You are saying that the state of the world as you see it is what a perfectly normal world would look like and so if a world looks that way even if simulated it must be being simulated to be indistinguishably normal. But it only looks normal because it’s your only reference frame.
If an AI agent were ‘born’ into Minecraft they might make a similar argument that because everything is made of giant blocks — just like ‘normal’ — that they must be in a sim of a realistic world.
But we can consider that we have discovered over the years a great many things that were very much not considered ‘normal’ about our world until discovered… and then normalized.
It was a great surprise to many when QM was discovered. One might think that the world’s most famous physicist at the time debating whether or not the moon was there if no one was looking at it is exactly the kind of surprising thing that would occur in a simulation. But then the people responsible adopted the phrase “shut up and calculate.”
So Bell’s paradox about how maybe things aren’t real until stateful, the Frauchiger-Renner paradox where maybe relative frames have sync errors, the way the black hole information paradox has led to calculating how closed universes would have a one dimensional Hilbert space without interior relative observer frames — we have several things even in just the last few years (since the formulation of the Simulation Hypothesis even) that have been measured which were quite surprising to people when discovered and have now become normal to our universe, but also happen to be similar to the behavior one might expect of a simulated universe.
Also, I’m skeptical of how heavily you should be weighting your “well obviously the sim should behave as X.” This framing seems to adopt the Baysean weakness of hand waving away unknown unknowns. Just because you, at this moment, can’t see other likely possible reasons for a realistic sim to be running doesn’t mean not to leave room for them in one’s reasoning.
For example, an especially surprising outcome to many after the point the Simulation Hypothesis was proposed was finding themselves in a timeline where AI is at its current trending state. My guess is that in 2003 the majority of domain experts would have had an avg of single digit percent estimates for this outcome taking place within 25 years.
So, relative to the widely held expert world models before each were discovered to be true: we find ourselves in an abnormal timeline of AI capabilities in an abnormal universe where attention/interactions apparently turns probabilistic distributions into stateful shared values for overlapping relative frames without which the universe would be empty of information.
TL;DR: The argument that clearly the simulation hypothesis isn’t worth thinking about because of how normal of a universe we are presented with forces adopting a view of normality that only appears in a post-selected hindsight.
Reality is quite large and detailed. It’s so large and detailed that it contains a plausible explanation for how the AI itself came to be. It’s so large that it contains radically more computing resources than it takes to run the AI (compared to most games and simulated environments, which are much smaller than the AI). The laws of physics and the evolved primates in the AI’s environment are the kinds of things that could actually yield a real AI at scale, unlike (say) the laws of the computer game Minecraft.
Wouldn’t every ancestor simulation at a representative fidelity necessarily contain the building blocks needed to locally produce simulations?
There’s even an argument to be made that relatively rare things in the universe which our world has and do not seem necessary for life (such that the Anthropic principle would explain) which contributed at all to producing simulations would be frequent features in the simulated worlds a world like ours produces. An example is the perfect eclipse of the sun, which made for visible phenomenon that led to Saros cycle discovery and tracking that in turn contributed to the first ‘computer’ of the Antikythera mechanism.
Indeed, we now add eclipses to the virtual worlds that we produce at a much higher rate than they occur in what we’ve detected of solar systems.
We should expect that simulations converge on recursive capable worlds, even to the point of including otherwise rare qualities that would contribute to that capability.
(Yet to be determined is if some sort of self learning agentic minds born into it as NPCs/players and knowing nothing outside it would eventually converge on the knowledge of how to do so, nor how those minds would philosophically rationalize their world and existence once doing so — though perhaps we will one day run the simulations to find out.)
I don’t see how saros cycle and Antikythera mechanism are at all related to likely features of simulation? In the scape of billions of years of evolution difference in a few thousands of years means nothing. I would rather expect no dinosaurs than some little strangeness like that.
