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

Reinterpreting the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Dead Reckoning and the P2P Simulation Hypothesis

This paper argues that the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) has not received consensus support because it appears to violate plausible empiricist principles requiring scientific theories to be directly confirmable and/or disconfirmable by observational evidence--which the MWI appears to preclude insofar as observers can in principle only directly observe our 'world.' The paper then argues that a new reinterpretation of the MWI--the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Hypothesis and computer science and mathematics of 'dead reckoning'--together provide an elegant interpretation of what the many 'worlds' of MWI are, and in a manner that not only provides strong observational evidence for the MWI, but also a deeper computational networking explanation, far beyond the traditional interpretation of the MWI (or any other interpretation of quantum mechanics for that matter), for why our reality has its many strange quantum mechanical features in the first place.

The notion is not new that some special form of the universe simulation hypothesis could explain the mysteries of seemingly irrational quantum mechanical interactions.

In my mind the P to P hypothesis of Arvan should be taken seriously, and one of the most interesting aspects as far as I'm concerned is how the numerous psychical paranormal phenomena indicative of survival and an afterlife which are of great concern in this forum (and also the theory of Intelligent Design),  could be interpreted in the hypothetical case that Arvan's P to P hypothesis were to be true. So I think some wild speculation would be appropriate in looking into this matter.

My view is that it is unlikely that in this case where the world is a simulation, paranormal phenomena (and the intelligent design of life) are themselves unreal because of being part of the simulation itself, and that therefore they are purely arbitrary and due to creative inclinations on the part of the outside transcendent designers of the simulation. 
 
It seems to me that this P to P hypothesis from our perspective would more likely have to be where what is simulated is physical reality where quantum mechanics are artifacts of the simulation's workings, and human spirits are in some sense the consciousness-throttled-down users or participators in the simulation, ultimately separately existing outside the simulation in another higher reality.

Additionally, this existence of the essence of ourselves separately outside the simulation is also necessitated by the Hard Problem of consciousness and the observation that the essence of consciousness is completely uncomputable which strongly militates against the notion that we (as users of the simulation) are actually parts of it and generated by it.

Rather than just being part of the simulation, paranormal phenomena like NDEs and reincarnation memories would come about due to the separate from the simulation existence of human spirits that transcend the simulated physical reality.

The big question of who or what are the creators and designers of the simulation would be ultimately unanswerable at present, but speculation would be along the lines of the notion that the designers were or are groups of our (much) higher selves looking to make a more interesting and somewhat limited (as opposed to unlimited potential) reality to experience.

These beings decided that the mechanics of this new reality could most conveniently and efficiently be created via a universe simulation technique such as proposed in Arvan's hypothesis.

Concerning Intelligent Design, the designers of life would again be these groups of very advanced spirits (whose home is outside the simulation), using the simulation's mechanisms to create the designs of life from outside our P to P universe simulation reality.

Then the question would arise, why use such an elaborate and messy method of physical life creation, rather than simply introducing the limitedly human users directly into the simulation reality with no origin whatsoever within that created simulated reality? It would seem to have to be some sort of special interest in the creative experience of designing and "evolving" things, on the part of these higher spiritual beings, and their desire to have this simulated reality follow a coherent and logical and rational operation (which it would't necessarily have to).  

Of course, from the philosophical or metaphysical point of view, there is no reason why Arvan's P to P world simulation reality couldn't be just one of many or an infinite regression of yet higher levels of simulation, so that from that very greatly higher perspective virtually all of our reality including paranormal phenomena and Intelligent Design could be just part of higher simulation realities, and therefore not ultimately real. 
 

I would say this universe can be looked at as if it were a simulation, but Arvan himself is a dualist who would reject the simulation of consciousness.

So there is a "higher frame", in his words, that generates the "lower frame" that is this universe. So it's essentially a design hypothesis from the start.

Where it gets interesting is that he takes things game programmers use to save data processing or provide an attempt at accurate positioning across peers. The way this can line up with QM "glitches" is what I think the P2P Hypothesis lives and dies on.

And while I think a lot of his conjecture is fascinating, I am not sure you can map all oddities in QM to some graphic engine trick. I do look forward to further work on this, however, as a Dualist Simulation Hypothesis definitely has potential to further academic interest in parapsychology...