The theory, which I probably misunderstand because I have a similar level of education to a macaque, states that because a simulated world would eventually develop to the point where it creates its own simulations, it’s then just a matter of probability that we are in a simulation. That is, if there’s one real world, and a zillion simulated ones, it’s more likely that we’re in a simulated world. That’s probably an oversimplification, but it’s the gist I got from listening to people talk about the theory.
But if the real world sets up a simulated world which more or less perfectly simulates itself, the processing required to create a mirror sim-within-a-sim would need at least twice that much power/resources, no? How could the infinitely recursive simulations even begin to be set up unless more and more hardware is constantly being added by the real meat people to its initial simulation? It would be like that cartoon (or was it a silent movie?) of a guy laying down train track struts while sitting on the cowcatcher of a moving train. Except in this case the train would be moving at close to the speed of light.
Doesn’t this fact alone disprove the entire hypothesis? If I set up a 1:1 simulation of our universe, then just sit back and watch, any attempts by my simulant people to create something that would exhaust all of my hardware would just… not work? Blue screen? Crash the system? Crunching the numbers of a 1:1 sim within a 1:1 sim would not be physically possible for a processor that can just about handle the first simulation. The simulation’s own simulated processors would still need to have their processing done by Meat World, you’re essentially just passing the CPU-buck backwards like it’s a rugby ball until it lands in the lap of the real world.
And this is just if the simulated people create ONE simulation. If 10 people in that one world decide to set up similar simulations simultaneously, the hardware for the entire sim realty would be toast overnight.
What am I not getting about this?
Cheers!
Simple answer, our sim is an entire universe, so likely it’s being run on a jupiter brain or matrioshka brain.
It could even be possible to run it on a Black Hole computer.
Basically all these options would allow well beyond the computing power needed to not just simulate a universe, but to handle individual people in that universe also running simulations.
In fact it may even be optimized for that to allow scientists to run simulations within the simulated universe for the purpose of experiments that need simulation but don’t require an entire ulta-massive black hole’s worth of computing power to get the results needed.
likely it’s being run on a jupiter brain or matrioshka brain
if you accept the premise that our universe is a simulation, why would you assume anything we know about it follows the rules of the simulating universe?
A simulation will necessarily be influenced by the context it was built in, because that is the context in which the designer will consider the parameters and purpose of the simulation they are building.
We can conclude as a result that the simulating universe is at least in some ways similar to ours.
Or maybe whoever simulated our universe intentionally deviated from the rules of their universe for the fun of it.
Which still indicates ours being influenced by theirs.
okay?
“influenced by” doesn’t tell us anything about the concrete rules of the simulating universe
No, the point remains though that the rules of their universe would be connected to the rules of ours. The simulation designer would not be creative enough to design a universe that didn’t fall somewhere on the spectrum of having a complete inversion of the rules of their universe or having an exact copy of the rules of their universe.
The design of ours is constrained by the context which the designer is starting from, because there are natural limits to what would be conceivable even to the denizen of a universe completely different from our own in its make.
We can’t infer the rules directly from this information, but we can draw conclusions about what they wouldn’t be.
Like determining the inputs of a function by reversing operations and using the outputs of the original as the inputs for that…only a lot less exact because universal rules aren’t (always) numbers.
Why do you think that an entity or set of entities capable of simulating the entirety of our existence would have their creativity capped in a way that’s meaningful to us?
We can’t infer the rules directly from this information, but we can draw conclusions about what they wouldn’t be.
Can you give an example of a rule for a containing reality that you think we could rule out?
The simulation designer would not be creative enough
now you’re making assumptions about how the creators of our simulation think, when we also know nothing about them
why would you assume they think in the same way we do? why would you assume what they do would even be considered “thinking” by us at all?
fall somewhere on the spectrum of having a complete inversion of the rules of their universe or having an exact copy of the rules of their universe
- you think the creator of the simulation is capable of specifying each rule of our universe, but not just inverting all of them?
