Ask HN: Why do half of Internet users think we are living in a simulation?
Whether we are living in a computer simulation is indeed a fascinating question, and I'm not dismissing it, but there's no proof or experimental evidence for it as far as I know.
I know about the simulation argument[3], but that's not a mathematical/physical proof or an experimental result. Lots of brainteasers and paradoxes have arguments structured like the simulation argument; one example is Olbers' paradox: Why is the night sky dark if there is an infinity of stars, covering every part of the celestial sphere? The argument about the stars seems to make sense but it doesn't count as proof or experimental result, and we know it's not true.
So I'm wondering how and why so many people are now convinced that we are living in a simulation?
[1] https://neal.fun/lets-settle-this/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29866981
[3] https://simulation-argument.com/simulation
116 comments
[ 682 ms ] story [ 405 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion
My faith is based on subjective experience, not objective ones. It wouldn’t make any sense at all from my perspective to expect anyone else to believe based solely on my word.
The idea that people shouldn't take you at your own word in order to accept your belief is interesting, though. The religion was pretty much word of mouth for most of its spread. Why not from you?
This is most definitely not snarky. You piqued my interest and I try to work out my doctrine with fear and trembling ;)
It’s 1am here, though, and I have to be up early. I’ll try to remember to come back to this thread tomorrow - if I don’t, feel free to bug me.
Cheers
My grandmother prayed for God to provide a way for them to get back home. The next morning she received a letter informing them that their bid on a Corps of Engineers contract to maintain a park had been accepted. They’d be paid quarterly, and the first check was enclosed. It was enough to buy a truck, a camp trailer to live in, and make the move.
No one had submitted a bid - no one was even familiar with the process or the position. I would be the first to propose that someone in the family bid on their behalf, but they later learned that the bid had both my grandparents’ signatures on it. My grandfather was in the hospital when the bid was submitted, and my grandmother maintained that she’d never seen the paper before getting a check in the mail for the rest of her life.
First thing I thought about was they might have applied and just forgot (I registered "grandfather"/"grandmother" as older people, though now I realize it might not have been so, as you were a two year old, so they might as well have been into their forties).
I don’t pray to anything. Good things and bad things happen to me. I don’t mind thanking supernatural parties— but they never leave their card!
Maybe I am a favorite of Odin? I do really like crows.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428359
If it is not possible, then, well, it's not.
So to a good approximation, the question "do you believe it is more likely than not that we are living in a simulation?" is equivalent to the question "do you believe that a simulation of the phenomenon you have observed is possible?"
And... well, sure, there's not a strong reason to think it's /impossible/, based on the evidence available to us. So, yeah, more likely than not.
Another way of phrasing this: Do you think it's more likely than not that there's some physical law, as yet discovered, that makes high fidelity simulation impossible? Such a law is certainly imaginable (limits on information density, magical-ness of souls, whatever); but if you don't have a reason to believe such a law is likely, then you probably believe we are more likely than not in a simulation.
We already do have a law of physics that is relevant here. We know that the information capacity of space is finite and fixed. A centimeter of space can only store so much information before it becomes a black hole. That means that to build a simulation in our universe you can only ever subdivide a fixed pie of information. That means the more relevant thing to ask is if a quantity of information is more likely to exist in the base reality or the simulated one. Because we have to assume that the base reality is not carpeted over with simulation super computers it seems safe to assume a random bit of information is more likely to be part of the base reality rather than a simulation all else being equal.
I think the idea of the universe being a simulation is just more fun
Edit: I don't understand the argument that if many good simulations exist, we must be in one, either. It seems bizarre to me. So having a bit of an odd suggestion about information density is as good of a response as any.
Well, what quantity of information? It seems relatively unlikely that one would bother simulating an entire universe for billions of years at this level of fidelity; what's the point? On the other hand, the quantity of information needed to simulate your current experiences, including the experience of having memories, is probably in the megabytes; human bandwidth just isn't that high.
