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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2013 19:38:04 GMT -5
Anyone else familiar with this, the logic and the implications of it? ABSTRACT This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2013 21:05:04 GMT -5
Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. That is the basic idea. The rest of this paper will spell it out more carefully. www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2013 19:48:21 GMT -5
Proposition (1) doesn’t by itself imply that we are likely to go extinct soon, only that we are unlikely to reach a posthuman stage. This possibility is compatible with us remaining at, or somewhat above, our current level of technological development for a long time before going extinct. Another way for (1) to be true is if it is likely that technological civilization will collapse. Primitive human societies might then remain on Earth indefinitely. There are many ways in which humanity could become extinct before reaching posthumanity. Perhaps the most natural interpretation of (1) is that we are likely to go extinct as a result of the development of some powerful but dangerous technology.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2013 19:51:36 GMT -5
The second alternative in the simulation argument’s conclusion is that the fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulation is negligibly small. In order for (2) to be true, there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations. If the number of ancestor-simulations created by the interested civilizations is extremely large, the rarity of such civilizations must be correspondingly extreme. Virtually no posthuman civilizations decide to use their resources to run large numbers of ancestor-simulations. Furthermore, virtually all posthuman civilizations lack individuals who have sufficient resources and interest to run ancestor-simulations; or else they have reliably enforced laws that prevent such individuals from acting on their desires. What force could bring about such convergence? One can speculate that advanced civilizations all develop along a trajectory that leads to the recognition of an ethical prohibition against running ancestor-simulations because of the suffering that is inflicted on the inhabitants of the simulation. However, from our present point of view, it is not clear that creating a human race is immoral. On the contrary, we tend to view the existence of our race as constituting a great ethical value. Moreover, convergence on an ethical view of the immorality of running ancestor-simulations is not enough: it must be combined with convergence on a civilization-wide social structure that enables activities considered immoral to be effectively banned. Another possible convergence point is that almost all individual posthumans in virtually all posthuman civilizations develop in a direction where they lose their desires to run ancestor-simulations. This would require significant changes to the motivations driving their human predecessors, for there are certainly many humans who would like to run ancestor-simulations if they could afford to do so. But perhaps many of our human desires will be regarded as silly by anyone who becomes a posthuman. Maybe the scientific value of ancestor-simulations to a posthuman civilization is negligible (which is not too implausible given its unfathomable intellectual superiority), and maybe posthumans regard recreational activities as merely a very inefficient way of getting pleasure – which can be obtained much more cheaply by direct stimulation of the brain’s reward centers. One conclusion that follows from (2) is that posthuman societies will be very different from human societies: they will not contain relatively wealthy independent agents who have the full gamut of human-like desires and are free to act on them. www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2013 20:22:53 GMT -5
The possibility expressed by alternative (3) is the conceptually most intriguing one. If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated that is running the simulation may or may not resemble the physics of the world that we observe. While the world we see is in some sense “real”, it is not located at the fundamental level of reality. It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated universe. Such computers would be “virtual machines”, a familiar concept in computer science. (Java script web-applets, for instance, run on a virtual machine – a simulated computer – inside your desktop.) Virtual machines can be stacked: it’s possible to simulate a machine simulating another machine, and so on, in arbitrarily many steps of iteration. If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations, this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2), and we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Reality may thus contain many levels. Even if it is necessary for the hierarchy to bottom out at some stage – the metaphysical status of this claim is somewhat obscure – there may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time. (One consideration that counts against the multi-level hypothesis is that the computational cost for the basement-level simulators would be very great. Simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be prohibitively expensive. If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman.) Although all the elements of such a system can be naturalistic, even physical, it is possible to draw some loose analogies with religious conceptions of the world. In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent” in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are “omniscient” in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels. www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2013 21:37:52 GMT -5
Further rumination on these themes could climax in a naturalistic theogony that would study the structure of this hierarchy, and the constraints imposed on its inhabitants by the possibility that their actions on their own level may affect the treatment they receive from dwellers of deeper levels. For example, if nobody can be sure that they are at the basement-level, then everybody would have to consider the possibility that their actions will be rewarded or punished, based perhaps on moral criteria, by their simulators. An afterlife would be a real possibility. Because of this fundamental uncertainty, even the basement civilization may have a reason to behave ethically. The fact that it has such a reason for moral behavior would of course add to everybody else’s reason for behaving morally, and so on, in truly virtuous circle. One might get a kind of universal ethical imperative, which it would be in everybody’s self-interest to obey, as it were “from nowhere”. In addition to ancestor-simulations, one may also consider the possibility of more selective simulations that include only a small group of humans or a single individual. The rest of humanity would then be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious. It is not clear how much cheaper shadow-people would be to simulate than real people. It is not even obvious that it is possible for an entity to behave indistinguishably from a real human and yet lack conscious experience. Even if there are such selective simulations, you should not think that you are in one of them unless you think they are much more numerous than complete simulations. There would have to be about 100 billion times as many “me-simulations” (simulations of the life of only a single mind) as there are ancestor-simulations in order for most simulated persons to be in me-simulations.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2013 21:41:01 GMT -5
Supposing we live in a simulation, what are the implications for us humans? The foregoing remarks notwithstanding, the implications are not all that radical. Our best guide to how our posthuman creators have chosen to set up our world is the standard empirical study of the universe we see. The revisions to most parts of our belief networks would be rather slight and subtle – in proportion to our lack of confidence in our ability to understand the ways of posthumans. Properly understood, therefore, the truth of (3) should have no tendency to make us “go crazy” or to prevent us from going about our business and making plans and predictions for tomorrow. The chief empirical importance of (3) at the current time seems to lie in its role in the tripartite conclusion established above.[15] We may hope that (3) is true since that would decrease the probability of (1), although if computational constraints make it likely that simulators would terminate a simulation before it reaches a posthuman level, then out best hope would be that (2) is true.
