
Elon Is Wrong. We Don't Live in a Simulation - pastalex
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/we-dont-live-in-a-simulation
======
galistoca
This guy basically is saying "the world we live in is physical, because well..
it is physical!". How does someone like this become a professor and publish
books?

I have no problem someone saying "it is very likely we live in a simulation"
because it's an opinion and he's not trying to hide the fact that it's just an
opinion.

But saying stuff like "THAT IS WRONG" and "It's conceptually and empirically
incorrect" is really amateur.

By the way does this guy even know what "empirically" means? Our experience is
nothing more than what we perceive as human beings, and there's plenty of
evidence that supports that what we perceive is not necessarily the reality.
And this guy is saying "it's empirically wrong". It is impossible to prove a
philosophical theory "empirically wrong".

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johnloeber
The basic objection here -- that Musk misunderstands the nature of simulation
on a philosophical-technical level, and that even if our existence was
simulated, it is still as meaningful as it would be if it weren't -- is nicely
written and argued, but it feels woefully irrelevant to the debate. The author
has done nothing to address the fundamental probabilistic argument that Musk
uses in favor of simulation. This article is mostly an attack on definitions,
not one on substance.

~~~
coliveira
The author doesn't consider the probabilities because he refutes the whole
notion altogether. The point is that being able to create a simulation
(imitation) of reality (a game for example) is completely different from
creating a different, separate reality. The simulations that we create are
always, and by necessity, inside the real world, the only one that really
exists.

Inside a game, there is no virtual reality. The only thing that exists inside
a machine are electric voltages. The simulation provided by a game only woks
for us, who are already in the real world, observing the simulation. And these
simulations only work because they replicates real things that we already
know. For any kind of "being" "living" in the simulation itself, there is
nothing of importance other than a bunch of electrical impulses in silicon.

~~~
chriswarbo
> For any kind of "being" "living" in the simulation itself, there is nothing
> of importance other than a bunch of electrical impulses in silicon.

Considering the fact that "a bunch of electrical impulses in silicon" is
enough to encompass all computable functions, including all of the laws of
physics, I don't know of anything "other" that a being might care about...

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coliveira
Whatever computers are capable of doing, they're still just part of the real
universe, not of a separate, simulated universe.

~~~
chriswarbo
> Whatever computers are capable of doing, they're still just part of the real
> universe, not of a separate, simulated universe.

I don't recall anyone ever claiming that computers or simulations are separate
from the real universe. Dualists make similar claims, but they usually claim
their non-physical quackery _doesn 't_ apply to computers. So, I don't know
what point you're trying to make.

