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”).
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”).