
Scientists are looking for ways to put the simulation hypothesis to the test - vikingo9
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/what-simulation-hypothesis-why-some-think-life-simulated-reality-ncna913926
======
gambler
The whole thing feels like encroachment of some kind of bizarre secular
theology into physics. Grandiose and mostly non-falsifiable claims that can't
be used to make any specific predictions. Thinking by analogy (with computers)
rather then by deduction or induction. What makes this fundamentally different
from, let's say, talks about the astral plane?

We don't have AI in GTA. We don't have strong AI at all. Our computing is
running into all kinds of physical limitations right now. Moreover, the only
thing that distinguishes GTA from accounting software is that we built it in
such a way that it can be _interpreted_ as a cruder version of the real world.
There is no fundamental difference.

~~~
jeletonskelly
It's just a probability thought experiment. If there is only one real universe
and there are (hypothetical) at least 2 simulations of universes (regardless
of their fidelity) then the odds that you, an inhabitant of a universe, is in
one of the simulated universes is 66%.

~~~
Retric
An actual universe contains vastly more computational power than all simulated
universes with that universe. Which means a thinking being is vastly more
likely to be in the real universe.

~~~
davorb
I don't think this follows. What you are saying is basically "All Bs must be a
subset of A. Therefore dogs like the sun."

~~~
Retric
Simulations are more computationally bound than the root universe. Simulating
a full being vs just a mind takes a lot more computation than simply
simulating a mind.

Therefore from an optimization standpoint simulations are unlikely to simulate
worlds nearly as complex as the real one. Either they are going to simulate
minds, or they will simulate tiny subsets of the real world, or vastly less
complex worlds. We are not operating as minds without body's which rules out
the pure mind simulation leaving far less efficient options which must
therefore simulate smaller spaces, less complex universes, and or shorter
periods of time.

ED: And by complexity I mean in terms of building blocks useful for simulating
a universe or hosting life. Complexity that's not useful for either purpose is
useless.

~~~
jeletonskelly
The bounds of the computing power isn't even worth considering because we have
no knowledge of the resources, let alone the nature of the reality, in either
a parent universe or parent simulation. Sure, fidelity must drop in each
nested simulation, but we have no idea if we are 2 levels deep, 1000 levels
deep, or in the actual real universe.

~~~
Retric
That's irrelevant as Life and computation both take resources.

In a more complex universe the bacteria equivalent could be more intelligent
than humans. But it does not go the other way simulations of a life form will
always be less efficient than the least complex lifeforms in a parent
universe.

~~~
coldtea
> _But it does not go the other way simulations of a life form will always be
> less efficient than the least complex lifeforms in a parent universe._

That doesn't follow logically.

It's perfectly fine to be able to simulate life forms MORE efficient than the
one's in your universe.

~~~
Retric
Simulation involves a lot of overhead. Computers and life can be built from
the same stuff QED. the simplest simulation of a lifeforms must be more
complex than the direct equivalent of that lifeforms.

That's not to say the simplest possible equivalent organism exists in that
universe, but anything that could make a simulation should also be able to
make that life form.

~~~
coldtea
> _Simulation involves a lot of overhead_

True for some values of "a lot", false for others.

What's undeniably true is that it incurs some overhead over NOT running a
simulation.

But that doesn't prove that a simulated life form incurs overhead larger than
its real life counterpart.

For one, there might not be any real life counterpart.

We say "simulation" here, but what we actually mean is "virtual world", which
might simulate an actual world, or it might be its totally own thing (the same
way I can chose to write a simulation of actual things, like e.g. "the Sims",
or a simulation of a domain I only imagined). If, for example, as per TFA, our
universe is a simulation, is doesn't mean that it actually simulated something
else. Just that it's a simulation in itself.

So, "simulated" in this discussion means "not an organically created world
made of some physical substrate, but consciously created/programmed by some
advanced civilization".

So, the thing simulated could be totally unlike (in properties, physical laws,
etc) what exists in the universe of those doing the simulation.

Second, a simulation (as we know it and practice it ourselves) usually has
much less overhead than the real life thing it simulates (when it does
simulate some real life thing). That's like, it's whole point. E.g. a weather
model running in some supercomputers has some overhead, but nothing like that
of the actual weather. Similarly, Sims has some overhead, but nothing like the
equivalent real-life place and humans would have.

Where you seem to be confused is that you assume that: (a) a simulation must
be of something that exists, (b) a simulation must be perfect, e.g. 1:1 to the
thing it simulates. Only then would your argument make sense.

But neither of those things are necessary -- even our Earth and universe, if
they are simulations, they could be very crude models, running with very low
resources, in a vastly more complex and powerful real universe.

~~~
883771773929
Adding on to this with an analogy from simulating dynamics in cellular
automata, most of the interesting models of physics we see act with high
redundancy in both spatial and temporal locality.

A simple rule like Conway's Game of Life that isn't too physically realistic
but is instructive because of how intimately it's been analyzed while
exhibiting some relatively high complexity, shows remarkable compressibility
using techniques such as memoization in HashLife[0].

