Yesterday’s New York Times article on if we live in a computer simulation draws heavily from our Nick Bostrom, and at one point mentions me: Maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation.
will perkins: The original paper shows that, according to our laws of physics, it's probable that we're living in a computer simulation. If it can be shown that our physics allow it, then it's a legitimate argument that we're likely to live in one - otherwise it's just a repetition of the millenia-old argument that it's possible for us to be living in a hallucination.
If one wants to make a plausible case for this, you have to start from our laws of physics and establish that it's likely according to them. Once you have already established that it's likely, then you can go around speculating about the physics in other worlds, because you've shown that there is at least one universe in which the argument holds (and the people simulating us might be living in a similar universe).
Isn't the whole premise of the original paper a little wrong? He claims that the probability of our being in a simulation depends on whether or not humans will eventually be able to simulate full worlds. But the two are unrelated. It is not our future descendants or 'post-humans' who would be simulating us, it is someone in a completely different universe with different laws of physics.
Think of it like this - the fact that the little Sims in SimCity are simulated has nothing to do with their ability to create a simulation inside the game.
Robin: Oh good. I was debating between irony and whether you were thinking of people having R2D2s or Mother Boxes with them. I should have linked originally: here and here are postings that I meant.
Matthew C, you remind me of creationists who always insist that we just haven't read THIS particular tome promoting intelligent design or whatnot. Are there any peer-reviewed studies published in respected scientific journals you'd like to point out? Any phenomena reliably reproduced in front of skeptics? Because I doubt Eliezer is going to purchase Irreducible Minds before Atlas of Creation.
Chad, I bet those people still see history as going from strangeness to normality to strangeness, they just pick a different time at which to place 'normality'. (Well, unless their idea of normality is the Paleolithic.) The psychology of this is interesting.
Which is why psychic powers always go away whenever a scientist tries to look at them!
This statement speaks volumes about your complete unfamiliarity with the literature. You might want to read my short message about uninformed versus informed criticism of psi phenomena.
The notion of hindsight bias is interesting, but it seems to me that for every person who has the feeling that history has progressed from strangeness to normality, there are those who feel quite the opposite and long for times past when "things made sense". Is this "nostalgia bias" perhaps?
Andrew, I don't know how hard it is for a sim to capture water flow and so on. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be hard to identify the scientists who were noticing a discrepancy between the sim and their scientific theories, reverse the sim there and rerun it with better fudged data that eliminate the discrepancy.
Andrew, on this one I think the stronger case is that we're more likely to be in an intrareality simulation than in a non-simulation reality. The analogy is more the move away from a terra-centric model of the universe than the move away from creationism in my opinion. How do you factor the multiple simulations of our universe already within the universe, and potential for a far greater number of simulations to be created and running within our universe as evidence that we're more likely to be a simulated than a nonsimulated reality?
Also, I'm curious about the degree to which the bluriness of our apparent reality at a sufficiently small scale may be evidence that we're in a simulation of a more nuanced/articulated nonsimulated (or less roughly simulated) reality.
I think the scientists in biology, water transport, etc., would doubt that a simulation could capture all the phenomena they see, ranging from photosynthesis to nanotechnology to the flow of arsenic in aquifers in Bangladesh. The usually understood scientific processes of physics, chemistry, evolution, etc., seem like a much more plausible description of what's happening.
It's similar to the argument against creationism: yes, a superbeing could have created the earth 6000 years ago, along with a complete fossil record, asteroids, meteorites, and people having appendixes--but it just seems a little silly.
I think your assigning of probabilities in #1 is so contestible on its own grounds that it feels like wasted effort on my part to do so.As for #2, it sounds like you disagree with Robin's paper linked to in his 8:34pm post. I agree with your distinction between interesting individuals and interesting events, but I think your probability assessment is arbitrary here, too.
