Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50

Like most people today he can't help but stick in some political commentary, but I thought there was enough meat in the article to make it worth posting ->

Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation

Jason Kehe

The only people who absolutely disagree are, well, scientists. They need to get over themselves and join the fun.

“But this is nonsense,” says the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. “I mean, why should the world be a simulation?”

This is typical of the flustered incredulity mustered up by the physics community whenever the subject of the simulation disturbs the learned serenity of their exemplary calculations. Lisa Randall at Harvard, Sabine Hossenfelder of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, David Deutsch at Oxford, Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin, the list goes on and on, and they all make versions of the same point: Our perceiving brains “simulate” the world around us, sure, but there’s no such thing as a “digital physics” or “its from bits”; real-world things (its) don’t come from code (bits). It’s so reductionist! So presentist! Just play out the thermodynamics! Or consider many-body effects! Even Neil deGrasse Tyson has, more recently, backed away from his Muskian metaphysics. (Though one of his counterarguments is, it should be said, highly untechnical. He simply doesn’t think far-future other-dimensional alien simulators would be entertained by beings as slow-moving and petty and cavemannish as we—in much the way we wouldn’t be entertained by the daily drudgery of actual cavemen.)

OK, but, and with all due respect to these undisputed geniuses: Maybe they should read their own books. Take Rovelli’s latest. In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, he puts forward what he calls the “relational theory” of reality. Basically, nothing exists except in relation to something else. “There are no properties outside of interactions,” Rovelli writes. So that tree over there? It isn’t just barely there. If you’re not interacting with it, it can’t be said to be there at all. Well, something is there, it seems, but that something is only and merely the potential for interaction. “The world is a perspectival game,” Rovelli concludes, “a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.”

Note the word he uses there: game. Reality is a game. What kind of game? A video game, maybe? Why not? Though Rovelli wouldn’t take kindly to this interpretation, isn’t that precisely how video games work? When your character is running through a field, whatever’s behind you, or otherwise out of view—trees, items, baddies, something better to do with your time—is only there, meaningfully there, if you turn around and interact with it. Short of that, the game won’t waste resources rendering it. It doesn’t exist, or exists only as a programmed possibility. Video games, just like our reality, are Rovellianly relational.

At this, our polite physicists might finally lose their cool and go entropic on us, raging hotly. But why? Why does this kind of playful speculation so incense not only them but so many other highly intelligent people, from philosopher-historians like Justin E. H. Smith to commentators like Nathan J. Robinson? They never really say, beyond dismissing simulation theory as either illogical or out of touch, a plaything of the privileged, but one senses in their skepticism a genuine fear, an unwillingness to even entertain the idea, for to believe that our world is fake must, they seem to think, be to believe, nihilistically, and in a way that makes a mockery of their lifelong pursuit of knowledge and understanding, in nothing.

Like most people today he can't help but stick in some political commentary, but I thought there was enough meat in the article to make it worth posting ->

Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation

Jason Kehe

The primary reasons we can't possibly be living in a simulation (that is, as part of a digital hyper-simulation) is the good old Hard Problem of consciousness, and the related fact that no matter how advanced the computer, it's entire processing necessarily consists of executing programmed algorithms, and human consciousness, thought and sentient awareness are non-algorithmic. That still leaves the possibility that we as conscious beings are the outside "users" of the physical reality simulation, but this version of the virtual reality simulation notion is not popular amongst the predominantly reductionist materialist simulation believers.

The primary reasons we can't possibly be living in a simulation (that is, as part of a digital hyper-simulation) is the good old Hard Problem of consciousness, and the related fact that no matter how advanced the computer, it's entire processing necessarily consists of executing programmed algorithms, and human consciousness, thought and sentient awareness are non-algorithmic. That still leaves the possibility that we as conscious beings are the outside "users" of the physical reality simulation, but this version of the virtual reality simulation notion is not popular amongst the predominantly reductionist materialist simulation believers.

I would say we are "functionally" in a simulation, in that there is a higher frame of reality that is responsible for the lower frame and we are "users"/"players" in the lower frame but ultimately belong to the higher one.

Two New Doubts about Simulation Arguments

Micah Summers and Marcus Arvan

Various theorists contend that we may live in a computer simulation. David Chalmers in turn argues that the simulation hypothesis is a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of our reality, rather than a sceptical scenario. We use recent work on consciousness to motivate new doubts about both sets of arguments. First, we argue that if either panpsychism or panqualityism is true, then the only way to live in a simulation may be as brains-in-vats, in which case it is unlikely that we live in a simulation. We then argue that if panpsychism or panqualityism is true, then viable simulation hypotheses are substantially sceptical scenarios. We conclude that the nature of consciousness has wide-ranging implications for simulation arguments.

