

Re: worlds simulated inside worlds, aka the Matrix, aka Plato's cavern- when I
did work on a MMOG we had this conversation once or twice that if we gave our
non-player characters ability to learn and communicate for an arbitrary length
of time, eventually they'd come up with theories like _"Every object in the
universe has an unique ID, which is a 64-bit integer"_. And they'd wake up
after a downtime and comment things like _"gee, finally capacitor recharging
is fixed!"_ , and then stop and wonder about the deep meaning of that.

Re: internet and cybernetic consciousness: when I first learned about the
internet, one of my first thoughts is that the interconnected computers would
create a new consciousness, or an ecosystem of competing consciousnesses. Not
that it would be pursued, but that it would happen spontaneously, just like
life evolved out of the primordial soup.

Then I thought that something similar would happen as a result of connecting
so many people. Now, it's been always like that to some extent (cultures,
memes, ideologies, etc. can be thought of as supraindividual consciousnesses),
but the instant communication would make it more ostensible and powerful. Just
like oxidation and explosion are instances of combustion, yet the difference
in speed makes it counterintuitive for us to recognize any sameness between
them.

Fast-forward to 2007: for about a year, the global hivemind has been thinking
intensely about cats with captions. Who knows what deep intentions hide behind
this?

~~~
euccastro
Another of these ramblings that act as repellents in parties:

Some people are reported to have survived with only one hemisphere of the
brain. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that you could transplant into
yourself all needed duplicates or artificial replacements for vital organs,
then split yourself in two so both halves survive, with one of the brain
hemispheres each.

Then, there are two new independent _you_ s there, neither of them being quite
like the old _you_ , neither of them _feeling_ the other you as yourself
anymore, but both of them independently feeling themselves as _you_. Stop and
imagine this situation. How do you think you'd feel? How do you feel now,
thinking about it?

Now let's leap a bit from the medical to the philosophical: let's abstract the
fact that parts of the brain are specialized. Assume that we could do other
partitions but left-right, or suppose that brains will rewire to make up for
lost functionality. Imagine it's actually true that 90% of our mental power
usually goes to waste, and that we could lose half of the brain and somehow
mostly make up for it. Or imagine that it's possible to make a perfect copy of
yourself, as proposed elsewhere in this thread. The result is the same: there
is another _you_ out there, virtually identical, with the same past, but which
you don't _feel_ as you anymore.

How do you feel about that other you?

~~~
jey
You could skip the split-your-brain-in-two step and skip straight to a mind
upload. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading>

Interesting thought experiment nonetheless.

------
robg
Finally something I know a bit about...

I think where it's easy to believe the simulation theories is where they're so
in line with what our brains do on an everyday basis. We simulate reality when
we're getting ready for the day and deciding what to wear. Or when our stomach
rumbles for lunch and we mentally compare General Tso's finest masterpiece
against the toasty cheese of Quizno's. Indeed, I'd argue that the human brain
is at it's best as a simulation engine - predicting the future and
understanding the present based on past experiences

Don't fall for the 90% myth. We can't be sure where it came from, but it
simply isn't true. The brain is a simple organ only in the sense that if you
don't use it, you lose it.

Consider: You were born with 10x the number of cells you end up needing. The
ones that survived are ones that found connections and strengthened them with
their neighbors.

Indeed, that's what makes "mind transplants" so difficult to pull off. Your
mind is a unique product of your development.

Now, neural implants for boosting abilities and restoring function after
damage....

------
portLAN
This also explains the Fine-Tuned Universe.

An interesting property of a simulated brain is the simulation can take an
arbitrarily long amount of time. You can update in virtual "Planck timesteps",
even if in real time this takes a million years. Any simulated brain won't be
able to tell, because it doesn't get any updates in between these steps. Time
becomes a property of the system you're simulating... Just like in reality.

It might take until the Sun goes Red Giant to run your single lifetime
simulation.

The speed of light is a convenience for updating the simulation in discrete
steps. Particle/wave duality "deciding" upon observation is just lazy
evaluation, like in Haskell. Quantum entanglement is no mystery when distance
is virtual. A Universe where the speed of light is a hard limit can still
contain a simulated Universe where it isn't.

Why do we want virtual worlds? Properly implemented and convincing, we can do
away with suffering altogether. We can "live" in a world that seems fully
real, but in which no-one is actually suffering because everyone else is
simulated. All our needs are met and all our desires are fulfilled.

The mistake we keep making is that in order to create convincing AIs to
inhabit the world with us, they actually become as sentient and conscious as
we are; being virtual is no barrier to feelings or emotions! [1]

Thus our creations want to create a simulation to live in themselves, so they
won't suffer, either, and so it goes like a perpetual zoom on a fractal set.

[1] To convince yourself of this, consider a matter replicator that copies
every single atom in your body. You'd create a clone. It would be thinking and
feeling just as you do. Now consider a computer simulation of a single atom;
if that can be done, then by extension, it would be possible to simulate
anything made of atoms. A simulated clone of you would also behave the same.
The neurological activity that occurs in your "real" brain when you feel or
think would also occur across the virtual atoms in the brain of your virtual
clone. In fact, that would involve real electrical activity taking place among
real atoms making up the RAM chips and CPUs "containing" the simulation of the
virtual clone. Thus any simulation at the same scope or nesting level as
yourself is as real as you are and therefore its feelings are just as valid.
[2]

[2] By further extension, if your simulations are as real as you are, then
your simulation's simulations are as real as it is, and thus a simulation at
any nesting level is as real as one at any other -- a simulation inside a
simulation is still running on real atoms with real electricity!

~~~
jey
" _This also explains the Fine-Tuned Universe._ "

Not true. Consider the anthropic principle, which says that we must be in a
universe that has parameters such that we could come into existence in the
first place if we are here asking this question. In other words, we couldn't
ask the question unless our universe had the "right" parameters to begin with.

Far better explanations of the Anthropic Principle are available at:
<http://www.anthropic-principle.com/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle>

~~~
portLAN
Our virtual Universe had the right parameters. Those may be completely
different when you go up in scope.