Here's two strong problems to the way I see you assigning probabilities:1. Although I think a good case can be made that that there are more intrareality simulations than there are nonsimulation realities (given that we already have multiple simulations of our universe within our universe, and have the apparent capacity for many more), I don't think a good case can be made that there are more entertainment simulations than problem-solving simulations. If anything, the reverse seems more likely to be true.2. It seems arbitrary (or even wrong-headed) to me to assign as "entertaining events" for the simulators those that we seem to find entertaining, or that we speculate an alien civilization would find entertaining, rather than what actually appears, as best as we can tell, to be rewarded with persistence. So the best evidence is that simulators find innovations in sanitation to be entertaining, even though entertainment media on this theme may not draw huge ratings here on Earth. That the "best evidence" may actually be "false memories of a non-existent past without intervention" is acknowledged, but that's a criticism that can be applied omnidirectionally. For example, beliefs about what we have found to be entertaining may be "false memories ..." too. So I don't thin it changes our probability estimates in any direction.
I don't disagree (and did not perform such disagreement above) that it appears that trying to preserve one's life is more successful than not doing so, and that artists do not appear to enjoy any narrative protection. That's the baseline before we consider the Simulation Argument.
I was responding to this statement, which I believe to be mistaken:
"If anything, it seems more likely that simulators would want us to try to rationally (bayesian until we develop something better) maximize our persistence odds,"In that comment and your reply to anon you mentioned the apparent benefits of efforts to survive as (non-conclusive) evidence about the motives of simulators. In other words, the probability of a world with no apparent simulator interventions on behalf of the 'interesting' is lower conditional on one set of simulator motives than on another, and we observe no such apparent interventions. I agree that this argument (the last two sentences of your initial comment) points to some evidence for the above statement, but that it is only very weak evidence and that the above statement is false, since:
1. The prior probability of simulations run for the human motivations Robin describes, or for predicting the nature of extraterrestrial civilizations as I discussed above, is far higher than for the idiosyncratic motivation of wanting simulated beings to maximize their persistence odds.
2. The probability of apparent interventions in favor of 'interesting' individuals, conditional on simulations being motivated by a desire to observe the outcomes of 'interesting' events, is not high. Likely motives for accurate simulations, and the possibility of false memories of a non-existent past without intervention, should both shift our estimates of that conditional probability.
will perkins: The original paper shows that, according to our laws of physics, it's probable that we're living in a computer simulation. If it can be shown that our physics allow it, then it's a legitimate argument that we're likely to live in one - otherwise it's just a repetition of the millenia-old argument that it's possible for us to be living in a hallucination.
If one wants to make a plausible case for this, you have to start from our laws of physics and establish that it's likely according to them. Once you have already established that it's likely, then you can go around speculating about the physics in other worlds, because you've shown that there is at least one universe in which the argument holds (and the people simulating us might be living in a similar universe).
Isn't the whole premise of the original paper a little wrong? He claims that the probability of our being in a simulation depends on whether or not humans will eventually be able to simulate full worlds. But the two are unrelated. It is not our future descendants or 'post-humans' who would be simulating us, it is someone in a completely different universe with different laws of physics.
Think of it like this - the fact that the little Sims in SimCity are simulated has nothing to do with their ability to create a simulation inside the game.
Robin: Oh good. I was debating between irony and whether you were thinking of people having R2D2s or Mother Boxes with them. I should have linked originally: here and here are postings that I meant.
Matthew C, you remind me of creationists who always insist that we just haven't read THIS particular tome promoting intelligent design or whatnot. Are there any peer-reviewed studies published in respected scientific journals you'd like to point out? Any phenomena reliably reproduced in front of skeptics? Because I doubt Eliezer is going to purchase Irreducible Minds before Atlas of Creation.
Chad, I bet those people still see history as going from strangeness to normality to strangeness, they just pick a different time at which to place 'normality'. (Well, unless their idea of normality is the Paleolithic.) The psychology of this is interesting.
Which is why psychic powers always go away whenever a scientist tries to look at them!
This statement speaks volumes about your complete unfamiliarity with the literature. You might want to read my short message about uninformed versus informed criticism of psi phenomena.
The notion of hindsight bias is interesting, but it seems to me that for every person who has the feeling that history has progressed from strangeness to normality, there are those who feel quite the opposite and long for times past when "things made sense". Is this "nostalgia bias" perhaps?
Which is why psychic powers always go away whenever a scientist tries to look at them!