Even more striking is the potential for superspeed caching where different
nodes are evolved at different speeds often allowing _exponential_ speedups of
pattern generations to be calculated for longer than the timeframe of the
universe we speculate about today for real physics.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife)

~~~
Retric
No free lunch. Hashlife takes more memory and only works well in low entropy
environments.

But, consider if you want to run a simulation 100 times using the same data
you can speed that output up by just copying the output of the first
simulation 100 times. But that's not simulating the same mind 100 times it's
simulating the mind only once. Hash life and similar approaches don't increase
your ability to compute unique mind states.

------
cwmma
A lot of these experiments start from a premise that the simulating universe
has similar physics to the one being simulated and thus any short cuts might
be noticed, but the outer universe could be be more have more complex (or just
different) physics so the fact that ours doesn't match up with theirs doesn't
mean ours isn't self consistent.

Sort of like how in Permutation City they create a simulated universe via
cellular automata and then when they tell the residents of that universe they
are simulated they don't believe them.

~~~
reacweb
The simulation has probably a purpose like solving (or understanding) issues
in the outer universe. It would be reasonnable to build the simulated universe
as similar as possible to the outer universe.

~~~
dustyleary
That's a big assumption.

What purpose does Goat Simulator [http://www.goat-
simulator.com/](http://www.goat-simulator.com/) serve to solve/understand
issues in our universe?

How do you know our universe is not a child's toy for a race of deity-like
beings? Or an art project?

Maybe the outer universe is populated by immortal godlike entities and has the
equivalent of the guys who made Dwarf Fortress saying, "hmm, I wonder what
would happen if there were a race of pseudo-intelligent creatures that just
arbitrarily died after just a few million seconds?" Or, "I wonder what would
happen if the fundamental building blocks of the universe did not behave
predictably, but instead made a random choice to determine the outcome of
every interaction?"

And maybe that programmer is just about to come back from his coffee break,
look at what happened, and say, "hmm, that was boring", kill the process, and
move on to other things.

When you're talking about something that could be powerful enough to simulate
our entire universe, assuming that our sense of scale matters at all to it is
pretty much the definition of hubris.

~~~
padobson
There's a question as to whether ethics/morals/compassion scale with power. I
think there's a solid argument to be made that human power has scaled near
exponentially over the last 200 years while human ethics seem to be coupled to
it (slavery and genocide are almost universally reviled where they were common
place before, per capita violence is way way down, international and
intercultural cooperation via trade, communication, etc have never been
higher).

Are the two things tightly coupled? Seems difficult to prove, but if they are,
they folks running our simulation are probably going to treat us a lot better
than we treat each other.

~~~
short_sells_poo
Maybe, maybe not. The problem is (as parent posits) that a hyper intelligence
with the means of simulating an entire universe could just be so utterly alien
to us that we can't make any predictions about it's reasoning. Perhaps they
would turn off our world/simulation with no more of a thought than what a
human would give about autoclaving a petri dish with some bacterial growth.

It's only human to try to ascribe human feelings and morals to such beings -
but the difference in scale is just too big. Comprehending why such a being
does or doesn't do something would be almost certainly beyond us.

------
AlexAltea
Whenever the simulation hypothesis comes up, there's always the questions
like: Who is simulating us? Where is the power coming from? What happens if
they pull the plug?

But why would any of that matter? In the end it's just a blob of data,
modified by some algorithm with every tick. That's not much different than
computing 2+2=4. Does it matter whose computer calculated that? Will the
answer be different if they pull the plug? None of that matters: maybe
multiple beings are simulating the exact same universe, or maybe none of them
are. Why would anything need to be computed "physically" to make the
simulation happen?

This take on the simulation hypothesis is the main plot point of "Permutation
City" by Greg Egan, which to this day, is (IMHO) the most reasonable variant
of the hypothesis I have read.

~~~
vikingo9
it begs the "Boltzmann brain" hypothesis - it's astronomically more likely
that the neurons of my brain will spontaneous configure to make me see a tree
rather than a tree spontaneously forming from a collections of atom.

~~~
Balgair
Thanks for the reminder of one of my favorite wiki pages :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future)

The timeline for a BB is about 10E(10E50) years, quite a bit of time. But this
gets me thinking as well: What kind of mess would that BB be?

Imagine you could actually survive that long, floating out in the black
vacuum. In a flash, a BB appears in front of you, spun out of the electrons
and dark energy. Over the eons you've figured out how to plug these BBs in and
chat with them. But they are mostly just random fictions of physics. Sure,
some astronomically small number of these BBs are the Kings of France, but
nearly all of them are just gibbering lunatics of random thoughts and
memories. I guess, in this manner, all possible versions of us are
reincarnated as BBs in the void. The quantum chance of an entire universe
winking into being is ~10E(10E(10E56)), so there's a bit of time to expect
these things to happen. But God! How boring!

------
ghobs91
Whenever this debate comes up, I find it interesting that it's rarely
discussed the theological ramifications of this.

God is generally described as a being who is outside the plane of our
existence, and created our existence.

It's intriguing to me that those who argue we're in a simulation have much
less trouble having faith in that premise despite the difficulty in proving it
being exactly the same as proving the existence of God.

If you think about it, the vast majority of the world which believes in a God
essentially believes we're in a simulation.

