First of all, there seem to be lots of ways in which we might fail to develop such technology. We might go extinct or our civilization collapse or something of the kind (outright extinction seems really unlikely, but collapse of technological civilization much more likely). It might turn out that computational superpowers just aren't really available -- that there's only so much processing power we have any realistic way of harnessing. It might turn out that such things are possible but we simply aren't smart enough to find our way to them.
Absolutely. I think this is where this thing most likely fails. Somewhere in the first disjunct. My gut does not think I am in a simulation, and while that is not at all a valid way to acquire knowledge, it is the case that it leans me heavily into this.
Second, if we (or more precisely our successors, whoever or whatever they are) develop such computational superpowers, why on earth use them for ancestor simulations? In this sort of scenario, maybe we're all living in some kind of virtual universe; wouldn't it be better to make other minds like ours sharing our glorious virtual universe rather than grubbily simulating our ancestors in their grotty early 21st-century world?
So I am not saying that they WOULD do it, I actually can think of a lot of pretty compelling reasons why they MIGHT. If the people who are around then are at all like us, then I think that a subset of them would likely do it for the one-boxer reasons I mentioned in the first post (which I have since updated with a note at the bottom to clarify some things I should have included in the post originally.) Whether or not their intuitions are valid, there is an internal logic, based on these intuitions, which would push for this. Reasons include hedging against the teletransportation paradox (which also applies to self-uploading) and hoping to increase their credence of an afterlife in which those already dead can join in. This is clearer I think in my update. The main confusion is that I am not talking about attempting to simulate or recreate specific dead people, which I do not think is possible. The key to my argument is to create self-locating doubt.
Also, in my argument, the people who create the simulation are never joined with the people in the simulation. These people stay in their simulation computer. The idea is that we are “hoping” we are similarly in a simulation computer, and have been the whole time, and that when we die, we will be transferred (whole) into the simulations afterlife component along with everyone who died before us in our world. Should we be in a simulation, and yet develop some sort of “glorious virtual universe” that we upload into, there are several options. Two ones that quickly come to mind: 1) We might stay in it until we die, then go into the afterlife component, 2) We might at some point be “raptured” by the simulation out of our virtual universe into the existent “glorious virtual afterlife” of the simulation computer we are in.
As it is likely that the technology for simulations will come about at about the same time as for a “glorious virtual universe” we could even treat it as our last big hurrah before we upload ourselves. This makes sense as the people who exist when this technology becomes available will know a large number of loved ones who just missed it. They will also potentially be in especially imminent fear of the teletransportation paradox. I do not think there is any inherent conflict between doing both of these things.
Someone else -- entirelyuseless? -- observed earlier in the thread that some such simulation might be necessary in order to figure out enough about our ancestors' minds to simulate them anywhere else, so it's just possible that grotty 21st-century ancestor sims might be a necessary precursor to glorious 25th-century ancestor sims; but why ancestors anyway? What's so special about them, compared with all the other possible minds?
Just to be clear, I am not talking about our actual individual ancestors. I actually avoided using the term intentionally as I think it is a bit confusing. I am pretty sure this is how Bostrom meant it as well in the original paper, with the word “ancestor” being used in the looser sense, like how we say “homo erectus where our ancestors.” That might be my misinterpretation, but I do not think so. While I could be convinced, I am personally, currently, very skeptical that it would be possible to do any meaningful sort of replication of a person after they die. I think the only way that someone who has already died has any chance of an afterlife is if we are already in a simulation. This is also why my personal, atheistic mind could be susceptible to donating to such a cause when in grief. I wrote an update to my original post at the bottom where I clarify this. The point of the simulation is to change our credence regarding our self-location. If the vast majority of “people like us” (which can be REALLY broadly construed) exist in simulations with afterlives, and do not know it, we have reason to think we might also exist in such a simulation. If this is still not clear after the update, please let me know, as I am trying to pin down something difficult and am not sure if I am continuing to privilege brevity to the detriment of clarity.
Third, supposing that we have computational superpowers and want to simulate our ancestors, I see no good reason to think it's possible. The information it would take to simulate my great-great-grandparents is dispersed and tangled up with other information, and figuring out enough about my great-great-grandparents to simulate them will be no easier than locating the exact oxygen atoms that were in Julius Caesar's last breath. All the relevant systems are chaotic, measurement is imprecise, and surely there's just no reconstructing our ancestors at this point.
I agree with your point so strongly that I am a little surprised to have been interpreted as meaning this. I think that it seems theoretically feasible to simulate a world full of individual people as they advance their way up from simple stone tools onward, each with their own unique life and identity, each existing in a unique world with its own history. Trying to somehow make this the EXACT SAME as ours does not seem at all possible. I also do not see what the advantage of it would be, as it is not more informative or helpful for our purposes to know that we are the same or not as the people above us, so why would be try to “send that down” below us. We do not care about that as a feature of our world, and so would have no reason to try to instill it in the worlds below us. There is sort of a “golden rule” aspect to this in that you do to the simulation below you the best feasible, reality-conforming version of what you want done to you.
