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We (probably) live in a simulation

Wilson Wilson

Wilson Wilson

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Bored of these religious threads, time for something a bit more interesting!

Simulation hypothesis suggests that it's a mathematical probability we live in a computer simulation.

The logic goes like this:
  1. We already create virtual worlds, albeit in a rather primitive way, by for example making computer games.
  2. Computers are constantly getting more and more advanced, with processing power exceeding previous supercomputers now available on common smartphones (your smartphone is more powerful than the computers NASA used to send a man to the moon).
  3. Given enough time, computers powerful enough to run complex simulations will become widely available in the consumer market. Software gets more and more advanced during this time as well as hardware.
  4. Basically everyone has a computer, so only a small portion of those people (a niche interest group/hobby for nerds) would need to have any interest in running simulations in order to create millions of them.
  5. Once the software is written, and computers are powerful enough, anyone who has such an interest could begin running them just as easily as I could start up a game on my computer.
  6. This means there is only one real world but millions of simulations.
  7. Additionally, it is possible that particularly advanced simulations could develop to a point where they create their own stimulations, leading to billions of simulations or more.
  8. Presuming that happens, there is one real world to billions of simulated worlds.
  9. Therefore, by pure mathematical probability, we are likely to be living in a simulation.
The well known hacker geohot, most famous for iPhone jailbreaking, has discussed this in some detail and likens these simulations to computer games and virtual machines, suggests the universe could be a computer program running on a Turing machine (a regular computer as we know them), ponders if god is a programmer, and asks what could happen if we hack the simulation:



While this view relies on faith and may be unfalsifiable, geohot points out that this still makes it just as feasible as any mainstream religion.

So my questions to you guys are... how likely do you think it is that we live in a simulation? If we do live in a simulation, what should we take from that belief? Should we modify our behaviour or not? If so, how and for what purpose? For what purpose was the simulation created? What can be said about the nature of life and free will if we're in a simulation? Are all of us sentient or are some people just "NPCs"? As the simulation has a creator, are they a god? Did we program our own simulation that we're living in right now? Do we have a simulated afterlife?

How stoned am I? Very.



 
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I think this has been discussed many times before, but what the hell, it's a good topic.

Simulation theory is appealing to my agnostic side and it also has a scientific basis that religion does not possess. However, it necessitates a creator so that grates upon my atheistic side as a creator = higher power = god.

To me, believing in simulation theory would mean having to accept that those god botherers may have been right all along...
 
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F.U.B.A.R. said:
I think this has been discussed many times before, but what the hell, it's a good topic. Let's just hope Gnostic Batshit doesn't stick his oar in ;)

Simulation theory is appealing to my agnostic side and it also has a scientific basis that religion does not possess. However, it necessitates a creator so that grates upon my atheistic side as a creator = higher power = god.

To me, believing in simulation theory would mean having to accept that those god botherers may have been right all along...
Click to expand...

Yeah the reason I and many other nerds love this idea is because it combines the comfort and knowable logic of computing with the unknowns of our existence and the implications of religion.

I find it different to conventional religion because it does not necessarily presuppose there is an almighty god we must worship, and it definitely does not necessitate one who cares about how we choose to fuck like that bothersome Christian one. It also doesn't even mean there is a single creator.

When you develop software, more often than not you do it as part of a team. Then people will run that software, configure it to their preferences, and let things run. If you believe in layered simulations, this has happened many many times with each level.

So who would our god actually be? We have a team of devs at the top level, and assuming layered simulations we have teams of devs between each new simulation on top, then we have the people who ran each simulation on their machines. They all played some small part to create the world we live in now. You cannot really pinpoint a single creator. And even if you believe there was one guy who wrote the initial program, it's highly unlikely he cares what any one person in any one of the billions of simulations does - he is not dictating good and evil, telling us not to sin, and so forth.

And in that video geohot makes what I think is a pretty compelling argument: if you do ignore religious explanations, what created the Big Bang? It doesn't actually provide an answer to the question "why was the universe created?" instead it merely explains how. Simulation theory provides a possible answer to something no one actually knows.