~~~
ASipos
That's because the simulation argument is the finitary version of the
ontological argument.

~~~
warent
I've never heard that a qualifier for the simulation hypothesis is that it
must be finite. For example, there could be infinitely many simulations
recursively, or there could be a sufficiently advanced extra-dimensional
lifeform that has generated an unbounded simulation that we live in.

~~~
ASipos
I wasn't referring to the finiteness of the simulation, but rather to the fact
that the notion of necessary truth (the box operator) is replaced by high
probability. (I'm specifically referring to the modern modal versions of the
ontological argument, which are not subject to Kant's objection.)

~~~
warent
There's too much jargon here for me to follow what you're saying. I'm not sure
what you mean by "box operator" or "modern modal versions of the ontological
argument", nor do I know what Kant's objection is.

------
pontifier
A friend and I had some deep discussions about this last year. We figured out
the basic outline of an escape plan, but unfortunately there is no way to
determine if it actually succeeds.

Essentially it boils down to creating an anomaly that cannot be ignored. Any
simulation being run at that level should also have some sort of way of
checking the contents and flagging things of interest for whoever is running
the simulation.

By creating an anomaly you gain attention. That attention may allow you to be
deemed valuable. If you are valuable, then you may be recorded outside the
simulation for some purpose. That may be the only route of escape, and it may
only happen as the data from the simulation is checked in post processing...

In conway' s game of life the glider is an example of escape. The pattern is
useful, so we copy it from simulation to simulation for reasons it cannot
comprehend. It has escaped.

~~~
jpmoyn
This is pretty borderline delusional

------
mLuby
I'm not sure how it _matters_ if we're in one. Our goal in all realities
should be to break free of that reality's constraints.

On the detection part, I predict we won't figure this out until we start
simulating realities ourselves; then for each bug we have to fix, we'll check
it against our reality. "A simulation inside a simulation!"

Or we may realize that energy is being supplied to the universe from an
external source.

Or we may be able to rowhammer a neighboring simulation (or any other part of
the machine really). Of course we might accidentally cause memory corruption
and destroy our universe, but we might also get root access! Basically execute
an in-universe hack to escape our simulation confines. Fun to think about how
this would all seem to aliens in the simulation next door when humanity first
fiddles with their data then is able to execute arbitrary code.

~~~
Razengan
> _Our goal in all realities should be to break free of that reality 's
> constraints._

Eh? Even if we cease to exist “outside” this “reality”?

What does it mean for a 2D pixelated game sprite to “break free out of its
reality”?

~~~
virmundi
A possibly hilarious buddy movie where two sprites escape into New York.

------
tokyodude
I probably don't understand the argument. My limited understanding is it's a
thought experiment

1\. We have GTA5

2\. GTA5 will continue to improve until there are actual A.I. NPCs in it

3\. Those NPCs will not know they are living in a simulated world

4\. Every PS2000 playing GTA5 = more simulated people than actual people. QED,
odds are we're simulated people

The problem I have with this is the basic premise. Is it actually possible to
simulate the entire universe? It seems impossible to me. The argument is
supposed to be that like GTA5 only the parts being observed by the NPCs need
to be simulated (actually GTA5 is only parts observed by the player).

In either case that seems false. In order for the causality to work out when
an NPC observes any part of the universe all causality for all atoms for the
NPC's observation need to be calculated since they were last observed. I don't
believe you can take shortcuts like a game does.

Also, games rarely save the state of the entire game world, usually they reset
any changes in few seconds.

Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are
impossible problems

* You need more atoms in the universe to simulate a universe (so that means the outer universe has to be several orders of magnitudes larger than this one)

* You can't actually take any shortcuts so you need insane processing power. More processing power than our entire universe.

I seems like the basic premise, that it's obvious we'll eventually have
universe simulators, is just flat out false. We could make a holodeck maybe,
but it will have to be limited the same way games today are limited since
otherwise it would require nearly infinite storage and computing power.

~~~
21
> Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are
> impossible problems

Our universe has 10^70 atoms (or whatever). This is an arbitrary number. Maybe
in the host universe there are 10^700000000 atoms, and 10^70 atoms are what
fits inside a small "tenis ball" from that universe.

BTW, we are already running pretty accurate physicals simulations, if only for
extremely short periods of time and small spaces -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD)

~~~
informatimago
Simulating a lot of atoms doesn't require more atoms, with quantum mechanics.
You only need to compute the wave function! You need to instanciate atoms only
when they're observed (and you can garbage collect them once they vanish again
into the wave probability).