The same logic suggests that, even if you discount simulation for reasons of faith or whatever, Boltzmann brains are worth considering. The idea that the experience you're having right now of reading my precious prose is worth keeping a universe running, or even a large-scale simulation, is a bit self-centered of you, isn't it?
Unless we think most information exists in simulations than if you take a random bit of information out of the universe it's more likely to be associated with the root existence's goinings on than it is with any kind of simulation. This works because it's an argument about that bit of information, not anything else. I think you could push back and say that really actually information isn't what's important and that actually even if we think that most information won't be part of a simulation most consciousnesses will be, but idk, that seems suspect, we don't have any reason to think that. Certainly most simulations we do now seem not to include consciousnesses.
I think the idea of Boltzmann brains fall apart because in that sea of possibility space it actually seems much more likely for the seeds of a universe to form than a complete brain full of consistent memories of writing 3/4th of a post on a randomly generated website called hacker news. I think it's just another illustration of the problems apply infinity to probability.
It's pretty trivial to have this reality be a 'container', as it were, within some superset reality, regardless of the information density of said contained reality.
Think of it like a human body sort of being its own unique, low-entropic thing.
I personally like thinking that in one sense, we're all a bunch of bits of fleeting consciousness on the edge of some fractal of realities, and the 'substrate' is simply possibility itself.
After all, the mandelbrot fractal is drawn by which series terminate, and often how long it takes them to terminate.
Why not us? Why can't we be one infinitesimal reality in the entire sea of possible realities, held together by the fact that our reality happens to have coherent rules that allows it to exist as some possible state in the greater states of some amorphous soup of possibility?
Just a thought. I know it may be more out there for some.
In fact if I were to build a simulator, I most likely have to design a mechanism to prevent its residents from observing beyond a certain micro scale due to limited cpu/mem resources and laziness to implement all the details. Tiny black hole is a good mechanism to reduce resource consumption when simulating a fixed volume of this universe. Imagine living in the world of Minecraft, the minimal unit is a block. Trying to look inside of it yields nothing. All physically meaningful characteristics are described by its surface. In our universe this looks very much like a blackhole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready-to-assemble_furniture ?
Like in the “clearly people doing the work is why potatoes are on store shelves, not due to the shareholders of Ore-Ida, which is hallucination.”
I don't see any reason to assume it's entirely impossible to make a computer system that provides brain IO indistinguishable from the real world. It'd obviously be very far beyond us, but it seems possible that a sufficiently advanced computer could manage it. But accepting that doesn't mean I have to accept that enough people did it to establish a population, they did so permanently, they forced it on their offspring (conceived both in the real world and simulation), and they never told anyone or left clear signs in the simulated world.
Alternatively it could assume that we are ourselves simulated, just programs unaware that we're programs. But that leaves many of the same questions (who did it, why keep it going forever, etc). We currently could dedicate all of humanity's exaflops of computing power to Monte Carlo simulations of Snakes and Ladders, but why? I don't think there's any reason to step from "theoretically it's possible" to assuming any amount of likelihood.
Looking at how green/co2 certificates work, looking at politics and misinformation, looking at escalating wars out of stupidity, looking how many countries have been far-right-winged lately into Sharia law,...I think that's the far more likely option.
Humans are petty, humans are irrational, humans forget too quickly.
Always bet on humans acting like psychotic apes wanting more bananas even when their belly is so stuffed that it almost explodes.
Whether you want to admit that this is how the planet works or not doesn't matter. In the end, right wing populism always wins because they bet on stupidity and irrational beliefs, not on compromise and rationality.
Why? This seems to me to be the weakness in the argument.
Of all the universes in which it is possible for a technological species to evolve and create a simulation of our universe, what’s the probably of said simulations having a given incentive or conducive cost/benefit ratio for said species?
Theoretically this could range from “can only do one once before our budget runs out and we move on” to your “unbounded” claim. But with what distribution?
