What is supposed to be useful or desirable about running ancestor sims of the singularity? I don’t remember a good argument for advanced civilizations or AGIs doing this.
I don’t think it swings this discussion either way, but I think simulations could be run many orders of magnitude more efficiently by using low-res sims, scaling resolution only where necessary, except for full res for the minds involved. We’ve never actually experienced an atom, and neural networks don’t need to be mod led to the molecular level to give good results. There is no good reason whatsoever to think we need quantum effects for intelligence or consciousness.
If thats right, and its almost always low-res sims that are sufficient then that destroys the main ancestor sim argument for our conscious experience being simulated. Low res is not conscious in the same way we are, different reference class to base reality bio-consciousness
I don’t think I was clear. I was trying to say that you can simulate just the minds in high-res, and the rest of the world in low-res. That reduces the computation by many orders of magnitude, since minds are such a tiny fraction of the physical universe.
Separately, I don’t think there’s any good reason to think we need molecular-level, let alone quantum-level process to explain consciousness. Thinking carefully about consciousness, it seems to me that neural networks, with specific properties and linked in specific ways, are adequate to explain our conscious experiences. But that’s neither here nor there for the compressed simulation point. And I haven’t written anything up, since explaining consciousness has little use in either academic neuroscience or AGI alignment.
OK but why would you need high res for the minds? If its an ancestor sim and chatbots can already pass the Turing test etc, doesn’t that mean you can get away with compression or lower res? The major arc of history won’t be affected unless they are pivotal minds. If its possible to compress the sims so they experience lesser consciousness than us but still are very close to the real thing (and havn’t we almost already proven that can be done with our LLM’s), then an ancestor simulator would do that.
What is supposed to be useful or desirable about running ancestor sims of the singularity? I don’t remember a good argument for advanced civilizations or AGIs doing this.
I don’t think it swings this discussion either way, but I think simulations could be run many orders of magnitude more efficiently by using low-res sims, scaling resolution only where necessary, except for full res for the minds involved. We’ve never actually experienced an atom, and neural networks don’t need to be mod led to the molecular level to give good results. There is no good reason whatsoever to think we need quantum effects for intelligence or consciousness.
If thats right, and its almost always low-res sims that are sufficient then that destroys the main ancestor sim argument for our conscious experience being simulated. Low res is not conscious in the same way we are, different reference class to base reality bio-consciousness
I don’t think I was clear. I was trying to say that you can simulate just the minds in high-res, and the rest of the world in low-res. That reduces the computation by many orders of magnitude, since minds are such a tiny fraction of the physical universe.
Separately, I don’t think there’s any good reason to think we need molecular-level, let alone quantum-level process to explain consciousness. Thinking carefully about consciousness, it seems to me that neural networks, with specific properties and linked in specific ways, are adequate to explain our conscious experiences. But that’s neither here nor there for the compressed simulation point. And I haven’t written anything up, since explaining consciousness has little use in either academic neuroscience or AGI alignment.
OK but why would you need high res for the minds? If its an ancestor sim and chatbots can already pass the Turing test etc, doesn’t that mean you can get away with compression or lower res? The major arc of history won’t be affected unless they are pivotal minds. If its possible to compress the sims so they experience lesser consciousness than us but still are very close to the real thing (and havn’t we almost already proven that can be done with our LLM’s), then an ancestor simulator would do that.