------
warent
> "As a huge bonus, Campbell claims the experiment could also explain the
> weird way that events in quantum physics seem to be influenced by the
> observer: It may be a quirk of the simulation we live in, not a fundamental
> aspect of reality."

I'm not a quantum physicist, but my spidey senses are tingling. Isn't this a
common misrepresentation of a relatively well-known behavior in quantum
mechanics, analogous to the Fourier transform trade-offs where a narrow window
yields a poor resolution?

~~~
furgooswft13
You're talking about the Uncertainty Principle, which is indeed a property of
all waves and not unique to Quantum Physics (I like to use the analogy of
taking a single slice of a 44.1khz PWM data stream of an audio signal, in
which you'd have 100% certainty of amplitude and 100% uncertainty of
frequency. The more slices you take the more certain you are of frequency,
less of amplitude.) Popular science and even QM itself has deeply confused
itself on this issue over the past 100 years, yet it is as based in pure logic
as the value of π is; nothing to do with the nature of the universe we happen
to live in.

But they seem to be talking about the so-called Observer Effect, an even more
deeply confused issue in QM. I'm not a physicist but from what I've read it
can be understood as a quantum system becoming entangled with another system,
the detector/observer, which causes the original system to lose coherence. But
nothing magical is happening due to consciousness or whatever, it's just 2 or
more systems interacting and interfering with each other. The trick is that
"observation" of a quantum system is said to collapse the wave function into
well defined values instead of probabilities. I think this is explained well
by Quantum decoherence[1], that the isolated system acquires phases from its
surrounding environment and thus loses it's original coherence and
superposition, however the total system of observed and observer is still
coherent (and I'm not totally clear on why the new system takes up well
defined values for certain properties, but it seems to be some dynamical time
evolved process especially when a small system interacts with a much bigger
one, if you can follow the linked article).

And yes, I've heard these confusions combined into the notion that the
universe only generates information when observed by some consciousness as
some kind of space optimization, so maybe that is what the article is getting
at.

Again, not a physicist, so I could be just as confused as everyone else, but I
prefer to try to understand things these ways than trying to make sense of the
constant refrain of dead and alive cats, the darkside of the moon not existing
until we sent a probe to see it, and "you might be able to be in two places at
once, just like a quantum particle!" we get from pop-sci and some grant
seeking scientists.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence)

~~~
jl2718
I was taught the ‘wave (eigenstate) collapse upon measurement’ concept, and in
the lab, it’s just silly; the decoherence concept you describe is quite
obviously the proper way to think about it, or we wouldn’t have to worry about
losses from anything that wasn’t measured.

Simple explanation of QM: a classical object has a vector of properties, but
in quantum this is a matrix. Any interaction is a matrix multiplication. After
a bunch of matrix multiplications, you end up with a single eigenvalue, and
now the quantum property matrix acts just like the classical property vector.
The choice of linear operators, and probably the internal linearity among
properties as well, is just a simplification, but otherwise we’d be
mathematically lost in a world of functions that arbitrarily modify other
functions.

------
currymj
I recommend the book “Paradoxes in Probability Theory”, by William Eckhardt.
It refutes a number of these thought experiments that play weird games with
probabilities, including the Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Hypothesis.

I find its refutations convincing, although I could be wrong — there are many
subtleties in play here.

Regardless, if you find the Simulation Hypothesis or Doomsday Argument
convincing, you ought to consider these refutations. Intuitively, it should be
surprising that we can predict the apocalypse, or deduce the nature of an
infinite regress of simulated universes, just by sitting in a chair and doing
some basic arithmetic.

------
nikkwong
I still think papers like these tend to undermine the sophistication and
difficultly in solving the hard problem of consciousness. We can throw more
and more computing power at creating a GTA-like simulation and make the AI
more and more complex and ever more alive; but that won't ever make them
conscious. And based on the current understanding, it seems that consciousness
is more than just something that springs up from raw computing power. So the
whole GTA-ification of reality just doesn't work for me. If we really are in
GTA—well, why am I having the experience I am having?

Is that question even answerable?

~~~
titzer
> I still think papers like these tend to undermine the sophistication and
> difficultly in solving the hard problem of consciousness. We can throw more
> and more computing power at creating a GTA-like simulation and make the AI
> more and more complex and ever more alive; but that won't ever make them
> conscious.

You're assuming dualism from the start, and you won't get anything but more
dualism out of this line of reasoning.

> If we really are in GTA—well, why am I having the experience I am having?

When the characters in GTA start asking themselves this out loud, you two can
argue it over and one or the other of you will have an epiphany.

------
hfdgiutdryg
_If our reality is built on top of a lattice, there’d be a fundamental
coarseness to it, since there could be no details in our mock-universe smaller
than the resolution of the simulation._

I'm pretty sure I read an article about some research team starting on exactly
that project at least ten years ago. I may even have read about it on
Slashdot.

~~~
earenndil
Plank length?

