A long time ago I wrote a blog post called "Statistical Immortality" that led others to recommend the concept of lazy immortality and the book "Permutation City" which I highly recommend.<p>And the very end of the day you have to take something on faith and proceed. Solipsism is internally inconsistent because it presupposes a mind that can evaluate a truth whilst simultaneously taking the argument that existence isn't knowable. Empiricism presupposes that our senses and mind can be relied upon to some degree. Theocratic foundations for selfhood are rooted in faith in a higher power.<p>So in a limited sense I agree with this article's argument. Once you allow that the simulation argument may be true you invalidate that your mind is capable of determining if this is likely.
There is a lack of consistency between an implicit premise in Bostrom's argument and one in Feather's critique:<p>>any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations <i>of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);</i><p>[emphasis added]<p>>This <i>lack of necessary overlap in metaphysics</i> between the world that creates a simulation and the simulation itself could be called the simulation barrier.<p>[emphasis added]<p>Why would there be a lack of necessary overlap in metaphysics between the world an evolved organism inhabits and a simulation <i>of its own evolutionary history?</i> Bostrom's reasoning for <i>why these simulations would exist in the first place</i> clearly depends on extrapolating from various aspects of human behavior, so his argument necessarily posits that the beings <i>running</i> the simulations are at least in this way (and probably in others) similar to humans. The similarity of the Universe, largely, follows.<p>Furthermore, the simulation argument fails to be really different from the dream argument when we omit Bostrom's motivation argument. If we can be in a simulation within matryoshkaed simulations thousands of layers deep, then surely we might be in a dream within a dream thousands of layers deep. We can provide all of the necessary metaphysical computational capacity to the dreamer that we would a simulator, can't we? The whole bit where creatures are <i>motivated</i> to simulate themselves seems, to me, to be crucial.
I think this is saying that you can't simulate a VAX on a Z-80. But we know that you can, just not at full speed. But if time created by the simulator does that matter?
What bothers me about the idea of an ancestor simulation is the suggestion that a computer which exists inside the universe could simulate the universe with enough fidelity that it could actually serve as a useful ancestor simulation. An ancestor simulation seems to be a contradiction, like a box that contains itself within.
If we are in a simulation it will be difficult to know that we are in a simulation because what we use to identify the simulation (mind) is itself simulated, our notion of simulation is acquired within the simulation. We are in this black box and are trying to see outside.
What would it take to simulate a conscious mind? Several orders of magnitude more processing power than is needed to perform the simple tasks we currently ask of AGI, I believe.<p>For example, in another part of biology, DNA seems to be a
very inefficient as a data structure and tool for genetic replication. But you’d expect and forgive that from a system that self organized through chance, iteration, and a vast amount of time. Evolution has short horizons and lacks the long term planning required to be economical.<p>Human engineered systems are by contrast far more efficient with their resources. You can now sift through photos of cats and not_cats with a GPU and a few decades of collective technological progress. To get to the stage where a mind, artificial or natural, has self awareness, I can completely believe that it would require the level of processing only made available by a naturally inefficient evolution process.<p>We have minds that are focused on hunting, gathering, procreating, toolmaking, and surviving. Humans have succeeded at doing these things by growing vast brains that only accidentally became good at spotting incoming lions and finding mates. We are lucky that our complex brains evolved in such a way[1] as to allow conscious thought to emerge as a side effect.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory</a>
The simulation argument in my mind arises from thinking about the universe in terms of computation. The concept of computing and tractability comes from limitations and phenomena we see in the universe: energy and the arrow of time. Yet, the arrow of time doesn't appear to be fundamental to the constitution of the universe (with the laws of physics being identical in reverse), but only an emergent property of entropy. Like a human-inspired sentient creator, the simulation is the most in-reach explanation of creation for a given perspective.<p>We could look beyond the limitations of thermodynamics, and consider that the contents of spacetime may just exist in the same way as the contents of pi or the Mandelbrot set exists.<p>Why must the universe be "created" at all by computation, when computation doesn't even seem to be a fundamental, but only an emergent property of it?