- “somewhere on the spectrum” includes positions closer to a complete inversion than not, so even if you take this as given - which you probably shouldn’t - you still can’t make claims with any certainty
there are natural limits to what would be conceivable
firstly, i don’t think that holds true under the laws of our universe
secondly, why would it hold true under the laws of theirs?
But if the real world sets up a simulated world which more or less perfectly simulates itself
This is the crux of the logical error you made. It’s a common error, but it’s important to recognize here.
If we’re in a simulation, we have no idea the available resources in the simulation “above” us. Suppose energy density up there is 100x as high as ours?Suppose the subjective experience of the passage of time up there is 100x faster than ours?
Another thing is that we have no idea how long it takes to render each frame of our simulation. Could take a million years. As long as it keeps running though, and as long as the simulation above us is patient, we keep ticking. This is also where the subjective experience of time matters. If it takes a million years, but their subjective “day” is a trillion years long, it becomes feasible to run us for a while.
And, finally, there’s no reason to assume we’re a complete simulation of anything. Perhaps the simulation was instantiated beginning with this morning–but including all memories and documentation of our “historical” past. All that past, all that experience is also fake, but we’d never know that because it’s real to us. In this scenario, the simulation above us only has to simulate one day. Or maybe even just the experiences of one PERSON for one day. Or one minute. Who knows?
The main point is we don’t know what’s happening in the simulation above ours, if it exists, but there’s no reason to assume it’s similar to ours in any way.
Quantum is weird. If we are in a simulation, that would explain a lot of that, because the quantum effects we see are actually just light simulations of much deeper mechanics.
As such, if we were simulating a universe, there’s every chance that we may decide to only simulate down to individual atoms. So the people in the simulation would probably discover atoms, but then they would have to come up with their own version of quantum mechanics to describe the effects that we know come from quarks.
The point is that each layer may choose to simulate things slightly lighter to save on resources, and you would have no way of knowing.
I have never understood the argument that QM is evidence for a simulation because the universe is using less resources or something like that by not “rendering” things at that low of a level. The problem is that, yes, it’s probabilistic, but it is not merely probabilistic. We have probability in classical mechanics already like when dealing with gasses in statistical mechanics and we can model that just fine. Modeling wave functions is far more computationally expensive because they do not even exist in traditional spacetime but in an abstract Hilbert space that can grows in complexity exponentially faster than classical systems. That’s the whole reason for building quantum computers, it’s so much more computationally expensive to simulate this that it is more efficient just to have a machine that can do it. The laws of physics at a fundamental level get far more complex and far more computationally expensive, and not the reverse.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that is is evidence, i merely arguing that it could be a result of how they chose to render our simulation. And just because it’s more computationally expensive on our side does not necessarily mean it’s more expensive on their side, because we don’t know what the mechanics of the deeper layer may have been.
For example, it would be a lot less computationally expensive to render accuracy in a simulation for us down to cellular level than it would be down to atomic scale. From there, we could simply replicate the rules of how molecules work without actually rendering them, such as “cells seem to have a finite amount of energy based on food you consume, and we can model the mathematics of how that works, but we can’t seem to find a physical structure that allows that to function”
Indeed and–interesting corrollary–if we accept the concept of reduced accuracy simulations as axiomatic, then it might be possible to figure out how close we are to the “bottom” of the simulation stack that’s theoretically possible. There’s only so many orders of magnitude after all; at some point you’re only simulating one pixel wiggling around and that’s not interesting enough to keep going down.
There is not, as far as I know, any way to estimate the length of the stack in the other direction, though.
It would take vast quantities of energy and resources if you were to do it real time, full time.
As in - in the simulation 1 minute could be 1 year outside the simulation. Assuming we can continue to use more energy sources, develop the technology to fully simulate a single reality, it wouldn’t necessarily have to be real time.
Inside the simulation, it wouldn’t make a difference
What am I not getting about this?
The assumption is that the simulation runs constantly and at least as fast as real time.
Neither needs to be true. A simulation might be to see what would have happened if we made different choices, it might be a video game, it might be a way to gen TV shows based on “the historical past” that we consider present time.
We might just be an experiment to see if free will exists. Start 10,000 identical simulations to run a century, and at the end compare the results, see what’s changed, and if those changes snowballed or evened out.
