Petal's Corollary To The Bostrom Simulation Argument · 11:15pm Aug 4th, 2016
Petal's Corollary To The Bostrom Simulation Argument
By Petal Chatoyance
1. Unless avoiding pain and seeking pleasure and satisfaction becomes irrelevant, post-human civilizations will primarily create fantastic and heavenly simulations of reality in which to reside in, where all needs are met, and all desires are fulfilled.
2. Unless the fundamental need for novelty, contrast in experience, and avoidance of boredom becomes irrelevant, post-human civilizations will place a special premium on simulated realities that serve these drives even if they should cause suffering.
3. The establishment of horrifically accurate simulations of the chaotic, unpredictable, and experientially authentic pre-Singularity world will occur, in sufficient number to meet the demand of bored or jaded post-human consciousnesses.
So, where do you stand on the original trilemma?
Seems like reasonable assumptions to me.
Seems sound to me.
Anything in particular inspire you to write and post this now, or was it just one of those ideas?
4. Because reality is to a great extent enormous stretches of boredom and/or changeless routine, these realities will be 'Spiced up" by having frequent outrageous interlopers- thereby creating a whole new category of premium Reality Realities™, a Goodman-Toddman-Benchemol Production!
1a: Unless these simulations are being run by non-humans with different value systems, and we're just unfortunate NPCs.
4132336 May be a NPC but I'm not unfortunate. Got and make my own luck. One day I'll be a real level 1 character person and show those non-human PCs that they NEED TO MAKE SURE THE SLEEPERS DON'T AWAKE when they play games with us!
4132222
I consider it possible - it is, after all, rational. It is also a very common thought, in various guises, throughout history - Bostrom isn't necessarily doing anything new, just codifying the concept better. In light of modern technology.
I consider the original Bostrom argument exactly as likely as it is likely that humanity will not destroy technological civilization within the next forty years.
So, my answer equals your own estimate of whether or not humanity wrecks itself and goes cave man again, over the next forty years.
If you are an optimist, then, you are (almost certainly) already within a simulation.
4132282
No Man's Sky is coming out on the ninth. Because it simulates an entire universe through mathematics, many people - such as Hawkings and Musk and Tyson - have shown great interest in it, specifically in relation to the Simulation Argument. Thus, lately, there have been a lot of video essays about all of this, and a common issue is that, if the Bostrom Argument is reasonable at all, why would any future people EVER simulate our world now - because our world now basically sucks. Why ever create sucky realities?
I find this video-blogger counter argument to Bostrom to be utterly lacking in imagination. It's dumb. And with my little corollary above, I offer my why.
I am sooooo hot and wet for No Man's Sky.
It may be meaningless to speculate about the motivations of a civilization capable of creating ancestor simulations, but being a human full of hubris I will try anyways. It seems to me that the most likely member of such a civilization to run such simulations would likely be AIs. If the AI was programed to 'satisfy human values', to use a cliched example, then the motivation to create ancestor civilizations would depend on the exact definition of 'human'. If beings that used to be human, such as the dead, are given any weight at all, and they probably should to account for all sorts of medical situations, then eventually the AI might well command enough resources to make it a net gain to attempt to bring back the dead. That, it seems to me, to be the most likely source of ancestor simulations.
4132474
That is a strangely chilling and existentially disturbing thought. That there may have once, long ago, been beings like us, that lived and died before the Singularity, and that we are best-calculation-reproductions of those lost lives. More than this, perhaps our current existence is the 'cooking' period that generates us - we live simulated lives within a historically accurate reproduction, in order to fully reproduce the original entities that were lost in ages past.
That said, it would still potentially be vastly better than actually being those ancient entities... because, if true, we would have a shot at some form of continuation after simulated death. Presumably.
Even more existentially freaky is that there is a strong argument that, if our minds are identical, or even reasonably representative of those lost ancient entities, we are in fact actually them, remade. From that perspective, it may not precisely matter which side of the divide one was on... though emotionally I cannot buy into that.
4132384
Just to prove how "out of the gaming community" I am, this is first I'd ever heard of No Man's Sky.
On the other hoof, thanks for cluing me in. Looks cool!
4132521 I would find it somewhat amusing if it turned out that many of the claims of traditional religion turned out to be true, but for entirely unrelated reasons.
I think I missed the memo or something, as I'm only half-certain about what this is all about.
4132384
Ah, thanks.
