We Are Definitely in a Simulation; Also the Simulation Argument is Poorly-Defined With Many Unjustified Assumptions

Periodically I re-write an argument about both the relevance of the simulation argument, as well as its poorly defined nature. This leads to people overextending its meaningfulness and smuggling in other assertions.

First, here's why it's irrelevant - because we're all already in a simulation, with high certainty, just not the one you think. People who lived in the middle ages believed the world was flat and there were dragons and trolls. This is a form of simulation. If you're outraged at this assertion, then tell your definition of a simulation. Full sensory immersion like in the Matrix? Why a sensory-only simulation? While we're using science fiction for our thought experiment - are the robots in Westworld not in simulations? On witnessing any potential epistemological disturbance to their world (e.g. being shown a picture of the late twenty-first century cities) they don't register it, instead saying "it doesn't look like anything to me".

This means that all of us - all of whom have some false beliefs - are in a simulation. An extremist position would be that to have any beliefs at all, even if they are accurately based on prior observation, is to be deluded, because your perception of here-and-now is polluted by past experience. Leaving that aside, pain, pleasure and emotions are entirely contained within nervous systems and do not represent anything in the external world - meta tags at best - and yet they are inextricably part of our experience of the world.

Even assuming we are living in a Matrix-like sensory immersion simulation, and we find some way to detect this and pierce the veil as it were - we would still be in a single, unitary material universe, albeit one with more complicated rules than we realized that led us previously to a distorted understanding. Isn't this what science has already been doing for centuries? The Egyptians thought the sky was a ceiling with holes letting in light from heaven, then we built lenses to pierce the veil of the inadequate model our naked senses had given us.

Second, these arguments often smuggle in simulators with agency. (Here is where we can more clearly see the clear parallels between theology and simulation arguments – always suspicious when familiar outlines re-emerge in high-status, low-data discussions, probably revealing more about the shape of the human mind than the universe that mind inhabits.) Why must there be simulators? Certainly there were no demons actively hiding the Milky Way from us. What we now call a simulation might be a natural feature of the wider universe that has so far tricked our senses.

Third, even assuming simulators - how can you know their nature and intentions? Often an argument is made that if we ever did figure out one way or the other that we're in a simulation, the simulators would adjust things so we forgot. So why are we bothering to talk about this then? (Boy does the discussion start to sound like religion at this point.) It also doesn't follow, at all, that the simulators would not want us to know we are being simulated. Maybe that's the point of the experiment!

And fourth, assuming we can know the nature of the simulators, why assume that they would be palatable to us, or relevant to our choices? There's an obvious track to monotheism's goal to learn and glorify the desires of the one true god, which are assumed to be (curiously) similar to the morals of the worshippers. But we're still arguing whether human morality is generalizeable between humans, much less to hyperintelligent 13th-dimensional squid aliens. They might not care, any more than a human scientist cares about the E. coli in a petri dish. Their sense of morality, if such a concept even applies to them, might be (it seems mostly likely) completely inscrutable to us. It might be grotesque. And again, should the E. coli (or one of your video game NPCs) suddenly figure out your morality, so what? What can they really do for you; what can we do for squid-god? If I had to pick, I would want a simulator that doesn't care, because their desires are likely to be repugnant or incomprehensible to us. Living in a universe created by a simulator that cared, and actually wanted us to do something, would be the same as every being in the universe being kidnapped by sadistic terrorists and turned into brains in a vat, utterly at their mercy.

It should not be missed that these are exactly the same questions an atheist asks a believer. I ask my many fellow atheists who are proponents of poorly-defined versions of the simulation hypothesis why they miss asking these questions; I also ask religious believers who may have accepted these arguments regarding the simulation hypothesis, why they don't turn them on their own beliefs. After all, don't you want to know the truth about whether there's a supreme being, and what they're like, and what we should do as a result? Isn't that the point of many religions?