~~~
coliveira
Just consider that when a computer simulation looks incredibly good, it just
looks great _for us_ , human observers. The simulation itself doesn't
recognize anything that is generated by computer screens (even when there is
some level of AI involved), it is our brain that perceives everything as
_real_. So, my point is that the simulations we create don't live in a
separate universe where they "experience" another reality. Just the opposite,
they only simulate our own reality. So, it really doesn't matter how good they
look, it doesn't make any difference if there is no subtract for this
simulated reality to exist independently.

~~~
chriswarbo
Of course, if a simulation happens to have some output, e.g. pixels on a
screen, infrared radiation from a processor, etc. that doesn't effect the
simulation itself.

While it's true that a simulation will be part of the real universe, it's not
particularly useful to think at that level; in the same way that it's not
useful to handle POSTs to a login form by considering the voltage difference
across logic gates. It's much more useful to use the "laws of HTTP", "laws of
TCP", etc. to reason about "requests", "processes", "sockets", etc. Such
entities _do exist_ , but they exist in a "virtual" world; that world is not
separate from the _physical_ world, but it can be completely described
_without reference to_ the physical world. Physics and reality are merely
implementation details, and don't offer any particular insights into the
system's behaviour.

In fact, a computer (e.g. one running a simulation) is an _incredibly_
contrived situation; about as pathological as you can get, since (digital)
computers are specifically engineered to abstract away the laws of physics,
are robust against perturbations, and their overall behaviour is irreducibly
complex (as Wolfram would call it). The only results we can derive about the
signals in the computer are trivial, i.e. they would apply regardless of what
the system's doing; e.g. the signals aren't creating/destroying energy,
they're not propagating information faster than light, etc.

As a concrete example, the statistical mechanics underpinning classical
thermodynamics requires that we assume ergodicity (all states are reachable
from all other states, with some non-zero probability). We _can 't_ make such
an assumption for a computer, since it would violates Rice's theorem (i.e. if
the "halt state" is always reachable, we've solved the halting problem), and
hence we can't apply many of those techniques. We _could_ argue that there
will be eventually be errors, like cosmic ray interactions, and we can use
their (exponentially small) probabilities to gain ergodicity, but that gives
us predictions _despite_ the simulation, not _about_ the simulation.

The only sensible level to understand a simulation is at the level of
software; e.g. as instructions, procedures, datastructures, modules, classes,
combinators, whatever. If those software components interact such that an
"Inhabitant" object's "tastes" attribute references an "Apple" object, then
it's completely appropriate to say that 'the simulation's inhabitant tastes an
apple'; we can compare/contrast how/if an inhabitant is related to a human,
and how its taste attribute is related to humans' sense of taste. In this
simplistic example, the simulation would be incredibly crude in comparison to
humans and their taste, in which sense we could say the simulation is "low
resolution". However, we cannot deny the existence of such simulated
individuals, or claim that they cannot taste simulated apples, in the same way
we cannot deny the existence of login forms and POST requests. They exist in
virtual worlds governed by laws encoded in software and hardware. That those
virtual worlds just-so-happen to be implemented by a chunk of the physical
world (called "a computer") is undeniable, but it's also almost completely
irrelevant if we want to describe, study, predict, etc. such worlds at a
meaningful level of abstraction.

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chriswarbo
Urgh, one nonsensical statement after another. I think I need a shower after
reading that.

Most of the authors' misguided ramblings seem to stem from a very naive
misunderstanding of the word "computer", i.e. that in a technical context it
refers to any system capable of universal computation (AKA "Turing complete").
"Universal computation" has precise Mathematical definitions, but can roughly
be understood as the "complexity limit" of the Universe; just as nothing can
go faster than light, nothing can exhibit behaviour that's more complex than
that of a Turing complete system. The proof boils down to showing that a
Turing complete system can, given a specially constructed input stimulus,
produce response behaviour which is equivalent to _any other system_. These
days, we call the system the "hardware" and the stimulus the "software".

As an analogy, the author's arguments would be like claiming the laws of
thermodynamics don't apply to the brain, since we have no theory of
conciousness and it certainly doesn't look like a steam engine. Just like
"computer" in computer science, the word "engine" has a precise meaning in
thermodynamics (any system which transforms energy from one form to another),
and we don't need to know the precise workings of the brain to know that, for
example, it's not a perpertual motion machine.

Likewise, we don't need to know the precise hardware or software of the brain
to know it obeys the physical Church Turing thesis, and can hence be simulated
by a universal Turing machine.

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Tossrock
I think Elon is wrong, but for technical reasons, not philosophical ones. For
one, we do not have photorealistic simulations for real-time games. We're not
even close, frankly. Still-renders can pass the photorealism barrier, as in
indistinguishable from a photograph, but even state-of-the-art triple A games
are still facilely obvious simulations.

Most importantly, there hasn't been much progress in the past few years.
Compare Battlefield 3 (2011) with Battlefield 4 (2013) with Battlefield 1
(2016, strangely enough), and you really won't see that much progress in
realism. While you can get pretty screenshots, as soon as it's in motion, the
distance from reality is obvious. What's missing is physics. Good physics
simulations (ie fluid flow, soft-body, divisible materials, etc) is so
computationally expensive that I doubt anything even approaching it will ever
be realtime possible.

Why? Because the rate of improvement is slowing. Those paying attention know
Moore's law is running out of steam (Intel recently had to insert an extra
tick into their tick-tock model), and power draw / heat dissipation are ever
more difficult to push. Arguments for the singularity / simulation all rely on
an exponential curve being projected as far into the future as the speaker
feels necessary, but in reality, there is no such thing as an exponential
curve. All physical processes that experience exponential looking growth
eventually slow down, forming a logistic curve, and it's looking like the
growth curve for FLOPS is going to top out well before "photorealistic
realtime simulation of the entire world available to every consumer".