And yeah. Even outside of academic simulations studying how people live in harsh times, video games with dark settings are already a thing. Movies with dark settings are already a thing, for that matter, and setting up a simulation where the events of the movie really (for a given value of really) happen means on-location shoots and really genuine acting without leaving the studio or hiring a single actor. Unless there's some sort of moral or empathic singularity after which we recoil in horror from the idea of anything at all suffering, why wouldn't people make unpleasant realities once given the ability?
Which pretty much restates your corollary, I think.
"I am sooooo hot and wet for No Man's Sky."
I very much hope that it turns out to be at least as good as you're anticipating. :)
4132561
If you speak of what inspired Chatoyance to write this, I don't have links to the video-bloggers, but here's the website of the game. If you speak of the Bostrom Simulation Argument, here are some links about that. Also, here is a pony story by a friend of mine exploring the concept.
4132755
Ah, 'simulated reality'? It's an interesting thought exercise, if nothing else.
Personally, however, I'm content to simply exist at all: Simulated, real, or otherwise.
4132806
That is also a valid view, I think. I've another friend who dismisses the simulation argument as something it's pointless to spend energy thinking about since we almost certainly can't know and almost certainly couldn't do much with the knowledge if we could know.
4132812
I disagree here, actually. A hypothetical revelation like that might motivate enough people to try and 'break' reality, as we know it.
If what we know as reality is truly a mere 'simulation' of some sort, then surely, there must be something capable of 'crashing' it, yes?
Who's to say that any ancestor simulation would necessarily follow the same course that the parent civilization did? IMHO, there's a higher chance that we're in an alternate history simulation than we are in a completely accurate historical sim. After all, if you have the tech to simulate a universe, there's a lot more reasons to set up deliberate points of departure to see what happens, or even just run sims in tandem from a fixed point and seeing what sort of butterfly effect changes accrue than there would be for a straight simulation that everyone knows how it played out, at least in general terms.
4132830 I think its simply a matter of definitions. Those simulations that are an attempt to faithfully recreate the past would be ancestor simulations, other simulations would be called something else. Even if we knew we were in a simulation we still wouldnt know if it was an ancestor simulation or another type.
On the surface it seems like ancestor simulations might be one of the less common types: lives of the occupants are often nasty, brutish and short. Fantasy simulations could also potentially be much more interesting/entertaining. But all that requires some guesswork about the motivations of the creator of the simulations.
I suggested earlier that an AI might value dead humans. One might value potential ones as well. If that was the case then every era in human history would be simulated and re-simulated so that every possible permutation is achieved. This would have the interesting side effect of exponentially increasing the number of simulations with global population. This in turn could explain why we are all alive at this time: there are simply more versions of us alive at this time for us to be. That may be some form of anthropic principle though.
4132818
That, also, is a valid idea, I think, but I believe my friend's view is that we wouldn't be able to do such a thing.
Even if there is something capable of crashing it, depending on the scale of the simulation, causing a crash might require, say, piloting multiple galaxies around deep space. If the entire universe could be broken by something as small as the actions of even an entire one-planet civilization, it seems likely that it would have already happened and been patched. Unless, of course, the situation is something like the universe as we see it actually being a skybox and Voyager 1 is in the process of going off the map. On a smaller scale, humans might be big enough to matter to that degree. That would also suggest, though, that disruptions are likely to be caught and fixed earlier and easier, since there's less to monitor.
There's a story I want to recommend here, but unfortunately the fact that it's relevant is a pretty big spoiler... Hm. Well, spoiler tags, and you (or other people reading this comment) can make up your own mind:
I.D. - That Indestructible Something, published on this very website by this very Chatoyance
4132521 , 4132882
There are a lot of implications of this line of thinking.
What if the AIs involved not only want to reproduce but enhance the lives of virtual humanity?
What if they have decided to undertake of whole slew of such simulations, designed to lead one individual intelligence down down some path of personal happiness? (Like the shards in FIO).
What if multiple lives were being lived by each individual in order to guide their "pattern" along some intended development path? (Like reincarnation in Bhuddism - by the way, this meshes very well with the Bhuddist interpretation of the soul, which is not the usual western view of if being the same as the conscious sense of self, and bringing this into the sphere of Bronydom), what if the intended destination is essentially, Equestria? (Unlike in FiO where each individual's shard is shaped to the inhabitant's values, not the other way round.)
In these cases, would there be any way to differentiate them from the standard religious cosmologies?
In addition to rule three: ...and they start their own long way to their own singularity. And thus, the chain (or, more likeably, a tree) of worlds will grow indefinite.
4132926
Incapable with our current level of understanding? Yes.
