LESSWRONG
LW

Comment Permalink

The argument that we live in a simulation doesn’t make any sense. To experiment on sentient beings without their consent is unethical, and I can’t see that changing, even in the far future. I won’t say it won’t happen, but I would be surprised if it is common. If ancestor simulations are rare, then they no longer outnumber the biological people.

Also, why would you want to run such a simulation at such high fidelity as to have intelligent people embedded therein? That sounds like needless complication and expense. Aggregate human behavior can already be modeled fairly well. The Sims with software people seems like way more than you’d need/want.

Also, what are they achieving? Calling them “ancestor simulations” is ridiculous because even if they could simulate the universe with perfect fidelity: you can’t possibly know the exact quantum state of the universe for some time in the past. Human history is a chaotic system built on the interactions of individuals, the environment, and knowledge. Any little perturbation is going to give you different results, especially over the long run. Given that, at best you’re playing out plausible scenarios. That’s interesting, but not so much so as to overcome the problems highlighted in the previous two paragraphs.

It’s just a poorly constructed argument. I don’t know how much the mundanity of this world is an argument against the Simulation Hypothesis in general, but here with the argument so poorly defined, it has to get in line.

1

1

The version of the argument I carry is more like; life is better at creating life than the universe is, and life is generally interested in life. It doesn't need to be common, even if it only happens 1 time out of 1000, most universes like this are simulated.

Also, why would you want to run such a simulation at such high fidelity as to have intelligent people embedded therein? That sounds like needless complication and expense. Aggregate human behavior can already be modeled fairly well.

I don't see why that would be true. Society has a lot of lone decisionm... (read more)

7

Lack of Spider-Man is evidence against the simulation hypothesis

6th Jan 2024

1 min read

7

This is a very short post, but I haven't seen this argument elsewhere so I wanted to write it up.

The basic argument in favor of the simulation hypothesis runs like this:

Far future people will likely be able to and want to create simulated realities

If they do, they will likely create many such simulations
The people in the simulations will not know they are in a simulation
We are probably some of those simulated people

I guess this is sort of an attack on #1 - looking around at the world today, people do create many (low-fidelity) simulations of the world, which we call video games. Some are more realistic than others, and actually most are very unrealistic and full of wild and crazy stuff!

Obviously this is an undercount on both sides, but I think it's instructive to compare The Sims to Spider-Man. According to Wikipedia, there have been 14 The Sims games, selling a total of about 200 million copies. That's a lot of simulations! But even looking at just one character, there are approximately 40 video games just with Spider-Man in the title, plus many more games that contain Spider-Man. I didn't easily find total sales numbers but just eyeballing the list, I know that some of those games were pretty damn popular. I think it's easily the case that these 40 Spider-Man games collectively outsold The Sims by a ton.

If our theory that future people will likely want to create simulations is based on looking at the kinds of things that present people want to do, and extrapolating (and how could it be based on anything else?), then we should conclude that simulations are far more likely to be fantastical than to be mundane. The fact that we live in a mundane world is some evidence against simulation.

Simulation HypothesisWorld Modeling

7

New Comment

22 comments, sorted by

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 3:08 AM

[-]Alicorn1y5229

Our world would seem mundane to us no matter what was in it. Maybe it's actually wildly unrealistic that many people keep cats as pets. Maybe dandelions are some kind of Easter egg. Maybe our so-called natural languages are ludicrously simple and regular compared to the monstrosities real people with real history speak.

[-]interstice1y83

I disagree, I think that our world is objectively simple in that everything is apparently consistent with a simple set of physical laws and initial conditions. Simulators wouldn't need to be constrained in this way(and could access a lot of fun possibilities by not being so constrained)

I mean, sure, it looks like that when people who sound credible to you are checking.

[-]interstice1y20

A vast within-simulation conspiracy is possible, but it increases the complexity of the hypothesis.

[-]Dave Orr1y70

We're here to test the so-called tower of babel theory. What if, due to some bizarre happenstance, humanity had thousands of languages that change all the time instead of a single universal language like all known intelligent species?

[-]Charlie Steiner1y40

"Oh, that? That's just the big sign in the sky saying 'you are in a simulation' in Aramaic. Totally normal, don't worry about it."

1

[-]frontier641y90

Far future people will likely be able to and want to create simulated realities

What about people from universes that are wildly different to our own? I don't think the simulation hypothesis is restricted to far-future simulators. An entity with the power to simulate our reality with the level of fidelity I perceive is so wildly powerful that I would be surprised if I could comprehend it and its motivations. I always picture the simulating entity as just a stand-in for God. It sits in its heaven, a level of reality above our own, and no matter what we do we can't understand God's motivations or perceive his reality. The simulation hypothesis is just intelligent design the same as biblical creationism.