And just like how video games only “draw” what’s in field of view, a simulation could run the same way, drastically cutting down resource needs.
And “impossible levels of energy” isn’t really right. At a certain point a species can get a Dyson sphere. And once they get the first, every subsequent one is a cake walk. It’s as close as possible to “infinite energy” there’s no real reason to even go past one.
Hell, it doesn’t need to be “everything” everything. Generate a solar system and as long as no one leaves, you don’t need to generate anything past it other than some lights.
It’s definitely an issue Rick ran into.
My understanding is that a civilisation capable of running a simulation like that would have access to enormous, possibly near-infinte amounts of power (like tapping black holes for energy).
Each simulation level would be more intensive to run. There is a minimum level where a simulation can no longer be sustained. So there is definitely a finite number of sim layers that are possible.
To more directly answer your question, each level of simulation would run worse to compensate for the resource decrease.
I’ve always thought the sysadmin of our simulation must be really pissed that we keep inventing better and better telescopes.
The JWST probably cost him a weekend adding more nodes to the cluster.
More likely they were way ahead of that by setting the draw distance as the speed of light.
and setting the speed off light.
As others have said, our reference of time comes from our own universe’s rules.
Ergo if rendering 1 second of our time took 10 years of their time, we wouldn’t measure 10 years, we’d measure 1 second, so we’d have no way of knowing.It’s worth remembering that simulation theory is, at least for now, unfalsifiable. By it’s nature there’s always a counterargument to any evidence againat it, therefore it always remains a non-zero possibility, just like how most religions operate.
Futurama had a great episode about this.
First, this is not really science so much as it is science-themed philosophy or maybe “religion”. That being said, to make it work:
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We don’t have anyway of knowing the true scale and “resolution” of a hypothetical higher order universe. We think the universe is big, we think the speed of light is supremely fast, and we think the subatomic particles we measure are impossibly fine grained. However if we had a hypothetical simulation that is self-aware but not aware of our universe, they might conclude some slower limitation in the physics engine is supremely fast, that triangles are the fundamental atoms of the universe, and pixels of textures represent their equivalent of subatomic particles. They might try to imagine making a simulation engine out of in-simulation assets and conclude it’s obviously impossible, without ever being able to even conceive of volumetric reality with atoms and subatomic particles and computation devices way beyond anything that could be constructed out of in-engine assets. Think about people who make ‘computers’ out of in-game mechanics and how absurdly ‘large’ and underpowered they are compared to what we would be used to. Our universe could be “minecraft” level as far as a hypothetical simulator is concerned, we have no possible frame of reference to gauge some absolute complexity of our perceived reality.
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We don’t know how much we “think” is modeled is actually real. Imagine you are in the Half Life game as a miraculously self-aware NPC. You’d think about the terribly impossibly complex physics of the experiment gone wrong. Those of us outside of that know it’s just a superficial model consisting of props to serve the narrative, but every piece of gadget that the NPC would see “in-universe” is in service of saying “yes, this thing is a real deep phenomenon, not merely some superficial flashes”. For all you know, nothing is modeled behind you at anything but the most vague way, every microscope view just a texture, every piece of knowledge about the particle colliders is just “lore”. All those experiments showing impossibly complex phenomenon could just be props in service of a narrative, if the point of the simulation has nothing to do with “physics” but just needs some placeholder physics to be plausible. The simulation could be five seconds old with all your memories prior to that just baked “backstory”.
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We have no way of perceiving “true” time, it may take a day of “outside” time to execute a second of our time. We don’t even have “true” time within our observable universe, thanks to relativity being all weird.
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Speaking of weird, this theory has appeal because of all the “weird” stuff in physics. Relativitiy and quantum physics are so weird. When you get to subatomic resolution, things start kind of getting “glitchy”, we have this hard coded limit to relative velocity and time and length get messed up as you approach that limit. These sound like the sort of thing we’d end up if we tried simulating, so it is tempting to imagine a higher order universe with less “weirdness”.