------
LaurieCheers
> It's also possible that there would be logistical > problems in creating
> layer upon layer of simulations. > There might not be enough computing power
> to continue > the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual > world
> started creating their own virtual worlds with > billions of inhabitants
> apiece.

What a ridiculous conclusion. It seems to me, the logical way to handle this
is to simulate an entire universe, galaxies to atoms.

That might sound like it requires an impractical amount of processing power...
but only to us _inside_ this universe. If you think about it, it's obviously
impractical to simulate an entire universe within the universe itself.

In our parent universe, this wouldn't be an issue. Their speed of light must
be faster, their atoms smaller. Moore's Law continues apace for them, and they
can build computers that seem unthinkably powerful to us.

And the weirdness of quantum physics shows the kind of hacks they've made to
get it to run.

I'm thinking about writing a short story where a guy implements a universe in
7 days...

~~~
euccastro
What makes you think they'd have anything like light or atoms in our parent
universe?

------
nostrademons
I always thought that this would be a really interesting plot for a novel.
_Sophie's World_ kinda did it already, but it dropped the ball by having the
recursion level stop at 1. I was kinda hoping that at the end of the book,
Sophie would pick up a pen and begin to write a book about a guy named
Jostein...

~~~
palish
I'm pretty sure a movie did it.. "The Thirteenth Floor", something like that.

------
andreyf
Posthumans? What? Since we're thinking in realms of "probabilities", what is
the probability that the super-reality we are simulated in resembles our own
reality? Why do we assume the agents that designed our reality are anything
like us? Keeping in mind that we can't begin to imagine most of what is the
reality around us (the "really big" or "really small"), what makes us think we
can imagine what life of agents in a super-reality would be like? How broadly
do we define "computer"? This article seems like a dumbed down version of
stoned CS majors ramblings... bah.

~~~
jey
" _Posthumans? What?_ "

Nick Bostrom is an influential transhumanist philosopher.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism>

" _This article seems like a dumbed down version of stoned CS majors
ramblings... bah_ "

Non "dumbed down" version of the ramblings: <http://www.simulation-
argument.com>

------
myoung8
I've thought about a similar phenomenon many times--that the Earth is nothing
more than an atom floating around in the body of some greater being.

But to see something like this published in the NYT...that was a bit
surprising. Interesting, though.

~~~
zach
I was disappointed it wasn't a headline on the Op-Ed page. Now that's the kind
of viewpoint that's rarely expressed in the media.

------
Tichy
My favorite variant of this is a story from Stanislaw Lem's book "Star
diaries", written decades ago. I chose my nickname from the name of the hero
of that book, Ijon Tichy ;-)

~~~
alex_c
One of my favourite authors :)

Another somewhat related short story - "The Last Question" by Asimov:

<http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html>

~~~
rokhayakebe
great writing. everyone should read it and try not to just scan through it or
you will miss a very valuable lesson.

------
jey
Professor Nick Bostrom's site on the Simulation Argument:
<http://www.simulation-argument.com/>

He also has some other cool stuff, like this "Letter From Utopia":
<http://nickbostrom.com/utopia.html>

------
vlad
I've thought about this 6 years ago. The sim could even be paused and resumed
by the creator whenever he wanted, and we'd never be able to tell there were
actually many gaps in our lives that range in billions of creator-life-terms.

------
r7000
What about the morality of simulating an environment where sentient beings are
produced by a long agonizing process of evolution? Greg Egan points that out
here:
[http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ...](http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html)
(question 6). "Post-humans" should have room for a much more robust morality
that would preclude someone purposely creating the world we live in - unless
we were an unintended byproduct of an unintended byproduct that no "post-
human" has even noticed or something.

------
jsmcgd
The theory becomes is even more convincing if you realise and accept that it
needn't just be humans that have to create sufficiently powerful computers. We
could be part of a program running on some alien planet. Planet Earth, human
beings and all that we've ever known and loved, don't need to have ever
existed. All it requires is for some intelligence, somewhere to build a pretty
ultimate PC/Mac, whatever.

~~~
ajju
At the moment we know of only one definition of 'existence'. By that
definition everything you mentioned - the earth, humans exists.

------
josefresco
this article is like that idea I get just before I wake up or as i'm soaping
my ass in the shower and think it's brilliant. Then I think about it for oh
... maybe a few hours and realize I was a big idiot for even beginning to
think that I understood the concepts involved.

I then usually eat a sandwich

------
sgraham
The "20%" hunch kind of made skim from then on, but:

What's the definition of computer, exactly? Even without any magical circular
reasoning, the computer built on atoms and physics that we're being simulated
in is just as deterministic as the computer I'm using, so I'm not sure I even
see a difference.

------
rokhayakebe
You guys make me feel soooo not smart at this point.

~~~
omouse
Time to migrate back to reddit where we can see things we understand. Like
LOLCats :D

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asdflkj
Just what exactly is an "ancestor simulation"? To simulate human minds, you
have to simulate the universe, since that's where human minds get input. And
you can't simulate a universe within a universe that's just like it. Not in 50
years, not in any number of years. Most crankbabble of this variety manages to
at least be "not even wrong", but this is just plain-old wrong. Shame on NYT.

------
extantproject
I don't mind.

------
aswanson
No we're not.