Fourth, it seems quite likely that our superpowered successors, if we have them, will be no more like us than we are like chimpanzees. Perhaps you find it credible that we might want to simulate our ancestors; do you think we would be interested in simulating our ancestors 5 million years ago who were as much like chimps as like us?
Maybe? I think that one of the interesting parts about this is where we would choose to draw policy lines around it. Do dogs go to the afterlife? How about fetuses? How about AI? What is heaven like? Who gets to decide this? These are all live questions. It could be that they take a consequential hedonistic approach that is mostly neutral between “who” gets the heaven. It could be that they feel obligated to go back further in gratitude of all those (“types”) who worked for advancement as a species and made their lives possible. It could be that we are actually not too far from superintelligent AI, and that this is going to become a live question in the next century or so, in which case “we” are that class of people they want to simulate in order to increase their credence of others similar to us (their relatives, friends who missed the revolution) being simulated.
As far as how far back you bother to simulate people, it might actually be easier to start off with some very small bands of people in a very primitive setting then to try to go through and make a complex world for people to “start” in without the benefit of cultural knowledge or tradition. It might even be that the “first people” are based on some survivalist hobby back-to-basics types who volunteered to be emulated, copied, and placed in different combinations in primitive earth environments in order to live simple hunter-gatherer lives and have their children go on to populate an earth (possible date of start? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck). That said, this is deep into the weeds of extremely low-probability speculation. Fun to do, but increasingly meaningless.
This is a bit rough, but I think that it is an interesting and potentially compelling idea. To keep this short, and accordingly increase the number of eyes over it, I have only sketched the bare bones of the idea.
1) Empirically, people have varying intuitions and beliefs about causality, particularly in Newcomb-like problems (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Newcomb's_problem, http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_grace).
2) Also, as an empirical matter, some people believe in taking actions after the fact, such as one-boxing, or Calvinist “irresistible grace”, to try to ensure or conform with a seemingly already determined outcome. This might be out of a sense of retrocausality, performance, moral honesty, etc. What matters is that we know that they will act it out, despite it violating common sense causality. There has been some great work on decision theory on LW about trying to thread this needle well.
3) The second disjunct of the simulation argument (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Simulation_argument) shows that the decision making of humanity is evidentially relevant in what our subjective credence should be that we are in a simulation. That is to say, if we are actively headed toward making simulations, we should increase our credence of being in a simulation, if we are actively headed away from making simulations, through either existential risk or law/policy against it, we should decrease our credence.
4) Many, if not most, people would like for there to be a pleasant afterlife after death, especially if we could be reunited with loved ones.
5) There is no reason to believe that simulations which are otherwise nearly identical copies of our world, could not contain, after the simulated bodily death of the participants, an extremely long-duration, though finite, "heaven"-like afterlife shared by simulation participants.
6) Our heading towards creating such simulations, especially if they were capable of nesting simulations, should increase credence that we exist in such a simulation and should perhaps expect a heaven-like afterlife of long, though finite, duration.
7) Those who believe in alternative causality, or retrocausality, in Newcomb-like situations should be especially excited about the opportunity to push the world towards surviving, allowing these types of simulations, and creating them, as it would potentially suggest, analogously, that if they work towards creating simulations with heaven-like afterlives, that they might in some sense be “causing” such a heaven to exist for themselves, and even for friends and family who have already died. Such an idea of life-after-death, and especially for being reunited with loved ones, can be extremely compelling.
8) I believe that people matching the above description, that is, holding both an intuition in alternative causality, and finding such a heaven-like-afterlife compelling, exist. Further, the existence of such people, and their associated motivation to try to create such simulations, should increase the credence even of two-boxing types, that we already live in such a world with a heaven-like afterlife. This is because knowledge of a motivated minority desiring simulations should increase credence in the likely success of simulations. This is essentially showing that “this probably happened before, one level up” from the two-box perspective.
9) As an empirical matter, I also think that there are people who would find the idea of creating simulations with heaven-like afterlives compelling, even if they are not one-boxers, from a simply altruistic perspective, both since it is a nice thing to do for the future sim people, who can, for example, probabilistically have a much better existence than biological children on earth can, and as it is a nice thing to do to increase the credence (and emotional comfort) of both one-boxers and two-boxers in our world thinking that there might be a life after death.
10) This creates the opportunity for a secular movement in which people work towards creating these simulations, and use this work and potential success in order to derive comfort and meaning from their life. For example, making donations to a simulation-creating or promoting, or existential threat avoiding, think-tank after a loved one’s death, partially symbolically, partially hopefully.
