Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? (2003)

For example, I believe that conciousness can transcend to anything. We could just be some collective consciousness. When we are born we have no memory of our previous life. When we die we have no memory of our current one. So this suggest to me that it is entirely possible that we are continually living in different bodies, different animals, different entities that collectively make up reality.

For instance, I learned that even animals take drugs to get high when they are stressed. That they feel affection and love just like humans. This tells me that our conciousness is overrated. It also suggests to me that it could entirely be possible that we live in some giant cess pool of conciousness, some network of consciousness that is constantly reproducing and dying like cells.

so if our concousness lives through different bodies over time, then it is entirely possible that the current reality we live is also a transient state of being.

it scares me how I came to know this and I'm not even on drugs or have done drugs in a long time.

element11• 11 years ago

I really like this comment. There is a deepness in our lives that everyone can feel, a love that transcends everything. Such a thing can't be simulated.

BuckRogers2• 11 years ago

Care to explain? This sounds like wishful thinking. When love is merely a chemical reaction and all of your emotions are, why can't this be simulated in some way?

vikiomega9• 11 years ago

Or that the biological imperative that we share is common across all animals. The fact that drugs were found by said animal implies trial and error. But then again, what constitutes a drug? In a world where drugs that induce sensation of the level of say cocaine were absent, some other milder drug would apply as a suitable substitute to relieving stress.

But really, I can't fathom how you connect collective consciousness to having no memory of a previous life or the one that follows. Apologies if I'm gravely mistaken.

curiously5• 11 years ago

collective consciousness I like to think of it as the internet. everyone starts with a clean html web page. they get filled up with stuff. everyone has a different webpage. then they get taken down. or they spawn new ones when two web pages combine. then the new ones get filled stuff.

further down this road, we have access to whatever was written about us, we of course have no recollection or unable to see or understand what our predecessors have felt other than reading about it, but the bigger picture is that our internet has gotten bigger, our offsprings will inherit even a larger version of it and so on.

the individual experience has no memory because it can't, but it inherits the greater consciousness, the greater collection of wisdom and knowledges of generations and generations before it.

whether this means we transcend through multiple lives like hindus or buddhists will argue or whether you go to hell or meet 72 virgins, is useless.

our collective consciousness is a result of myriad of simulations conducted by ourselves and on this planet, in this universe, we do not live in some Matrix 2.0, our species as a whole has been able to evolve and reach our state through our entire human existence, our very lives are simulations that provide input to the collective, good ones, bad ones, towards a state where we are so efficient, so intelligent, so enlightened that further improvement is impossible OR series of events create catastrophic extinction of our biological representation and new ones emerge on this planet or another where the whole process will begin again.

man I'm so scared by all this shit.

me_myself_and_I• 11 years ago

I pretty much reached this same conclusion :S I'm constantly tormented how I'm not conscious about 7 billion people's mind but I am of mine. Why it happened till now? Can it be happening infinitely? Like if you play a video, then you pause it for billions of years, then play it again. If we were able to watch the video cutting the part where it was paused, it would look like it was never paused in the first place.

Maybe life is like that. I'll die, in a couple of billions of years, or other universes what I perceive as my consciousness will wake up (independently of the body form).

If I was told to close my eyes, and I'll get some drugs to fall asleep, then during that time someone is going to make a 100% exact copy of myself, where would my current consciousness wake up? In which bed, if me and my copy are in the same room?

How someone could convince my copy, he is not the original one? (if, for example, there is no video of the procedure). Would that prove there is no real consciousness as we perceive it and we are merely a byproduct of the laws of the universe?

Why did I become conscious in the first place? What if my homosapien body had never born?

Can it be that there is just one single consciousness but every creature experiences it on their own way? (like an OS being installed in different hardware. After some time they would look different, just like we all have different personalities and experiences, etc).

There is an hypothesis that says there is just one single electron in the universe, but all the matter is a kind of representation of it in time. That would explain why a positron and electron would annihilate each other.

