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Alsadius comments on Open thread Jan. 5-11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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How would you act differently even if we assume that your whole life merely exists inside a simulation? You still have to live the life you've been given - it's not like you can break out of the simulation and go take your real life back. Your actions in the simulation still have their usual effect on the life in the simulation. The only case where it matters is if the simulator wants you to behave certain ways and will reward you accordingly(either real-you or by moving you to a nicer simulation), but that's just a different way to talk about religion.
Imagine that you learn tomorrow that we're in a simulation, because scientists did a test and found a bug in the program. Perhaps you would act differently? Maybe email all your friends about it, head over to lesswrong to discuss it, whatever. These things wouldn't happen in the original.
The main distinction is the way you'd learn about the simulation, like I said in my response.
Please define the difference between "bug in the simulation" and "previously unknown law of physics".
That said, I do agree in principle. However, simulation theories are sufficiently obvious(at least to creatures that dream/build computers/etc.) that they can't count as corruption - it'd be weirder for a simulated civilization to not have them.
There have been plausible tests given that would seem to produce Bayesian evidence of simulation. To give an analogy, if tomorrow you'd hear a loud voice coming from Mount Sinai reciting the 10 commandments, more of your probability would go to the theory "The Bible is more-or-less true and God's coming back to prove it" than "there's a law of physics that makes sounds like this one happen at random times". The same way, there are observations that are strictly more likely to occur if we're in a simulation than if not. There are some proposed in http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 , and other places as well.
This is not true in general. This is true for some particular kinds of simulations (e.g. your link says "we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization"), but not all of them.
Let's rephrase: our expectations are different conditioning on simulation than on ~simulation.
The probability distribution of observations over possible simulation types is different from the probability distribution of observations over possible physics laws. If you disagree, then you need to hold that exactly the right kinds of simulations (with opposite effects) have exactly the right kind of probability to cancel out the effects of "particular kinds of simulations". That seems a very strong claim which needs defending. Otherwise, there do exist possible observations which would be Bayesian evidence for simulation.
I don't think mine are.
That is a content-free statement. You have no idea about either of the distributions, about what "possible simulation types" there might be, or what "possible physics laws" might be.
Well, barring things which actually break the simulation (e.g. an alien teenager appearing in the sky and saying that his parents are making him shut off this sim, so goodbye all y'all), can you give me an example?
Any of the things proposed in papers with the same aims of the one I linked above. The reason I'm not giving specifics is because I don't know enough of the technical points made to discuss them properly.
I wouldn't be the one making the observations, physicists would, so my observation is "physicists announce a test which shows that we are likely to be living in a simulation" and it gets vetted by people with technical knowledge, replicated with better p-values, all the recent Nobel Physics prize winners look over it and confirm, etc. (Note: I'm explicitly outlawing something which uses philosophy/anthropics/"thinking about physics". Only actual experiments. Although I'd expect only good ones to get past the bar I set, anyway, so that may not be needed.) I couldn't judge myself whether the results mean anything, so I'd rely on consensus of physicists.
Using that observation: are you really telling me that your P(physicists announce finding evidence of simulation| simulation) == P(physicists announce finding evidence of simulation| ~simulation)?
Ugh, so all you have in an argument to authority? A few centuries ago the scientists had a consensus that God exists. And?
No, I'm telling you that "evidence of simulation" is an expression which doesn't mean anything to me.
To go back to Alsadius' point, how are you going to distinguish between "this is a feature of the simulation" and "this is how the physical world works"?
I gave my observation, which is basically deferring to physicists.
"evidence of simulation" may not mean anything to you, but surely "physicists announce finding evidence of simulation" means something to you? Could you give an example of something that could happen where you wouldn't be sure whether it counted as "physicists announce finding evidence of simulation"?
Right now, as I'm not trained in physics, I'd defer to the consensus of experts. I expect someone who wrote those kinds of papers would have a better answer for you.
Or is your problem of defining "evidence of simulation" something you'd complain about even if real experts used that in a paper?
Although I can't think of any way that I personally would behave differently based on a belief that I exist in a simulation, Nick Bostrom suggests a pretty interesting reason why an AI might, in chapter 9 of Superintelligence (in Box 8). Specifically, an AI that assigns a non-zero probability to the belief that it might exist in a simulated universe might choose not to "escape from the box" out of a concern that whoever is running the simulation might shut down the simulation if an AI within the simulation escapes from the box or otherwise exhibits undesirable behavior. He suggests that the threat of a possibly non-existent simulator could be effectively exploited to keep an AI "inside of the box".
Unless there's a flow of information from outside the simulation to inside of it, you have zero evidence of what would cause the simulators to shut down the machine. Trying to guess is futile.
Bostrom suggested that a simulation containing an AI that is expanding throughout (and beyond) the galaxy and utilizing resources at a galactic level would be more expensive from a computational standpoint than a simulation that did not contain such an AI. Presumably this would be the case because a simulator would take computational shortcuts and simulate regions of the universe that are not being observed at a much coarser granularity than those parts that are being observed. So, the AI might reason that the simulation in which it lives would grow too expensive computationally for the simulator to continue to run. And, since having the simulation shut down would presumably interfere with the AI achieving its goals, the AI would seek to avoid that possibility.
Observed by what? For this to make sense there'd need to be no life anywhere in the universe but here that could be relevant to the simulation.
Actually, all it requires is that the universe is somewhat sparsely populated - there is no requirement that there must be no life anywhere but here.
Furthermore, for all we know, maybe there is no life in the universe anywhere but here.