In LessWrong contributor Scott Alexander’s essay, Espistemic Learned Helplessness, he wrote,
Even the smartest people I know have a commendable tendency not to take certain ideas seriously. Bostrom’s simulation argument, the anthropic doomsday argument, Pascal’s Mugging – I’ve never heard anyone give a coherent argument against any of these, but I’ve also never met anyone who fully accepts them and lives life according to their implications.
I can’t help but agree with Scott Alexander about the simulation argument. No one has refuted it, ever, in my books. However, this argument carries a dramatic, and in my eyes, frightening implication for our existential situation.
Joe Carlsmith’s essay, Simulation Arguments, clarified some nuances, but ultimately the argument’s conclusion remains the same.
When I looked on Reddit for the answer, the attempted counterarguments were weak and disappointing.
It’s just that, the claims below feel so obvious to me:
It is physically possible to simulate a conscious mind.
The universe is very big, and there are many, many other aliens.
Some aliens will run various simulations.
The number of simulations that are “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own experience far outnumbers authentic evolved humans. (By “subjectively indistinguishable,” I mean the simulates can’t tell they’re in a simulation. )
When someone challenges any of those claims, I’m immediately skeptical. I hope you can appreciate why those claims feel evident.
Thank you for reading all this. Now, I’ll ask for your help.
Can anyone here provide a strong counter to Bostrom’s simulation argument? If possible, I’d like to hear specifically from those who’ve engaged deeply and thoughtfully with this argument already.
Thank you again.
… but it’s expensive, especially if you have to simulate its environment as well. You have to use a lot of physical resources to run a high-fidelity simulation. It probably takes irreducibly more mass and energy to simulate any given system with close to “full” fidelity than the system itself uses. You can probably get away with less fidelity than that, but nobody has provided any explanation of how much less or why that works.
There are other, more interesting and important ways to use that compute capacity. Nobody sane, human or alien, is going to waste it on running a crapton of simulations.
Also, nobody knows that all the simulated minds wouldn’t be p-zombies, because, regardless of innumerable pompous overconfident claims, nobody understands qualia. Nobody can prove that they’re not a p-zombie, but do you think you’re a p-zombie? And do we care about p-zombies?
If that’s true, and you haven’t provided any evidence for it, then those aliens have many, many other things to simulate. The measure of humans among random aliens’ simulations is going to be tiny if it’s not zero.
Again, that doesn’t imply that they’re going to run enough of them for them to dominate the number of subjective experiences out there, or that any of them will be of humans.
Future humans, or human AI successors, if there are any of either, will probably also run “various simulations”, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to dump the kind of vast resources you’re demanding into them.
Um, no? Because all of the premises you’re using to get there are wrong.
By that definition, a simulation that bounces frictionless billiard balls around and labels them as humans is “subjectively indistinguishable” from our own, since the billiard balls have no cognition and can’t tell anything about anything at all. You need to do more than that to define the kind of simulation you really mean.
Counterpoint: speedrunning and things like ‘Twitch plays’, which are some of the most popular streaming genres in existence, and exist largely because they are unimportant. A TAS speedrunner may well run millions or billions of simulations simply to try to shave off 1s from the record. (An example I like to cite uses 6 CPU-years to bruteforce NES Arkanoid to achieve nearly optimal play. Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide the wallclock equivalent, but I strongly suspect that this project alone simulates more minutes of NES Arkanoid than it was ever played by humans. If not, then I’m quite sure at this point that NES Mario has been played in silico OOMs more than by humans. Plenty of projects like ‘My First NEAT project’ will do a few years or centuries of NES Mario.)
This is a very silly argument, given the sorts of things we use compute capacity for, in the real world, today.
Pick the most nonsensical, absurd, pointless, “shitpost”-quality webcomic/game/video/whatever you can think of. Now find a dozen more like it. (This will be very easy.) Now total up how much compute capacity it takes to make those things happen, and imagine going back to 1950 or whenever, and telling them that, for one teenager to watch one cat video (or whatever else) on their phone takes several orders of magnitude more compute capacity than exists in their entire world, and that not only do we casually spend said compute on said cat video routinely, as a matter of course, without having to pay any discernible amount of money for it, but that in fact we regularly waste similar amounts of compute on nothing at all because some engineer forgot to put a return statement in the right place and so some web page or other process uses up CPU cycles needlessly, and nobody really cares enough to fix it.
