It is physically possible to simulate a conscious mind.
… but it’s expensive, especially if you have to simulate its environment as well. You have to use a lot of physical resources to run a high-fidelity simulation. It probably takes irreducibly more mass and energy to simulate any given system with close to “full” fidelity than the system itself uses. You can probably get away with less fidelity than that, but nobody has provided any explanation of how much less or why that works.
There are other, more interesting and important ways to use that compute capacity. Nobody sane, human or alien, is going to waste it on running a crapton of simulations.
Also, nobody knows that all the simulated minds wouldn’t be p-zombies, because, regardless of innumerable pompous overconfident claims, nobody understands qualia. Nobody can prove that they’re not a p-zombie, but do you think you’re a p-zombie? And do we care about p-zombies?
The universe is very big, and there are many, many other aliens.
If that’s true, and you haven’t provided any evidence for it, then those aliens have many, many other things to simulate. The measure of humans among random aliens’ simulations is going to be tiny if it’s not zero.
Some aliens will run various simulations.
Again, that doesn’t imply that they’re going to run enough of them for them to dominate the number of subjective experiences out there, or that any of them will be of humans.
Future humans, or human AI successors, if there are any of either, will probably also run “various simulations”, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to dump the kind of vast resources you’re demanding into them.
The number of simulations that are “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own experience far outnumbers authentic evolved humans.
Um, no? Because all of the premises you’re using to get there are wrong.
(By “subjectively indistinguishable,” I mean the simulates can’t tell they’re in a simulation. )
By that definition, a simulation that bounces frictionless billiard balls around and labels them as humans is “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own, since the billiard balls have no cognition and can’t tell anything about anything at all. You need to do more than that to define the kind of simulation you really mean.
There are other, more interesting and important ways to use that compute capacity. Nobody sane, human or alien, is going to waste it on running a crapton of simulations.
Counterpoint: speedrunning and things like ‘Twitch plays’, which are some of the most popular streaming genres in existence, and exist largely because they are unimportant. A TAS speedrunner may well run millions or billions of simulations simply to try to shave off 1s from the record. (An example I like to cite uses 6 CPU-years to bruteforce NES Arkanoid to achieve nearly optimal play. Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide the wallclock equivalent, but I strongly suspect that this project alone simulates more minutes of NES Arkanoid than it was ever played by humans. If not, then I’m quite sure at this point that NES Mario has been played in silico OOMs more than by humans. Plenty of projects like ‘My First NEAT project’ will do a few years or centuries of NES Mario.)
There are other, more interesting and important ways to use that compute capacity. Nobody sane, human or alien, is going to waste it on running a crapton of simulations.
This is a very silly argument, given the sorts of things we use compute capacity for, in the real world, today.
Pick the most nonsensical, absurd, pointless, “shitpost”-quality webcomic/game/video/whatever you can think of. Now find a dozen more like it. (This will be very easy.) Now total up how much compute capacity it takes to make those things happen, and imagine going back to 1950 or whenever, and telling them that, for one teenager to watch one cat video (or whatever else) on their phone takes several orders of magnitude more compute capacity than exists in their entire world, and that not only do we casually spend said compute on said cat video routinely, as a matter of course, without having to pay any discernible amount of money for it, but that in fact we regularly waste similar amounts of compute on nothing at all because some engineer forgot to put a return statement in the right place and so some web page or other process uses up CPU cycles needlessly, and nobody really cares enough to fix it.
People will absolutely waste compute capacity on running a crapton of simulations.
(And that’s without even getting into the “sane” caveat. Insane people use computers all the time! If you doubt this, by all means browse any social media site for a day…)
I haven’t heard the p zombie argument before, but I agree that is at least some Bayesian evidence that we’re not in a sim.
We don’t know if simulated people will be p zombies
I am not a p zombie [citation needed]
It would be very surprising if sims were not p zombies but everyone in the physical universe is
Therefore the likelihood ratio of being conscious is higher for the real universe than a simulation
Probably 3 needs to be developed further, but this is the first new piece of evidence I’ve seen since I first encountered the simulation argument in like 2005.
I’ve never understood why people make this argument:
but it’s expensive, especially if you have to simulate its environment as well. You have to use a lot of physical resources to run a high-fidelity simulation. It probably takes irreducibly more mass and energy to simulate any given system with close to “full” fidelity than the system itself uses.
Let’s imagine that we crack the minimum requirements for sentience. I think we already may have accidentally done so, but table that for a moment. Will it really require that we simulate the entire human brain down to every last particle, or is it plausible that it will require a bare minimum of mathematical abstractions?