If we learn more about posthuman motivations and resource constraints, maybe as a result of developing towards becoming posthumans ourselves, then the hypothesis that we are simulated will come to have a much richer set of empirical implications.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2013 21:42:28 GMT -5
A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one. If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3). Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation.
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Post by bob0627 on Mar 8, 2013 22:26:13 GMT -5
Are you having fun Baxter?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 9, 2013 18:51:06 GMT -5
Eh sorry, this is one of my favorite logic exercises.
The idea of a simulated reality nested in simulated realities, the idea of a simulation creator imposing their morals on us in an afterlife or uploading us into a body into the "real world", and so on is endlessly fascinating to me.
If humans do not go extinct, and survive to spread out into the universe, the odds that we are actually the original population preceding that event is incredibly small (just from a statistical point of view) and infers we are indeed already living in a simulation.
There are some ways science can test for it and I will post some more related items to this thread, but if indeed we are in a simulation the creator(s) could possibly be able to rewind and erase any discovered facts or parts they don't like.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 9, 2013 20:02:37 GMT -5
An article about testing the simulation theory Red Pill, Blue Pill: Is the Universe Just a Giant Computer Simulation? By Matt Peckham Dec. 13, 2012 ...Does the possibility that the universe is structured like an extremely complex network — that our brains and the things we create with them, like the Internet, may resemble the universe’s underlying structure — also imply that we exist in an incomprehensibly sophisticated computer-like simulation? “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” says Laurence Fishburne’s character Morpheus in that eminently quoted scene from The Matrix. “You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” University of Oxford physics professor Nick Bostrom wasn’t the first person to suggest reality could be computer-fied — the idea’s been around since I was a kid, at least, reaching a kind of pop-cultural critical mass in the Matrix films — but he may have been the first to take a stab at a “red pill” explanation, laying out his theory in an actual paper published in 2003. Call it another version of the strong anthropic principle, except the universe’s catalyst would in this instance be an advanced civilization running an unfathomably sophisticated massively multiplayer, um, cosmos game... ...How do you test for something like that? Can you? Bostrom argues that we’ll know his third claim is true if we’re ever able to create an ancestor simulation ourselves (in other words, not for a really long time). But a group of University of Washington researchers has suggested there may be a way to start testing soon if we want to verify Bostrom’s supposition. Start with the assumption that we’ll actually be able to simulate the universe, or small portions of it, perfectly someday — a pretty big assumption, since we’re still trying to reconcile disparate physical and cosmological theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity, to say nothing of Stephen Hawking’s and Leonard Mlodinow’s idea in The Grand Design that “ours is just one of many universes that appeared spontaneously out of nothing, each with different laws of nature.” (In fact most days, we’re lucky if we’re getting the weather right.) But according to University of Washington physics professor Martin Savage, we could test our universe for computational artifice by looking for the sort of “signatures” you’d find in current-day simulations. Supercomputers currently use a technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQC) to model aspects of physical reality, say molecules, or quarks and gluons. If our universe were crafted from a lattice-driven simulation, we ought to be able to find evidence of the underlying, interlacing imprint. According to the UW summary, supercomputers using LQC chop space-time into a four-dimensional grid, which allows researchers to inspect something called the “strong force” — one of the four building-block forces (along with electromagnetism, the weak force and gravity) that hold subatomic particles together. “If you make the simulations big enough, something like our universe should emerge,” says Savage. At that point, you could start poking around, looking for a “signature,” say something like a limitation in the energy produced by cosmic rays. According to a paper posted by the researchers titled “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation,” in which the participants state they “have taken seriously the possibility that our universe is a numerical simulation,” they note that the simulation might reveal itself if it turned out that cosmic rays behaved in unexpected ways at the boundaries of the lattice. “This is the first testable signature of such an idea,” adds Savage. Read more: techland.time.com/2012/12/13/red-pill-blue-pill-is-the-universe-just-a-giant-computer-simulation/#ixzz2N5tjYPOq
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Post by bob0627 on Mar 9, 2013 20:13:35 GMT -5
Along the lines of a philosophy such as:
The universe was created when I was born and it will end when I die.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 9, 2013 21:34:06 GMT -5
A lot of interesting possibilities.
It will be interesting to see if science can prove or disprove the idea.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 10, 2013 20:00:38 GMT -5
Through The Wormhole: Are We Simulated?
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