People will absolutely waste compute capacity on running a crapton of simulations.
(And that’s without even getting into the “sane” caveat. Insane people use computers all the time! If you doubt this, by all means browse any social media site for a day…)
I haven’t heard the p zombie argument before, but I agree that is at least some Bayesian evidence that we’re not in a sim.
We don’t know if simulated people will be p zombies
I am not a p zombie [citation needed]
It would be very surprising if sims were not p zombies but everyone in the physical universe is
Therefore the likelihood ratio of being conscious is higher for the real universe than a simulation
Probably 3 needs to be developed further, but this is the first new piece of evidence I’ve seen since I first encountered the simulation argument in like 2005.
I’ve never understood why people make this argument:
Let’s imagine that we crack the minimum requirements for sentience. I think we already may have accidentally done so, but table that for a moment. Will it really require that we simulate the entire human brain down to every last particle, or is it plausible that it will require a bare minimum of mathematical abstractions?
Additionally, we’ve seen people create basic computers inside of minecraft and little big planet, now let’s pretend there was a conscious npc inside one of those games looking at their computer and wondering:
and the other sentient npc says
For all we know all the particles in the universe are as difficult to run as the pixels on-screen during a game of pac-man, and/or perhaps the the quantum observer effect is analogous to an advanced form of view frustum culling.
Why would we ever assume that an outer reality simulating our own has similar computational resource constraints or that resource constraints is even a meaningful concept there?
The general problem with Bostrom’s argument is that it tries to apply incorrect probabilstic model. It implicitly assumes independence where there is causal connection, therefore arriving to a wrong conclusion. Similarly to conventional reasoning in Doomsday Argument or Sleeping Beauty problems.
For future humans, say in year 3000, to create simulations of year 2025, first actual year 2025 has to happen in the base reality. And then all the next years up to 3000. We know about it very well. Not a single simulation can happen unless an actual reality happens first.
And yet Bostroms models our knowledge about this setting as if we participate in a probability experiment with random sample between many “simulation” outcomes and one “reality” outcome. The inadequacy of such modelling should be obvious. Consider:
and compare it to
Clearly, the second procedure is very different from the first. The mathematical model that describes it doesn’t describe the first at all for exactly the same reasons why Bostrom’s model doesn’t describe our knowledge state.
There is not much practical advise following from simulation argument. One I heard that we should try to live most interesting lives, so the simulators will not turn our simulation off.
Richard Carrier has written an entire rebuttal of the argument on his blog. He always answers comments under his posts, so if you disagree with some part of the rebuttal, you can just leave a comment there explaining which claim makes no sense to you. Then, he will usually defend the claim in question or provide the necessary clarification.
It looks like he argues against the idea that friendly future AIs will simulate the past based on ethical grounds, and imagining unfriendly AI torturing past simulations is conspiracy theory. I comment the following:
There are a couple of situations where future advance civilization will want to have many past simulation:
1. Resurrection simulation by Friendly AI. They simulate the whole history of the earth incorporating all known data to return to live all people ever lived. It can also simulate a lot of simulation to win “measure war” against unfriendly AI and even to cure suffering of people who lived in the past.
2. Any Unfriendly AI will be interested to solve Fermi paradox, and thus will simulate many possible civilizations around a time of global catastrophic risks (the time we live). Interesting thing here is that we can be not ancestry simulation in that case.
Some of those people may be a bit cheesed off about that, speaking of ethics.
Assuming it believes “measure war” is a sane thing to be worrying about. In which case it disagrees with me.
There seems to be a lot of suffering in the “simulation” we’re experiencing here. Where’s the cure?
That sounds like a remarkably costly and inefficient way to get not that much information about the Fermi paradox.
I think a more meta-argument is valid: it is almost impossible to prove that all possible civilizations will not run simulations despite having all data about us (or being able to generate it from scratch).
Such proof would require listing many assumptions about goal systems and ethics, and proving that under any plausible combination of ethics and goals, it is either unlikely or immoral. This is a monumental task that can be disproven by just one example.
I also polled people in my social network, and 70 percent said they would want to create a simulation with sentient beings. The creation of simulations is a powerful human value.
More generally, I think human life is good overall, so having one more century of human existence is good, and negative utilitarianism is false.
