The Simulation hyothesis





Right, I've been meaning to write an interesting blog post and the subject is pretty interesting, could help if you could correct me on anything if I'm wrong. It's also not going to be that great a quality, and I'm sure it will have a few spelling erros. Sorry for this.

Right, so philosophers have always been asking questions about reality and what is real and what can be known to be real. Descartes, a notable philosopher penned the idea of an evil demon who could provide an illusion to the senses, so the victim couldn't know anything beyond what was given to him. Very crude example, but the idea suddenly regained new popularity with another take on the hypothesis that we may be under the influence of an evil genious which was called by some philosophers the Brain-In-A-VAT thought experiment. Basically, out senses are provided to us with electrical signals from the eyes, ears etc. If a genious and computer which was powerful enough could isolate a brain and connect to the right parts of it, sending appropriate electrical signals, the brain could be fooled into believing that it was still in a body, in a famililar environment.

Hopefully that should explain what has taken philosophers decades and centuries to ponder over. But one recent philospher argues that perhaps it's not even philosophically possible but probable that we are in a similar situation, all of us. The name of the philosopher is Nick Bostrom, and he's a professor at Oxford University. Bostrom argues that chances are we are living in a computer simulation, based on a extrapolated data and educated guesses. These are as followed:

Three things will happen:

1. Humanity will destroy itself before it can produce ancestor simulations that can simulate thinking beings.

2.Humanity will have the technology to create simulations but wil refrain from creating them.

3.We are almost certain to be living in a simualation.

Woah! Ancestor simulations! What the hell are they? Well


Are they even possible? Well, a case could certainly be put forward that the technology's possible even if it isn't possible now. We have in a way been creating simulations for a while now. You could say that the first simulation we created was the game Pong. Look now to the Halo series or the newest Grand Theft Auto to see how much we've progressed. You can thank Moore's Law for that. Moore's law essestiantially guesses that the ammoutn of transistors in a chip that you can buty for $1000 doubles every eighteen months. So basically the average computer's power doubles every one and a half years. Some theoriests believe that computing will be so powerful that by 2030 we'll have virtual reality that's almost indistinguishable from real life in terms of the graphics of a computer.

The other thing that some theoriests have estimated is the advancement of artifical intelligence that equals human intelligence by the year 2030. So within a computer we have a mind. Perhaps it will even think like us. Well, going back to our Brain-In-A-VAT senario, what if we engineer the mind so that when subjected to the equivilant of electircal impulses to where it could experience stimulai from the external world, then perhaps we could simulate an environment for it where it couldn't tell the difference between the simulated world and real life.

So how does this imply we're in a simulation? Well the theory is that at first the technology would be costly (both in resources and with money) so only one or two simulations could be created. But as computing power cheapens and becomes more powerful, then more can be created. The supercomputers that were around thirty years ago are now as powerful as an ordinary calculater found in a home. So the supercomputers that produce a simulation at first are like the supercomputers we had thirty years ago: they will become overshadowed by its predesessors in power. Perhaps the computers will be so powerful that anyone with a personal computer can simulate a mind and an internal world for the mind. Potentially billions of simulations will be created. So here's the point: if we're outnumbered by billions of simulations, what makes us sure that we're the first simulation? What makes us so sure that we're the original. Perhaps it's turtles all the way down.

Of course, this depends on many things, like whether Moore's law will continue for the next few decades. But it's interesting definately, and it's probably one of the stonger arguments for a creator of our universe.

So what does this mean for us? Well for one, it means we can go 'Woah man' without having pot, but some people have already started theologising about what this means for us. One guy has suggested we're likely to be deleted by the year 2050. He argues that as soon as we start creating simulations, in order to stop stacking, our creates will delete us. I'm not sold on this idea, why would a creator be so ashamed or in such a hurry to witness such an interesting find in the simualtion. Anyway, the link to the website of the simulation hypothesis can be found here. There are a varity of interesting links on that site. The orginal paper describing the simulation hypothesis can be found here.