Columbia Professor: 50/50 odds

Posted on by

In an influential 2003 paper, University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom laid out the possibility that our reality is a computer simulation dreamed up by a highly advanced civilization. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three propositions must be true:

 

  1. Civilizations usually go extinct before developing the capability of creating reality simulations.
  2. Advanced civilizations usually have no interest in creating reality simulations.
  3. We’re almost certainly living inside a computer simulation.

Now, Columbia University astronomer David Kipping took a hard look at these propositions, also known as Bostrom’s “trilemma,” and argued that there’s essentially a 50-50 chance that we are indeed living in a simulation, Scientific American reports.

 

Kipping collapsed the first two propositions into one, arguing that they both would result in the same outcome — we are not living inside a simulation.
https://futurism.com/columbia-professor-50-percent-chance-simulation

 I am OK with 50/50, unless a simulation actually becomes possible, anywhere in the future of our planet, then it becomes almost certain.
Destroy technology to stop it happening?
No, that would only stop us from making a simulation within our simulation.

Art and Prescience

Posted on by
I think I have just solved the pyramids and Shakespeare, with the same theory. It might take many years to explain it properly. It involves the same simulation (us) running repeatedly, tweaked by some people knowing a little about what happened last time it ran.
 

Many artists, especially songwriters, have said that it just came to them, fully formed, all at once.

I know this as well. My best ideas are never laboured – they just pour out of me without thought – as if I am copying them from elsewhere.

If we live in a simulation that is a rerun but allows some people to tap into what it important from the future (coming from the last time the same simulation was run) – then we can get a feedback effect.

Example:

Shakespeare in Run One writes a play. It is well received, so well received that all of England knows his name.

In Run Two, Shakespeare, with the gift of prescience, gets the notion that he is writing a great play. That emboldens him to make it more of what it would be otherwise. It becomes even more successful in Run Two.

In Run Three, the feedback effect continues. All Shakespeare gets is an inkling of its potential, a spark felt from the future. It emboldens him to make the play more x. The play is still a hit, but not as much as Run Two.

Run Four, and Shakespeare only feels the future from Run Three. No matter how it manifests itself, the future feedback changes the play, somehow.

Some artists feel the future so well, and are so good at their art, that every Run causes that art to get better again.

We might be in Run Seventy Four, and we are baffled. How could Shakespeare write such amazing plays that nobody has come close to matching since?

Shakespeare had an advantage – he was there right at the beginning of his type of art – when it first became available to all. Consequently, his feedback effect is from many more years than subsequent artists can have, because they came later. First mover advantage x feedback effect.

In Run One Hundred and Nine, Shakespeare could be a religion…

This first mover advantage x feedback effect could explain curiosities like the oldest Egyptian pyramids being the best ones.

Or Michelangelo.

Crash the Simulation

Posted on by

Computer programs can crash, and we might be inside a computer program.

So how do we crash it?

Over at Scientific American they argue that we can overload the system by creating our own simulations:

The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process. And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole. If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.

To me this fails because we have our own real world constraints of computing power and storage to deal with first. We would need unlimited computing power and storage here to stack overflow the system that runs our simulation.

My personal theory is that quantum mechanics, where we can only tell the status of a particle if we observe it, is an indicator of resolution limits of out simulation. Maybe if we observe enough quantum particles at once, we will either crash the system, or quantum mechanics will start acting differently, proving we are in a simulation.

Then there is the impossible to answer ethical question – is it wrong to crash the simulation? If we are not “real”, then no harm done. But if we experience life or even consciousness, despite not being real, should that be protected or even sacred?

Breaking the simulation would be like death, I expect. Once you achieve it, you’ll never know what comes next.

But if there is a restore point, would we as conscious individuals experience that reboot, or would be cease to exist?

Randonauting starts now

Posted on by

Because of my autism, which has a preference for routine, I deliberately invite randomness into my life, forcing me out of my comfort zone, and helping me grow as a person.

Randomness has been a bigger part of my life than you would imagine, because decades ago I read The Dice Man, and even today I carry a die in my pocket. Several times a week my lunch is decided randomly, but I have also made major life decisions with dice.

This is all good, except nothing is truly random. If our journey is already preordained, than rolling a die is part of that. Many philosophers have put a lot of thought into this.

So I have stumbled across http://randonauts.com/guide.html which tries to screw up the simulation we live in by sending people to random locations they have never been to before, and never would otherwise. And they use quantum randomness, which they think gets around the preordained aspect.

Meanwhile, I often go on patrol, like a vigilante super hero would (and, yes, I do it more when I have been watching a show like Daredevil). While I try to choose random journeys, they aren’t really random. I suspect that I am not meant to encounter crime in my life.

So by using the Randonaut bot on patrol nights… let’s see what happens!

I don’t have a selfie stick, but this seems like a fair representation of what I am hoping for:

Infinity in Pi

Posted on by

I love this idea from Clifford Pickover:

“Somewhere inside the digits of pi is a representation for all of us — the atomic coordinates of all our atoms, our genetic code, a coding of our motions and all our thoughts through time, all our memories…. Given this fact, all of us are alive, and hopefully happy, in pi. Pi makes us live forever. We all lead virtual lives in pi. We are immortal.”

It is similar to the whole idea of infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare, but exisiting in a single irrational number.

Pickover’s idea is that we must be immortal, because every moment of our existence, rendered numerically, exists within Pi. The only argument against this is perhaps the universe has aspects that cannot be described with numbers. Prove that, and living in a simulation becomes impossible.