~~~
MatthaeusHarris
From inside a simulation, it's impossible to tell how fast the simulation is
running because you have no external time reference. The visible universe as
we know it could be running at a time dilation of of 10^100:1 and it would
look exactly the same to us.

~~~
Tossrock
True, but orthogonal to the argument. Elon's pro-simulation argument is
fundamentally grounded in our reality ("video games have progressed a lot and
there are lots of video game consoles, so eventually we could run the types of
simulations postulated"), and my argument is refuting that ("video games will
never be good enough to run those types of simulations")

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gonvaled
If you are in a simulation you are not the one looking at the picture of the
apple, and trying to eat it from the outside: you are the one for whom the
only real thing is the apple that you have in front of you. And the apple
indeed feeds you, since the rules in the simulated world are such that
"consuming apple object provide nutrients to being eating it".

In a simulation, the reality _is_ the simulation, the rules are the rules
programmed in the simulation, in fact you will have a hard time reaching out
to base level, since the rules in the simulated world are hiding it from you
(which gives for interesting science fiction ideas).

> Simulations are things that we use to talk or to think about other things.
> In this respect, they do not step out of Musk’s base reality. They are still
> base reality. They are made of the same stuff everything else is made of.

Accepting the simulation premise does contradict the fact that everything is
made of stuff. But that everything is made of stuff does not mean that the
objects in the simulation are made of the stuff that the simulation suggests.

And he is missing the main point of the simulation theory, namely that all
entities in the simulation are not aware of the underlying levels: in our
simulations, the apple and the avatar eating the apple are objects in a
program (that is, basically 1s and 0s, not matter) running in a computer
processor _made of_ silicon matter. But the apple, or the avatar do not know
anything about computer programs, 0s or 1s, silicon, or anything else in the
underlying level. And, more interestingly, the apple and the avatar can be
upgraded, modified, cloned, deleted or shut down by the computer programmer,
all while they are running on "stuff".

In the simulations being run by our masters, where we live, we are objects in
a "program" running in a "computer" made of "silicon", all that in quotes
because we do not know how exactly the underlying level is structured.

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freyir
As evidence against:

> _Simulations Are Things In The World ... they do not step out of Musk’s base
> reality. They are still base reality. They are made of the same stuff
> everything else is made of._

I stopped reading here.

~~~
shrugger
I stopped at Vice.com

~~~
nibs
I stopped at Elon is wrong ;)

~~~
vorotato
Right, because a non-falsifiable statement is a fools errand to try to prove
wrong.

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joelg
I'm reminded of the title-text from this xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/947/](https://xkcd.com/947/)

"But Einstein said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the
universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by
theoretical physicists making small talk at parties."

Musk's comments get held to ludicrously high standards because it's
sensational to write headlines like "Elon is wrong."

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devnonymous
I'm getting a bit tired of reading this 'Elon Musk says we live in a
simulation'. No he didn't! At least he wasn't the first one to say it. The
idea isn't his. The philosophical idea has been around since when people
started questioning existence and actual theoretical basis of living in a
computer simulation argument has been around since well 2001.

[http://www.simulation-argument.com](http://www.simulation-argument.com)

~~~
bbcbasic
The Matrix film came out 1999 iirc.

~~~
devnonymous
Yes it did and that's between Plato[1] or earlier and Bostrom[2] and later,
which was essentially my point. You really should have visited the link in my
comment before making that observation. I was speaking about the theoretical
basis of the idea.

Elon Musk's caution about AI comes from the book superintelligence[3]

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

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

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies)

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nikki-9696
Someone missed the point. If we're in a simulation, there is no spoon, man.
Nor a worm that needs that apple. The water isn't simulated because there is
no water.

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Vanit
Do the authors even know what a simulation is?

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dukoid
Let's assume it's feasible to run this kind of simulation in the future.
Wouldn't this be unethical and hence probably illegal, making it less likely?

~~~
dogma1138
Why would it be unethical or illegal? You are also basing the fact that the
simulation is run by humans or any other entities with a social structure and
a grasp on what we call "morality".

If we are living in a simulation morally it is not much different than the
SIMS or minecraft...

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JakeAl
Reality: it's is all in your head.

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fbomb
"Simulation." \- You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you
think it means.