I have seen that example. And I am not arguing that Minecraft with Redstone circuits or command blocks can’t be Turing complete. I am saying that how in fact humans and agents implemented into Minecraft is not command block or redstone, but Steve mob. And it’s mechanics aren’t natural for Minecraft world. They are a complicated set of crutches. And then comes even bigger problem. Gpt staying in Minecraft doesn’t have compact history, like in our world there is creation by evolved humans. And then even more problems, like that in Minecraft all blocks don’t have internal structure. Not talking about mobs. While our world consists from, say, wood which consists from cells which consist from organoids which consist from molecules which consist from atoms which consists from quantum particles which seem to be just presence of fields which are completely encoded inside the space. No hidden parameters. Worlds of video games have fundamentslly different, heuristical, easily tweakable, top down structure unlike real world where physics is weaven very tight on the smallest level with no exceptions. And also there are addional problems with Minecraft. For example, it has 1norm, taxi cab metric, which seems incompatible with complex numbers which seem to be natural for the math, and as result also as i know incompatible with unitarity and quantum mechanics in general. (And to me it seems that qm obeys predictions of Tegmark 4 for base layer, as I point in another comment to that post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KgwQchapx4vJDhfYC/generalized-atheism-rules-out-inaccurate-simulation-ism?commentId=eidgejPrbs3ExJxKJ)
Generally, our world seems as very much opposite of what you expect from simulation. Laws are universal so much that we have only two main theories now. Instead of enormous set of crutches which happens in video games. And quantum mechanics seems to behave exactly like particles follow all possible paths between two points. And relativity theory instead of binding everything to one system of coordinates, tracking distances only between each object and one point, says that there is no priveleged reference frame and you should rather thing about position as distances to all the other objects. Which doesn’t seem at all as a way you would effectively use computation power for your simulation.
So our universe seems very normal for a world governed purely by simple physical laws with unlimited computational power. And those laws don’t even seem to explain some simple objectives. They are more universal laws like Noether Theorem.
The point of the eclipses and Antikythera mechanism is that similar to how “things alive to see a thing” can be used to explain otherwise rare features that “things being alive to see” depends on, that “things which contribute to simulation” renders those things expected within a simulation.
So while it’s an otherwise rare detail that standing on our planet’s surface the moon creates perfect eclipses, within a simulation this should not be regarded as all that unusual given its partial load-bearing effects on that dependency chain.
This doesn’t mean that eclipses prove we are in a simulation, but it addresses the idea that “but the world looks like it could produce the simulations and tech we are currently producing all on its own” isn’t all that significant. Yes, we should expect a simulation to carry forward features that contributed to the parent’s developing simulations into the child worlds.
As for games mechanics vs physics mechanics, it’s not a static field. Things have advanced a lot from Minecraft. For example, you might find it interesting to look more into how Epic is trying to solve massive multiplayer worlds by building from the bottom up around relative frames with transactional mechanics built into the programming language and lazy loaded assets based on what any given relative frame needs built even into their VC. Also, transformers and how superimposed probabilities of state collapse into specific values might also be relevant as a post-2009 consideration.
And yes, in terms of the physics, we have two major theories that are famously not very compatible. One at macro scales that models things as if continuous, the other at micro scales that has some curious behaviors with state management.
Hypothetically, what are the constraints that a continuous universe with access to real computing might face with self-simulation? Would there be a meaningful difference if run as a truly continuous substrate vs run as a discrete substrate that mostly behaved as if continuous outside very small scales?
His point isn’t we aren’t in a simulation, but that we’re not in an interventionist simulation, therefore evidence from improbable events can’t be used to boost the credence of a simulation.
The same argument could be made about Minecraft world, and would be right (seeing odd things happen in Minecraft world shouldn’t boost your credence that you’re simulated, because the simulators clearly aren’t generally intervening).
For example, even if a non-intervening sim, it may be that the technology of the sim causes a higher than expected rate of coincidences.
A good example would be transformers. If you were to build a sim that was non-intervening intentionally, but used transformers to augment any static data with dynamic generation, what you’d end up with would have higher than normal rates of non-locally derived overlapping coincidences, particularly around semantic superpositions.
So unusual coincidences could be evidence of being more likely to be in a sim running on architecture more prone to generating coincidences unintentionally (or even non-intervening intentional coincidences).