If you get even deeper into the topic of entropy it starts getting real interesting.
 
Wilson Wilson said:
Yeah the reason I and many other nerds love this idea is because it combines the comfort and knowable logic of computing with the unknowns of our existence and the implications of religion.

I find it different to conventional religion because it does not necessarily presuppose there is an almighty god we must worship, and it definitely does not necessitate one who cares about how we choose to fuck like that bothersome Christian one. It also doesn't even mean there is a single creator.

When you develop software, more often than not you do it as part of a team. Then people will run that software, configure it to their preferences, and let things run. If you believe in layered simulations, this has happened many many times with each level.

So who would our god actually be? We have a team of devs at the top level, and assuming layered simulations we have teams of devs between each new simulation on top, then we have the people who ran each simulation on their machines. They all played some small part to create the world we live in now. You cannot really pinpoint a single creator. And even if you believe there was one guy who wrote the initial program, it's highly unlikely he cares what any one person in any one of the billions of simulations does - he is not dictating good and evil, telling us not to sin, and so forth.

And in that video geohot makes what I think is a pretty compelling argument: if you do ignore religious explanations, what created the Big Bang? It doesn't actually provide an answer to the question "why was the universe created?" instead it merely explains how. Simulation theory provides a possible answer to something no one actually knows.

If you get even deeper into the topic of entropy it starts getting real interesting.
Click to expand...

But if you assume a bunch of computer nerds creating a simulation as part of a higher dimensional university assignment, then the question is - are they also a simulation?

The one thing that 'those with faith' will always have over 'us with logic' is that however far science can take us, there is always an unknown guarding our way.

The ultimate question is, 'how did matter come into being?' Simulation theory just puts this question back by infinite levels - but it's still there.

Perhaps infinity is god. This would be the best result because as we cannot comprehend infinity, then we cannot possibly comprehend god. That means the religious fuckwits can just shut their fuckin gobs cos they ain't got a clue.

Prophets my arse...

QED



(How pissed am I? Getting toward full on atheist....😉 )
 
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You could say that reality is a total simulation run within eternal consciousness. Albert hoffman had a good explanation of reality using tv as a example for reality to exist it needs a observer and a object to observe or their would be no reality. Our consciousness is like a tv screen even able to change changes to different realities or dimensions of existence via ingestion of psychedelics.

Reality is infinite i have seen it for myself many times why it is who the fuck knows does god itself even knows its god? does it even know what infinity means itself or where it came from.

I guess its hard questions i believe computers will reach some ultra powerful levels but honestly no where enough to run a entire simulation of a universe unless we started building planet sized computers?. I doubt physical power could simulate a infinite reality. I believe some mathematicians gave some formula was it last year disproving the simulation theory will have to find that article. We know the big happened and the earliest physics til it breaks down no one simply knows what was before that some physicists argue its not even a question since time didn't exist before the big bang but i believe thats a cop out they give because they cant answer it and want to try seem smart still.

The inflation theory is some pretty cool stuff giving that the expansion is infinite there would be infinite universes created in bubbles with different laws of physics governing them but the underlying creation of them all was still the big bang.

I have witnessed the big bang happen on my first acid trip (3 hits probably total taken 300-350 ug) and some others. I believe the big bang had infinite information encoded within it thus everything is a automatic process from the laws of nature, physics atoms and everything else was able to bond form and create structure giving rise to life.

@F.U.B.A.R In the quran they never claim to understand god they simply put it like you did nobody could ever understand or comprehend god its beyond all human existence and understanding. Does god even understand god? maybe the experience of life is a way for the infinite reality to try comprehend itself in infinite ways of existence.

5-meo DMT convinces everybody who tries it that they are truly god buts its also a ego trap for something that is suppose to be ego death. when i had ego death on LSD there was nothing not even a god just a timeless void of non existence nothingness no thoughts i didn't even know what i was or that i had been human it was just pure nothingness no body no brain just pure awareness. Yet 5-meo dmt is like some godhead source trip i don't really believe that to be true ego death since you know everything in infinity on it.

