Countering the Simulation Hypothesis
~ let’s show all our work… ~
TL;DR — Mostly, this world is redundant and boring, which means it’s almost certainly real. Though, if you had the perfect day, with your love, and the sunset is just… time to be suspicious that you aren’t re-living a memory.
Yeah, you probably heard it — “this is all just a simulation, dude… ask Elon!”
Really? I think there’s a more thorough way of looking at the problem, checking each box, to see what we’re really talking about…
Arguing for the ‘Mundane Hypothesis’
The format here is to look at *each* sort of “they’re simulating this” scenario… and, if you think of one that’s NOT on the list, please respond! It’s how we figure stuff out together :)
So, when we look at each possible scenario, we’ll be beginning with the assumption that we *actually are* in the scenario that we SAY we are; we don’t get to ‘hop to a new scenario mid-argument’. See that? (It’d be like thinking “what do we do Saturday if it rains?” “Well, if it won’t be raining, we should go to the park…” “No, I asked under the circumstance of rain. Are you listening?”) The plan is, if we check EVERY scenario, and see their combined results, we can make a complete determination. That’s called Proof by Exhaustion. Oof. Get ready…
The Kinds of Simulator-Sources
What is the ‘base reality’ like, in terms of cosmic rules, and who is doing the simulation?
“It’s Us!” — These are variants on ‘future humans role-playing in the past’, ‘future scientists replicating for study’ and ‘future memoirs of the immortal cyborgs’.
“It’s Aliens!” — These are all *in our universe* yet they are some other weird intelligence and motivation. The plausible motives which jump-out to me are ‘see if that blue planet in the far galactic rim has a chance of developing technology’ and ‘are we so incredibly rare of an event, in this kind of universe, that we should consider the universe *for us* in some ethical-responsibility and reciprocal sense?’
“From another Di-MEN-sion, another di-men-, another…” — The ‘base reality’ has totally different physics than ours; they are simulating what other universes might be like! Yet, their world still has fundamental laws; it’s not random havoc of ‘well, just imagine whatever, brah, and you can’t explain that!’ THAT situation is last…
“It’s Cthulhu?!” — Nothing is certain. Paradox can manifest in otherwise steady states, and finds no resistance to the meander of meanings flowing vacuous. It’s anything! Everything! And, so, even just one such world is the same as all other ‘chaos-worlds’ — they all dripple madly through mazes of every kind, eternally, without bounds, and so they all are overlapping as one-and-the-same in our regards. The Crawling Chaos!
…Cracking Knuckles Made of Beer Cans…
Proof by Exhaustion can be grueling, so I’ll try to present arguments in the order that knocks-out the most situations per stone.
“Noisy Ensembles of Chaotic Systems” :groaning in the background:
Sorry, this first thought really IS that horrific-sounding mess of words. And, it’s a key to making sense of the first problem with a lot of these scenarios. Not insanely complex, just complex-sounding, because mathematicians don’t like to go to parties.
Chaotic System — When the rules of a simulation are just so, in a way that a small error stays small (like, setting a clock’s minute-hand forward), we call it LINEAR. Those have been completely understood for generations. Cool. But, almost all the other times, the rules bump around in a cascade of ‘butterfly effects’ — a ‘chaotic’ system. That ONLY means one thing about the rules: “A SMALL difference in the initial state will DIVERGE QUICKLY from the path that it started-out NEXT-TO.” So, if your satellite-scan of the clouds can’t read each molecule to every picometer, then your simulation is doomed to be soon unreliable! (“But I don’t care if it’s exact…” “Oh, perfect, we address that one next.” :gulp:)
To deal with that uncertainty, scientists pick a whole bunch of initial conditions, all of them in a clump around where your data said clouds were. That’s an ensemble; by seeing where MOST of them go, you can get a sense of what is MOST likely, and also, when the paths begin to split apart, then you know you have less certainty about the future after that point. You see these paths flow together and then split, on the Hurricane Tracking charts. Pretty handy!
Noisy ensembles just don’t care much about the details. If you have the budget to do 100,000 simulations at *full resolution* or 10 trillion trillion *lower-res approximations* (or, actually, use full-res only to improve low-res heuristics, and build-up a gestalt…) then you’ll do the low-res ones, to get a better cluster profile over a longer duration into the future. It’s just actually the better way to get information about complex systems. (Oh, and if a universe-scenario doesn’t allow complex systems, then it’s trivial in the mathematical sense, and by not allowing complexity, it can’t ever simulate THIS world. Ever.)
Why am I talking about this? A Noisy Ensemble will beat a strict ‘simulate every detail’ run, every time, because computing all the details doesn’t actually make the outcome more accurate or informative — unless the weather satellite can measure the entire atmosphere at one instant, Planck scale! The point is: any simulator will fudge the details that aren’t impactful or interesting, if they can. You get more for less, when you do; if folks rest their Simulation Hypothesis upon presuming that the path which is chosen MOST is the one which needs trillions of trillions of times more work, then that is equivalent to “blowing-up your civilization to launch a spacecraft” — yeah, a Tesla Bruh can ‘imagine it happening’, but that won’t make such a scenario more likely abundant than our real reality, which is actually what the Simulation Hypothesis MUST argue, to be correct. (“There will be SO MANY simulations, in each universe, that our CHANCE of being in the real ONE is overwhelmed.”) Will our reality be overwhelmed by the sheer number of simulations… that were done as inefficiently as possible? Unlikely.
So, simulations skip details, whadduvit?
