I can see a case that we’re more likely to be living in an ancestor simulation (probably not very accurate) than to be actual ancestors, but I believe strongly that the vast majority of simulations will not be ancestor simulations, and therefore we are most likely to be in a simulation that doesn’t have a close resemblance to anyone’s past.
I can see a case that we’re more likely to be living in an ancestor simulation (probably not very accurate) than to be actual ancestors, but I believe strongly that the vast majority of simulations will not be ancestor simulations, and therefore we are most likely to be in a simulation that doesn’t have a close resemblance to anyone’s past.
That seems… problematic. If your argument depends on the future of people like us being likely to generate lots of simulations, and of us looking nothing like the past of the people doing the simulating, that’s contradictory. If you simply think that every possible agency in the top level of reality is likely to run enough simulations that people like us emerge accidentally, that seems like a difficult thesis to defend.
I don’t see anything contradictory about it. There’s no reason that a simulation that’s not of the simulators’ past need only contain people incidentally. We can be a simulation without being a simulation created by our descendants.
Personally, if I had the capacity to simulate universes, simulating my ancestors would probably be somewhere down around the twentieth spot on my priorities list, but most of the things I’d be interested in simulating would contain people.
I don’t think I would regard simulating the universe as we observe it as ethically acceptable though, and if I were in a position to do so, I would at the very least lodge a protest against anyone who tried.
We can be a simulation without being a simulation created by our descendants.
We can, but there’s no reason to think that we are. The simulation argument isn’t just ‘whoa, we could be living in a simulation’ - it’s ‘here’s a compelling anthropic argument that we’re living in a simulation’. If we disregard the idea that we’re being simulated by close analogues of our own descendants, we lose any reason to think that we’re in a simulation, because we can no longer speculate on the motives of our simulators.
I think the likelihood of our descendants simulating us is negligible. While it is remotely conceivable that some super-simulators who are astronomically larger than us and not necessarily subject to the same physical laws, could pull off such a simulation, I think there is no chance that our descendants, limited by the energy output of a star, the number of atoms in a few planets, and the speed of light barrier, could plausibly simulate us at the level of detail we experience.
This is the classic fractal problem. As the map becomes more and more accurate, it become larger and larger until it is the same size as the territory. The only simulation our descendants could possibly achieve, assuming they don’t have better things to do with their time, would be much less detailed than reality.
I don’t think that the likelihood of our descendants simulating us at all is particularly high; my predicted number of ancestor simulations should such a thing turn out to be possible is zero, which is one reason I’ve never found it a particularly compelling anthropic argument in the first place.
But, if people living in universes capable of running simulations tend to do run simulations, then it’s probable that most people will be living in simulations, regardless of whether anyone ever chooses to run an ancestor simulation.
At the fundamental limits of computation, such a simulation (with sufficient graininess) could be undertaken with on the order of hundreds of kilograms of matter and a sufficient supply of energy. If the future isn’t ruled by a power singlet that forbids dicking with people without their consent (i.e. if Hanson is more right than Yudkowsky), then somebody (many people) with access to that much wealth will exist, and some of them will run such a simulation, just for shits and giggles. Given the no-power-singlets, I’d be very surprised if nobody decided to play god like that. People go to Renaissance fairs, for goodness sakes. Do you think that nobody would take the opportunity to bring back whole lost eras of humanity in bottle-worlds?
As for the other point, if we decide that our simulators don’t resemble us, then calling them ‘people’ is spurious. We know nothing about them. We have no reason to believe that they’d tend to produce simulations containing observers like us (the vast majority of computable functions won’t). Any speculation, if you take that approach, that we might be living in a simulation is entirely baseless and unfounded. There is no reason to privilege that cosmological hypothesis over simpler ones.
I think it’s more likely than not that simulating a world like our own would be regarded as ethically impermissible. Creating a simulated universe which contains things like, for example, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, seems like the sort of thing that would be likely to be forbidden by general consensus if we still had any sort of self-governance at the point where it became a possibility.
Plus, while I’ve encountered plenty of people who suggest that somebody would want to create such a simulation, I haven’t yet known anyone to assert that they would want to make such a simulation.
I don’t understand why you’re leaping from “simulators are not our descendants” to “simulators do not resemble us closely enough to meaningfully call them ‘people.’” If I were in the position to create universe simulations, rather than simulating my ancestors, I would be much more interested in simulating people in what, from our perspective, is a wholly invented world (although, as I said before, I would not regard creating a world with as much suffering as we observe as ethically permissible.) I would assign a far higher probability to simulators simulating a world with beings which are relatable to them than a world with beings unrelatable to them, provided they simulate a world with beings in it at all, but their own ancestors are only a tiny fraction of relatable being space.
Also, simulating one’s ancestors would be something that you’d only need to do once, or (more likely) enough times to accommodate different theories. Simulating one’s ancestors in what-if scenarios would probably be more common, unless the simulators just don’t care about that sort of fun.
I don’t think it’s that hard to defend. That people like us emerge accidentally is the default assumption of most working scientists today. Personally I find that a lot more likely than that we are living in a simulation.
And even if you think that it is more likely that we are living in a simulation (I don’t, by the way) there’s still the question of how the simulators arose. I’d prefer not to make it an infinite regress. Such an approach veers dangerously close to unfalsifiable theology. (Who created/simulated God? Meta-God. Well then, who created/simulated Meta-God? Meta-Meta-God. And who created/simulated Meta-Meta-God?...)
Sometime, somewhere there’s a start. Occam’s Razor suggests that the start is our universe, in the Big Bang, and that we are not living in a simulation. But even if we are living in a simulation, then someone is not living in a simulation.