Though one thing i believe is that beyond duality and the likes of good vs evil is just non-duality everything is one together at source eternal peace or rest. If non existence is death an eternal sleep from where we once popped out of nothingness through a vagina into this world then we should return there right or maybe pop out of some aliens vagina in another totally different alien universe to ours to experience the infinite creation of reality.

String theory is really interesting stuff but impossible to even prove it. Though some theories say if we had certain technology we could try in theoretical terms measure other universes or higher dimensions with the very slight interactions they should have with ours but that will probably be impossible for a few hundred years or some major breakthrough.

 
F.U.B.A.R. said:
But if you assume a bunch of computer nerds creating a simulation as part of a higher dimensional university assignment, then the question is - are they also a simulation?

The one thing that 'those with faith' will always have over 'us with logic' is that however far science can take us, there is always an unknown guarding our way.

The ultimate question is, 'how did matter come into being?' Simulation theory just puts this question back by infinite levels - but it's still there.

Perhaps infinity is god. This would be the best result because as we cannot comprehend infinity, then we cannot possibly comprehend god. That means the religious fuckwits can just shut their fuckin gobs cos they ain't got a clue.

Prophets my arse...

QED



(How pissed am I? Getting toward full on atheist....😉 )
Click to expand...

Simulation theory does usually suggest there are likely layers of simulations. So if we could break out of the simulation we'd likely end up in another one. It's simulations all the way down. But that's exactly why it becomes so difficult to identify a "god" within this belief. If we say for example we're 100 simulations deep, each one coded by new teams of nerds, each instance of simulation software run by yet more nerds, who is the "god"?

It's also possible to go the other way and simplify the whole thing a lot. What if the real version of me just created a simulation version of me inside a simulated world similar enough to the real one that the simulation could be used to help the real me make decisions? So I could make something happen to my simulation and see what the consequences are then decide if I do it in real life. I could also change small details of the world and predict the likely outcome in the real world.

That's as much of a possibility as anything else (certainly if I had the ability to create such a thing I would) and it would pretty much make me my own god.

Or you could make the question more complex by considering the possibility of a multiverse. If the multiverse exists within the simulation it would simply mean multiple simulations are being run on one machine. If the simulations run like normal computers, there's no reason to think there couldn't be exploits allowing a sandbox escape, which in English means breaking out of a virtual machine onto the main host OS. That would enable us to get a clue about who created the simulation and enter any others that are running.

The whole creation of the universe and god tilt is also a real interesting theme in Asimov's The Last Question, one his best known works and one referenced in geohot's talk there. Won't spoil anything in case you wanna read it, it's just a short story. But it deals with the question of dealing with increasing entropy in the universe.

en.wikipedia.org

The Last Question - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

What's real interesting is that whether you are looking at the universe or a computer, increasing entropy is a constant. There's people way smarter than me who've studied the universe and concluded it seems to run on the same logic as a computer program. I can dig around for the article I'm thinking of if anyone's curious.
 
I started to believe in the simulation theory after watching matrix everytime I had a stim comedown and once when I had a psychosis.

The best theory Ive heard that we might actually be in the future lets say 3020 but live in the 2020 simulation.
 
The problem of a belief in matrix simulations, is that if the ones who are creating it can, then they could well be living in one as well, and so on and so on into infinity just like fractals.

The ancient Gnostics called god over god over god over god, ad infinitum.

IOW, a waste of good time to think about just like the unknowable gods.

Regards
DL
 
Very interesting topic, one of my favourite in fact, and nice to see something more interesting than the endless tiresome discussion of religious scripture that's been filling up this forum recently.

Something that occurred to me when thinking about the Simulation Hypothesis but which I haven't really seen repeated elsewhere is that the modern day version of this argument is unnecessarily technologically oriented, and such versions somewhat unavoidably invoke the need for a conscious creator of some sort. But computers capable of running simulations do not necessarily need to be "built" - they can also evolve. As we know, the brain is a computer - capable of running at least one full fidelity simulation of reality - that of the consensus reality that we believe we all share. It is also capable of running multiple "lower fidelity" simulations of this reality, such as in dreams, or simply in the routine, somewhat unconscious speculation about the multiple possible futures that might result from any given decision in any given moment - or even in remembering the past.