The epistemic problem with that approach is more that without other points of reference and a complete picture of alternative outcomes it’s not really possible to determine the base rates for how likely an observed coincidence was compared to the non-observed coincidences that didn’t happen, so the “look at the coincidence, we must be in a sim” is a weak argument as an argument, independent of the propensity of a simulated world to have more or unusual coincidences.
But even taking Minecraft as an example, while the game is mostly non-intervening, the chests periodically all turning into gift boxes for a while (coordinated with non-local to the game world Dec 25ths) or finding blocks with faces of mobs on them do represent intentional efforts of a simulator even if those do not materially change the outcomes of any given game world.
I’d even argue that it’s entirely probable given the frequency in most virtual worlds I’ve seen that if we are in a simulation, there’d be a significant chance of things like Easter eggs somewhere out there.
It’s just that even if you found a plausible example, it would not be able to prove that we are in a simulation because of the base rate point above, not anything to do with what someone envisions of what a simulator would or would not do.
(That said, considering striking coincidences or Easter egg-like material from the reverse angle of “if we are in a simulation, is there plausible significance to X” doesn’t struggle with the same issues.)
(Also, technically the Epicurian paradox falls apart with recursive creation due to introducing faithfulness to an emergent original as a valid out, and it was a weak choice to try to generalize from.)
I agree that semi interventionist Sims are reasonable to hypothesise, but unless you have strong priors over what rare interventions are most likely, by conservation of expected evidence it’s almost impossible to get any evidence your in one (when looking at everything as a whole, not isolated events).
It’s hard for me to address ambiguously as I’ve already had priors based on seeing a trope often in virtual worlds with complex lore, checked against our own lore for the same pattern through the lens of sim theory to rule out the existence of significant hits, and then was very surprised when I did actually find a hit much more significant than I’d ever expected to surface.
Separately, from a Baysean perspective, I’ll also point out that when it comes to metaphysical ‘truth’ it’s probably worth weighing the discovered property of things which are immeasurable from a given relative frame not necessarily having binary objective mutually exclusive truth values.
At best, we should probably only look at the question of immeasurable metaphysics via a Baysean lens through a more relativistic QBism-ish formulation. The question of whether or not the metaphysics governing one person are the same as the ones governing another is its own unknown. The physics must be shared across any interactive decoherence, but the metaphysics may be relative beyond that.
That a closed universe may of necessity have a one-dimensional Hilbert space is surprising (with normal quantum mechanics only arising for internal observers, relative to the unique total wavefunction of such a universe). But why is it what you’d expect of a simulation?
Because it’s how a lot of our own simulated worlds behave?
For a game like Minecraft or No Man’s Sky with procgen or a transformer’s world model like Genie 3 or Seedance 2.0 the information of the world generates based on the relative frame intersecting it. There’s the latent potential for generation, but the inner world model only fills out with actual data based on the need to render.
If you load up a Minecraft world with no players visiting it, it’s very small. As you add players into the game, it’s at that point that the engine is populating it with state that needs to be tracked and managed, based on each relative frame within it.
Convergence here is not “Q.E.D. we’re in a simulation” — these approaches could have occurred in parallel due to just how efficient systems organize information entirely separate from simulation and recursive containment.
But it’s not surprising through a simulation lens given how common the paradigm is of a virtual universe whose information increases lazily based around relative inhabitation.
I don’t think it should be particularly surprising that physics gets more weird and unintuitive to humans the more we inspect it at scales further and further away from the ones we evolved to operate in. And domain experts being wrong about AI timelines is, to me, not surprising whatsoever, both because of technological advancement timelines being notoriously hard to predict and AI itself being a difficult subject.
More generally, how exactly would we differentiate human error because of a task or subject being difficult and human error because of living in a simulation? I feel like in the case of the second one, it would be more like having a completely inconsistent hole in our world. Like, if everything else played out the same before November 3, 2020 but Kanye West got elected instead, every domain expert, even after the fact, would still be absolutely baffled.
In the case of AI and physics, so far, we seem to be able to readjust our internal knobs into something consistent (because, as expected, no matter how outlandish the rules of the micro world are, they still need to add up to what we experience in the macro world).
The Minecraft thought experiment is interesting, but you would have to play by the actual rules of the Minecraft world, so whatever intelligent agent is born there would have to be instantiated according to those rules.