We have very little evidence as to what the reality of the entity simulating us looks like. The concept of dimensions themselves could be foreign to the entity. As an analogy, a self-reflective Sim thinking about the reality that creates and runs him might automatically assume the presence of some tile grid when of course there's no such concept in our world.

[-]mako yass1y85

No, there's plenty of spidermen. Here are some things that're weird about the present era that simulators would probably find interesting:

Takes place during the formation of the constitution of the future - AGI is about to be built, a brief period unlike any before it and long before most of the people of this universe lived, being artificially boosted for its historical significance.
Weirdly high individual agency high drama societies despite the historical (and still in china) norm of dictatorships.
Weirdly tightly balanced situation with AI politics. FTX was extraordinarily bad luck. Altman turning out to be unfirable was bizarre. The wins of the movement have also been oddly convenient. It's as if we're supposed to be balanced on the edge between victory and failure and they'll fudge it to keep it there. Or... oh: They're sampling the possible technohistories to try to figure out the measure of outcomes that go well or poorly, so scenarios where it's a foregone conclusion aren't worth simulating. So if we'd already won or lost, they'd stop, or simulate with lower detail. Most of the simulation measure ends up in the timelines where it's very ambiguous and the end can't be inferred.
This is a different simulator theory but Elon strikes me as a protagonist insert character. Elon has indicated that he kind of believes he might be, both by describing that exact theory (around the time he was with Grimes), and, now that I think about it, his fixation on mars (despite AGI) would make a lot more sense if he was fairly sure this is all just a video game he's playing. I mean, if it was, it would be a big waste if he didn't play that part.

[-]mako yass1y20

Although on reflection I'm not sure how much time Elon actually devotes to thinking about colonizing mars or whether it's just a surface talking point for him. Maybe even a deflection, to avoid talking about where the profits in space really are.

[-]TheCookieLab1y40

The lack of Spider-Man in any Sims game is evidence Spider-Man doesn’t exist.

[-]lorepieri1y20

A somewhat similar statistical reasoning can be done to argue that the abundance of optional complexity (things could have been similar but simpler) is evidence against the simulation hyphotesis.

See https://philpapers.org/rec/PIETSA-6 (The Simplicity Assumption and Some Implications of the Simulation Argument for our Civilization)

This is based on the general principle of computational resources being finite for any arbitrary civilisations (assuming infinities are not physical) and therefore minimised when possible by the simulators. In particular one can use the simplicity assumption: If we randomly select the simulation of a civilization in the space of all possible simulations of that civilization that have ever been run, the likelihood of picking a given simulation is inversely correlated to the computational complexity of the simulation.

It is hard to argue that a similar general principle can be found for something being "mundane" since the definition of mundane seems dependent on the simulators point of view. Can you perhaps modify this reasoning to make it more general?

[-]interstice1y20

You're right and all the other commenters and downvoters are wrong -- the absence of spider-man or other locally-physics-defying phenomena is obviously evidence against a simulation. To all of them -- think about it -- if we saw people magically levitating or controlling the weather or whatever, that would clearly be strong evidence that we were simulated, so not seeing those things has to be evidence against. Sad!

Now that being said I don't think it's very strong evidence, since in a large future there would be many, many simulations run for a variety of purposes, so there would still likely be a vast number of realistic simulations even if they weren't the most popular(I also don't think we have strong reason to believe they wouldn't be popular since it's hard to predict what use-case for simulations would be the most common, what people's taste in entertainment would be like, etc.)

The argument that we live in a simulation doesn’t make any sense. To experiment on sentient beings without their consent is unethical, and I can’t see that changing, even in the far future. I won’t say it won’t happen, but I would be surprised if it is common. If ancestor simulations are rare, then they no longer outnumber the biological people.

Also, why would you want to run such a simulation at such high fidelity as to have intelligent people embedded therein? That sounds like needless complication and expense. Aggregate human behavior can already be modeled fairly well. The Sims with software people seems like way more than you’d need/want.

Also, what are they achieving? Calling them “ancestor simulations” is ridiculous because even if they could simulate the universe with perfect fidelity: you can’t possibly know the exact quantum state of the universe for some time in the past. Human history is a chaotic system built on the interactions of individuals, the environment, and knowledge. Any little perturbation is going to give you different results, especially over the long run. Given that, at best you’re playing out plausible scenarios. That’s interesting, but not so much so as to overcome the problems highlighted in the previous two paragraphs.

