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?
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?