I’m not really sure how life could begin naturally by Minecraft rules. If an intelligence just sort of pops in there suddenly, then I feel like, to it, that would be good evidence of outside interference once it learns more about standard Minecraft world rules.
It’s that they are repeatedly weird and unintuitive in ways that converge with ways we’re addressing challenges in simulating our own worlds.
For example, sync errors with local state between different clients has been an issue multiplayer games have around for decades before Frauchiger-Renner or Bong et al. found reasons that maybe in QM there’s local observer independence where different relative frames might disagree about local facts. And one of the newest ways of dealing with it in video games (see UE 6) is building things from the ground up around relative frames that have transactional fallbacks before state changes. So behavior like a quantum eraser where the absence of persistent information unwinds the stateful shift from wave behavior to particle behavior is convergent with approaches to solve the relative frame information conflicts in games… that we seem to have discovered in our own substrate through two different approaches in just the last decade.
A good counterexample would be if we had discovered matter was continuous. That would have surprised the people who were betting it was discrete. But I’d also be having a much harder time right now arguing that we might be in a simulation if matter were composed of uncountably infinite parts.
That’s not how things landed. (At least, not in the micro scales. The cosmic scales work very well with continuous theory like GR.)
Does the surprising convergence prove we are in a simulation? No. But had many of those surprises gone in different directions, the case for a sim would be weaker.
Something overlooked in discussing Bostrom’s take is that his argument was substrate agnostic. The statistical argument was just that if sims could be built they’d outnumber an original. But what we are actually looking at, especially in the ~25 years since, is a universe where the direction the tech is heading in how it manages state and relative frames is strikingly similar to aspects of how our own universe behaves. Not because the former is trying to replicate the latter from a fidelity standpoint. But because simulating worlds is hard, and the efficient solutions are landing on convergent behavior.
(Again, it’s possible this just reflects some meta-universe trend in how information is efficiently handled or something and doesn’t prove we are in a sim. But the convergence is notably more than it was in 2003 on both sides of the aisle.)
As for the ontology from within a Minecraft world — any NPC could point to the existence of diamonds and how they don’t form no matter if you wait for years, so clearly the world is many years older. The apparent formative process of a virtual world at the moment it is being examined from within does not necessarily correlate with the state by which the world actually formed. (If you’re interested in the thought experiment, do check out some of the existing experiments developing models that play Minecraft with no outside knowledge other than exposure to the game. It’s neat stuff and accelerating in surprising ways.)
Ok, I see what you’re saying. If our world’s rules align with what we consider to be computationally efficient, then that is at least moderate evidence for living in a simulation. I’m not sure whether that is consistently the case, though.
As for your Minecraft point, what I was saying was that you would have to instantiate the intelligence within the Minecraft world, running by its rules. And I can’t see how anything like that could arise naturally in there. It would have to just sort of appear suddenly.
I guess you could also have it running externally and only feed it input from Minecraft, but that seems like even further evidence for a simulation from its perspective (“everything else in the world fits into relatively simple rules, but I’m a super complex black box that also just suddenly popped in here”).
Actually, that’s an interesting thought. The usefulness of the notion The Tao of Physics implies EITHER that there actually is some underlying distribution from which possible physical laws were sampled for our universe, OR (perhaps as a subset of the first horn of this dilemma?) that there is an intelligent designer with actual preferences over mathematical style of physical laws. The only non-infinitesimal scrap of evidence we have for a supposed creator with any preferences at all beyond our universe’s mere existence.
So much of the discussion and thought ends up being in debating “are we in a simulation?”
But a significantly more interesting discussion is “if we are in a simulation…”
Because unlike with magic where infinite turtles are a valid conclusion or adversarial tricksters can be accused of hiding dinosaur bones to fool the faithful, simulation has anchored principles that can be applied to better reverse engineer what’s more or less meta-plausible if we are in a sim.
We may never be able to concretely know if we are in a sim, but we can very plausibly rule out aspects of what kind of sim it would be if it is a sim, and this rarely gets seriously engaged with as the debate stops at sim vs no sim.
The recent discussion here has me thinking about working on a piece about this.
The argument here is tautological.