 

Who Is Who?

Posted on by

westworld-extra-0

In video games, especially first person shooters, there are players, and there are non-player characters (NPCs) – computer-generated folk who flesh out the story but they are run via AI, and aren’t being played by a real person.

If the world as we know it is one big simulation, then one of the questions that must be asked is who are the players, and who are the NPCs?

The first possibility is that we are all players. That fits quite well because most people think all people are just people.

The second possibility is that we are all NPCs – and we are merely pawns in a simulation being run for unknown reasons.

Neither of those possibilities are worthy of pursuit, because ultimately the simulations are no different for us than if we were in a reality.

The third possibility is that some are and some aren’t. So who is who?

I presume I am a player, because an NPC would probably be programmed to not question their reality, otherwise the simulation loses its focus. (Yes, there is the possibility that the focus is seeing if NPCs can work out they are in a simulation…)

I also presume that real players are the minority. That is because NPCs exist to flesh out a scenario in a FPS video game, because it is easier to program and more economical to have it that way.

Historically there have been some very different individuals who have “stirred things up” or advanced the simulation somehow. Think Buddha, Jesus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Einstein etc. They stand out like a sore thumb and suggest to me that they were introduced when the simulation stagnated, that they are players with special privileges. You could argue that the only reason we have societies focussed on “progress” is because there is no point running a simulation that doesn’t progress.

Aside from them, I have a few ideas about who are players and who are not:

Players

  • Might fight the system / break rules
  • More likely to be keen on physical and mental pleasures, including drug and alcohol addictions
  • Includes anyone on the Autistic scale, or pretty much anyone who could be judged as being defective
  • Singer-songwriters
  • Writers/Poets
  • Rebels and activists, or anyone who takes an individual stance that puts their life in danger

NPCs

Purely from my own observations and totally guesswork

  • Cyclists and rowers – those who do so obsessively
  • Bus drivers – it has occurred to me that nobody knows one
  • Osteopaths – they all seem to be too nice and perfect, unlike GPs
  • People who look the same – not exactly the same but who feel familiar because you have known people almost the same as them
  • Adherents of organised religion
  • Politicians – only about 10% of them seem to have a soul, and the way they talk is surely programmed
  • Actors – ditto
  • Dancers – ditto
  • Classical singers – ditto
  • People who don’t have strong dislikes

Clearly the simulation will be a failure if the Players can tell who the NPCs are. Unless the aim of the game is to prove that we live in a simulation.

Or, just like Westworld the TV show, perhaps the players can beat the system, or hosts.

Whoever cracks this puzzle will be adept at spotting patterns, and perhaps won’t be able to prove them – just like modern AI systems that will just know the answer and not be able to show the path their logic took…

 

 

Is This The Easter Egg?

Posted on by

If we live in a simulation, proving it might be impossible. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to find proof, and not a day goes by without me actively looking for it.

For me the most likely proofs will be either:

a) the simulation’s internal logic breaking down – some customisation that doesn’t ring true

or

b) an easter egg – some little conceit from the designers that nobody is supposed to find

If the designers figured we would never land on Mars, or ever create cameras good enough to see the planet close up, then perhaps they slipped in a serial number?

The original NASA pic is here:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00907/mcam/0907MR0039700340501405C00_DXXX.jpg

I would prefer finding similar on Earth, where it can be visited and beyond dispute.

Virtual Universe 1.0

Posted on by

I’m sure there have been less detailed virtual universes previously, but this one – Illustris – feels like it might lead to better and better representations as time goes on and computing power increases. It looks great (pic above).

The stats:

– 5 years of work
– 3 months of computer run time (2000 years if run on a regular PC)
– 12 billion pixels
– 41,000 galaxies
– 350 million light-years in each direction

Every few years a new group of scientists will build on previous simulations, with the latest technology, and the resolution will improve.

At some stage we will see life begin on numerous simulated worlds…

Family Tree Simulation?

Posted on by

Here’s a new twist on the simulation theory…

In a future where simulations of our world are so precise that telling them apart from the real thing is almost impossible – what if people ran a simulation to investigate/view the calculated lives of their ancestors?

If such a concept took off, with millions of simulations being run, and they were as good as the real thing – the odds of us being one of those simulations is very high.

The original article is at H+ Magazine.

While I think this idea has great merit for a future time when everything is recorded and stored, I can’t see there being enough building blocks to create a simulation of our time that would be a fair reflection of reality, in terms of ancestry.

Photogrammetry

Posted on by

A wave of new games use a technique called photogrammetry to produce digital replicas of the real world. The technique can be used to recreate rooms, objects, streets and even whole cities.

…Photogrammetry works by gathering hundreds of photographs of an object or scene taken from multiple angles and combining them into a 3D model. Common points between photos are joined up to create a basic shell and this virtual object is then skinned with the overlapping images.

“You not only end up with the exact shape of the object but the exact look of the object as it appears in the photos,” says Andrew Poznanski of The Astronauts. The results are so accurate that photogrammetry has been used to improve aerial mapping and forensic analysis of crime scenes. [Source: New Scientist, 12 July 2014]

So, the idea here is that a virtual world can be recreated from still images taken in a real world.

Lots of images, so many that it would probably be obvious that the shots were being taken.

Clearly our current world could not be created using this technique – unless time-travellers brought back cameras and filmed the entirety of our planet without being noticed…

However, given that this technology is now being used, anyone born beyond today has the possibility of living in a world recreated from photographs.