But at one point or another, the same impossibility could have been said for flight, reaching space, and deep-sea exploration. Humanity has already defied those so-called 'limits', and created working solutions to those problems anyway.
Crashing reality, in theory, may be as simple as discovering how it 'really' works, then finding where its functions are 'weakest', then exploiting that weakness to crash the 'system'. I'm speaking hypothetically, of course, but that's just how I'd look at it, in that scenario.
4133584 It happens all the time, but the M.U.N.D.I.S. system has a little better resource of stability, than win-vista. When the glithes appear, we usually call its "magic" or "UFO" or "Out-of-body expirience", or else. You know, two absolutely similar black cats and so on... Our world also have a signs of using a procedure levels generator (and i don't mean honest Dwarf-Fortress-like process of geology+history, in fact, DF there are MORE honest than reality), the garbage from obsolete world-versions like un-working (anymore) spell books and artifacts. It also based on a strange long-term memory hardware, it never loses anything, but oftenly aberrate it. Like broken hologram... or living brain. Maybe it is even a brain of pony, why not... Really crazy one, i'd said.
4133661
...You lost me here.
4133584
Sure, sure, but I expect that crashing the universe, actually finding, reaching, and exploiting that weakness, is probably a lot more difficult than any of those three. And that's before adding in that humanity seems unlikely to be united on the "let's see if we can cause the end of the world" project.
4133661
It actually happening all the time and just being quickly handled is another possibility, yes.
4134063
And this is where I point you towards the Cold War. Among other things, that period bore witness to over 30 years worth of nuclear weapons testing, many of which resulted in harmful, radioactive fallout being accidentally spread to civilian areas. Such testing was conducted by members of the United Nations, and by members of the now-dissolved Warsaw Pact: The United States and the former Soviet Union were the largest and most active testers, by far, during that period.
I dunno about you, but the participants of those nuclear tests seemed rather 'united' on that endeavour. Even after the effects of nuclear fallout and radioactive contamination became more well-known, it didn't seem to slow them down. Even with the knowledge that, a full-scale nuclear war would probably render Earth uninhabitable by us—and most known forms of life—for a very long time.
Motivating an organized group of people to accomplish an impossible goal—or to solve an 'unsolvable' problem—is more than likely to result in the group actually succeeding, no matter how impossible the goal might have seemed at the time. Such things seem almost inherent to humans, for better and for worse.
4134114
Hmm, fair point about the Cold War; with that in mind, it's a lot more likely than I was thinking. It still seems to me, though, that it's a pretty small minority of cases in which that sort of balance of power would arise.
4134445
The fact that it's still—theoretically—possible is worth committing to the concept being discussed here, I'd think.
While I can't offer anything wrt Bostrom up there (as this is the first I've heard of it), I can however state one emphatic truth:
No Man's Sky + VR = paradise. Throw in eventual uploading, and... well <3
4134730
Well, a lot of extremely unlikely things are still theoretically possible. I'm not saying that you can't discuss it if you want to, though, of course.
4135035
Personally, the only use I'd have for VR, is as a method to indulge in activities that would carry serious, fatal, or catastrophic consequences if attempted in reality: War, violence, gratuitous property damage, murder, etc. In VR, all of those can be undone with a simple 'reset' function, something that real life utterly lacks.
4135220
I guess I was just making my point and position clear. For the most part, I usually focus on what I can perceive with my physical senses. If I cannot perceive something, then it often boils down to one or more of the following reasons:
• It doesn't exist, or it sits outside of our particular Universe.
• It exists beyond the detection ability of unaided human senses (microscopic, outside the 'visible light' spectrum, etc).
• I lack the required physical nerve endings to perceive it.
• I lack a coherent 'focus' to understand what it is that I'm trying to perceive (like having a reference point to filter out 'junk' sensory data).
You can probably tell that I'm firmly rooted in a 'physical' reality.
4135304
"I guess I was just making my point and position clear."
No problem.
"For the most part, I usually focus on what I can perceive with my physical senses. If I cannot perceive something, then it often boils down to one or more of the following reasons:
• It doesn't exist, or it sits outside of our particular Universe.
• It exists beyond the detection ability of unaided human senses (microscopic, outside the 'visible light' spectrum, etc).
• I lack the required physical nerve endings to perceive it.
• I lack a coherent 'focus' to understand what it is that I'm trying to perceive (like having a reference point to filter out 'junk' sensory data)."
I'm afraid that I'm not sure how this is germane.
"You can probably tell that I'm firmly rooted in a 'physical' reality."