I'm not an expert whatsoever on physics. I'm just curious of my own existence :)

curiously5• 11 years ago

can you feel consciousness like I feel mine? I think you can, and I also think you don't. No one consciousness is same, it's like fingerprints, it's totally unique but the same components are there, just different patterns, different states, but ultimately the same.

Looking at all the people on earth, do we as a whole represent some ulterior ocean of consciousness that has passed the test of time and evolution as the dominant species on this planet, and our offsprings may continue to improve and build our ocean of conciousness so that one day it may be rid of filth and waste, nothing but pristine, clean, transparent body of water?

Could it be that our consciousness, our mind, can exist beyond our own species? Even our own planet and beyond? That we are all one in this race and struggle, that the pluses and minuses, at the end of the day all balance out and we are left with nothing permeable but something that is ephemeral?

What if everyone earth stopped what they are doing and just did nothing, just began letting go of our daily activities and stresses, just let go of our firm grasp of what our version of reality is, what would we see? What would everyone eventually see what it is that we are fighting for, what is it about our existence that requires so much searching, when in fact our ancestors have already stopped doing some time ago, eventually being kick started again time to time in a period of spiritual famine?

I only have questions, just like our scientific modeling of our reality and universe raises unanswerable questions. Is it wrong to marry the view of what actually is, has been to what needs to be according to a civilization that begun relatively short time ago? Is it fair or even wise to search for answers with precision that will fail with the same level of accuracy for those that practice this method?

I just can't believe I'm uttering these things without drugs. I think even then I wasn't able to reach this level of depth.

Udo6• 11 years ago

For example, I believe that conciousness can transcend to anything.

That's a religious argument unconnected to the question of whether our universe is simulated or not.

When we are born we have no memory of our previous life.

This presumes there is such a thing as previous lives to begin with, something for which no scientific evidence exists. Barring that, the problem becomes the same as the question "why does a computer program I just wrote have no memory of its previous existence?".

So this suggest to me that it is entirely possible that we are continually living in different bodies

Step back a moment from this logical jump and try to imagine how someone without your spiritual background might parse this conclusion. It comes from out of nowhere, some might even say it's the opposite of what one would expect to follow an observation like "When we die we have no memory of our current one.".

That they feel affection and love just like humans. This tells me that our conciousness is overrated.

These observations about animals are not new, in fact most pet owners are likely to see this as a trivial truism.

so if our concousness lives through different bodies over time

Another non sequitur. This observation doesn't follow from your chain of arguments, it follows from a premise you started out with.

then it is entirely possible that the current reality we live is also a transient state of being

Everything is transient, our existence is as ephemeral as the configuration of our environment - this fact does not in itself mean anything. It sounds like you're reserving a special place for humans or intelligent life in general, but in actual fact the universe doesn't care about the existence of life one way or the other. The presumption that consciousness is a basic physical force constitutes a fundamental category error, it runs counter to everything we know about physics.

In any case, this has no bearing on whether the universe is simulated or not: the basic building blocks of reality do not make special exceptions for brains. There is absolutely no expected difference between a mind running within a computer-like system and a mind running on the "real" universe, whatever that may be.

curiously5• 11 years ago

I really don't think a logical, academic review of what I think the reality is of much use when in fact the very subject of what we are discussing is so strange and hard to fathom in our heads but I'll play.

to me, if we were to believe that our our idea of ourselves is actually not unique, that we are just a very large variation of the basic properties of consciousness (something we can't really quite put a finger on), then it can be said that we are in a simulation, for the same reason, you dream, you daydream.

Our brain frequently runs simulations during these period of rest and animals do as well. Why is it that we can be so convinced of our dreams as if it were real? Why is it that they by themselves have no real beginning or an end, sort of like our own existence? What if your life is just an episode of a dream? Who's running the simulations? Why is it not just one continuous flowing state? Why does it need to be disparate and seemingly discontinuous?