We don't actually know what level of fidelity or complexity is required to give rise to the kind of detailed, conscious experience that we consider to be waking reality. There is a temptation to believe that waking reality is the baseline - and that lower fidelity "realities" can be simply dismissed as not capable of containing conscious beings (except temporarily when that conscious being is a "sleeper" from a higher level of the simulation - ie, when we are dreaming) - and of course, it is only with the advent of modern computer technology that we have begun to entertain the possibility that we might be able to create a virtual world indistinguishable from the real one. But I think that this interpretation of reality is likely incomplete. There is no way for us to tell that this reality is not simply a low fidelity representation of a higher fidelity reality a level above - all of us being mere characters in the dream of a god - and there is equally no way to truly know that the simulated universes we create when dreaming, or just thinking about the future, the past, or an alternate present, do not have properties that somewhat elude our perception, but which imbibe the characters within these simulated - and very temporary - realities with some kind of experience of being.

This being the case, and bringing biological, evolved computers - ie, brains - into the sphere of objects capable of playing host to simulated realities - I think it removes the need for any kind of explicitly "conscious creator". That said - I think that moving far enough up or down the reality tree, the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious entity likely ceases to have meaning. If this reality is indeed a low fidelity representation of a higher reality existing only as a fleeting thought in the mind of a god - then it's safe to say that the complexity of this higher reality is such that even if the brain hosting our entire universe belonged to something very close to a jellyfish (ie, close to entirely brainless) it would still be godlike to us.


An argument which relates to this (the Simulation Argument in general I mean, not my own expanded interpretation of it, necessarily) which may be somewhat philosophically nonsensical but which I very much enjoy personally is Frank Tipler's Omega Point cosmology -
Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler generalizes[16] Teilhard's term Omega Point to describe what he maintains is the ultimate fate of the universe required by the laws of physics: roughly, Tipler argues that quantum mechanics is inconsistent unless the future of every point in spacetime contains an intelligent observer to collapse the wavefunction, and that the only way for this to happen is if the Universe is closed (that is, it will collapse to a single point) and yet contains observers with a "God-like" ability to perform an unbounded series of observations in finite time. However, scientists such as Lawrence Krauss have stated that Tipler's reasoning is erroneous on multiple levels, possibly to the point of being nonsensical pseudoscience.
Click to expand...
It strikes me that the invocation of quantum mechanical terminology is kind of unnecessary here and only serves to muddy the waters of an otherwise enjoyable circular and unfalsifiable theory about the nature of the universe.

In essence, it could be said that it may be the case that existence in general tends towards intelligent, self-organising systems, and that the logical end point at the end of eternity is a universe, or multiverse, even, in which all matter and energy has become a part of this unified godlike intelligence. Tipler argues that towards the end of time, the capacity of this unified mind would tend towards infinity, such that this entity would eventually be capable of simulating every possible version of reality within it's mind - including every event that lead up to it's genesis as an infinite god at this "Omega Point".

Again, obviously there are, potentially several things wrong with this argument or reasons that "true reality" might not actually be like this - but I personally think it's a very fun interpretation of cosmology, and has the pleasing bonus of positing a manner in which god can think himself into being, and with it the entire infinity of existence - and of course, in this instance there is no real distinction between the 2.
 
I started taking university sciences for the hell of it, and I have been studying chemistry the past year. On a molecular level, atoms are mostly empty space. Even the so-called protons of the nucleus can be further subdivided into sub-atomic space. It goes on and on, ad infinitum. So the deeper you look, the more you see that nothing is really there.

Calling it a simulation is somewhat accurate, but not completely. There is substance, but it is only minuscule, and it is the same substance at the core of everything. Please take what I'm about to say lightly as I am using this metaphorically. It seems like everything is a projection of god. The projection is unreal, but is a way for god to generate an experience realm and experience things. Yet the foundational god presence is the same everywhere. It is the same universal essence.