If we are in a sim it seems it render's what is percived by "intelegence" to stop any inconsistencies revealing themselfs to the observer ( Maybe to save on processing power, to estimate the overall picture only giving answers to the very small details when observed). We should look for limitations of this system that show up these inconsistencies such as Wigner's superposition thought experiment and many other quantum peculiarities. Could we hack such a system? maybe using quantum computers is a start? getting past the construct and utilising the vast processing power that would be needed to create the sim, getting past the rules of rendering to the observer by seemingly not looking, If Im in a sim id like to think we could hack the hell out of it, or at least try.
The impossibility of being sure of the rules of the parent reality is why I find all arguments that we can't be in a simulation because it would take too long to calculate certain aspects of our reality to be unconvincing.<p>The computational complexity hierarchy could be different in a parent universe.<p>I do wonder though what things might have to be the same. I would be very surprised if any reality that allowed intelligent life forms able of creating and running simulations didn't have causality. What about the concept of number, or certain parts of logic? I think there may well be reasonable assumptions that can be made about a parent universe, even if they don't reach the level of complete confidence.
Can someone help me imagine what a world with different math is like? It’s easy enough to imagine a world with different physics (such as in video games). But math is just a list of rules/axioms and the results of following those rules. They might find different axioms more applicable but our math should still work in their universe even if it’s considered pure math with no applications.
I have an inherent problem with these discussions: I'm not convinced a simulation can be conscious.<p>There's an xkcd comic titled "A Bunch of Rocks" at <a href="https://www.xkcd.com/505/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xkcd.com/505/</a>. Could dropping rocks in the sand to simulate a turing machine produce a conscious being? If not, why can a computer?
The crux of this article appears to be:<p>> it seems reasonable to allow that simulations, as experienced by their inhabitants, could have entirely different models of math, physics, and even consistency.<p>Which is a (shallow, informal) restatement of Hilary Putnam's work on externalism and its many responses. Just read some of that instead.<p>Software developers (or worse, tech entrepreneurs) often assume they have something to add to the discussion of simulationism just because computation is the simulation substrate du jour in Bostrom's work. But the philosophical discussion goes back directly to Descartes and indirectly even further. It's broad, complex, and not something a dilettante can just jump into after a teenage diet of scifi.<p>(This doesn't apply to Bostrom himself - the article's objection is a subset of his #2 option. If the "necessary overlap in metaphysics" is impossible or prohibitively expensive future civilizations are not likely to run them.)
If we are in a sim, most likely we are part of the sim program and not plugged in Matrix style.What differences could there be between reality and sim? I cannot see any plausible reason for a conscious dimension in actual reality, but we see lots of evidence for the conscious dimension interacting with reality in the quantum, quantum computing especially should not really be possible unless you are accessing processing power from else where,it seems to me very likely we are in a sim that's designed to produce intelegent life, big bang is someone turning the on switch that produces through the Hawking inflation theroy infinite combinations for intelegent life to exist within there created framework, where the sim computer only needs to collapse the quantum wave function and render what is percived where there is inteligence, we evan may be an attempt by AI to create conscious but if so our worlds history remains intact and genuine, but as musk says what's outside the sim,who created and programed it may have came from a very different universe than we can imagine, and what is there consciousness like? Would we call that a creator ?
While I fancy simulated reality, Bostrom's hypothesis placed constraints and assumptions that "human" must exist in the least and sim's purpose are about their "ancestors" and "we" are the reason that ever more simulations will continue to co-exist<p>But why must it be post-human from future? why not a "pre-human-ancestor" from "relatively ages ago" that may have created a simulation to peek into simulated future?(so they can learn and won't make the same mistakes we did)<p>You may notice a contradiction in my example is IF the creator are instead from the past? How can they even be a human at all if they had to exist before human does?<p>The thing is chicken and egg "only" if we assume our creator themselves must be human, on the other hand<p>Today, we are designing/training artificial intelligence life form barely resembling us in simulations and most of their purposes are generally "forecast/solution/learning/gaming"<p>With the penultimate goal to create ASI to solve problems in nature, perhaps the reality is our universe may just be one of the branches as a result of such humble "exploration"<p>OBTW are you aware "I AM AI" a slogan favored by Nvidia is a cute palindrome itself that can also be rearranged to "AI AM I", "AM I AI", "AI I AM", "I A I AM" :D