My view is that this is actually the most efficient state a simulation can reach. If it was one giant cesspool of initial variables in one bubble it would be pretty obvious for the inhabitants of the simulation to figure out the walls quickly and before long question what's outside of it. The same reason that we can realize we are dreaming and experience lucid dreaming. But, we can't for the love of god find this wall in our own reality because our brain through years of evolution by previous consciousness, have been designed to find safety in numbers, fight or flight reflexes, gather or horde scarce goods. Only when our innate animal like instincts are squelched can we experience reality in it's rawest and purest form, something buddhist tibetian monks often frequent, a higher form of understanding where they are able to feel the whole range of human experiences without actually doing them because they realize that it's actually our own consciousness that trap us into realities that we create for ourselves.

Knowing that we can and create simulations of our own through dreaming, out of will, help of substances or even meditation, it shows that at the outer level our reality can be fluid and can take many different shapes or forms.

In the end, our own intelligence, our ability to find patterns out of chaos, traps us into thinking that something that doesn't follow a rigid set of rules or lack of data automatically mean that they don't exist, when in fact, such narrow mindedness can only come from the choice to view reality and oneself with the same set of practices used in laboratory or whatever environment where such mentality has been useful.

I will say that even the latter situation is actually a simulation of it's own, but much much worse kind, it's created and rigorously maintained by other consciousnesses aimed at supressing all other views.

Quantumn theory suggests that we live in our own simulation create by us, religious texts also suggests the same thing, you shape your own reality but at the end of the day, it's lacking the same solid walls as the one you create, it must be that the most efficient simulation is also one where every possible permutation is achievable, that our collective human race is literally a race towards achieving some enlightened status as a whole, that through experiencing life in the myriad of lives, that our collective consciousness will improve and become efficient, that it outlives all things biological, it continues beyond even our own planet, maybe we are truly one with the universe and everything it represents, we are simply the creation, not of an external super intelligent aliens, not future versions of us running Matrix 2.0 for shits and giggles but because it simply is the way it is designed, the same way we discover math in our own reality, and how it reveals answers, it must be that we are the simulation, not the simulatees or simulators.

seba_dos13• 11 years ago

If you don't have memory or any other way to link your actual "live" with previous ones, how does the situation where "conciousness" travels between bodies and does not actually differ? What identifies a consciousness A that was in the body X and traveled now to the body Y? How is it different from consciousness B that used to be in the body P and now lives in the body Q? How can you actually link them like that if there's no difference between them, so swapping those two consciousnesses between bodies Y and Q won't make any difference?

logn2• 11 years ago

We could be living in a multi-verse world. That's partly what the LHC experiments are trying to discern. If there are infinitely many universes then I think it would make it less likely we're in a simulation even if we are able to create our own simulation.

throwaway420• 11 years ago

If there are infinitely many universes then I think it would make it less likely we're in a simulation

I'm not sure how this logically follows...why would this make it less likely?

logn2• 11 years ago

Say there are 100 universes. Suppose each universe has 1 in 100 chance of making simulations and if they do they make 100. Your chances then of living in a simulation are ~50%. It's much different than assuming a single universe in which case the advent of simulations almost assures that you're living in one (assuming the author's line of reasoning).

Edit: in summary the pace at which new universes arise could rival or exceed the pace at which simulations could be created.

BuckRogers2• 11 years ago

Would someone care to explain -why- you're downvoting the parent, instead of just downvoting? The idea that there could be more universes than there are universes creating simulations makes sense.

I'm genuinely curious and we must have some silent geniuses downvoting that comment. Instead of downvoting him, please, do go on.

tjradcliffe2• 11 years ago

No: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1220

Or if we are, the universe simulating us has completely different physics from the one we live in, which have to be fully specified before the "argument" becomes remotely plausible.

catshirt2• 11 years ago

"The great thing about the human imagination is that it has no problem imagining contradictions."

ah yes, and science is always free of such contradiction. the author invests so much energy laughing at the simulation theory, only to conclude that he cannot disprove it? considering how much the author apparently hates philosophy, he managed to write a rather philosophical article.

"Or if we are, the universe simulating us has completely different physics from the one we live in"

i kind of feel like, with all due respect, no shit? why explore such profound philosophy within the constraints of science as we know it today?

shawnhermans• 11 years ago

That doesn't prove or disprove anything. The author assumes the simulation would have to simulate the entire known universe at the level of detail we observe. That is absurd. A simulation wouldn't need to simulate the entire universe, just what I am observing at that exact moment.