It’s just a poorly constructed argument. I don’t know how much the mundanity of this world is an argument against the Simulation Hypothesis in general, but here with the argument so poorly defined, it has to get in line.

1

1

[-]mako yass1y42

The version of the argument I carry is more like; life is better at creating life than the universe is, and life is generally interested in life. It doesn't need to be common, even if it only happens 1 time out of 1000, most universes like this are simulated.

Also, why would you want to run such a simulation at such high fidelity as to have intelligent people embedded therein? That sounds like needless complication and expense. Aggregate human behavior can already be modeled fairly well.

I don't see why that would be true. Society has a lot of lone decisionmakers making contingent, historically significant decisions, and always has.

Calling them “ancestor simulations” is ridiculous because even if they could simulate the universe with perfect fidelity: you can’t possibly know the exact quantum state of the universe for some time in the past. Human history is a chaotic system built on the interactions of individuals, the environment, and knowledge. Any little perturbation is going to give you different results, especially over the long run.

So you run it again and again to sample all of the outcomes and learn the constants :) (that's probably what physics did anyway)

[-]Jacob G-W1y2-3

You need to use conservation of expected evidence. You can't say something is evidence against the simulation evidence without saying what crazy event would need to happen to provide evidence for the simulation hypothesis.

A lot of crazy stuff is happening in our world. (Elon Musk, political figures, whatever) If lack of one crazy thing is evidence against hypothesis, then existence of crazy things must be evidence for the hypothesis. If you only see it one way, you violate the law of conservation of expected evidence.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]interstice1y70

You can’t say something is evidence against the simulation evidence without saying what crazy event would need to happen to provide evidence for the simulation hypothesis.

He has already provided that -- since not seeing spider-man is evidence against simulation, it follows that seeing spider-man, or another person who could apparently violate the laws of physics, would be strong evidence for a simulation. Conservation of evidence is not being violated here.

[-]Jacob G-W1y70

This makes sense. I've changed my mind, thanks!

[-]RamblinDash1y20

I would say that the existence of superheroes/villains, wizards, etc would be the kind of crazy things I'm talking about. I would posit that a pretty high percent of video games (aka low-fidelity simulations) have a player who can do things easily that even the most elite athletes can't approach in real life. I'm talking about having physical abilities like 100x or 1000x average, or abilities different in kind such as the ability to fly unaided, shoot lasers from their eyes, breathe water, throw fireballs, survive dozens of gunshots, etc. That would be essentially "Spider-Man" in my analogy. But you don't see that.

Untrained men's average bench press doesn't have super reliable sources but one source I saw put it at 110 lbs. I think that's a little high, so let's call it more like 75lb. That puts the world record (unaided) bench press at 10x average - not Spider-Man/Superman/Hulk/etc territory. Similarly, average running speed is (conservatively) 5mph. Top sprint speed ever recorded is 28mph - much faster but less than 6x, not The Flash territory.

In short, there are elite athletes but no superheroes or wizards.

[-]Jacob G-W1y20

p.s. I could totally see an advanced alien playing Elon Musk :P

[-]the gears to ascension1y42

nah musk is wayyyyy too human and seems like too much of a product of his circumstances just like the rest of us for that to make sense to me

[-]mako yass1y40

More likely a human is playing him, a crude one.

If the theory is true, his memories of his childhood aren't real (because who would sign up for that), the player was probably patched in some time after the player character started getting his hair back. (Or maybe just prior, so that he could the climb over the hedonic setpoint)

In the base universe, he's probably just a normal engineer, a few months after receiving a servant superintelligence, with almost no mental augmentations. He asked for the best, most realistic video game ever. He wanted it to have a mars adventure in it. And now he's trying to play the hero role by reproducing the flawed singularity of the base universe, in ours.

But I think he probably wont. The game will end with a twist. :)

If compute is limited in the universe, we can expect that civilizations or agents with access to it will only run simulations strategically, unless running simulations is part of their value function. Simulations according to a value function would probably be more prevalent, and would probably have spiderman or other extreme phenomena.

However, we can't discount being in one of those information gathering simulations. If for some reason you needed to gather information from a universe, you'd want to keep everything as simple as possible, and only tune up the things you care about. That does seem very similar to our universe, with simple physical laws, no real evidence of extraterrestrial life, and simply emerging dynamics.

Also keep in mind that it's possible that simulations are extremely expensive in some universes: when you think of the actually expensive simulations that humans run, it's all physics and earth models on supercomputers.

Mostly though I think that using games as your reference class for the types of simulations a developed civilization would run is reductive and the truth is probably more complex.

More from RamblinDash

Curated and popular this week