That's why calling it a simulation is not entirely accurate. A simulation is completely hollow. I don't think this simulation we live in is totally hollow because it is being projected from an infinite source. The same source that is at the core of all of us, just like those atoms that are mostly empty space, except for their substantial core. The core is omnipresent and never changes, even though the surrounding projection has seemingly changeable diversity. When everything is created or destroyed, it arises and dissolves from the same unchanging source.

If you take the simulation analogy too seriously, you could easily enter the realm of nihilism, i.e. nothing really exists. But that doesn't resonate with me, and the fact there is resonance/dissonance implies a binary duality that is arising from some kind of core awareness. That core awareness is the backdrop of everything. If you try to look for substance in the simulation you won't find it. You'll only find emptiness, but it doesn't mean non-existence. Just like a movie projected on the screen comes from a projector, the 10,000 Things are all projected from the Dao. Everything goes back to reconciling duality, which is a human problem. The questions themselves are due to duality.
 
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Some scientists have stated it's a 40% chance we are in a simulation/s. This possibility leaves me cold, yet liberated.
 
Kurt Godel would like a word with all of you.

This theory has two built in things that irk me. First is it isn't falsifiable (any way to disprove it can be handwaved away as the logic is simulated and false).
Second is it can be applied to itself recursively infinitely, which outside of being a cool idea doesn't provide explanations for the interesting questions of the origin of all things.

My biggest beef with the theory is that it requires an omnipotent ai to be created/generated by humans. Even with utmost efficiency, there is not enough energy in the universe to power fully detailed and infinite recursions. Without invoking some kind of divine power (which is what I feel this theory is trying to do. It is trying to bootstrap the existence of an all powerful entity into terms that don't require religious beliefs) this theory doesn't work.

At the end of the day I feel like the simulation theory requires the same amount of faith as any religion. That is fine. Religions are worth exploring. What bothers me is how tech celebrities treat this like a matter of fact thing (like with people assigning statistics to the likelihood of this being true or untrue when it is truly unfalsifiable).

That being said if you like the theory for its way of depicting jnfinities, you should check out some of the writing of Juan Luis Borges. That man could really capture many diverse snapshots of different infinites.
 
Yeah and because animals, birds -- origins from dinosaurs does that mean they saw the afterlife? Were they humans too? I don't think. Energy isn't infinite, mass is. So just because space can alter his dimension to be as large as he want that doesn't mean shit. If we were in a simulation, there would be glitches, it's impossible to not have glitches, you can have any kind of technology you want but you will have glitches it's inevitable. You might say well ok we had weird anomalies in the past.. like raining with frogs or inexplicable noises in the Sky and they were proved to be factories around the world. Look, when it's raining right, there's + a - and that where the thunders comes from, that's their origin. You might now say, how about glitches? We have Deja-Vu's, people appearing/disappearin, voices, past-life memories. What's your past-life memories other than your imagination? How can you prove'em? If you say ''past-life'' you already go with Monks, there's no past-life there's only this life. There's a word called ''imagination'' and some people use it more than they need maybe because of FOMO, maybe because they attack the world with what they see in themselves, maybe a lotta things. Flight of fantasies are infinite and senseless for science. If we were in a simulation, doesn't matter how bad the Gov is, if we were in a simulation we would know by now. There's millions but millions of theories out there as how this is a real thing but isn't. While being lonely is the origin of your best ideas, it also might be your rabbit hole if you don't know what you're doing. We are here for a short amount of time so although exploring it's our main purpose in life we might find ourselves in a fox hole. And so if the architects doesn't want us to know, they've failed. So this being said, we have quantum computers -- but we can't run schrodinger's formula. It's way too, how can I say, not big -- it's way to phantomable. It's a dilemma that still havocs the science world even today.
 
So theoretical science purely based in human constructs are less likely to stand the test of time?
 
The glitches you have described can be explained by natural laws. Plus the simulation idea doesnt enlighten or expand on those concepts.

Neither energy nor mass are infinite

Schrodingers formula describes how things are. It is not a problem for scientists, just a real world application of Godel's incompleteness theorem.

@Larny

I am a little bit confused on your last statement, could you expand on it.
 
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