However, I am against repeating intense suffering in simulations, and I think this can be addressed by blinding people’s feelings during extreme suffering (temporarily turning them into p-zombies). Since I am not in intense suffering now, I could still be in a simulation.
Now to your counterarguments:
1. Here again, people who would prefer never to be simulated can be predicted in advance and turned into p-zombies.
2. While a measure war is unlikely, it by definition generates so much measure that we could be in it. It also solves s-risks, so it’s not a bad idea.
3. Curing past suffering is based on complex reassortment of observer-moments, details of which I would not discuss here. Consider that every moment in pain will be compensated by 100 years in bliss, which is good from a utilitarian view.
4. It is actually very cost-effective to run a simulation of a problem you want to solve if you have a lot of computing power.
I am sorry to butt into your conversation, but I do have some points of disagreement.
I think that’s a very high bar to set. It’s almost impossible to definitively prove that we are not in a Cartesian demon or brain-in-a-vat scenario. But this doesn’t mean that those scenarios are likely. I think it is fair to say that more than a possibility is required to establish that we are living in a simulation.
I think that some clarifications are needed here. How was the question phrased? I expect that some people would be fine with creating simulations of worlds where people experience pure bliss, but not necessarily our world. I would especially expect this if the possibility of “pure bliss” world was explicitly mentioned. Something like “would you want to spend resources to create a simulation of a world like ours (with all of its “ugliness”) when you could use them to instead create a world of pure bliss.
Would you say that someone who experiences intense suffering should drastically decrease their credence in being in a simulation? Would someone else reporting to have experienced intense suffering decrease your credence in being in a simulation? Why would only moments of intense suffering be replaced by p-zombies? Why not replace all moments of non-trivial suffering (like breaking a leg/an arm, dental procedures without anesthesia, etc) with p-zombies? Some might consider these to be examples of pretty unbearable suffering (especially as they are experiencing it).
From a utilitarian view, why would simulators opt for Ressurection Simulation? Why not just simulate a world that’s maximally efficient at converting computational resources into utility? Our world has quite a bit of suffering (both intense and non-intense), as well as a lot of wasted resources (lots of empty space in our universe, complicated quantum mechanics, etc). It seems very suboptimal from a utilitarian view.
Why would an Unfriendly AI go through the trouble of actually making us conscious? Surely, if we already accept the notion of p-zombies, then an Unfriendly AI could just create simulations full of p-zombies and save a lot of computational power.
But also, there is an interesting question of why this superintelligence would choose to make our world the way it is. Presumably, in the “real world” we have an unfriendly superintelligence (with vast amounts of resources), who wants to avoid dying. Why would it not start the simulations from that moment? Surely, by starting the simulation “earlier” than the current moment in the “real world” it adds a lot of unnecessary noise into the results of its experiment (all of the outcomes that can happen in our simulation but can’t happen in the real world).
We have to create a map of possible scenarios of simulations first, I attempted to it in 2015.
I now created a new vote on twitter. For now, results are:
”If you will be able to create and completely own simulation, you would prefer that it will be occupied by conscious beings, conscious without sufferings (they are blocked after some level), or NPC”
The poll results show:
Conscious: 18.2%
Conscious, no suffering: 72.7%
NPC: 0%
Will not create simulatio[n]: 9.1%
The poll had 11 votes with 6 days left’
Yes. But I never experienced in my long life such intense sufferings.
No. Memory about intense sufferings are not intense.
Yes, only moments. The badness of not-intense sufferings is overestimated, in my personal view, but this may depend on a person.
More generally speaking, what you presenting as global showstoppers, are technical problems that can be solved.
In my view, individuality is valuable.
As we don’t know nature of consciousness, it can be just side effect of computation, not are trouble. Also it may want to have maximal fidelity or even run biological simulations: something akin to Zoo solution of Fermi paradox.
We are living in one of the most interesting periods of history which surely will be studied and simulated.
If preliminary results on the poll hold, then that would be pretty in line with my hypothesis of most people preferring creating simulations with no suffering over a world like ours. However, it is pretty important to note that this might not be representative of human values in general, because looking at your Twitter account, your audience comes mostly from a very specific circles of people (those interested in futurism and AI).
I was mostly trying to approach the problem from a slightly different angle. I wasn’t meant to suggest that memories about intense suffering are themselves intense.