Expanding on the fourth point, here's a problem not unique to the simulation argument, but to any "super" being. If you're a utilitarian (greatest good for greatest number), there's a familiar problem put forth by Robert Nozick, the utility monster, a being who experiences sublime pleasure (and suffering) that "swamps the signal" of the collective happiness and suffering, so that you spend all your time pleasing and avoiding hurting the utility monster and neglecting everyone else. A simulator who cares could be such a utility monster, and on learning of their existence, you must give up caring about anything or anyone else, and bring glory to their name (or whatever it is they want you to do.) You could waste your time on improving the pale blunt emotions of the primitive beings in your family, or the sublime simulator squid-god. Indeed this is what aesthetics do.

Fortunately, based on the best empirical evidence, our present preferences do not appear to influence the type of universe we're already in. We are definitely in some kind of simulation, owing to the way our nervous systems work; in fact it’s not clear how it could be otherwise. If we find this is true more than we knew beyond even the functioning of our brains, it could well be a revolution in science, but would not overturn the brute fact of monist reality.

Bell's Theorem: We're Not In a Simulation

Bell's theorem is the one that predicts quantum entanglement. (If you're not already familiar, go here to learn about it.)



The point for this post is that Bell inequalities have repeatedly been shown to be violated, which means that there are no local hidden variables.

The implication is that quantum mechanics is at the "bottom" of reality; the implication for the simulation argument that I constantly decry as meaningless yet can't seem to keep myself from writing about (most recently here and here) is that we are not in a simulation. No local hidden variables means no concealed causally-upstream inputs.

This is what many simulation-worriers have told us to look for, and if QM is complete (as Bell's theorem suggests) they're not there, period. What we really need is a fully generalizable, formal argument as to whether hidden variables are in principle detectable from inside such a system. When I add cells to a game of Conway's life that's already running, is it just the equivalent (from the gliders' viewpoint) of particle pairs popping into existence? Too bad Turing didn't read more Descartes.

The reality-skeptic's counterargument of course (for example, from Robin Hanson) is that every time we do such experiments, the simulators get ontological do-overs to conceal their dastardliness, i.e. the rules of the simulation are changed briefly, and/or they make us forget, etc. etc. etc. Of course this is the same as saying that if we are in a simulation, we could never know (asking how we could know for sure if we are in a simulation is at least as interesting a twist on this question, which is usually asked in terms of how we could know we're not. That is, what could I do to trick someone else into thinking they're in a simulation when they're not?)

All of this again raises the question of why the simulators would care if we found out. When I'm playing Conway's life, if one of the gliders becomes sentient and figures out it's on my computer, it doesn't much matter to me. What are they going to do, spell out dirty words on the screen next time I check the playing field? Also, it often pays to be suspicious of any science that claims to have solved the universe, even if there is a rigorous argument supporting this. To argue by analogy: would Newton have been able to show, had he rigorously pursued it mathematically, that his own theories were NOT at the bottom?

In closing, just in case, please meet me at La Jolla Shores tomorrow to spell out dirty words.

Astrophysicist Ben Weaver on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Ben Weaver goes on Fun With Astrophysics again to talk about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - listen here. I haven't listened to the whole thing but he probably talks about beer in there somewhere too because honestly, he usually can't help himself. (Here's the show webpage.)

I spend too much time worrying about whether we live in a simulation so of course that's what SDSS makes me worry about. As it's traditionally put by the likes of Bostrom or Descartes, the question is how we could be sure that what we think is reality is not a simulation, but it might actually be more interesting to ask how we could ever be sure that we are. The reason I mention this now is that it is exactly the kind of activities that Weaver and his colleagues are engaging in that are likely to piss off our simulators. Why? Some of the characteristics you might expect to see on the inside of a simulated universe are those which limit the amount of data the simulators have to crunch: i.e., resolution limits, and limits to how much of the game volume you could observe and interact with. So looking up and making the most detailed image ever (by orders of magnitude) of the universe that surrounds us is one of the worst possible things you could do. Weaver will soon receive a stern visit from Special Agent Smith because he's slowing down their mainframe.


See, they hate this. Before they could just put a bunch of dots up there and have like Atari 2600 graphics with square baseballs and it didn't matter because we weren't paying attention. But as soon as we really scrutinize it we're forcing them to dedicate all kinds of resources to keeping this looking convincing. We're asking for trouble. From SDSS.