------
palisade
I've said this before and I'll say it again. The problem with coming up with a
test for being in a simulation is that the creator of the simulation might
simply overwrite our memories. They could make us believe we succeeded in
proving the simulation hypothesis false. There really isn't a way to test this
properly when you aren't able to experience reality objectively. We're on the
inside.

Side Note: I had an interesting debate just last night with some friends where
I pointed out the creator of the universe might not even be aware of the
aberration of our existence in it and from a high level thinks everything is
running smoothly. And, we haven't made a big enough dent in the universe to
get noticed. The question then becomes, if we for example destroyed a star or
entire solar system to get the creator's attention would they go, "WHAT IS
THIS?!" and delete the aberration? Contact us? Or, simply observe? Note: I was
discussing a real god at the time, but my friend thought I was referring to a
creator in the context of simulation theory at the time. Still an interesting
brain buster either way.

Also, if it's true the creator is more of a macroscopic thinker than
microscopic and are "asleep at the wheel" then it kind of explains a lot of
things regarding injustices in the world. The creator just glances at the
universe from time to time says to themselves, "Well, the galaxies are still
spinning. All is well."

No offense to any religion. It was just a fun thought experiment.

~~~
earenndil
Why should we be an aberration? Perhaps life is one of many things that occur
naturally with _relative_ frequency given the parameters of the simulation.

~~~
palisade
Most of humanity assumes we are meant to be here. It was a more interesting
thought experiment to consider that we might be a happy accident.

------
ken
"If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe, and if
they run computer simulations ..."

This argument strikes me as similar in form to Fermi's Paradox -- and I don't
buy that one, either. They both have the form: "If <unproven hypothesis 1> and
<unproven hypothesis 2> and ... and <unproven hypothesis N>, then <surprising
consequence>!"

In Fermi's case, the consequence is observably false, so people assume that
(only?) one of the clauses must be false. In the Simulation case, the
consequence is not easily observable, but the premises seem not-completely-
outrageous, so people start picking away at it.

The hunch that "the universe is really _really_ big, therefore occurrence X
(which I just made up) ought to be happening an awful lot (but we have no way
to even make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many times)" just
doesn't hold water for me. There's plenty of cases where my planet seems
_really_ big, but things just don't happen as often as I might predict by
looking at one corner of it. If something were happening all the time, it
would have been happening all along, and you wouldn't need to come up with the
idea just now -- obviously the only ideas left to invent today must not be
happening much!

Apply the Fermi Paradox to the Simulation Hypothesis. The universe is only 14B
years old, and AFAICT so far, completely void of intelligent life except for
us (a very recent development). Isn't "life is exceptionally new and rare" a
completely plausible (if boring) solution to both of these questions?

~~~
byteface
Fermi's just points out a contradiction between what's observable locally vs
universally. So to your point can be related to simulation. But saying we're
new or rare given how uniform it all is, is not boring but exceptional and
that's the problem IMO. The fast radio bursts thing is interesting in this
respect.

------
ElBarto
It's a possibility but I think not more likely than the possibility that we
are not.

If we are, then it pushes back 'reality' one step back but the question of
what 'reality' is remains. And that even opens new questions.

In my view this is similar the question of the origin of the Universe.

Both questions boil down to either a singularity or to infinity. It's
difficult for the mind to make sense of either.

~~~
nomadiccoder
It is argued that there is a higher probability that we are living in a
simulation.

~~~
7dare
He's arguing against that view and gave arguments. Do you have any?

~~~
jcranmer
The standard argument for simulation boils down to "in the future, we'll get
access to insane computational ability, and someone is bound to run ancestor
simulations just because we can; once this becomes possible, the amount of
time consumed by such simulations will dwarf the time of history." In other
words, the argument is basically "it's not impossible, so it will eventually
happen, and over a long enough time period, it doesn't matter how long it
takes to happen."

(As you might imagine, I am not persuaded by this argument.)

~~~
stan_rogers
No, it's _far_ more likely that we're the result of an emergency overload dump
of a runaway thaumic reactor experiment run in the squash court of a
university for wizards on a much more sensible flat world. There's far less
hand-waving in that narrative.

------
jwalton
I suspect the simulation hypothesis is false. It relies on the premise that
computers will get faster and faster until eventually we are simulating
universes, but I suspect this will not be the case; we have been running into
physical boundaries in making CPUs faster for quite some time. It's true that
simulating a universe would lend itself well to parallelization in some
respects, and it's also true that the universe would not have to be simulated
in realtime in order for it's occupants to perceive it in realtime, but still
it would be a monumentally expensive undertaking with current technology.
Quantum computing may give us some big shortcuts here.

I also read a clever paper some years ago that assumed a minimum amount of
energy required to perform a computation, and then asked, if our CPUs continue
to double in power every year, how long will it be until we need to convert
all the matter in the observable universe into its rest energy to power our
computer? As with all numbers that double on a regular basis, the answer is
shorter than you'd think.

But, there's a far more worrisome subset of the simulation hypothesis; when we
train an image classifier, we show it a whole bunch of pictures of cats and
dogs and "train" it. It stands to reason that when we want to build a general
purpose AI, we will need to train it with general experiences. You could
easily do that by recording a person's entire life and then feeding it to an
AI. Hard to start recording a person right out of the womb, but you could make
some minor modifications to the recording so that everyone in this "recorded
universe" thought it was perfectly normal for everyone to not remember the
first four of five years of their life.

If this hypothesis is true, then I have good news; when you "die", there will
indeed be an afterlife. There will be several in fact, as you are instanced
across many servers and put into service doing natural language processing for
users of the iPhone MMLX.