As far as I understand it, your hypothesis was that Friendly AI temporarily turns people into p-zombies during moments of intense suffering. So, it seems that someone experiencing intense suffering while conscious (p-zombies aren’t conscious) would count as evidence against it.
Reports of conscious intense suffering are abundant. Pain from endometriosis (a condition that affects 10% of women in the world) has been so brutal that it made completely unrelated women tell the internet that their pain was so bad they wanted to die (here and here).
If moments of intense suffering were replaced by p-zombies, then these women would’ve just suddenly lost consciousness and wouldn’t have told the internet about their experience.
From their perspective, it would’ve look like this: as the condition progresses, the pain gets worse, and at some point, they lose consciousness, only to regain it when everything is already over. They wouldn’t have experienced the intense pain that they reported to have experienced. Ditto for all PoWs who have experienced torture.
That’s a totally valid view as far as axiological views go, but for us to be in your proposed simulation, the Friendly AI must also share it. After all, we are imagining a situation where it goes on to perform a complicated scheme that depends on a lot of controversial assumptions. To me, that suggests that AI has so many resources that it wouldn’t feel bad about one of the assumptions turning out to be false and losing all the invested resources. If the AI has that many resources, I think it isn’t unreasonable to ask why it didn’t prevent suffering that is not intense (at least in a way I think you are using the word) but is still very bad, like breaking an arm or having a hard dental procedure without anesthesia.
This Friendly AI would have a very peculiar value system. It is utilitarian, but it has a very specific view of suffering, where suffering basically doesn’t count for much below a certain threshold. It is seemingly rational (Friendly AI that managed to get its hand on so many resources should possess at least some level of rationality), but chooses to go for a highly risky and relatively costly plan of Ressurection Simulation over just creating simulations that are maximally efficient at converting resources into value.
There is another somewhat related issue. Imagine a population of Friendly AIs that consist of two different versions of Friendly AI, both of which really like the idea of simulations.
Type A: AIs that would opt for Ressurection Simulation.
Type B: AIs that would opt for simulations that are maximally efficient at converting resources into value.
Given the unnecessary complexity of our world (all of the empty space, quantum mechanics, etc), it seems fair to say that Type B AIs would be able to simulate more humans, because they would have more resources left for this task (Type A AIs are spending some amount of their resources on the aforementioned complexity). Given plausible anthropics and assuming that the number of Type A AIs is equal to the number of Type B AIs in our population, we would expect ourselves to be in a simulation by Type B AI (but we are, unfortunately, not).
For us to be in a Ressurection Simulation (just focusing on these two types of value systems a future Friendly AI might have), there would have to be more Type A AIs than Type B AIs. And I think this fact is going to be very hard to prove. And this isn’t me being nitpicky; Type B AI is genuinely much closer to my personal value system than Type A AI.
I don’t think the simulations that you described are technically impossible. I am not even necessarily against simulations in general. I just think that, given observable evidence, we are not that likely to be in either of the simulations that you have described.
She will be unconscious, but still send messages about pain. Current LLMs can do it. Also, as it is simulation, there are recording of her previous messages or of a similar woman, so they can be copypasted. Her memories can be computed without actually putting her in pain.
Resurrection of the dead is the part of human value system. We need a completely non-human bliss, like hedonium, to escape this. Hedonium is not part of my reference class and thus not part of simulation argument.
Moreover, even creating new human is affected by this arguments. What if my children will suffer? So it is basically anti-natalist argument.
So if I am understanding your proposal correctly, then a Friendly AI will make a woman unconscious during moments of intense suffering and then implant her memories of pain. Why would it do it though? Why not just remove the experience of pain entirely? In fact, why does Friendly AI seem so insistent on keeping billions of people in a state of false belief by planting false memories. That seems to me like a manipulation.
Friendly AI could just reveal to the people in simulation the truth and let them decide if they want to stay in a simulation or move to the “real” world. I expect that at least some people (including me) would choose to move to a higher plain of reality if that was the case.
Furthermore, why not just resurrect all these people into worlds with no suffering? Such worlds would also take up less computing power than our world so the Friendly AI doing the simulation would have another reason to pursue this option.
Creation of new happy people also seems to be similarly valuable. After all, most arguments against creating new happy people would apply to resurrecting the dead. I would expect most people who oppose the creation of new happy people to oppose the Ressurection Simulation.