This question seems fundamental and so reduces the initial question to a more complex one than what you pose: is it possible and if so how plausible?
Unless I’m missing something, leaping over this factor, as seems to be the mainstream approach, indicates to me that some techno-utopic-transcendentalism bias is at play.
Yeah, at some level. The universe that we observe doesn't seem to be set up, in the current epoch, to have very tight resource limits other than time. Energy is plentiful. The main cost of anything is opportunity cost. Sure, simulating a universe might cost /our/ civilization so much compute capacity that we have to choose between than and advertising Christmas sales, and that's clearly no choice at all -- but it only takes a small percentage of similar planets to hold civilizations that are just slightly more advanced to make this a reasonable freshman project, and at that point, plentitude creeps in again. Basically -- and I agree this can totally be interpreted as utopianism -- it's hard to imagine a line between "it is possible to build a computer capable of computing <X>" and "it is expensive, on the scale of reasonably-advanced civilizations, to build a computer capable of computing <X>."
Well it’s not so much about whether there is a line but what the probability distributions are and whether it continues to make sense to think that of all sentient beings the majority are likely simulated.
And while I personally get the argument you and the parent post make, I think it’s worthwhile highlighting that it’s likely not a simple matter of whether it’s possible and that the biases/utopianism that facilitate making that leap are also factors and worth making explicit.
Personally, I find it hard to conclude that a sufficiently advanced civilisation would necessarily be concerned with running so many simulations when there are probably a number of things they could spend time on that we can think of and many more we can’t because we’re not that advanced.
And I think humans are highly susceptible to creating explanations without evidence.
How simulated Universe would be different from a "real" one? Some give an answer like "we couldn't know" and finish at that. But this approach is a way to lose opportunity to think. Suppose we can guess some properties of a simulation, what they would be? I'd say simulated Universe would have an informational nature. We can create informational models of real phenomena. But our models tend to have limitations brought to simplify calculations.
For example, we limit precision of calculations. Probably these can be detected from inside of a model.
We tend to resort to stochastic models in some cases. And quantum mechanics sees a lot of stochastic.
Physicists tend to talk about information like it is a real thing. I do not understand what they mean by that, maybe they just talk about logarithms of probabilities? But it looks weird... simulation like.
All this leads me to two questions:
1. Can we make some falsifiable predictions from a simulation hypothesis? Information in physics could be one of such predictions, but it is not, because we retrospectively explain it with a simulation.
2. Probabilities and information look to me as artefacts of a human mind's way to function, it is very strange that they pop up in quantum mechanics. Is it possible that they are not really real but a projection of our mind to reality?
Extend this to Roko’s Basilisk and it’s even more similar - instead of getting tortured in hell for eternity for coveting the ox you get tortured in cyberspace for eternity for not working on the AI.
* The 4 million internet users that self selected to answer a philosophical question on Matrix type simulations are unlikely to respond to general questions in the same manner as, say, 4 million K-Pop fans.
* Neither of the above groups are likely to be a good and true representation of the mean responses of the 5.3 billion internet users worldwide.
tl;dl: There's no way to know so it's a thought experiment that has no pertinence to reality.
[1] this is a deep rabbit hole to go down into: did the creator actually design the simulation or did he only start it to while away some time on his gaming system? Is this a first-level simulation or is it a simulation inside another simulation, either as part of some sort of experiment or just as a mini game inside the game just started by some pimpled green-skinned lizard-boy on his Game-o-Saurus?
Edit: what if blackholes == instance crashes? o_O
The question is not whether we are in a simulation, but rather is there an experiential reality outside of this simulation, or did the simulation pop into existence from nothing.
I mean, reality might be just what it is even if it feels and looks like a simulation.
How living outside of the simulation would feel? Could we tell it is not a simulation?
"It won't let me see the article without filling out a survey."
"I enjoy being a 19 year old Black woman with a PhD on such surveys." -- Male with PhD in his 50s, either Caucasian or ethnically Indian (as in the country), iirc.
