How the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Hypothesis Explains Just About Everything

Philosopher's Stone interview with Marcus Arvan

Rather short interview, here's a small sample of the questions asked ->

Q. When we zoom out from the individual experience and look at the shared perception of reality, your theory maintains that the joint choices of all conscious observers work to collapse possible paths that can be taken (through the multiverse) into a single actualized reality, which all conscious observers experience in tandem.

How do MMORPG’s, as they form an integral part of your theory, substantiate this idea and how do they exist as an example we can read into?

...Although Halo 2 doesn’t use a P2P network architecture (each game is played on a dedicated server), some strange things would happen while playing the game sometimes when your game console failed to network with the server properly: specifically, you would appear to be doing something on your console while something very different appeared to happening on someone else’s.

Here is one case I remember distinctly: me and [a] friend stood shooting at each other. On my console, I appeared to be shooting directly at his head. However, on his console, my character was oriented in a slightly different direction, shooting at a wall in front of but to the right of his head. And now comes the fun part: because my console was coding me shooting him and his console was coding me shooting a wall, the server told his console that my gunshots were tunneling through the wall and hitting him in the head, making it appear on his console as though my shots were literally going through the wall. Which is what quantum tunneling is, more or less!...

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How likely do you, personally, think it is that we exist in a simulation?

I think it is extremely likely. This is because (1) we should believe the best explanations of what we observe in the world around us, and (2) I don’t know of a better explanation of quantum phenomena than that they are produced by peer-to-peer networking

I'm still gonna saaaaay....doubt.

At the very least the P2P hypothesis is more interesting than the regular simulation one, though it suffers the same pitfalls.

I don't think P2P is real, but I do think it works well at functionally describing what a reality with some subjective dependency is like.

Where I think the Simulation Hypothesis is most useful is it has become somewhat acceptable to hold the position among the skeptical types.

Of course once you have this idea of game worlds, it isn't hard to think of different planes of existence being just a line of code away.

Marcus Arvan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tampa. He has published widely in ethics, social-political philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind, and is the author of two books, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality: A Philosophical Theory (Routledge, 2020) and Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). He also co-manages ‘New Work in Philosophy’ with Barry Maguire (University of Edinbugh), a multimedia Substack newsletter that discusses new publications in philosophy for a general audience.

Website: https://www.marcusarvan.net/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/marcusarvan

Published and unpublished articles on the P2P Hypothesis:

Marcus Arvan (2013). A New Theory of Free Will. Philosophical Forum 44 (1):1-48. https://philpapers.org/rec/ARVANT-2

Marcus Arvan (2014). A Unified Explanation of Quantum Phenomena? The Case for the Peer‐to‐Peer Simulation Hypothesis as an Interdisciplinary Research Program. Philosophical Forum 45 (4):433-446. https://philpapers.org/rec/ARVAUE

Marcus Arvan (unpublished manuscript). The P2P Simulation Hypothesis and Meta-Problem of Everything. https://philpapers.org/rec/ARVTSH