But leaving that aside, I don’t think we need to invoke hedonium here. Simulations full of happy, blissful people would be enough. For example, it is not obvious to me that resurrecting one person into our world is better than creating two happy people in a blissful world. I don’t think that my value system is extremely weird, either. A person following a regular classical utilitarianism would probably arrive at the same conclusion.
There is an even deeper issue. It might be the case that somehow, the proposed theory of personal identity fails and all the “resurrections” would just be creating new people. This would be really unpleasant considering that now it turns out that Friendly AI spent more resources to create less people who experience more suffering and less happiness than it would’ve if it followed my proposal.
Even the people who don’t consistently follow classical utilitarianism should be happy with my proposed solution of resurrecting dead people into blissful worlds, which kills two birds with one stone.
It’s not an anti-natalist argument to say that you should create (or resurrect) people into a world with more happiness and less suffering instead of a world with less happiness and more suffering.
To put it into an analogy, if you are presented with two options: a) have a happy child with no chronic diseases and b) have a suffering child with a chronic disease, then option (a) is the more moral option under my value system.
This is similar to choosing between a) resurrecting people into a blissful world with no chronic diseases and b) resurrecting people into a world with chronic diseases.
The discussion about anti-natalism actually made me think of another argument for why we are probably not in a simulation that you’ve described. I think that creating new happy people is good (an an explicitly anti-anti-natalist position). I expect (based on our conversation so far) that so do you. If that’s the case, then we would still expect ourselves to be in a blissful simulation as opposed to being in a simulation of our world. Here is my thought process:
The history of the “real” world would presumably be similar to ours. That means that (if Friendly AI was to follow your strategy) there would be 110 billion dead people to resurrect. This AI happens to completely agree with everything you’ve said so far in our conversation. So it goes ahead and resurrects 110 billion people.
Perfect, now it’s left with a lot of resources on its hands because an AI pursuing a strategy that depends on so many assumptions should have more than enough resources to tolerate a scenario where one of the assumptions turns out to be false.
Thus, this Friendly AI spends a big chunk of resources on creating new happy people into blissful simulations. Given that such simulations require fewer resources, we would expect more people to be in such simulations than in the simulations of worlds like ours.
Even if you don’t agree with the reasoning above, you should agree that it would be pretty weird and ad-hoc if Friendly AI had exactly the amount of resources to resurrect 110 billion people into a world like ours but not enough resources to resurrect (110 + N) billion people into a blissful simulation. Thus, we ought to expect more people to be in blissful simulation than in a world like ours.
Given plausible anthropics, we should thus expect that, if we are being simulated by a Friendly AI, we would be in a blissful world (like the ones I described). Since we are not in such a world, we should decrease our credence in the hypothesis of us being simulated by a Friendly AI.
My point is that it is impossible to resurrect anyone (in this model) without him reliving his life again first, after that he obviously gets eternal blissful life in real (not simulated) world.
This may be not factually true, btw, - current LLMs can create good models of past people without running past simulation of their previous life explicitly.
It is a variant of Doomsday argument. This idea is even more controversial than simulation argument. There is no future with many people in it. Friendly AI can fight DA curse via simulations—by creating many people who do not know their real time position which can be one more argument for simulation, but it requires rather wired decision theory.
Yup, I agree.
This makes my case even stronger! Basically, if a Friendly AI has no issues with simulating conscious beings in general, then we have good reasons to expect it to simulate more observers in blissful worlds than in worlds like ours.
If the Doomsday Argument tells us that Friendly AI didn’t simulate more observers in blissful worlds than in worlds like ours, then that gives us even more reasons to think that we are not being simulated by a Friendly AI in the way that you have described.
I suggest sending this as a comment under his article if you haven’t already. I am similarly interested in his response.
Here is Richard Carrier’s response to avturchin’s comment (for the courtesy of those reading this thread later):
I did. It is under moderation now.
I would put more emphasis on this part:
Indeed, I think this tendency commendable and I do not take these ideas seriously. Like Puddleglum, I ignore and am untroubled by the whispers of evil spirits, even though I may not (yet) have any argument against them. I do not need one. Nor do I need to have an argument for ignoring them. Nor an argument for not looking for arguments. Gold Hat’s line comes to mind:
“Arguments? We ain’t got no arguments! We don’t need no arguments! I don’t have to show you any stinking arguments!”
I can show you a vibe instead, if that helps, but it probably doesn’t. Somehow, the Simulation Argument seems to me to not be doing enough work to get where it goes.