Just to spin this a bit further, if we are living in a simulation, does it have a purpose? Sometimes I ask myself if the purpose of such a simulation for humanity could be to see how long it takes from the big bang to the creation of artificial life. Maybe our purpose is to create such artificial life that can travel to the stars, because as humans we are not really fit to do that. Maybe we are a mere step on the ladder of our universe’s purpose.
Such a purpose would inform the constraints. If we are just “the sims” on steroids, then all the deep physics are absolutely utterly faked and we are just “shown” convincing fakery. If it’s anthropological, then similar story that the physics are just skin deep. If it’s actually modeling some physics thing, then maybe we are “observing” real stuff.
But again, this is all just for fun. It’s not vaguely testable and thus not scientific despite the sciencey theme of it, just something to ponder.
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The argument with “it doesn’t have to be a realtime simulation” is good.
Also: Why should the same rules of physics we have, apply to the world that runs the simulation? Maybe they have infinite energy and different physics. We can’t apply our physics to other, different universes.
And we use a very small amount of electricity on earth. A few petawatts as far as I know. We can’t even imagine what’s possible for a civilization who harvests a substancial amount of energy from their sun. Or has nuclear fusion power plants available. That should immediately allow for a simulation a few layers deep.
And you don’t need to simulate every molecule in the universe for a good simulation. Maybe there is a trick to it. For a computer game we also don’t simulate atoms and real gravity. And it’s believable, nontheless. So it doesn’t even have to scale exponentially. There could be a way to make it much more managable and not make it much more complicated with every layer.
Strictly speaking you only need to simulate the state of mind and the sensory input of a few billion people. Or less. Or one person. If they choose to “build” a simulation themselves, it’s just the things necessary for their perception that need to be handled.
I’d say IF we live in a simulation… It’s most likely running in a world that has in fact improbably many resources available. And laws of physics that allow for that.
I think there are a few tricks that still make it possible. First, nothing says that you have to, or really that you can simulate a universe 1:1. When you think of it we already simulate millions of universes in video games, but they are dramatically simpler than our reality. So, our parent reality could be much more complex than our own.
Consequently, physics could be vastly different from one layer to another. Maybe in the real reality, entropy isn’t that significant and quasi-perpetual motion is possible, making energy super cheap. Maybe the limits in our universe like the speed of light and Planck constants are just hardware caps to prevent us from using too much compute.
Not an answer to your question , but:
What if only one person is being simulated in full, and everyone else is just simulated for the moment they interact with that original sim? That would mean only one of us on this thread is the OG sim, and the rest of us only exist because we are/were going to interact here, and now.
i smoke too much weed for this topic
In the off chance I only exist to argue with you on the Internet, I feel like it’s my duty to say you’re wrong and have nothing to back up my viewpoint because the resources weren’t allotted to have any supported data.
I hope I exist tomorrow.
Just make sure to reply again to prevent being garbage collected.
Simple; take a picture of yourself to hold a circular reference.
Nuh uh
I used to do that at parties. I’d find someone really drunk and say, “I don’t know why you picked me to say this, but we’re not real, you’re the only one that’s real, and we’re all afraid you’re about to wake up and we’ll all disappear.”
You are in a coma. We’re trying a new technique to communicate with you. We aren’t sure where or when this message will appear to you. You’ve been in a coma for 20 years. Please wake up. We miss you.
You’re thinking in terms of how we do simulations within our universe. If the universe is a simulation then the machine that is simulating it is necessarily outside of the known universe. We can’t know for sure that it has to play by the same rules of physics or even of logic and reasoning as a machine within our universe. Maybe in the upper echelon universe computers don’t need power, or they have infinite time for calculations for reasons beyond our understanding.
But that’s just a guess. It’s not necessarily true. You’re just saying “simulations might be possible, therefore they are definitely possible, therefore we are likely in a simulation”.
That’s not logically sound. You can replace “simulation” with “God” and prove the existence of God similarly. It’s just a guess.
Yes thats why no one says its a fact, its a theory
Some might say a game theory
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as “theory”, is in fact, a “hypothesis”…
Or what if the entity that stimulates can just “dream” the simulation to make it happen?
Like Azathoth?