Think of it is lazy evaluation. The rules are all known, but they are not evaluated until needed. If we have one single person, how hard would it be to simulate every single input to that one person? You wouldn't need to simulate an entire universe to do that.

Going back to what the author had to say, you wouldn't have to simulate the state of every atom at every time. You only need to simulate when it is measured. Interestingly, this syncs up with what we know about the quantum world where measurement causes the state of the wave function to collapse.

Additionally, the author seems to assume the universe exists outside of himself. He seems to trust the measurements and insights of scientific facts I doubt that he has confirmed via his own observation. Even if he did confirm all of them, this still doesn't prove the universe exists outside of what he directly observes with his own senses.

By analogy, imagine you are a character in a video game. The video game doesn't render the entire universe of the game. Only the portion of the game the character is in at that moment. From the character's point of view, the laws are consistent. The character could even try to postulate some universal laws. Try to determine the size of their universe.

I am not saying the philosophers are right or wrong. I'm just saying there is a lot more to the philosophy than the article covers.

tjradcliffe2• 11 years ago

A simulation wouldn't need to simulate the entire universe, just what I am observing at that exact moment.

How do you know this? I've run a lot of simulations, and to get things exactly right anywhere you need to compute everything everywhere. That at least is my experience.

You've simply asserted that that is not the case, doing precisely what I'm critiquing the original argument for: imagining a case where there's no problem, and then asserting that case as a matter of fact.

As to Cartesian skepticism, it isn't even a self-consistent position: you want me to take your argument seriously while simultaneously asserting that I don't even know you exist.

scobar• 11 years ago

Although I disagree with the condescending style, I found your article very interesting and a good argument against this hypothesis. I'm likely out of my depth, so I apologize if my question seems very naive. You said, 'it is overwhelmingly likely that whatever the “most elementary” controllable aspect of reality is, be it strings or something else, it will be able to encode at most a single bit per thing.' What if more variables were considered when deriving meaning from an electron? For example, Up means 1, Down means 0, and the position of that 1/0 relative to other 1s and 0s provides further info, or the time between transitions between 0 and 1 provides further info. Could a single electron then store information about more than 1 elementary particle?

uptown• 11 years ago

I doubt anybody would bother programming Chia Pets in a simulation, so I'm going with no.

odie88• 11 years ago

Just because I was curious: Chia Pet mod for The Sims 1 with over 15k downloads http://www.thesimsresource.com/downloads/7806

catshirt2• 11 years ago

depending on the constraints and circumstances of the simulation and it's parent, maybe the absence of chia pets would trigger some sort of undesirable self-awareness.

like a switch in your dreams that doesn't turn the lights on or off.

tessierashpool• 11 years ago

protip: if you substitute "in a computer simulation" with "inside some dude's dream," you discover a vast amount of prior research on this topic was conducted by everybody who ever smoked their first joint.

hartator• 11 years ago

I think I am the only one who think humans will never manage to build something that complex.

Come on: (1) We still have to use humans for motion capture in order to make 3d realistic. (2) We still haven't come up with an IA to chat with. (3) We still haven't figure out what's the smallest unit in the matter, if matter is a thing.

Udo6• 11 years ago

I think I am the only one who think humans will never manage to build something that complex.

The universe is impossibly large, but it's not fundamentally complex. All complexity is emergent, not built in. The universe may very well run on a few very simple rules of data transformation, like a collection of cellular automata.

I don't think any physicist would argue in favor of the universe's complexity in connection with the simulation idea. In my opinion a better implausibility argument could instead be constructed from the enormous size and the apparent wastefulness of calculating every single simulation tick (which may well be equal to Planck time).

BinaryIdiot• 11 years ago

The reason you're the only one who thinks we can't is because you're limiting the possibility of building something like that with todays technology.

1. I'm not sure this is the case anymore but it certainly makes things easier. Regardless, why do you think 3d motion can't improve?

2. We have some but nothing that is a true AI. Many AI experts think a true AI, most likely modeled after the human brain once better understood, is going to happen in the next 50-100 years [from last I read, I am certainly no expert]. Why do you think this can't happen when most seem to think it eventually will?

