Thread: The Simulation Argument: Why we are most likely living in a Matrix

My general feeling towards it is that it may or may not be true, and I don't care about whether it is, because it doesn't really matter.

His argument is flawed because it assumes the final condition, and then disguises it as a probability. It breaks down into: "ASSUMING the vast majority of entities in existence are simulated, chances are that we are among those entities." That is not the same as saying, "chances are, the majority of entities are simulated." This is pure speculation, and an interesting mental exercise, but it is in no way an argument in favour of the "we live in the Matrix" view.

Furthermore, he talks about "living in something like the Matrix" and "The Sims" as if they were analogous, when in fact, they are ENTIRELY different. The big difference being that the Sims cannot exist outside of their universe, and cannot, by definition, "wake up" from their universe. If you are a Sim, and I am the player, and I save my game and turn off the computer for the night, and reload my saved game the next morning, you, as a Sim, do not experience "darkness" or "a storm" or any kind of interruption in your existence that you notice. Why? Because your consciousness is PART of the simulation. The matrix, on the other hand, was a very, very convincing virtual reality video game. The brains that were playing said game were not part of it. You could wake someone up, and they would remember the Matrix.

Anyway, here's some fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMXME2pm83c

Originally Posted by Xei

It's interesting. I wonder though, to what extent information can be preserved through these speculative 'layers' of simulation.

I think there's a simple solution to this problem: lossless data compression algorithms. Briefly, for those not familiar, these work by eliminating the redundancies that are present in data. For example, let's say we have a file which contains 5 instances of an entity we'll call X. X is some package of information, perhaps a paragraph of text, perhaps an image, whatever. One way for us to structure this file would be:
[X X X X X]
That's a lot of redundancy. We can represent this same data (i.e., no loss of information) by structuring the file some way similar to this:
[5 of: X]
Making the very reasonable assumption that it's far more economical to represent the concept "5 of" then it is to represent 4 instances of X, we just reduced our file size dramatically.

The amount of redundancy in our world is staggering. Is it really necessary to code the information for a particular shade of red for every single particle anywhere that reflects light just so? Is it necessary to have complete, separate representations of every single DNA molecule in my body? Sure, some of them are different enough from one another that they deserve to have a separate instance, but how many are exactly the same, only in a different part of my body? How about electrons? The potential for lossless compression is huge enough that I think we can, in principle, simulate multiple universes within ours that are just as informationally rich as our own.

But here's the question: Have we only bought ourselves one extra "level," or is it possible for the compressed, simulated world to do the same thing in turn?

Originally Posted by Replicon

it doesn't really matter.

Agreed. The "lucky ones," in my opinion, are not all that lucky.

Originally Posted by Replicon

His argument is flawed because it assumes the final condition, and then disguises it as a probability. It breaks down into: "ASSUMING the vast majority of entities in existence are simulated, chances are that we are among those entities." That is not the same as saying, "chances are, the majority of entities are simulated." This is pure speculation, and an interesting mental exercise, but it is in no way an argument in favour of the "we live in the Matrix" view.

It's easy to come away with this impression after hearing the relatively informal treatment given it by Chalmers, but I think that the excerpt by Bostrom makes it pretty clear that the argument does not assume its correctness. (And if you're interested, the original philosophical paper is available online here.) It says that if we reject both of the first two propositions, then it is logically incoherent to reject the third proposition. The only two preconditions for this argument which are not made explicit in the above excerpt are that (a) functionalism is true, and (b) it is in principle possible to simulate a universe with the necessary level of detail. As Bostrom points out in his paper, these are both relatively uncontroversial assumptions. The "argument," then is simply that we should acknowledge that there is a nontrivial probability that we are part of a simulation.

We can make a rough estimate of what this probability is. The third proposition is true if and only if both of the first two are false. Both of those propositions probably warrant debates unto themselves, but we can be both nonpartial and conservative by assuming that each is as likely to be true as false. In other words, the probability of each of the first two being true is 50%. Simple probabilistic reasoning then tells us that the probability of the third proposition being true is 25%. We can probably never know the true probability, but it is reasonable to assign a 1 in 4 chance to the possibility that we are right now in a simulation.