If the simulation is skipping a detail, that is a moment and place where any conscious being that was present is now replaced with a ‘stochastic variable’ until needed! When you are doing dishes, or picking dog poop out from between your shoes, or waiting for the end of the commercial, THAT moment of consciousness SHOULD have gotten SKIPPED. (Is the ‘Mind of God’ stuck waiting for the MeTube ads to stop?) Sure, once that moment is gone, then that torpor of boredom could very-well be an implanted false memory. Yet, while you do the boring, inane stuff, you can be almost certain that THIS IS REAL. cr@p
10,000 Worlds, drawn from the Infinite
Suppose that an alien civilization has been gobbling stars, simulating other worlds to check, uh, stuff. k. And, in the course of their history, they still need to do a first-pass detailed simulation, numerous times, to get a good guess at the stochastic variable to give when a redundant, boring thing is happening. So, yeah, boring still happens in the simulation, at least INITIALLY! Yet, how many runs of that ‘boring junk’ do they really do? It MUST be fewer runs than would actually occur during the simulation, or else they would just compute those details strictly (that is, what would need to be true otherwise is ‘we are doing more runs than would occur if we just ran all the details’ instead of this assumption we started the paragraph with: that ‘they are leaving details out and simplifying, only needing some examples for their measures, first’… we’d have to ‘switch assumptions mid-stream’ to get boring runs more often than reality, which isn’t part of Proof by Exhaustion). Lots of stuff in the simulation would be too weirdly specific and important, and would still get computed. If anything like that happens to you, then NONE of the following applies, and yeah, aliens or future grandkids may be watching us compute. ;)
Worse for those aliens’ mega-project of omniscience, there are SO MANY variations on each world, people, events, that they are only sampling a TINY fragment of the possibility space, vanishingly small. The chance that they chose this world is effectively nil, and their ‘n out of inf.’ sample adds zero to the probability, in sum. T.B. shouts back: “Well, it doesn’t matter how few simulations they do, when you divide by infinity! If each universe does just *two* universes of simulation, on average, then the simulations OUTNUMBER all the universes. See?”
Not quite. Because, many of our civilizations may not get to simulations, or not make many of such vast size that they overwhelm extant consciousness… and many of those simulations will not generate their OWN simulations within them. Nor will many of those worlds contain life, or consciousness, civilization, technology, at all. The *frequency of dead-ends* trims-down T.B.’s supposed panoply of simulacra. Similarly, when they presume “simulating even just two universes”, that would ONLY produce a total quantity of conscious experiences in proportion to those parts of universes which were computed explicitly. The boring parts you skipped don’t count as ‘conscious hours’ — those would be a stochastic variable, no complex consciousness simulated just to wipe drips from shower ears. As noted, those ‘un-boring de-redundant’ bits are comparatively rare, so our actual universe’s sum total of conscious experiences is likely to vastly outweigh the few simulated for curiosity’s sake in ‘two entire universe-timeline-simulations’.
To have scientists’ simulations within one cosmos equal the experiences of all the consciousnesses in that same actual cosmos, and thereby hold equal weight of total experience, then those simulators would have to happen frequently, and they would need to simulate an immense amount — which seems unlikely, without some cryptic resolution to the Fermi Paradox. The idea that “the sum total of simulated consciousness would completely overwhelm the real consciousness, one-for-one, hour-for-hour, a la the pigeonhole principle, within each universe, on average” seems to necessitate much of the universe computing until its dying stroke. Do your numbers come-up different on ‘what proportion of my time is new to human history, and worth detailed study?’ ‘Cuz that’s the ‘simulated-universes-which-got-this-far denominator’ which is accounted-for, to have simulations ‘out-consciousness’ us.
Similar reasoning attacks the idea of consciousnesses simulating our universe from within their own separate rules. They have so many rule-worlds to attempt, and most of them will never produce life, consciousness, civilization, technology, simulations which themselves are conscious. They wouldn’t know ahead of time — that’s the exact reason they simulated, right? Most of their simulations of ‘other cosmos’ would be dead, so the ‘lots of simulations per universe’ argument isn’t strong, compared to ‘sum total of experience of the actual civilizations of the people who got far enough to do such insane simulations, plus all the other civilizations wondering this stuff who didn’t make it’.
Okay. But this is getting confusing…
The core idea here, which knocks-out ‘it’s us!’ and ‘it’s aliens!’ as well as ‘another dimension’ is that the non-redundant parts of our lives are minuscule, and thus, whichever civilization made it to simulations would have a herculean computing budget, just to catch-up hour-for-hour with all our boredom. What about when life is interesting? Meh. I have no claim on that moment’s chance of being real.
So, uh… but, what about Cthulhu?
This one is the last bastion of the T. Bruh — “it could have any kind of random rules or even weirder stuff we just can’t even imagine, because I can imagine that I can’t imagine, I think…” Uh… Alright. Let’s roll with it.
If the ‘base reality’ upon which our simulation is built is some variant of the Crawling Chaos mentioned in the outset, then, technically, yeah — it could fart blood that spawns an entire simulator-supercomputer that mimics our universe in utmost detail for what we perceive to be eternity, though it only took 2 1/5 minutes for Cthulhu to notice, bite it in half, and dissolve into a mixture of complimentary colors. Sure. But, that has no purpose, no plan, no predictable variance or any sense or meaning. You are making an equivalent claim of ‘unrealness’ by saying that our cosmos blooped onto the scene due to a quantum fluctuation. If that ‘base reality’ actually has NO rules to follow, then it’s irrelevant. We can’t know anything about it, because it is simultaneous paradox. I’ll pay attention to the simultaneous paradox that bugs me for rent when I can’t leave their broken elevator, thanks.
So, unless I missed something, it seems like the simulation is unlikely to bother with boring details *enough* to outweigh the preponderance of boredom and redundant events, here. If life is a drag, sh*t’s real. If it’s too good to be true, then I’m not saying it’s aliens, but… It’s aliens.