11) There is at least some room for Pascalian considerations even for two-boxers who allow for some humility in their beliefs. Nozick believed one-boxers will become two boxers if Box A is raised to 900,000, and two-boxers will become one-boxers if Box A is lowered to $1. Similarly, trying to work towards these simulations, even if you do not find it altruistically compelling, and even if you think that the odds of alternative or retrocausality is infinitesimally small, might make sense in that the reward could be extremely large, including potentially trillions of lifetimes worth of time spent in an afterlife “heaven” with friends and family.
Finally, this idea might be one worth filling in (I have been, in my private notes for over a year, but am a bit shy to debut that all just yet, even working up the courage to post this was difficult) if only because it is interesting, and could be used as a hook to get more people interested in existential risk, including the AI control problem. This is because existential catastrophe is probably the best enemy of credence in the future of such simulations, and accordingly in our reasonable credence in thinking that we have such a heaven awaiting us after death now. A short hook headline like “avoiding existential risk is key to afterlife” can get a conversation going. I can imagine Salon, etc. taking another swipe at it, and in doing so, creating publicity which would help in finding more similar minded folks to get involved in the work of MIRI, FHI, CEA etc. There are also some really interesting ideas about acausal trade, and game theory between higher and lower worlds, as a form of “compulsion” in which they punish worlds for not creating heaven containing simulations (therefore effecting their credence as observers of the simulation), in order to reach an equilibrium in which simulations with heaven-like afterlives are universal, or nearly universal. More on that later if this is received well.
Also, if anyone would like to join with me in researching, bull sessioning, or writing about this stuff, please feel free to IM me. Also, if anyone has a really good, non-obvious pin with which to pop my balloon, preferably in a gentle way, it would be really appreciated. I am spending a lot of energy and time on this if it is fundamentally flawed in some way.
Thank you.
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November 11 Updates and Edits for Clarification
1) There seems to be confusion about what I mean by self-location and credence. A good way to think of this is the Sleeping Beauty Problem (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem)
If I imagine myself as Sleeping Beauty (and who doesn’t?), and I am asked on Sunday what my credence is that the coin will be tails, I will say 1/2. If I am awakened during the experiment without being told which day it is and am asked what my credence is that the coin was tails, I will say 2/3. If I am then told it is Monday, I will update my credence to ½. If I am told it is Tuesday I update my credence to 1. If someone asks me two days after the experiment about my credence of it being tails, if I somehow do not know the days of the week still, I will say ½. Credence changes with where you are, and with what information you have. As we might be in a simulation, we are somewhere in the “experiment days” and information can help orient our credence. As humanity potentially has some say in whether or not we are in a simulation, information about how humans make decisions about these types of things can and should effect our credence.
Imagine Sleeping Beauty is a lesswrong reader. If Sleeping Beauty is unfamiliar with the simulation argument, and someone asks her about her credence of being in a simulation, she probably answers something like 0.0000000001% (all numbers for illustrative purposes only). If someone shows her the simulation argument, she increases to 1%. If she stumbles across this blog entry, she increases her credence to 2%, and adds some credence to the additional hypothesis that it may be a simulation with an afterlife. If she sees that a ton of people get really interested in this idea, and start raising funds to build simulations in the future and to lobby governments both for great AI safeguards and for regulation of future simulations, she raises her credence to 4%. If she lives through the AI superintelligence explosion and simulations are being built, but not yet turned on, her credence increases to 20%. If humanity turns them on, it increases to 50%. If there are trillions of them, she increases her credence to 60%. If 99% of simulations survive their own run-ins with artificial superintelligence and produce their own simulations, she increases her credence to 95%.
2) This set of simulations does not need to recreate the current world or any specific people in it. That is a different idea that is not necessary to this argument. As written the argument is premised on the idea of creating fully unique people. The point would be to increase our credence that we are functionally identical in type to the unique individuals in the simulation. This is done by creating ignorance or uncertainty in simulations, so that the majority of people similarly situated, in a world which may or may not be in a simulation, are in fact in a simulation. This should, in our ignorance, increase our credence that we are in a simulation. The point is about how we self-locate, as discussed in the original article by Bostrom. It is a short 12-page read, and if you have not read it yet, I would encourage it: http://simulation-argument.com/simulation.html. The point about past loved ones I was making was to bring up the possibility that the simulations could be designed to transfer people to a separate after-life simulation where they could be reunited after dying in the first part of the simulation. This was not about trying to create something for us to upload ourselves into, along with attempted replicas of dead loved ones. This staying-in-one simulation through two phases, a short life, and relatively long afterlife, also has the advantage of circumventing the teletransportation paradox as “all of the person" can be moved into the afterlife part of the simulation.