3. Every year science makes progress to test, image and discover things that are very small. Right now string theory is a possibility that strings may be smaller than atoms. Why do you think this cannot or will not be either proven or disproven, ever?

egypturnash• 11 years ago

Ah, but how do you know you're not just used to a pale shadow of what REAL motion is outside of the simulation?

hits the bong again

Udo6• 11 years ago

The simulation argument is an interesting intellectual exercise, and I'd charitably expand the definition of such simulations to universes of an artificial nature in general, but it's still just a thought experiment about something which cannot be falsified. Granted, it's a fascinating one, but it shares too many traits with The Invisible Dragon in my Garage to be of profound scientific value.

It's worth taking into account that people tend to have two entirely separate ideas about the nature of any such simulation.

The first one is a Matrix-like universe: a world designed from the ground up to be an illusion specifically for us - a computer program so idiosyncratic as to be utterly implausible, which only cares about deceiving human minds into living in an artificial environment. This is the concept of a computer simulation always invoked by the popular media whenever this subject comes up.

The second one, which is what scientists usually mean, is an actual simulation that merely runs the basic processes of physics from which all the other things in the universe emerge - and these include accidentally, among other things and quite marginally, intelligent life forms such as humans. It's merely an uncaring physics simulation indistinguishable from a "natural" universe.

In the end both of these are scientifically barren concepts. The Matrix is an implausible just-so story with quasi-religious undertones, and it's a concept that exhibits quite a few glaring holes the closer you look at its practical implications - holes which seem like they are in disagreement with daily observation and hence should lend themselves to falsification. The cold physics simulation on the other hand, while it doesn't share the intellectual weaknesses of the Matrix, gets us rapidly to a point where we might ask what difference it makes at all whether the fabric of reality is running on an artificial or "natural" substrate if there is no hope of ever finding out.

tvmalsv• 11 years ago

I don't remember who authored the following, but I thought it was amusing enough years ago to toss it into my interesting-quotes.txt:

I recall reading a science fiction story that involved the first human spaceship to reach the edge of the universe. When they tried to go through they bounced off, it was impenatrable.

Then we cut to 2 higher dimensional beings, and one says, "On that run it took life only 14.7 gigayears to reach the edge."

The other one says, "Great! Let's do another run. Sterilize the medium."

Udo6• 11 years ago

:D That's a very funny story!

When I imagine an intelligent life form simulating the universe, it might as well be a simple creature just pushing little stones from cell to cell across a coordinate system drawn into the sand of an impossibly huge plain, using a few very simple rules about where stones move on every single cell. And when the creature gets to the last stone in the grid, it starts the same thing again from the top.

This is also not my idea, I don't remember where I heard it first. But it's appealing for several reasons. It illustrates that no intelligence is necessary to run the universe. More fundamentally, however, it shows how a higher-dimensional being might very well have no real concept of what goes on in here. ;)

ccvannorman3• 11 years ago

The Matrix is an implausible just-so story with quasi-religious undertones, and it's a concept that exhibits quite a few glaring holes the closer you look at its practical implications

I agree the Matrix argument has significant plot holes, but given that there are an infinite set of conditions in which something analogous to The Matrix could exist that are probably outside the scope of current human understanding, it's not disprovable. (Although you can also say "God isn't disprovable".. but my point is you can't discredit Matrix arguments on implausibility grounds because we don't have the scope to make that judgement.)

what difference it makes at all whether the fabric of reality is running on an artificial or "natural" substrate if there is no hope of ever finding out.

There is always hope of figuring it out given enough time. I see no reason to assume we couldn't "escape" the simulation and enter the next-level-up (which is probably also a simulation, but that's a discussion for a post-simulation-broken-hacker-news thread.)

Udo6• 11 years ago

There is always hope of figuring it out given enough time.

Well, there could be a message embedded into some basic universal structure, left there in case any intelligent life forms might come across it. But other than that, I don't see how any arbitrary phenomenon happening in the universe could possibly tip the scale of plausibility in either direction. Discoveries of computation-like processes have indeed been (ab-)used for that purpose in the past, but people forget that there is no reason to believe this couldn't happen in a natural universe.