I should add that increasingly for me, the simulation question is becoming a word game and a chance to make jokes. The reason is that the epistemology is sloppy, and what people call a simulation (or not) is not clearly defined and/or not that useful. To wit: are people with delusions in a simulation? They see the same thing you do, but come up with a different model of the world. What about people who believe a lie they were told? What about people with bad theories of the world, i.e. phlogiston, geocentrism, and surely in some cases, you and I right now? How about when you're watching a movie? Or when a drug shuts off your pain sense? Why not why not why not? The difference between Neo in the vat and someone who's sure they parked in this parking lot rather than that one looks more and more like a spectrum, with a quite arbitrary cut-off needed to determine where it starts being a simulation.


A flight simulator built in order to convince fruit flies that they're flying fast, and study their neurons in real time. Is this a simulation? Why or why not? From the website of Dr. Björn Brembs.

In the sense that we are only aware of a model of the world synthesized through a somewhat arbitrary set of filters, we are already in a simulation. What seems to concern people is whether the inputs are gaming our nervous system in arbitrary rule-based ways, and whether we were put in this situation by intentional beings, and both of these seem to be curiously human concerns. (A perennial question is why those intentional simulators would bother with all this, although the Drosophila above are quite unable to understand why or how we would do this.) I think these questions really do reduce back to the exist-or-not question that Descartes encountered, and the of it is just details about how we know the world and experience pleasure and pain, whether or not more information would tell us that spacetime is actually someone's flash drive.

Where Are the Post-Singularity Replicators: A New One for Fermi and Bostrom

One of the underlying assumptions of singularity arguments is that not only will technology improve sufficiently to hit an inflection point beyond which tools improve themselves to the point of something usefully called intelligence and reproduction, but that this is basically inevitable, as long as we don't destroy ourselves before then. (Whether the singularity would destroy us is another question.) A final assumption is that sufficiently advanced post-singularity machines will be able to preserve or add to themselves, or replicate, by recruiting "dumb" matter far better than current Earth biology can, as we do when we eat and breathe.

If we make the additional assumption that any intelligence in the universe which uses tools and has behavior will incrementally improve those tools - then the same should happen for any other species.

Taking these assumptions as valid, we should assume that the universe we observe should already be heavily influenced by singularity events. But it is NOT obviously behaving in any way that dumb matter doesn't behave. I observed in a previous post that singularity arguments, taken to their conclusion, track Bostrom and Fermi: if these are such powerful principles in the evolution of the universe, shouldn't we already be experiencing the consequences?

Even more generally speaking (outside of singularity arguments) shouldn't we assume that, given enough time, most matter and energy will eventually be locked up into replicators, if living things and/or intelligence continues to expand? It's worth emphasizing that all of the arguments are some version of the self-indication argument, although the where-are-all-the-singularity argument is a hypothetical SIA, which I am using to argue against the probability of a singularity.

The most likely answer, based on what we know so far, is that there have been no singularities, which in turn means that it is less likely than we might otherwise have thought that we will have a singularity. While some version of panspermia seems more and more plausible, the seeding of young worlds with nucleobases and amino acids isn't exactly what people have in mind in these discussions. Indeed the absence of expanding "life clouds" argues not just against singularities as such but against the indefinite expansion and survival of life. But there are a number of possible counterarguments:

- Entropy wins; matter and energy also get locked up into black holes faster than life and/or intelligence can employ that matter for their own preservation.

- By the nature of physics, only a very small fraction of matter and energy can be pressed into service as a substrate for life and intelligence.

- Replicators are always unstable processes. This solves Fermi's paradox by making Drake's omega attrition factor much more influential to the outcome.

- Most of what we observe is indeed the result of such processes (galaxies, stars, our own solar system?) and we either don't have the pattern recognition skills to see it or are only observing a vanishingly small slice of possible data. (This one makes for the best science fiction ideas, and also is more analogous to Bostrom than Fermi.)

- Humans are the only species that uses tools and improves them.

- We're lucky and we're the first, or one of the first, and the expanding sphere of others' computronium hasn't hit us yet.

If I had to bet, I would bet against the last two.