Additionally, we’ve seen people create basic computers inside of minecraft and little big planet, now let’s pretend there was a conscious npc inside one of those games looking at their computer and wondering:
what if we exist inside of a simulation, and a device like this is being used to generate our entire world—including us?
and the other sentient npc says
nonsense, there aren’t enough resources in the whole of our reality to simulate even a single island, let alone the entire world
For all we know all the particles in the universe are as difficult to run as the pixels on-screen during a game of pac-man, and/or perhaps the the quantum observer effect is analogous to an advanced form of view frustum culling.
Why would we ever assume that an outer reality simulating our own has similar computational resource constraints or that resource constraints is even a meaningful concept there?
… but it’s expensive, especially if you have to simulate its environment as well. You have to use a lot of physical resources to run a high-fidelity simulation. It probably takes irreducibly more mass and energy to simulate any given system with close to “full” fidelity than the system itself uses. You can probably get away with less fidelity than that, but nobody has provided any explanation of how much less or why that works.
There are other, more interesting and important ways to use that compute capacity. Nobody sane, human or alien, is going to waste it on running a crapton of simulations.
Also, nobody knows that all the simulated minds wouldn’t be p-zombies, because, regardless of innumerable pompous overconfident claims, nobody understands qualia. Nobody can prove that they’re not a p-zombie, but do you think you’re a p-zombie? And do we care about p-zombies?
If that’s true, and you haven’t provided any evidence for it, then those aliens have many, many other things to simulate. The measure of humans among random aliens’ simulations is going to be tiny if it’s not zero.
Again, that doesn’t imply that they’re going to run enough of them for them to dominate the number of subjective experiences out there, or that any of them will be of humans.
Future humans, or human AI successors, if there are any of either, will probably also run “various simulations”, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to dump the kind of vast resources you’re demanding into them.
Um, no? Because all of the premises you’re using to get there are wrong.
By that definition, a simulation that bounces frictionless billiard balls around and labels them as humans is “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own, since the billiard balls have no cognition and can’t tell anything about anything at all. You need to do more than that to define the kind of simulation you really mean.
Counterpoint: speedrunning and things like ‘Twitch plays’, which are some of the most popular streaming genres in existence, and exist largely because they are unimportant. A TAS speedrunner may well run millions or billions of simulations simply to try to shave off 1s from the record. (An example I like to cite uses 6 CPU-years to bruteforce NES Arkanoid to achieve nearly optimal play. Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide the wallclock equivalent, but I strongly suspect that this project alone simulates more minutes of NES Arkanoid than it was ever played by humans. If not, then I’m quite sure at this point that NES Mario has been played in silico OOMs more than by humans. Plenty of projects like ‘My First NEAT project’ will do a few years or centuries of NES Mario.)
This is a very silly argument, given the sorts of things we use compute capacity for, in the real world, today.
Pick the most nonsensical, absurd, pointless, “shitpost”-quality webcomic/game/video/whatever you can think of. Now find a dozen more like it. (This will be very easy.) Now total up how much compute capacity it takes to make those things happen, and imagine going back to 1950 or whenever, and telling them that, for one teenager to watch one cat video (or whatever else) on their phone takes several orders of magnitude more compute capacity than exists in their entire world, and that not only do we casually spend said compute on said cat video routinely, as a matter of course, without having to pay any discernible amount of money for it, but that in fact we regularly waste similar amounts of compute on nothing at all because some engineer forgot to put a return statement in the right place and so some web page or other process uses up CPU cycles needlessly, and nobody really cares enough to fix it.
People will absolutely waste compute capacity on running a crapton of simulations.
(And that’s without even getting into the “sane” caveat. Insane people use computers all the time! If you doubt this, by all means browse any social media site for a day…)
I haven’t heard the p zombie argument before, but I agree that is at least some Bayesian evidence that we’re not in a sim.
We don’t know if simulated people will be p zombies
I am not a p zombie [citation needed]
It would be very surprising if sims were not p zombies but everyone in the physical universe is
Therefore the likelihood ratio of being conscious is higher for the real universe than a simulation
Probably 3 needs to be developed further, but this is the first new piece of evidence I’ve seen since I first encountered the simulation argument in like 2005.
I’ve never understood why people make this argument:
Let’s imagine that we crack the minimum requirements for sentience. I think we already may have accidentally done so, but table that for a moment. Will it really require that we simulate the entire human brain down to every last particle, or is it plausible that it will require a bare minimum of mathematical abstractions?
Additionally, we’ve seen people create basic computers inside of minecraft and little big planet, now let’s pretend there was a conscious npc inside one of those games looking at their computer and wondering:
and the other sentient npc says
For all we know all the particles in the universe are as difficult to run as the pixels on-screen during a game of pac-man, and/or perhaps the the quantum observer effect is analogous to an advanced form of view frustum culling.
Why would we ever assume that an outer reality simulating our own has similar computational resource constraints or that resource constraints is even a meaningful concept there?