Living in a Simulated Universe

John D. Barrow

Once you take seriously that all possible universes can (or do) exist then a slippery
slope opens up before you. It has long been recognised that technical civilisations, only a
little more advanced than ourselves, will have the capability to simulate universes in
which self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another2. They
would have computer power that differed from ours by a vast factor. Instead of merely
simulating their weather or the formation of galaxies, like we do, they would be able to
go further and watch the appearance of stars and planetary systems. Then, having coupled
the rules of biochemistry into their astronomical simulations they would be able to watch
the evolution of life and consciousness (all speeded up to occur on whatever timescale
was convenient for them). Just as we watch the life cycles of fruit flies they would be
able to follow the evolution of life, watch civilisations grow and communicate with each
other, argue about whether there existed a Great Programmer in the Sky who created their
Universe and who could intervene at will in defiance of the laws of Nature they
habitually observed.

Faced with these perplexities do we have any chance of winnowing fake realities from
true? What we might expect to see if we made scientific observations from within a
simulated reality?

We might also expect that simulated realities would possess a similar level of
maximum computational complexity across the board. The simulated creatures should
have a similar complexity to the most complex simulated non-living structures—
something that Stephen Wolfram8 (for quite different reasons, nothing to do with
simulated realities) has coined the Principle of Computational Equivalence.

Living in a Simulated Universe

John D. Barrow

 

...It has long been recognised that technical civilisations, only a
little more advanced than ourselves, will have the capability to simulate universes in
which self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another....

This exhibits the typical fallacy and failure of materialist thinkers to comprehend that since all computers’ data processing entirely consists of numerical and logical computations of various sorts using algorithms of various sorts, computers fundamentally can’t generate qualia, that is, subjective consciousness, awareness. This is because qualia or basic subjective awareness and perception (along with the other properties of consciousness and mind) are the essence of consciousness but are non-algorithmic and noncomputable. So we can conclude that computers, including any possible programs implemented on them, simply cannot ever even in principle become conscious.

So we can’t possibly be living in, as part of, a digital hyper-simulation, due to the good old Hard Problem of consciousness, and the related fact that no matter how advanced the computer, it’s entire processing necessarily consists of executing programmed algorithms, but human consciousness, thought and sentient awareness are non-computable and non-algorithmic. 

However, this still leaves open the possibility that we as conscious beings are the outside “users” of the physical reality simulation. In other words, we could be in a simulation, but in such a way that there is a higher frame of reality that is responsible for our lower physical frame and we are “users”/”players” in the lower frame but ultimately belong to the higher spiritual one which is our home. But of course this version of the virtual reality simulation notion (with ideas derived from contemporary virtual reality computer game technology) is not popular amongst the predominantly reductionist materialist simulation believers.

How to test whether we're living in a computer simulation

Melvin M. Vopson

Another curiosity in physics supporting the simulation hypothesis is the maximum speed limit in our universe, which is the speed of light. In a virtual reality, this limit would correspond to the speed limit of the processor, or the processing power limit. We know that an overloaded processor slows down computer processing in a simulation. Similarly, Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity shows that time slows in the vicinity of a black hole.

I have postulated that information is in fact a fifth form of matter in the universe. I've even calculated the expected information content per elementary particle. These studies led to the publication, in 2022, of an experimental protocol to test these predictions. The experiment involves erasing the information contained inside elementary particles by letting them and their antiparticles (all particles have "anti" versions of themselves which are identical but have opposite charge) annihilate in a flash of energy—emitting "photons," or light particles.

I have predicted the exact range of expected frequencies of the resulting photons based on information physics. The experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and we have launched a crowdfunding site) to achieve it.

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Can we hack our way out of the universe?

Roman V. Yampolskiy

In this speculative long read, Roman V. Yampolskiy argues if we are living inside a simulation, we should be able to hack our way out of it. Elon Musk thinks it is >99.9999999% certain that we are in a simulation. Using examples from video games, to exploring quantum mechanics, Yampolskiy leaves no stone unturned as to how we might be able to hack our way out of it.

In 2016, news reports have emerged about private efforts to fund scientific research into “breaking us out of the simulation” [69, 70], to date no public disclosure on the state of the project has emerged. In 2019, George Hotz famous for jailbreaking iPhone and PlayStation has given a talk on Jailbreaking the Simulation [71] in which he claimed that "it's possible to take actions here that affect the upper world" [72], but didn’t provide actionable insights. He did suggest that he would like to "redirect society's efforts into getting out" [72].

Given primacy of consciousness [94] in our world it may also be designed to generate large number of diverse experiences to select from, serving as a qualia mining farm [95], with top experience recreated for enjoyment by simulators. Qualia mining simulations can be classified as a type of entertainment simulation and would have comparable security. If our simulators are AIs (which is likely [96, 97] the simulation may be a byproduct of their “thinking” process, for example in the context of trying to better understand human preferences [98].