I see no reason to assume we couldn't "escape" the simulation and enter the next-level-up

There would be absolutely no difference in "escaping" an artificial universe or a real universe. In both cases, the exact same problems apply. Artificiality in this context doesn't really mean anything.

devnonymous• 11 years ago

  > but it's still just a thought experiment about something 
  > which cannot be falsified.

Well, there's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis#Testing_t... ( http://io9.com/5950543/physicists-say-there-may-be-a-way-to-... )

tiatia• 11 years ago

The Matrix is an implausible just-so story with quasi-religious undertones

Actually, no. The question is simple: Can a universe with a least a few intelligent individuals be simulated? (Grand Auto Theft also does not simulate the whole city but only a selected "view"). The answer to this is probably "yes". But then you have another problem: If a universe can be simulated, it is mathematically FAR FAR more likely that you live in a computer simulation than not since billions of worlds with trillions of individuals are getting simulated.

and it's a concept that exhibits quite a few glaring holes the closer you look at its practical implications

Be my guest and elaborate.

holes which seem like they are in disagreement with daily observation and hence should lend themselves to falsification.

Actually, you are right and wrong here. First, I don't see "disagreement" with daily observations since there is only one known idea how to test the hypothesis. And then you are right, this thesis can be tested:"To avoid stacking (i.e. simulations within simulations), the termination of these simulations is likely to be the point in history when the technology to create them first became widely available, (estimated to be 2050)."

Actually, there is a movie preceding "The Matrix" that is much much better: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070904/

O____________O5• 11 years ago

(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof)

I've always thought this part was, by far, the most likely. It would be unethical to create a simulation in which the simulated beings were sophisticated enough to be self-aware and capable of significant suffering. It's the same thing that's caused me to shift from "I don't believe in god" to "I believe there probably isn't a god". For example, infants have been raped in Africa due to the virgin cleansing myth, and every year thousands of people kill themselves due to unmanageable misery. Not to mention the way that so many people die of "natural" causes, e.g. drowning in their own phlegm only to be revived by hospital staff for another go-around.

ccvannorman3• 11 years ago

It would be unethical to create a simulation in which the simulated beings were sophisticated enough to be self-aware and capable of significant suffering

Well .. is it though?

What if everything is so blissful and boring in the future that people intentionally torture themselves for decades at a time by experiencing "Earth-sim" so that they can build character / enjoy the utopia they've created? Or maybe this simulation is the rehabilitation track for criminals? There are a number of reasons to "suffer" and suffering shouldn't be cast out as unethical because we don't like it in the current context.

O____________O5• 11 years ago

There are a number of reasons to "suffer" and suffering shouldn't be cast out as unethical because we don't like it in the current context.

Please do provide some reasons why raping a day-old newborn infant wouldn't be considered unethical.

swatow• 11 years ago

There's a Greg Egan novel where one character is invited to work to help build such a simulation. The character is shocked that the simulation creator was aware of the issue of suffering, and had plans to minimize suffering in the simulation. They found this more shocking then if the creator hadn't thought of the issue

pcthrowaway3• 11 years ago

By this same argument, wouldn't having children be unethical? (I believe it is by the way)

O____________O5• 11 years ago

I suppose it would be, if you had reason to believe there was a sufficient likelihood of a sufficiently negative outcome. It's probably not a concern for anyone reading this, though.

ccvannorman3• 11 years ago

One of my favorite books, Idlewilde, is about a simulation that we created for just 9 people because the rest died of an incurable disease, and these 9 would need to repopulate the human race. A very good reason to have a simulation in my opinion. The book handles the wakeup in a pretty interesting way.

The best part is nested simulations -- if you're toying around with simulations like Oculus Rift and then you wake up from Earth-sim, it starts to become a game of "where the actual f_k am I really?"

cayblood• 11 years ago

For further exploration of some of the ramifications of this hypothesis, see http://www.new-god-argument.com/

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? (2003)

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