Hm. I don't think that I'd have thought of that, on my own, from what you've said, I'm afraid. I don't think I'd assume the opposite, either; I just don't think I'd have assigned you a position on that spectrum. I hope you don't mind.
edit: Part of that may be because the existence of the spectrum... fits somewhat awkwardly in my worldview? I tend to have a very broadly-encompassing definition of "physics". Therefore, the spectrum is less about my own categorization and more about those used by others.
4134063
I've heard that when you crash the universe, it gets replaced by one that's even more bizarre and inexplicable.
I've always been baffled by any boredom argument in the context of a high tech society. We have effective boredom treatments right now. A popular one is legal in Colorado.
4135437
"I've heard that when you crash the universe, it gets replaced by one that's even more bizarre and inexplicable."
:)
I found something today, something potentially tangentally relevant by Cheyenne Wright written in June:
It's not one I'd considered, and I'm not sure how well it'll hold up when I think about it. But I thought it might be worth bringing up here.
4138498
I have spent the majority of my life considering that, in one form or another, as a possibility to explain the world.
There's an early novella by Pat Cadigan called Mindplayers where many people take the inverse approach. They use technology to view and alter their minds. Rather than make different worlds, they explore the same world with different personas. In a weird way, it's a mirror image of Total Recall. Starts with paranoid schizophrenia, but the story is about an honest career.
4138498 That makes a LOT of sense, unfortunately. Perhaps more than my own theory that we're scary bad-guy aliens developed for someone's fictional universe. Like we're someone else's Orcs, or Kzinti, or Klingons, or something ...
Here's a fun little thought chain for you:
If you're simulating a world, then it would make sense to optimize the performance of the simulation in order to get results faster.
One of the most effective techniques in improving the performance of virtual spaces -- well-known to anyone who's built a 3D renderer -- is to focus resources on the things being inspected and divert them away from more incidental things. This is why occlusion culling is faster than the naive painter's algorithm, and why mipmaps and other level-of-detail scaling functions are useful.
Probably the most philosophically profound results of scientific research is the discovery of the observer effect, which applies all the way down to the quantum level -- in fact, the smaller the detail you're studying is, the more powerful the observer effect is: The act of observing a phenomenon itself changes the results.
If we live in a simulation, then we may never find a Grand Unifying Theory because there ISN'T one: the macro-scale phenomena that can be predicted by relativity (which is, all things considered, a fairly simple and elegant theory) are simulated by a completely different algorithm than the micro-scale phenomena that quantum theory attempts to predict, and those quantum-scale effects ONLY HAPPEN when something is paying enough attention for it to make a difference!
(Note I say "something" -- "someone" implies consciousness, but quantum effects in a silicon wafer have a direct impact on modern computing technology that persist even when you don't have atomic-scale microscopy pointed at it.)
The quantum limits of silicon-based computation may in fact be related to hitting the minimum resolution of the simulation engine.
It's great to see you posting more Blogs. At this point it's all I hear from you, and I'm glad you're well. ^.^
I read that first part and it inspired an odd thought in me. Let me just copypaste it first...
"Unless avoiding pain and seeking pleasure and satisfaction becomes irrelevant, post-human civilizations will primarily create fantastic and heavenly simulations of reality in which to reside in, where all needs are met, and all desires are fulfilled."
What makes you think that avoiding pain and seeking pleasure and satisfaction won't become irrelevant in post human civilizations? I mean, maybe for the space amish there'll still be humans, and there will probably be 'fishbowl humans' like pets or preservations. But I would think that for posthumans who had completely mastered their bodies and minds that avoiding pain and seeking pleasure and satisfaction WOULD become irrelevant.
Pain is ephemeral, and it's mostly just the body's way of provoking a reaction out of you to bad stimulus. When you've got a posthuman body, it's probably durable and replaceable enough to not require pain anymore. Maybe just a message like you get in No Man's Sky "Hey the sole of your foot is sustaining heat damage. Just FYI." and you can ignore it if you want 'cause it's not serious damage, and you can repair or replace it easily.
Pleasure is the scary thing. I really worry that we'll have posthumans falling into the hedonism trap where you just push your brain's pleasure button infinitely. I've read someone's story before featuring beings that did two things to that effect, they pressed the pleasure button and maximized the potential for pleasure. They were basically just eggs that would never hatch.
I figure post humans will have to find some other meaning of life besides something as organic as pleasure and pain. I think they'll come up with their own unique reasons for existing, like a project or goal, or a purpose. This'll lead to bizzare, incompatible personalities, and 'friendly wars' where nobody dies but they try to claim as much of whatever resources exist for their own purposes. That's just an idea though.