You are saying that the state of the world as you see it is what a perfectly normal world would look like and so if a world looks that way even if simulated it must be being simulated to be indistinguishably normal. But it only looks normal because it’s your only reference frame.
If an AI agent were ‘born’ into Minecraft they might make a similar argument that because everything is made of giant blocks — just like ‘normal’ — that they must be in a sim of a realistic world.
But we can consider that we have discovered over the years a great many things that were very much not considered ‘normal’ about our world until discovered… and then normalized.
It was a great surprise to many when QM was discovered. One might think that the world’s most famous physicist at the time debating whether or not the moon was there if no one was looking at it is exactly the kind of surprising thing that would occur in a simulation. But then the people responsible adopted the phrase “shut up and calculate.”
So Bell’s paradox about how maybe things aren’t real until stateful, the Frauchiger-Renner paradox where maybe relative frames have sync errors, the way the black hole information paradox has led to calculating how closed universes would have a one dimensional Hilbert space without interior relative observer frames — we have several things even in just the last few years (since the formulation of the Simulation Hypothesis even) that have been measured which were quite surprising to people when discovered and have now become normal to our universe, but also happen to be similar to the behavior one might expect of a simulated universe.
Also, I’m skeptical of how heavily you should be weighting your “well obviously the sim should behave as X.” This framing seems to adopt the Baysean weakness of hand waving away unknown unknowns. Just because you, at this moment, can’t see other likely possible reasons for a realistic sim to be running doesn’t mean not to leave room for them in one’s reasoning.
For example, an especially surprising outcome to many after the point the Simulation Hypothesis was proposed was finding themselves in a timeline where AI is at its current trending state. My guess is that in 2003 the majority of domain experts would have had an avg of single digit percent estimates for this outcome taking place within 25 years.
So, relative to the widely held expert world models before each were discovered to be true: we find ourselves in an abnormal timeline of AI capabilities in an abnormal universe where attention/interactions apparently turns probabilistic distributions into stateful shared values for overlapping relative frames without which the universe would be empty of information.
TL;DR: The argument that clearly the simulation hypothesis isn’t worth thinking about because of how normal of a universe we are presented with forces adopting a view of normality that only appears in a post-selected hindsight.
I think he meant something like that:
(from https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/5/what-if-we-make-it-think-its-in-a-simulation)
Wouldn’t every ancestor simulation at a representative fidelity necessarily contain the building blocks needed to locally produce simulations?
There’s even an argument to be made that relatively rare things in the universe which our world has and do not seem necessary for life (such that the Anthropic principle would explain) which contributed at all to producing simulations would be frequent features in the simulated worlds a world like ours produces. An example is the perfect eclipse of the sun, which made for visible phenomenon that led to Saros cycle discovery and tracking that in turn contributed to the first ‘computer’ of the Antikythera mechanism.
Indeed, we now add eclipses to the virtual worlds that we produce at a much higher rate than they occur in what we’ve detected of solar systems.
We should expect that simulations converge on recursive capable worlds, even to the point of including otherwise rare qualities that would contribute to that capability.
Also technically for Minecraft, while not especially scalable, the simulated world we produced loosely modeled on our own can in turn run a GPT text model within it: https://www.techspot.com/news/109666-gamer-builds-functional-version-chatgpt-inside-minecraft-using.html
(Yet to be determined is if some sort of self learning agentic minds born into it as NPCs/players and knowing nothing outside it would eventually converge on the knowledge of how to do so, nor how those minds would philosophically rationalize their world and existence once doing so — though perhaps we will one day run the simulations to find out.)
I don’t see how saros cycle and Antikythera mechanism are at all related to likely features of simulation? In the scape of billions of years of evolution difference in a few thousands of years means nothing. I would rather expect no dinosaurs than some little strangeness like that.