Andrew, I don't know how hard it is for a sim to capture water flow and so on. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be hard to identify the scientists who were noticing a discrepancy between the sim and their scientific theories, reverse the sim there and rerun it with better fudged data that eliminate the discrepancy.
Andrew, on this one I think the stronger case is that we're more likely to be in an intrareality simulation than in a non-simulation reality. The analogy is more the move away from a terra-centric model of the universe than the move away from creationism in my opinion. How do you factor the multiple simulations of our universe already within the universe, and potential for a far greater number of simulations to be created and running within our universe as evidence that we're more likely to be a simulated than a nonsimulated reality?
Also, I'm curious about the degree to which the bluriness of our apparent reality at a sufficiently small scale may be evidence that we're in a simulation of a more nuanced/articulated nonsimulated (or less roughly simulated) reality.
Robin,
I think the scientists in biology, water transport, etc., would doubt that a simulation could capture all the phenomena they see, ranging from photosynthesis to nanotechnology to the flow of arsenic in aquifers in Bangladesh. The usually understood scientific processes of physics, chemistry, evolution, etc., seem like a much more plausible description of what's happening.
It's similar to the argument against creationism: yes, a superbeing could have created the earth 6000 years ago, along with a complete fossil record, asteroids, meteorites, and people having appendixes--but it just seems a little silly.
and please replace "alien civilization" with "simulator".
For "2." please replace "entertaining" with "interesting". throughout the paragraph.
I think your assigning of probabilities in #1 is so contestible on its own grounds that it feels like wasted effort on my part to do so.As for #2, it sounds like you disagree with Robin's paper linked to in his 8:34pm post. I agree with your distinction between interesting individuals and interesting events, but I think your probability assessment is arbitrary here, too.
Here's two strong problems to the way I see you assigning probabilities:1. Although I think a good case can be made that that there are more intrareality simulations than there are nonsimulation realities (given that we already have multiple simulations of our universe within our universe, and have the apparent capacity for many more), I don't think a good case can be made that there are more entertainment simulations than problem-solving simulations. If anything, the reverse seems more likely to be true.2. It seems arbitrary (or even wrong-headed) to me to assign as "entertaining events" for the simulators those that we seem to find entertaining, or that we speculate an alien civilization would find entertaining, rather than what actually appears, as best as we can tell, to be rewarded with persistence. So the best evidence is that simulators find innovations in sanitation to be entertaining, even though entertainment media on this theme may not draw huge ratings here on Earth. That the "best evidence" may actually be "false memories of a non-existent past without intervention" is acknowledged, but that's a criticism that can be applied omnidirectionally. For example, beliefs about what we have found to be entertaining may be "false memories ..." too. So I don't thin it changes our probability estimates in any direction.
Hopefully,
I don't disagree (and did not perform such disagreement above) that it appears that trying to preserve one's life is more successful than not doing so, and that artists do not appear to enjoy any narrative protection. That's the baseline before we consider the Simulation Argument.
I was responding to this statement, which I believe to be mistaken:
"If anything, it seems more likely that simulators would want us to try to rationally (bayesian until we develop something better) maximize our persistence odds,"In that comment and your reply to anon you mentioned the apparent benefits of efforts to survive as (non-conclusive) evidence about the motives of simulators. In other words, the probability of a world with no apparent simulator interventions on behalf of the 'interesting' is lower conditional on one set of simulator motives than on another, and we observe no such apparent interventions. I agree that this argument (the last two sentences of your initial comment) points to some evidence for the above statement, but that it is only very weak evidence and that the above statement is false, since:
1. The prior probability of simulations run for the human motivations Robin describes, or for predicting the nature of extraterrestrial civilizations as I discussed above, is far higher than for the idiosyncratic motivation of wanting simulated beings to maximize their persistence odds.
2. The probability of apparent interventions in favor of 'interesting' individuals, conditional on simulations being motivated by a desire to observe the outcomes of 'interesting' events, is not high. Likely motives for accurate simulations, and the possibility of false memories of a non-existent past without intervention, should both shift our estimates of that conditional probability.
Robin, interesting piece (no pun intended) and I enjoyed reading it. But I don't think it changes the assessment in my 7:42pm post.