I also think there are stronger, physical arguments for assuming we’re not in a digital simulation. That is, I think the universe routinely does things we could not expect any digital computer to do. But that is a subject for another post.
Thanks for the reminder.
I can see a case that we’re more likely to be living in an ancestor simulation (probably not very accurate) than to be actual ancestors, but I believe strongly that the vast majority of simulations will not be ancestor simulations, and therefore we are most likely to be in a simulation that doesn’t have a close resemblance to anyone’s past.
That seems… problematic. If your argument depends on the future of people like us being likely to generate lots of simulations, and of us looking nothing like the past of the people doing the simulating, that’s contradictory. If you simply think that every possible agency in the top level of reality is likely to run enough simulations that people like us emerge accidentally, that seems like a difficult thesis to defend.
I don’t see anything contradictory about it. There’s no reason that a simulation that’s not of the simulators’ past need only contain people incidentally. We can be a simulation without being a simulation created by our descendants.
Personally, if I had the capacity to simulate universes, simulating my ancestors would probably be somewhere down around the twentieth spot on my priorities list, but most of the things I’d be interested in simulating would contain people.
I don’t think I would regard simulating the universe as we observe it as ethically acceptable though, and if I were in a position to do so, I would at the very least lodge a protest against anyone who tried.
We can, but there’s no reason to think that we are. The simulation argument isn’t just ‘whoa, we could be living in a simulation’ - it’s ‘here’s a compelling anthropic argument that we’re living in a simulation’. If we disregard the idea that we’re being simulated by close analogues of our own descendants, we lose any reason to think that we’re in a simulation, because we can no longer speculate on the motives of our simulators.
I think the likelihood of our descendants simulating us is negligible. While it is remotely conceivable that some super-simulators who are astronomically larger than us and not necessarily subject to the same physical laws, could pull off such a simulation, I think there is no chance that our descendants, limited by the energy output of a star, the number of atoms in a few planets, and the speed of light barrier, could plausibly simulate us at the level of detail we experience.
This is the classic fractal problem. As the map becomes more and more accurate, it become larger and larger until it is the same size as the territory. The only simulation our descendants could possibly achieve, assuming they don’t have better things to do with their time, would be much less detailed than reality.
I don’t think that the likelihood of our descendants simulating us at all is particularly high; my predicted number of ancestor simulations should such a thing turn out to be possible is zero, which is one reason I’ve never found it a particularly compelling anthropic argument in the first place.
But, if people living in universes capable of running simulations tend to do run simulations, then it’s probable that most people will be living in simulations, regardless of whether anyone ever chooses to run an ancestor simulation.
Zero? Why?
At the fundamental limits of computation, such a simulation (with sufficient graininess) could be undertaken with on the order of hundreds of kilograms of matter and a sufficient supply of energy. If the future isn’t ruled by a power singlet that forbids dicking with people without their consent (i.e. if Hanson is more right than Yudkowsky), then somebody (many people) with access to that much wealth will exist, and some of them will run such a simulation, just for shits and giggles. Given the no-power-singlets, I’d be very surprised if nobody decided to play god like that. People go to Renaissance fairs, for goodness sakes. Do you think that nobody would take the opportunity to bring back whole lost eras of humanity in bottle-worlds?
As for the other point, if we decide that our simulators don’t resemble us, then calling them ‘people’ is spurious. We know nothing about them. We have no reason to believe that they’d tend to produce simulations containing observers like us (the vast majority of computable functions won’t). Any speculation, if you take that approach, that we might be living in a simulation is entirely baseless and unfounded. There is no reason to privilege that cosmological hypothesis over simpler ones.
I think it’s more likely than not that simulating a world like our own would be regarded as ethically impermissible. Creating a simulated universe which contains things like, for example, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, seems like the sort of thing that would be likely to be forbidden by general consensus if we still had any sort of self-governance at the point where it became a possibility.
Plus, while I’ve encountered plenty of people who suggest that somebody would want to create such a simulation, I haven’t yet known anyone to assert that they would want to make such a simulation.
I don’t understand why you’re leaping from “simulators are not our descendants” to “simulators do not resemble us closely enough to meaningfully call them ‘people.’” If I were in the position to create universe simulations, rather than simulating my ancestors, I would be much more interested in simulating people in what, from our perspective, is a wholly invented world (although, as I said before, I would not regard creating a world with as much suffering as we observe as ethically permissible.) I would assign a far higher probability to simulators simulating a world with beings which are relatable to them than a world with beings unrelatable to them, provided they simulate a world with beings in it at all, but their own ancestors are only a tiny fraction of relatable being space.
Also, simulating one’s ancestors would be something that you’d only need to do once, or (more likely) enough times to accommodate different theories. Simulating one’s ancestors in what-if scenarios would probably be more common, unless the simulators just don’t care about that sort of fun.
I don’t think it’s that hard to defend. That people like us emerge accidentally is the default assumption of most working scientists today. Personally I find that a lot more likely than that we are living in a simulation.
And even if you think that it is more likely that we are living in a simulation (I don’t, by the way) there’s still the question of how the simulators arose. I’d prefer not to make it an infinite regress. Such an approach veers dangerously close to unfalsifiable theology. (Who created/simulated God? Meta-God. Well then, who created/simulated Meta-God? Meta-Meta-God. And who created/simulated Meta-Meta-God?...)
Sometime, somewhere there’s a start. Occam’s Razor suggests that the start is our universe, in the Big Bang, and that we are not living in a simulation. But even if we are living in a simulation, then someone is not living in a simulation.
I also think there are stronger, physical arguments for assuming we’re not in a digital simulation. That is, I think the universe routinely does things we could not expect any digital computer to do. But that is a subject for another post.