Some here may be too young to remember it, but there was a television show at the time called "Beverly Hills 90210". Guess which zip code would immediately come to mind for people who didn't want to use their real one.
Religion can be seen as a special case of God’s simulation
Not whether we think we do or don't.
Which is a quite different question.
For my 2 pennies, whether or not it makes a difference (as mentioned in simulation argument) does itself not matter, all that matters if people think it matters (it is, after all, entirely in our head at this point). Does it create a disassociation effect where counter-intuitively a constructivist approach allows is to see the world more positively (positive, as in positivist). And if not, are poll answers blunder or is there no disassociation of self determination.
- Dark energy would make it less compute-intensive towards the end of the simulation. If you knew where your observers are you could simulate less and less over time, while also reaching an ethical endpoint for the simulation
- and with Double-slit experiment, we kinda know that universe knows when things are observed
- Cosmic Microwave Background would hide a lot of signals further away, giving a possibility of aggregating or dropping signals further away from observers
- Diffraction Limit would limit the resolution of observations we can make from further away, limiting the resolution of the needed simulation.
- Quantum uncertainty principle would be easy way to make the simulation non-deterministic by just adding some jitter / variance.
I might have written some things that are wrong. Also it doesn't really answer your questions as this doesn't really lead me to believe we surely live in a simulation, it's just something I like to think about sometimes.
Edit: this has an obvious issue: if (when?) humanity (or rather the most ubiquitous "observer" species, whatever it is) "saturates" the cosmos, these optimization opportunities will get rarer and rarer. If it leads to localized "slowdowns" of physical phenomena then we'll have positive evidence of the simulation hypothesis.
Because of stellar dust? I'm not sure what makes this a paradox. There's a well-known explanation.
Yet even if the dust was mostly local, it would still block out light from infinity. Assuming it’s thick enough. But presumably the dust wouldn’t only be local; it could even be worse in other parts of the universe. Essentially we just don’t live in a perfect vacuum. There’s a bunch of crap blocking the light.
I suppose at some point in the history of the universe, there was probably less dust and it actually was much brighter.
This whole thing is just a problem with an universe both infinite and old, though. In a young universe, the dust might still be cold enough (yet still hotter than it is in reality), and in a finite universe, there could be a steady state as you described.
The universe could well be infinite, but the Hubble volume is pretty much finite...
If it was only dust, it alone would not explain the darkness due to re-emission of light (as other commenters pointed out).
The wave particle duality is just a min-decision/min-consciousness optimization.
Church-Turing thesis has no sign of being wrong - the maximum expressiveness of this universe is captured by computation.
The most complex theorems of the generalization of mathematics, computation, are actually about what would happen in formal systems, which physical systems are... So high complexity truth is... Simulcrums like Truman Show. Have fun, ahh
The people who think they are living in a simulation because they can't argue their way out of it should tell the people who accuse them of it to prove it.
(I think I passed the subject. Waiting for the results.)
/ please appreciate the humour in that I know nothing more than I knew last year
There's a third aspect to it, which is following the spiritual aspect of it while not actually believing in a creator/actual divine entity (see for example Christian atheism^1).
I go regularly (albeit less so in the past few years, since covid made me lose the habit) to church while having developed my belief into only a "metaphorical god" and the idea of Christ. The main thing I get from it is the spiritual aspect of it. It feels nice being into that kind of meditative space, into the idea of unconditional love, endless forgiveness, absolute empathy.
My experience of practicing christians is that they're on a spectrum when it comes to how literally they believe, from not at all, to metaphorical at every level, to people who actually think there's a grey-bearded guy in the clouds. Those last ones are not marginal by any means and constitute the core of the hardcore flock (it's much easier to wake up on a sunday morning (or even in the week) if you think that you punishment for missing mass is hell).
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism
Xide Hyrlis: "War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale."
Choubris Holse: "Of course, your god could just be a bastard."