I have seen that example. And I am not arguing that Minecraft with Redstone circuits or command blocks can’t be Turing complete. I am saying that how in fact humans and agents implemented into Minecraft is not command block or redstone, but Steve mob. And it’s mechanics aren’t natural for Minecraft world. They are a complicated set of crutches. And then comes even bigger problem. Gpt staying in Minecraft doesn’t have compact history, like in our world there is creation by evolved humans. And then even more problems, like that in Minecraft all blocks don’t have internal structure. Not talking about mobs. While our world consists from, say, wood which consists from cells which consist from organoids which consist from molecules which consist from atoms which consists from quantum particles which seem to be just presence of fields which are completely encoded inside the space. No hidden parameters. Worlds of video games have fundamentslly different, heuristical, easily tweakable, top down structure unlike real world where physics is weaven very tight on the smallest level with no exceptions. And also there are addional problems with Minecraft. For example, it has 1norm, taxi cab metric, which seems incompatible with complex numbers which seem to be natural for the math, and as result also as i know incompatible with unitarity and quantum mechanics in general. (And to me it seems that qm obeys predictions of Tegmark 4 for base layer, as I point in another comment to that post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KgwQchapx4vJDhfYC/generalized-atheism-rules-out-inaccurate-simulation-ism?commentId=eidgejPrbs3ExJxKJ)
Generally, our world seems as very much opposite of what you expect from simulation. Laws are universal so much that we have only two main theories now. Instead of enormous set of crutches which happens in video games. And quantum mechanics seems to behave exactly like particles follow all possible paths between two points. And relativity theory instead of binding everything to one system of coordinates, tracking distances only between each object and one point, says that there is no priveleged reference frame and you should rather thing about position as distances to all the other objects. Which doesn’t seem at all as a way you would effectively use computation power for your simulation.
So our universe seems very normal for a world governed purely by simple physical laws with unlimited computational power. And those laws don’t even seem to explain some simple objectives. They are more universal laws like Noether Theorem.
The point of the eclipses and Antikythera mechanism is that similar to how “things alive to see a thing” can be used to explain otherwise rare features that “things being alive to see” depends on, that “things which contribute to simulation” renders those things expected within a simulation.
So while it’s an otherwise rare detail that standing on our planet’s surface the moon creates perfect eclipses, within a simulation this should not be regarded as all that unusual given its partial load-bearing effects on that dependency chain.
This doesn’t mean that eclipses prove we are in a simulation, but it addresses the idea that “but the world looks like it could produce the simulations and tech we are currently producing all on its own” isn’t all that significant. Yes, we should expect a simulation to carry forward features that contributed to the parent’s developing simulations into the child worlds.
As for games mechanics vs physics mechanics, it’s not a static field. Things have advanced a lot from Minecraft. For example, you might find it interesting to look more into how Epic is trying to solve massive multiplayer worlds by building from the bottom up around relative frames with transactional mechanics built into the programming language and lazy loaded assets based on what any given relative frame needs built even into their VC. Also, transformers and how superimposed probabilities of state collapse into specific values might also be relevant as a post-2009 consideration.
And yes, in terms of the physics, we have two major theories that are famously not very compatible. One at macro scales that models things as if continuous, the other at micro scales that has some curious behaviors with state management.
Hypothetically, what are the constraints that a continuous universe with access to real computing might face with self-simulation? Would there be a meaningful difference if run as a truly continuous substrate vs run as a discrete substrate that mostly behaved as if continuous outside very small scales?
His point isn’t we aren’t in a simulation, but that we’re not in an interventionist simulation, therefore evidence from improbable events can’t be used to boost the credence of a simulation.
The same argument could be made about Minecraft world, and would be right (seeing odd things happen in Minecraft world shouldn’t boost your credence that you’re simulated, because the simulators clearly aren’t generally intervening).
It’s still not a particularly strong case.
For example, even if a non-intervening sim, it may be that the technology of the sim causes a higher than expected rate of coincidences.
A good example would be transformers. If you were to build a sim that was non-intervening intentionally, but used transformers to augment any static data with dynamic generation, what you’d end up with would have higher than normal rates of non-locally derived overlapping coincidences, particularly around semantic superpositions.
So unusual coincidences could be evidence of being more likely to be in a sim running on architecture more prone to generating coincidences unintentionally (or even non-intervening intentional coincidences).
The epistemic problem with that approach is more that without other points of reference and a complete picture of alternative outcomes it’s not really possible to determine the base rates for how likely an observed coincidence was compared to the non-observed coincidences that didn’t happen, so the “look at the coincidence, we must be in a sim” is a weak argument as an argument, independent of the propensity of a simulated world to have more or unusual coincidences.
