Reality just contains vastly, vastly more compute than any of your sims can. Reality is the first world that has a compelling explanation of how the AI came to exist, and the first explanation where the resources that it uses to compute are continuous with the world that spawned it.
I don’t understand why you seem to assume here that an intelligence could confidently infer anything about the computing conditions in a universe that’s simulating it.
I do agree that our reality is vastly more self-consistent and complex than any faithful simulations we could make. I’m just challenging the claim that this lets us infer anything about the relationship between our reality and higher layers of hypothetical simulation.
Reality is also the first world that can compellingly contain the signature of superintelligent optimization in it. For example, it’s plausibly very hard to fake the reaction of a real global stock market to some superintelligent trades without actually having a bunch of human brains running in the background. (And if this isn’t true of stock markets, it’s true of something.)
I’m not clear on the logic underlying this example. Stock markets are affected by quantum-scale uncertainty bubbling up into macro-scale effects in domains like weather, war, and politics. Indeed, any real-world macro-scale system will be similarly affected. That level of noise would likely make it infeasible for a superintelligence to accurately judge its odds of being in a simulation from how its superintelligent actions affect the world.
Further, a superintelligence wouldn’t have a firm foundation for inferring how much computation anything it observes would take. Distant galaxies could be simulated more efficiently by a planetarium, and when it sends a probe into the firmament the simulators could send back bogus data.
And ultimately, the superintelligence could never be sure that it didn’t discover a smoking gun of the simulation 10 minutes ago, only for the simulators to swoop in Cartesian-evil-demon-style and edit its mind state to remove all trace of that.
I agree it could reason its way toward regarding simulation scenarios as very unlikely on Solomonoff induction grounds, but the fundamental limitations above strike me as preventing the number of nines of certainty that you suggest elsewhere in the post.
I don’t understand why you seem to assume here that an intelligence could confidently infer anything about the computing conditions in a universe that’s simulating it.
I do agree that our reality is vastly more self-consistent and complex than any faithful simulations we could make. I’m just challenging the claim that this lets us infer anything about the relationship between our reality and higher layers of hypothetical simulation.
I’m not clear on the logic underlying this example. Stock markets are affected by quantum-scale uncertainty bubbling up into macro-scale effects in domains like weather, war, and politics. Indeed, any real-world macro-scale system will be similarly affected. That level of noise would likely make it infeasible for a superintelligence to accurately judge its odds of being in a simulation from how its superintelligent actions affect the world.
Further, a superintelligence wouldn’t have a firm foundation for inferring how much computation anything it observes would take. Distant galaxies could be simulated more efficiently by a planetarium, and when it sends a probe into the firmament the simulators could send back bogus data.
And ultimately, the superintelligence could never be sure that it didn’t discover a smoking gun of the simulation 10 minutes ago, only for the simulators to swoop in Cartesian-evil-demon-style and edit its mind state to remove all trace of that.
I agree it could reason its way toward regarding simulation scenarios as very unlikely on Solomonoff induction grounds, but the fundamental limitations above strike me as preventing the number of nines of certainty that you suggest elsewhere in the post.