~~~
orwin
I remember my philosophy teacher saying to the class that we can make 3
hypothesis:

\- Technology can advance until we can make simulation undicernable from
reality: in this case, we are likely to live in this simulation

\- Any civilisation comming close to the previous point is likely to already
have destroyed itself. In this case, living in a similation is unlikely,

\- Technology can't advance to this point in our universe. Living in a
simulation is impossible.

On of these proposition is true, but we are unable to know which one. So we
have to put an equal weight on those, and the probability that we live in a
simulation is 1/3.

Sadly (or hopefully), Church-Turing conjecture is somehow backing the 3rd
theory too, and i'll by anything coming from Turing.

------
user812
It is fundamentally impossible to know whether we live in a "simulation". The
concept itself is a notion connected to contemporary culture based on certain
technical knowledge, and thus the definition of what a simulation is isn't
absolute, but rather subjective.

It follows that not much objective can come from this biased root assumptions.

In many ways physics is theoretical nowadays. You can look through the list of
theories in theoretical physics and realize that it is all a giant construct.
Physicists can spend their entire careers with illusions, which is ironic as
physics supposedely is about reality.

At the end of his career, Albert Einstein said:

"I think it's entirely possible that physics can't be based upon the field
concept, i.e. consistent structures. In this case not a single part of my
cloud-castle remains, including the theory of gravitation and all the rest of
modern physics."

------
nickbeukema
Wouldn't the world view of a single god who created the universe also fall
under a "simulation"?

------
scottndecker
The simulation won't allow it. Those trying to determine it will be eliminated
from the simulation. Even discussing this on a public forum is dangerous.

~~~
clamprecht
If this is true, then the fact that no one is eliminated after this discussion
would be evidence that we're not in a simulation. At least not one with the
rules you suggest.

But maybe the simulation does allow such discussions.

~~~
meijer
We probably don't remember those who were eliminated.

~~~
dwighttk
who brought this up anyway?

------
wyldfire
I think those scientists should hire the researchers who keep discovering
escapes from VMs/containers. Depending on which iteration we're on, there
might be some simple low-hanging fruit like a BIOS call we could make. ;)

Aside: read "Microcosmic God" [1], an interesting sci-fi short story by
Theodore Sturgeon [2].

[1] [http://1pezeshk.com/wp-
content/pics/2013/01/microcosmicgodth...](http://1pezeshk.com/wp-
content/pics/2013/01/microcosmicgodtheodoresturgeon-111104040008-phpapp02_2.pdf)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God)

------
apo
Science can never "prove" a hypothesis - it can only _disprove_ it. Therefore,
a hypothesis that makes no falsifiable predictions has no business in
scientific discourse. This is a point that non-scientists (and, unfortunately
even some scientists) often get wrong.

Some on this thread have compared the simulation hypothesis (SH) to theology.
The difference is that the SH, at least in its most useful form, makes
falsifiable predictions, as shown in the article.

Theology, on the other hand, makes no falsifiable predictions. Christian
theology takes this one step further by elevating "faith" to the highest plane
of human being. Reason and disbelief, Christian theologies tell us, is the
path to pride and Satan.

------
macawfish
If you think you're living in a simulation, maybe you're projecting something
about about your cushioned (alienated) consumer lifestyle onto life itself.
Your been absolved (robbed) of contact with the roots of your life. You sit in
comfort zones, nibbling and sipping on life's material fruits, discarding
packaging to the netherworld, wondering if the roots ever even ever existed in
the first place. You're starting to doubt it. Maybe you're just living in a
simulation.

I'm more interested in this idea as a product of contemporary materialism than
as a testable physical theory.

Study semiotics, then ask yourself again if you're living in a "simulation".

~~~
Vraxx
Hmm, I mentioned in another comment that I'm not even sure how much I
"believe" this premise, but for the sake of discussion let's assume I do as I
find it fun to think about from time to time.

Your post sounds very condescending, but I'm interested in what sounds like a
completely different take on the topic than I've seen before. I don't know
anything about semiotics and had to look up what the term meant before
posting. What would be your abbreviated and distilled thesis for how semiotics
relates to this topic and to your first paragraph? Phrase differently, if I
were to study semiotics, what part of it in particular would be the most
relevant to changing my answer/ideas related to the question "am I living in a
simulation"?

------
jl2718
I had a math teacher in high school (Mr Atlas) that asked an epistemological
question: “What if, before Copernicus, the stars really were just holes in the
sky?”