But even taking Minecraft as an example, while the game is mostly non-intervening, the chests periodically all turning into gift boxes for a while (coordinated with non-local to the game world Dec 25ths) or finding blocks with faces of mobs on them do represent intentional efforts of a simulator even if those do not materially change the outcomes of any given game world.
I’d even argue that it’s entirely probable given the frequency in most virtual worlds I’ve seen that if we are in a simulation, there’d be a significant chance of things like Easter eggs somewhere out there.
It’s just that even if you found a plausible example, it would not be able to prove that we are in a simulation because of the base rate point above, not anything to do with what someone envisions of what a simulator would or would not do.
(That said, considering striking coincidences or Easter egg-like material from the reverse angle of “if we are in a simulation, is there plausible significance to X” doesn’t struggle with the same issues.)
(Also, technically the Epicurian paradox falls apart with recursive creation due to introducing faithfulness to an emergent original as a valid out, and it was a weak choice to try to generalize from.)
I agree that semi interventionist Sims are reasonable to hypothesise, but unless you have strong priors over what rare interventions are most likely, by conservation of expected evidence it’s almost impossible to get any evidence your in one (when looking at everything as a whole, not isolated events).
It’s hard for me to address ambiguously as I’ve already had priors based on seeing a trope often in virtual worlds with complex lore, checked against our own lore for the same pattern through the lens of sim theory to rule out the existence of significant hits, and then was very surprised when I did actually find a hit much more significant than I’d ever expected to surface.
Separately, from a Baysean perspective, I’ll also point out that when it comes to metaphysical ‘truth’ it’s probably worth weighing the discovered property of things which are immeasurable from a given relative frame not necessarily having binary objective mutually exclusive truth values.
At best, we should probably only look at the question of immeasurable metaphysics via a Baysean lens through a more relativistic QBism-ish formulation. The question of whether or not the metaphysics governing one person are the same as the ones governing another is its own unknown. The physics must be shared across any interactive decoherence, but the metaphysics may be relative beyond that.
That a closed universe may of necessity have a one-dimensional Hilbert space is surprising (with normal quantum mechanics only arising for internal observers, relative to the unique total wavefunction of such a universe). But why is it what you’d expect of a simulation?
Because it’s how a lot of our own simulated worlds behave?
For a game like Minecraft or No Man’s Sky with procgen or a transformer’s world model like Genie 3 or Seedance 2.0 the information of the world generates based on the relative frame intersecting it. There’s the latent potential for generation, but the inner world model only fills out with actual data based on the need to render.
If you load up a Minecraft world with no players visiting it, it’s very small. As you add players into the game, it’s at that point that the engine is populating it with state that needs to be tracked and managed, based on each relative frame within it.
Convergence here is not “Q.E.D. we’re in a simulation” — these approaches could have occurred in parallel due to just how efficient systems organize information entirely separate from simulation and recursive containment.
But it’s not surprising through a simulation lens given how common the paradigm is of a virtual universe whose information increases lazily based around relative inhabitation.
I don’t think it should be particularly surprising that physics gets more weird and unintuitive to humans the more we inspect it at scales further and further away from the ones we evolved to operate in. And domain experts being wrong about AI timelines is, to me, not surprising whatsoever, both because of technological advancement timelines being notoriously hard to predict and AI itself being a difficult subject.
More generally, how exactly would we differentiate human error because of a task or subject being difficult and human error because of living in a simulation? I feel like in the case of the second one, it would be more like having a completely inconsistent hole in our world. Like, if everything else played out the same before November 3, 2020 but Kanye West got elected instead, every domain expert, even after the fact, would still be absolutely baffled.
In the case of AI and physics, so far, we seem to be able to readjust our internal knobs into something consistent (because, as expected, no matter how outlandish the rules of the micro world are, they still need to add up to what we experience in the macro world).
The Minecraft thought experiment is interesting, but you would have to play by the actual rules of the Minecraft world, so whatever intelligent agent is born there would have to be instantiated according to those rules.