Originally Posted by Replicon

Furthermore, he talks about "living in something like the Matrix" and "The Sims" as if they were analogous, when in fact, they are ENTIRELY different. The big difference being that the Sims cannot exist outside of their universe, and cannot, by definition, "wake up" from their universe. If you are a Sim, and I am the player, and I save my game and turn off the computer for the night, and reload my saved game the next morning, you, as a Sim, do not experience "darkness" or "a storm" or any kind of interruption in your existence that you notice. Why? Because your consciousness is PART of the simulation. The matrix, on the other hand, was a very, very convincing virtual reality video game. The brains that were playing said game were not part of it. You could wake someone up, and they would remember the Matrix.

This is all based on a misunderstanding of the argument -- to be fair, an entirely understandable one considering how Chalmers explained it (in the interview they had been discussing the movie). The simulation argument is not called the Matrix argument, because it's arguing for the possibly that we live in a simulation, not The Matrix(tm). Taken in this light (in which it was intended), these objections disappear.

And thanks for the video -- that was great!

Refutation of simulation argument: Occam's Razor. Simplest solution is probably correct. I find it hard to believe that I'm hooked up to a flawless simulation of reality while the "machines" rule us. Far too many variables, far too unlikely. Though we shall never know for sure, I guess.

Does this article lend credence to the simulation theory at all? Or perhaps i am taking it too literally?

Originally Posted by Our World May Be A Giant Hologram

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-hologram.html

...what about quantum foam?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam

Quantum foam, also referred to as spacetime foam, is a concept in quantum mechanics, devised by John Wheeler in 1955. The foam is supposedly the foundations of the fabric of the universe,[1] but it can also be used as a qualitative description of subatomic spacetime turbulence at extremely small distances of the order of the Planck length. At such small scales of time and space the uncertainty principle allows particles and energy to briefly come into existence, and then annihilate, without violating conservation laws. As the scale of time and space being discussed shrinks, the energy of the virtual particles increases. Since energy curves spacetime according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, this suggests that at sufficiently small scales the energy of the fluctuations would be large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth spacetime seen at larger scales, giving spacetime a "foamy" character. However, without a theory of quantum gravity it is impossible to be certain what spacetime would look like at these scales, since it is thought that existing theories do not give accurate predictions in this domain. However, observations of radiation from nearby quasars by Floyd Stecker of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have placed strong limits on the possible violations of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity implied by the existence of quantum foam.[2]

I buy that more than the "hologram" idea.

It's true, I mostly skimmed the written part and based what I said on the video.

So then. What if I just accept proposition 1 as true? I think the likelihood that we will go extinct before reaching a level of techological maturity that would allow us to persist indefinitely is much higher than the likelihood that we're in a simulation. Especially at the rate we're going.

I'm not sure what the proposition means by "technological maturity" though. It might be about "ability to survive indefinitely, in spite of what happens to our planet, etc." (to argue that the number of level-0 species in existence is always increasing on average) It might also be about reaching a point where we can simulate a real universe that is at a level of richness similar to ours.

Of course, if we ARE a simulation, then it's fair to assume that the world outer to ours has a level of complexity such that, relatively to it, we are like the sims relatively to us haha. It's not an impossibility. But it's also not worth worrying about.

To further support Bostrom's argument I present this:

The Physical World as a Virtual Reality by Brian Whitworth.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0801/0801.0337.pdf

Abstract
This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information
processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical
world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual
reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be
an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the
essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of
information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation.
If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical,
as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective
reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can
suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive
from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories,
with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it
creates energy and matter.

Key words: Digital physics, virtual reality, information theory

It goes further than Bostrom's argument, as it connect the dots between currently unexplained phenomena in relativity and QM to the whole aspect of virtual reality.

I think you will enjoy it DuB.