Think of scientists as unit testers for new features in CI.

------
ranprieur
If we're in a simulation, it's almost certainly not a computer simulation, but
some technology that we can't even imagine, any more than cavemen could
imagine computers.

~~~
saalweachter
Infinite 2-state, 3-color Turing machine.

------
blueadept111
It's absurd to think that any entity within a simulation could draw
conclusions about anything outside the simulation itself.

"Better than 50%" my ass, Elon and Neil are hacks.

------
samuelfekete
The probabilistic argument can be made the other way:

All the information for a simulated universe needs to be stored in some form
in the outer universe, but the outer universe would also contain information
not used for simulation.

If we consider an arbitrary piece of information, chances are it exists in the
outer universe only - unless more than 50% of the outer universe is used for
simulations.

If 100% of the outer universe is used for simulations, than the simulations
are the outer universe(s).

------
supastring
If this is a simulation then it’s pretty mundane. If civilisations had the
power to simulate universes, i can imagine vast numbers of more extreme or
interesting universes. Heavens, hells, dramatic and artistic experiments. The
mediocrity principle coupled with the fact that we’re in quite a boring
universe seems to indicate that either the majority of simulations are quite
mundane for some reason, or we’re likely not in a simulation.

~~~
jeletonskelly
Given the immense size of our simulation and our relatively small presence in
it, it could be that the simulators had no expectations of it becoming self-
aware. It would seem that they simply picked some fundamental parameters
(physics) and started it.

------
jpmoyn
I don't see it as any more likely than us not being in a simulation.
Regardless, these discussions always drag up so much existential dread in me.

------
dr_dshiv
I like the moral implications: if the existential risk is being shut off, we
should all do our part to keep things _interesting_

------
mbil
Slightly off topic, but anybody who's interested in thinking about the
simulation hypothesis might get a kick out of this short fiction piece:
[https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/166941](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/166941)

------
ai_ia
One of the most important worries and cause of anxiety I have had, has been
the question of who created humans and why. And who has the created this
entity in return and who created that entity in return, so on and so forth.

I had many panic attacks with a sense of futility to life and meaning of it.
Until some years earlier, I had an insight that maybe the rule that everything
requires a beginning is a necessity for human mind to comprehend things. It is
very damn well, possible to have things to exists without anyone setting
things in order.

There is a significant probability that this world simply exists without a
beginning nor an end. This notion has given peace and satisfaction & I very
well maybe wrong, but that is least of my concern now.

------
TomMckenny
>"...we..."

"We"? Down this line of thinking, maybe the rest of you don't exist. Maybe I
made the simulation complete with friends and then erased the fact from my
memory.

Maybe instead of bugs in the simulation we should be looking for design flaws
like irrational numbers for constants or slews of arbitrary particles. Of
course if the universe were well designed we could use that as proof it's a
simulation too.

But I'm not sure "fun to think about" corresponds with "interesting enough to
take even remotely seriously"

------
xamuel
Of course "Are we living in a simulation" is far too vague to test. The type
of simulation must be narrowed down before the question can be tested.

In my paper "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we
don't live in", I give an example of a (very specific) type of simulation
which we can easily test:
[https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf)

------
baxtr
Side note: I strongly believe that we’re just living inside a dream of some
billionaires that were completely bored out. And, there is no test to falsify
that thought...

------
Razengan
I always thought that one of the biggest criteria for the existence of a
“parent” “reality” would be whether there is such a thing as Free Will or not.

If there is true randomness in our universe, then surely it must come from
outside the universe, or our system could spontaneously put itself into an
invalid state at some point and possibly crash, no?

------
TheOtherHobbes
How would you tell if a competent simulation was fixing the results to return
"I'm not a simulation" when queried?

------
paraschopra
If there are simulators, can't / won't they detect our attempts to test the
simulation hypothesis and patch any defects that scientists might notice to
render such experiments un-reproducible?

