Simulationism
From Telkoth.net
I've always thought that we're almost certainly part of a computer simulation, but I only recently really started thinking about its implications.
During a visit to Pennsylvania with a friend, we had a lot of time to talk about weird philosophical things, causing me to think about my own ideas in ways I had never considered...
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[edit] The Options
To recap:
- Humans will one day be able to create a simulation of a universe that evolves intelligent life.
- Humans will be unable to create such a simulation.
If possibility 1 is the case - if we can create a simulation - then we can create many simulations, and our simulations should also be able to create simulations. The number of these simulations would greatly outnumbers the number of "real" universes, forcing to accept that it is more likely that we are in a simulation ourselves than not. This is Simulationism.
It is important to note that the simulated universe need not reflect the "parent" universe, however it seems reasonable to expect that some will.
Possibility 2 implies that we will never be able to fully understand and describe the universe, and that such understanding is necessary to create intelligent life.
If, for example, a spirit or soul is necessary for human-like intelligence, and the spirit or soul is, for whatever reason, completely beyond our ability to understand or describe, then we would not be able to create such a simulation.
Even in this case, however, the possibility that we are in a simulation is not excluded, however there would not be a strong argument for it, either.
Also note that it may be possible for there to be things beyond our ability to understand (such as the spirit or soul) without preventing us from simulating intelligent life. The intelligent life we created, however, may not resemble our own.
[edit] Possibilities Within Simulationism
But anyway, assuming we're in a simulation:
[edit] Determinism vs. Non-determinism
- The universe is deterministic - the same inputs always yield the same outputs. If you rewound time to any point in the past then hit play, everything that happened the first play-through would happen again, exactly the same.
- The universe is non-deterministic - the same inputs may yield different outputs.
Determinism at first seems like the only option in a simulated universe. Computers themselves are, after all, deterministic, and even random number generators in computers are predictable, if you know the algorithm being used.
However: the world outside a computer is not deterministic, or, more accurately, even if it is deterministic, from the point of view of the simulation, it may not be.
[edit] Examples of Non-determinism
- A random number generator seeded by information from outside the computer - the ambient temperature, electromagnetic fields, the value of a company's stocks - could all make a simulated universe non-deterministic. Even if the parent universe is deterministic, we may not have access to enough information about it in order to predict its effects on our own universe.
- It is possible that the universe is deterministic, but allows for "human" input from the parent universe. This doesn't mean that there has to be an interface for creating life and causing supernovae (although that's also possible); there could be programmers who are occasionally updating the simulation, for example.
[edit] Pausing, Saving, Quitting, Loading
If we are simulated on a computer anything like the computers we are familiar with, then it's very possible that our simulation can be paused, saved, loaded, etc, and in all cases, we would never notice. We might also imagine a situation where the simulation's servers experience a hardware failure, causing someone to have to load us up again from a backup taken some time in the past...
If the universe is deterministic, a backup will play out the exact same way - there would be data loss - but if our universe is non-deterministic (including the possibility that a random number generator gets re-seeded when the simulation is loaded), then some events would not repeat, and the course of our universe would be slightly altered.
Again, not that we would notice.
Necessarily...
It would be interesting if, at some time in the future, we come to understand a random number generator at play within our universe, and predict it... only to have it abruptly change because our universe was quit and restarted (for whatever reason). If our economies and industries came to depend on our ability to predict this random number generator, then such events would actually have real consequences for us.
I'm now picturing us petitioning for a software update, to save the state of the random number generator with our universe's backups :)