I’m not really sure how life could begin naturally by Minecraft rules. If an intelligence just sort of pops in there suddenly, then I feel like, to it, that would be good evidence of outside interference once it learns more about standard Minecraft world rules.
It’s not simply being weird and unintuitive.
It’s that they are repeatedly weird and unintuitive in ways that converge with ways we’re addressing challenges in simulating our own worlds.
For example, sync errors with local state between different clients has been an issue multiplayer games have around for decades before Frauchiger-Renner or Bong et al. found reasons that maybe in QM there’s local observer independence where different relative frames might disagree about local facts. And one of the newest ways of dealing with it in video games (see UE 6) is building things from the ground up around relative frames that have transactional fallbacks before state changes. So behavior like a quantum eraser where the absence of persistent information unwinds the stateful shift from wave behavior to particle behavior is convergent with approaches to solve the relative frame information conflicts in games… that we seem to have discovered in our own substrate through two different approaches in just the last decade.
A good counterexample would be if we had discovered matter was continuous. That would have surprised the people who were betting it was discrete. But I’d also be having a much harder time right now arguing that we might be in a simulation if matter were composed of uncountably infinite parts.
That’s not how things landed. (At least, not in the micro scales. The cosmic scales work very well with continuous theory like GR.)
Does the surprising convergence prove we are in a simulation? No. But had many of those surprises gone in different directions, the case for a sim would be weaker.
Something overlooked in discussing Bostrom’s take is that his argument was substrate agnostic. The statistical argument was just that if sims could be built they’d outnumber an original. But what we are actually looking at, especially in the ~25 years since, is a universe where the direction the tech is heading in how it manages state and relative frames is strikingly similar to aspects of how our own universe behaves. Not because the former is trying to replicate the latter from a fidelity standpoint. But because simulating worlds is hard, and the efficient solutions are landing on convergent behavior.
(Again, it’s possible this just reflects some meta-universe trend in how information is efficiently handled or something and doesn’t prove we are in a sim. But the convergence is notably more than it was in 2003 on both sides of the aisle.)
As for the ontology from within a Minecraft world — any NPC could point to the existence of diamonds and how they don’t form no matter if you wait for years, so clearly the world is many years older. The apparent formative process of a virtual world at the moment it is being examined from within does not necessarily correlate with the state by which the world actually formed. (If you’re interested in the thought experiment, do check out some of the existing experiments developing models that play Minecraft with no outside knowledge other than exposure to the game. It’s neat stuff and accelerating in surprising ways.)
Ok, I see what you’re saying. If our world’s rules align with what we consider to be computationally efficient, then that is at least moderate evidence for living in a simulation. I’m not sure whether that is consistently the case, though.
As for your Minecraft point, what I was saying was that you would have to instantiate the intelligence within the Minecraft world, running by its rules. And I can’t see how anything like that could arise naturally in there. It would have to just sort of appear suddenly.
I guess you could also have it running externally and only feed it input from Minecraft, but that seems like even further evidence for a simulation from its perspective (“everything else in the world fits into relatively simple rules, but I’m a super complex black box that also just suddenly popped in here”).
Actually, that’s an interesting thought. The usefulness of the notion The Tao of Physics implies EITHER that there actually is some underlying distribution from which possible physical laws were sampled for our universe, OR (perhaps as a subset of the first horn of this dilemma?) that there is an intelligent designer with actual preferences over mathematical style of physical laws. The only non-infinitesimal scrap of evidence we have for a supposed creator with any preferences at all beyond our universe’s mere existence.
So much of the discussion and thought ends up being in debating “are we in a simulation?”
But a significantly more interesting discussion is “if we are in a simulation…”
Because unlike with magic where infinite turtles are a valid conclusion or adversarial tricksters can be accused of hiding dinosaur bones to fool the faithful, simulation has anchored principles that can be applied to better reverse engineer what’s more or less meta-plausible if we are in a sim.
We may never be able to concretely know if we are in a sim, but we can very plausibly rule out aspects of what kind of sim it would be if it is a sim, and this rarely gets seriously engaged with as the debate stops at sim vs no sim.
The recent discussion here has me thinking about working on a piece about this.