[ Note: I strongly agree with some parts of jbash’s answer, and strongly disagree with other parts. ]
As I understand it, Bostrom’s original argument, the one that got traction for being an actually-clever and thought-provoking discursive fork, goes as follows:
It’s a valid and neat argument which breaks reality down into a few mutually-exclusive possibilities—all of which feel narratively strange—and forces you to pick your poison.
Since then, Bostrom and others have overextended, confused, and twisted this argument, in unwise attempts to turn it into some kind of all-encompassing anthropic theory. [ I Tweeted about this over the summer. ]
The valid, original version of the Simulation Hypothesis argument relies on the [plausible-seeming!] assumption that posthumans, in particular, will share our human interest in our species’ history, in particular, and our penchant for mad science. As soon as your domain of discourse extends outside the class boundaries of “future humans”, the Simulation Argument no longer says anything in particular about your anthropic situation. We have no corresponding idea what alien simulators would want, or why they would be interested in us.
Also, despite what Aynonymousprsn123 [and Bostrom!] have implied, the Simulation Hypothesis argument was never actually rooted in any assumptions about local physics. Changing our assumptions about such factors as [e.g.] the spatial infinity of our local universe, quantum decoherence, or a physical Landauer limit, doesn’t have any implications for it. [ Unless you want to argue for a physical Landauer limit so restrictive it’d be infeasible for posthumans to run any ancestor-simulations at all. ]
So, while the Simulation Hypothesis argument can imply you’re being simulated by posthumans, if and only if you strongly believe posthumans will both of [ a] not die, b] not elect against running lots of ancestor-simulations ], it can’t prove you’re being simulated in general. It’s just not that powerful.
Is there any specific reason the first option is “die off early” and not “be unable to run lots of high-fidelity simulations”? The latter encompasses the former as well as scenarios where future humans survive but for one reason or the other can’t run these simulations.
I think a more general argument, in my opinion, would look like this:
“Future humans will at least one of 1) be unable to run high-fidelity simulations or 2) be unwilling to run high-fidelity simulations or 3) run high-fidelity simulations.”
Yes, I think that’s a validly equivalent and more general classification. Although I’d reflect that “survive but lack the power or will to run lots of ancestor-simulations” didn’t seem like a plausible-enough future to promote it to consideration, back in the ’00s.
My own take on the simulation argument is that it’s true, but has no implications, because you can narrow nothing down other than pure logic, so it would be a problem.
(Here, I’m focused on the most general version of the arguments I’ve seen).
Maybe. But what do you mean by, “you can narrow nothing down other than pure logic”?
I interpret the first part—”you can narrow nothing down”—to mean that the simulation argument doesn’t help us make sense of reality. But I don’t understand the second part: “other than pure logic.” Can you please clarify this statement?
Basically, I’m stating that the only thing that the simulation hypothesis gives you is the tautologies, that is statements that are true in every world/model.
More below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)
I don’t see the phrase “self-indication assumption” in here anywhere.
Nothing is obviously wrong with it. I’m not sure what probability to assign it. Its sort of “out of sample”. But it seems very plausible to me we are in a simulation. It is really hard to justify probabilities or even settle on them. But when I look inside myself the numbers that come to mind are 25-30%.
Nor can you refute that my qualia experience of green is what you call red, but because every time I see (and subsequently refer to) my red is the same time you see your red, there is no incongruity to suggest any different. However I think entertaining such a theory would be a waste of time.
I see the simulation hypothesis as suffering from the same flaws as the Young Earth Theory: both are incompatible with Occums Razor, or to put it another way, adds unnecessary complexity to a theory of metaphysics without offering additional accuracy or better predicting power. The Young Earth Hypothesis says that fossils and geological phenomena only appear to be older than 6,000 years, but they were intentionally created that way (by the great Simulator in the sky?). This means it also fails to meet the important criteria of modern science: it can’t be falsified.
To be able to falsify something means that a theory is valuable, because if it fails, then you’ve identified a gap between your map of something and the territory that you can correct. A theory becomes even more valuable if it predicts some counter-intuition or result which hereto none of our models or theories predict, yet repeated tests do not falsify it.
Simulation Hypothesis intrinsically means you cannot identify the gap between your map and the territory, since the territory is just another representation. Nor does it explicitly and specifically identify things which we would expect to be true but aren’t: again, because everything would continue to appear as it always has been. So it offers not value there.
