An idea I keep coming back to that would imply we reject the idea of being in a simulation is the fact that the laws of physics remain the same no matter your reference point nor place in the universe.
You give the example of a conscious observer recognizing an anomaly, and the simulation runner rewinds time to fix this problem. By only re-running the simulation within that observer’s time cone, the simulation may have strange new behavior at the edge of that time cone, propagating an error. I don’t think that the error can be recovered so much as moved when dealing with lower resolution simulations.
It makes the most sense to me, that if we are in a simulation it be a “perfect” simulation in that the most foundational forces and quantum effects are simulated all the time, because they are all in a way interacting with each other all the time.
Companies writing programs to model and display large 3D environments in real time face a similar problem, where they only have limited resources. One work around they common use are “imposters”
A solar system sized simulation of a civilisation that has not made observable changes to anything outside our own solar system could take a lot of short cuts when generating the photons that arrive from outside. In particular, until a telescope or camera of particular resolution has been invented, would they need to bother generating thousands of years of such photons in more detail than could be captured by devices yet present?
If it is the case that we are in a “perfect” simulation, I would consider that no different than being in a non-simulation. The concept of being “in a simulation” is useful only insofar as it predicts some future observation. Given the various multiverses that are likely to exist, any perfect simulation an agent might run is probably just duplicating a naturally-occurring mathematical object which, depending on your definitions, already “exists” in baseline reality.
The key question, then, is not whether some simulation of us exists (nearly guaranteed) but how likely we are to encounter an imperfection or interference that would differentiate the simulation from the stand-alone “perfect” universe. Once that happens, we are tied in to the world one level up and should be able to interact with it.
There’s not much evidence about the likelihood of a simulation being imperfect. Maybe imperfect simulations are more common than perfect ones because they’re more computationally tractable, but that’s not a lot to go on.
I 100% agree that a “perfect simulation” and a non-simulation are essentially the same, noting Lumifer’s comment that our programmer(s) are gods by another name in the case of simulation.
My comment is really about your second paragraph, how likely are we to see an imperfection? My reasoning about error propagation in an imperfect simulation would imply a fairly high probability of us seeing an error eventually. This is assuming that we are a near-perfect simulation of the universe “above” ours, with “perfect” simulation being done at small scales around conscious observers.
So I’m not really sure if you just didn’t understand what I’m getting at, because we seem to agree, and you just explained back to me what I was saying.
I guess where we disagree is in our view of how a simulation would be imperfect. You’re envisioning something much closer to a perfect simulation, where slightly incorrect boundary conditions would cause errors to propagate into the region that is perfectly simulated. I consider it more likely that if a simulation has any interference at all (such as rewinding to fix noticeable problems) it will be filled with approximations everywhere. In that case the boundary condition errors aren’t so relevant. Whether we see an error would depend mainly on whether there are any (which, like I said, is equivalent to asking whether we are “in” a simulation) and whether we have any mechanism by which to detect them.
Everyone has different ideas of what a “perfectly” or “near perfectly” simulated universe would look like, I was trying to go off of Douglas’s idea of it, where I think the boundary errors would have effect.
I still don’t see how rewinding would be interference; I imagine interference would be that some part of the “above ours” universe gets inside this one, say if you had some particle with quantum entanglement spanning across the universes (although it would really also just be in the “above ours” universe because it would have to be a superset of our universe, it’s just also a particle that we can observe).
An idea I keep coming back to that would imply we reject the idea of being in a simulation is the fact that the laws of physics remain the same no matter your reference point nor place in the universe.
You give the example of a conscious observer recognizing an anomaly, and the simulation runner rewinds time to fix this problem. By only re-running the simulation within that observer’s time cone, the simulation may have strange new behavior at the edge of that time cone, propagating an error. I don’t think that the error can be recovered so much as moved when dealing with lower resolution simulations.
It makes the most sense to me, that if we are in a simulation it be a “perfect” simulation in that the most foundational forces and quantum effects are simulated all the time, because they are all in a way interacting with each other all the time.
Companies writing programs to model and display large 3D environments in real time face a similar problem, where they only have limited resources. One work around they common use are “imposters”
A solar system sized simulation of a civilisation that has not made observable changes to anything outside our own solar system could take a lot of short cuts when generating the photons that arrive from outside. In particular, until a telescope or camera of particular resolution has been invented, would they need to bother generating thousands of years of such photons in more detail than could be captured by devices yet present?
If it is the case that we are in a “perfect” simulation, I would consider that no different than being in a non-simulation. The concept of being “in a simulation” is useful only insofar as it predicts some future observation. Given the various multiverses that are likely to exist, any perfect simulation an agent might run is probably just duplicating a naturally-occurring mathematical object which, depending on your definitions, already “exists” in baseline reality.
The key question, then, is not whether some simulation of us exists (nearly guaranteed) but how likely we are to encounter an imperfection or interference that would differentiate the simulation from the stand-alone “perfect” universe. Once that happens, we are tied in to the world one level up and should be able to interact with it.
There’s not much evidence about the likelihood of a simulation being imperfect. Maybe imperfect simulations are more common than perfect ones because they’re more computationally tractable, but that’s not a lot to go on.
I 100% agree that a “perfect simulation” and a non-simulation are essentially the same, noting Lumifer’s comment that our programmer(s) are gods by another name in the case of simulation.
My comment is really about your second paragraph, how likely are we to see an imperfection? My reasoning about error propagation in an imperfect simulation would imply a fairly high probability of us seeing an error eventually. This is assuming that we are a near-perfect simulation of the universe “above” ours, with “perfect” simulation being done at small scales around conscious observers.
So I’m not really sure if you just didn’t understand what I’m getting at, because we seem to agree, and you just explained back to me what I was saying.
I guess where we disagree is in our view of how a simulation would be imperfect. You’re envisioning something much closer to a perfect simulation, where slightly incorrect boundary conditions would cause errors to propagate into the region that is perfectly simulated. I consider it more likely that if a simulation has any interference at all (such as rewinding to fix noticeable problems) it will be filled with approximations everywhere. In that case the boundary condition errors aren’t so relevant. Whether we see an error would depend mainly on whether there are any (which, like I said, is equivalent to asking whether we are “in” a simulation) and whether we have any mechanism by which to detect them.
Everyone has different ideas of what a “perfectly” or “near perfectly” simulated universe would look like, I was trying to go off of Douglas’s idea of it, where I think the boundary errors would have effect.
I still don’t see how rewinding would be interference; I imagine interference would be that some part of the “above ours” universe gets inside this one, say if you had some particle with quantum entanglement spanning across the universes (although it would really also just be in the “above ours” universe because it would have to be a superset of our universe, it’s just also a particle that we can observe).
One difference is the OFF switch. Another difference is the (presumed) existence of a debugger.
Recall that the traditional name for the simulation hypothesis is “creationism”.