Unless they really want us to find them. But then there are easier ways for
that. One is simply painting in the sky: show me what you got.

~~~
ken
Aliens might not be constantly watching all billions of life forms. Aliens
might not care if we find them or not. There's plenty of reasons aliens
wouldn't bother to interfere.

If you buy the Simulation Hypothesis, based on the premise that aliens have
infinite computing power in which to run simulations like this, then logically
you should also believe that we're not special. With infinite computing power,
they don't need a giant datacenter and a research team to run us. It's just a
few basic principles they chose last month (in their time), and a little box
sitting on someone's desk, like the TNG episode "Ship in a Bottle". With
infinite power, there's probably millions of simulations running.

Maybe if it becomes self-aware, a light turns on, and they cheer, like we do
when the bouncing DVD logo hits exactly in the corner -- and then they go on
with their life. Maybe kids pick different initial conditions and race to see
which universe becomes self-aware first.

I don't believe the Simulation Hypothesis, but if it is true, the most likely
scenario is that there's gobs of different simulations running, and aliens
don't care about us at all.

------
byteface
Maybe something like conways game of life but using rules of thermodynamics
instead to distribute cell energies may be fruitful at even a small level?
Also it's worth considering if a reality that can operate outside of, or break
mathematics/physics is possible. i.e. 1/0 as this would be harder to simulate

------
Lichtso
Here is my collection of thoughts and opinions on the topic.

First: The fascination for simulation hypothesis is another extension of us
humans wanting to be something special and also being very worried that we
might not be so special after all. This is the constant inner battle of our
minds between the our inferiority complex and the mediocrity principle. Like
as if living a simulated but enjoyable life is not good enough. But, that is
not to say that it is not at least an interesting thought experiment everybody
should try once. It can even help us understand our own insignificance.
(Excuse me, my nihilist got out)

Second: I do think there is no such a thing as simulation or even an inner and
an outer forming a hierarchy. Imagine two astronomers looking into a
telescope. One says to the other: "Wow, look I created this galaxy in there.
And if I change the parameters just so slightly by adjusting this here, I get
a totally different one which still has some similarities to the last one."
Now, replace the telescope by a computer screen and the astronomers by two
people programming a video game. What they fail to realize is that they do not
"create" these galaxies or simulated universes. No, they are just observing
them. And by interacting with the computer you don't change the simulation but
instead switch to observing a different version. But, just like the natural
numbers all of this just exists. It does not come into existence (is not
created), neither does it cease to exist or change. It also needs no space or
memory to be stored on and no mass to be conserved. 1+1=2 is true with and
without us. It is completely independent. Concepts like time, space and mass
are specific to some universes (like ours) and are not universal (pun
intended).

Third: Yes, multiverse theory does not solve everything, but it solves the
"trivial" questions like: \- Are we the result of an intelligent design, god,
alien, simulation? Question which are just offsetting the problem by one. \-
Are we just a computer simulation and thus not "real"? All universes are
equally real, there is no hierarchy: Cognito ergo sum. \- Can we break out?
Everything you find would just be another physical law and property of our
universe. Or you get really lucky and are actually boltzmann-brained, allowing
you to visit another universe while keeping your memories of the last one. At
least that is what it would seem like to you.

Yet, multiverse theory lets us move on to the harder questions like: Why does
anything exist at all? Wouldn't it be much simpler for just nothing to exist?
What is qualia and how does it "emerge"?

P.S: Let them do their experiments, maybe they accidentally find something
useful anyways.

------
blancheneige
surprised no one has mentioned The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch. it's a
must read on the subject, in particular when it comes to all the irreducible
hints and theoretical constraints that would allow us to rule out a simulated
reality.

------
danbruc
This is more or less simply impossible. If we observe some fact X about our
universe we have no source of truth that can tell us whether X should be true
or false for real universes, simulated universes, or both kinds of universes.

~~~
lev99
It's impossible to prove, but empirical evidence could improve the theory.

~~~
danbruc
What kind of evidence are you hoping for? Say we measure particle trajectories
very precisely and discover something that looks a lot like floating point
rounding errors. Now what? How would you know that the physics of the real
universe doesn't resembles floating point numbers? It is absolutely
unjustified to jump from the universe looks smooth to us but our computer
simulations have finite precision to the real universe is smooth and simulated
universes might have finite precision.

It is an attempt to distinguish something we don't know from something else we
don't know. Everything we know about our universe might be something that
applies to real universes or something that applies to simulated universes
depending on whether we live in a real universe or in a simulated universe.
Even worse, we know nothing at all about simulated universes if we live in a
real universe and we know nothing at all about real universes if we live in a
simulated universe.

------
misthop
Even if detecting that we are/are not in a simulation, building experiments to
help answer unusual questions is another way to understand the physics of our
reality. I think it is great.

------
memebox3f
Where is all this computing power coming from? How many universes could you
compute with the power of one sun over the course of it's life?

~~~
misthop
Why only one star? Even if you assume the simulating universe has similar
physics to ours the simulating entities could be Kardashev[0] III, IV or V

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)

------
tjtuck
Eh, dark matter is the bug they seek.

------
vinayms
I hypothesize that its one or a combination of these three things.

1\. these people have run out of research ideas.

2\. they want a series on the Discovery network.

3\. they are scamming gullible billionaires into funding the "research".

The fact that Tyson has something insightful to say makes point 2 a strong
possibility, I say better than 50-50. I am disappointed to not see Kaku pitch
in.

~~~
lurquer
And 4. They watched The Matrix at an impressionable age.

------
sebringj
Couldn't a simulation also simulate our conclusions that we are not in one? It
doesn't seem like one could answer this with any certainty in the end.

------
ape4
If its a simulation there would be some "shortcut" way to get into "root" or
supervisor mode.

~~~
ken
Why? Conway's Life doesn't have a supervisor shortcut.

~~~
21
Depends how you think about it.

What if you ran Conway's Life simulation, and suddenly on you screen appear
cells ordered in the form of text messages like "Hi, I am aware that this is a
simulation, I want to talk with the entities outside it".