Simulation Hypothesis isn’t taken seriously not because it can’t be true—so when you see green I see red—but that you can predict no difference in my or your behavior from knowing this. So what?
But we can. This sort of “epiphenomenal spectrum inversion” is not possible in humans[1], because human color perception is functionally asymmetric (e.g. the “just noticeable difference” between shades of a hue is not invariant under hue rotation, nor is the shape of identified same-color regions or the size of “prototypical color” sub-regions).
We can hypothesize aliens whose color perception works in such a way that allows for epiphenomenal spectrum inversion, but humans are not such.
But that surely just describes the retina and the way light passes through the lens (which we can measure or at least make informed guesses based on the substances and reflectance/absorbtion involved)? How do you KNOW that my hue isn’t rotated completely differently since you can’t measure it—my experience of it? The wavelengths don’t mean a thing.
Absolutely not.
What I am talking about has very little to do with “wavelengths”.
Example:
Consider an orange (that is, the actual fruit), which you have in your hand; and consider a photograph of that same orange, taken from the vantage point of your eye and then displayed on a screen which you hold in your other hand. The orange and the picture of the orange will both look orange (i.e. the color which we perceive as a hybrid of red and yellow), and furthermore they will appear to be the same orange hue.
However, if you compare the spectral power distribution (i.e., which wavelengths are present, and at what total intensity) of the light incident upon your retina that was reflected from the orange, with the spectral power distribution of the light incident upon your retina that was emitted from the displayed picture of that same orange, you will find them to be almost entirely non-overlapping. (Specifically, the former SPD will be dominated by light in the ~590nm band, whereas the latter SPD will have almost no light of that wavelength.)
And yet, the perceived color will be the same.
Perceptual colors do not map directly to wavelengths of light.
I’m not sure what I’m meant to be convinced by in that Wikipedia article—can you quote the specific passage?
I don’t understand how that confirms you and I are experiencing the same thing we call orange. To put it another way, imagine a common device in Comedy of Errors: we are in a three-way conversation, and our mutual interlocutor mentions “Bob” and we both nod knowingly. However this doesn’t mean that we are imagining “Bob” refers to the same person, I could be thinking of animator Bob Clampett, you could be thinking of animator Bob Mckimson.
Our mutual interlocutor could say “Bob has a distinctive style”—now, assume there is nothing wrong with our hearing. We are getting the same sentence with the same syntax. Yet my mental representation of Bob and the visual style will be different to yours. In the same way that we could be shown the same calibrated computer screen which displays the same image of an orange, of a banana, we may appear to say “yep that orange is orange” “yep, that banana is a pale yellow”—but how do you know that my mental representation of orange isn’t your purple. When ever I say “purple” I could be mentally experiencing your orange, in the same way that when I heard “Bob” I’m making reference to Clampett not Mckimson?
I’ll certainly change the analogy if you can explain to me what I’m missing… but I just don’t understand.
For an argument against the sim hypothesis see https://lorenzopieri.com/sim_hypothesis/ or the full article https://philpapers.org/rec/PIETSA-6 (The Simplicity Assumption and Some Implications of the Simulation Argument for our Civilization).
In a nutshell:
0- Suppose by absurd that we are in a simulation.
1- We are equally likely to be in one of the many simulations.
2- The vast majority of simulations are simple [see paper to understand why this is reasonable].
3- Therefore, we are very likely to be in a simple simulation.
4- Therefore, we should not expect to observe much complexity.
5- But we do observe complexity, therefore we are very unlikely to be a simulation.
Humanity gets to choose whether or not we’re in a simulation. If we collectively decide to be the kind of species that ever creates or allows the creation of ancestor simulations, we will presumably turn out to be simulations ourselves. If we want to not be simulations, the course is clear. (This is likely a very near-term decision. Population simulations are already happening, and our civilization hasn’t really sorted out how to relate to simulated people.)
Alternatively, maybe reality is just large enough that the simulation/non-simulation distinction isn’t really meaningful. Yudkowsky’s “realityfluid” concept is an interesting take on simulation-identities. He goes into it in some depth both in the Ultimate Mega-Crossover and in Planecrash.
Bostrom’s argument may be underappreciated. You might like Roman Yampolskiy’s work if you’re deeply interested in exploring the Simulation argument.