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The Universe Is Simulated. Now What? | David Chalmers and Scott Aaronson (Part 3/3)
April 30, 2024
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
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Serious allergic reactions may occur. Tremphia may increase your risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms of infection including fever, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough. Tell your doctor if you had a vaccine or plan to. Emerge as you. Learn more about Tremphia, including important safety information at Tremphia.com or call 1-877-578-3527.
The moment we realize we're in a simulation, that is when we become conscious of the true nature of our world and the simulators will shut us down. History will end at the moment when the world becomes conscious of itself, of its own true nature.
Today we have a treat. This is a panel including both David Chalmers and Scott Aronson. This was at MindFest directly following their talks, which are linked in the description, and today they cover the simulation hypothesis as it's distinct from the simulation argument, all while taking questions from a live audience.
This panel is hosted by Mark Bailey, Department Chair of the Cyber Intelligence and Data Science at National Intelligence University. This talk was given at MINDFEST, put on by the Center for the Future Mind, which is spearheaded by Professor of Philosophy Susan Schneider. It's a conference that's annually held where they merge artificial intelligence and consciousness studies and held at Florida Atlantic University. The links to all of these will be in the description
There's also a playlist here for MindFest. Again, that's that conference, Merging AI and Consciousness. There are previous talks from people like Scott Aaronson, David Chalmers, Stuart Hammeroff, Sarah Walker, Stephen Wolfram, and Ben Gortzel. My name's Kurt Jaimungal, and today we have a special treat, because usually Theories of Everything is a podcast. What's ordinarily done on this channel is I use my background in mathematical physics, and I analyze various theories of everything.
So you both sort of touched on this in your introductions. Some people may argue that if the simulation implies some intelligent designer,
Do you see any distinction between this sort of naturalistic explanation for a possible simulation versus a theological one? We'll start. Go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, I like the way that David put it in his talk that like the simulation hypothesis is sort of like an amalgamation of two things, right? Where you believe like the world is computational in a certain appropriate sense.
And there was some creator who made a choice to set that in motion. You could imagine that this universe arises mechanistically out of a different universe with utterly different laws. But in a certain sense, that is what physics already says. The classical world was built out of this quantum world that looks totally different from anything that you a priori thought about.
You can define the simulation hypothesis the way you were suggesting so that it doesn't actually require a simulator. Interesting question. Just say it turns out that we're in a
Yeah, we're contained in a world where just to totally by chance a simulation of our universe came into existence. Then is the simulation hypothesis true? Well, I think this is kind of, it's a, it's a verbal question. We consider if we could circulate in my book, I stimulate that the simulation hypothesis requires a simulator who designed and created this intentionally. So this would not count, but it's interesting question. Is there a, there are simply going to be hypotheses that don't have a simulator. And, uh, it's a, uh,
Interesting question whether any of those are plausible. The one I mentioned is just like a Boltzmann simulation. Maybe it could be terrible that way. Maybe there are versions where you said naturalistic version where somehow universes evolve as on one of those isn't at least Smolin who had the universes evolving. Maybe that could happen with simulations.
I'm really glad that David covered the quantum mechanics part, so I don't have to. There are so many areas of agreement that I was thinking, what could we actually have a fight about here? I might have found something. Even I would agree that the
Presumably that it's meaningful whether we're in a simulation or not right you even assuming that there was no way to get any evidence about it and i think for me i would only say that it's pre meaningful right well you know i got willing to hear out the arguments for why it's meaningful but i know that the answer is going to look like.
Well, on these philosophical views, it's meaningful, and on these other philosophical views, it isn't, right? And then, you know, the question like, do you guys ever resolve these things? There were, you know, the logical empiricists or logical positivists of the 1930s had this famous hypothesis, verificationism. For a hypothesis to be meaningful, it's got to be verifiable. And then there's the closely related falsification version. Pretty meaningful. It's got to be falsifiable. And I think in this case, it looks like the perfect simulation hypothesis may not be falsifiable,
Most philosophers these days do not roundly reject this verificationist thesis. They say things like, is that thesis verifiable or falsifiable? Sure, but I don't have to be like a strict, like an orthodox verificationist in order to say, well, you've given me this hypothesis, but you haven't told me what to do. And therefore like I'm willing to hear you out, but like convince me that it's meaningful. What moves me the most is thinking about we could actually create someone for whom the simulation hypothesis is true. We could take a brain in a vat or make a
Make a simulated universe in which there is a cognitive system who is precisely interacting with a computer simulation in a way which was totally unverifiable or unfalsifiable for that person if we do a good enough job with the simulation they will never know but it just seems obvious they are in fact in a simulation this is a coherent way for a being to be like you say isn't that at least a coherent possibility that we're in that situation very interesting
There's this interesting and, I would say, very disturbing thought experiment that emerged in the AI safety and effective altruism community a few years ago called Roka's Basilisk. Have you ever heard of this? It's already gotten probably like a hundred thousand times more discussion than it merits. Wasn't this thing responsible for getting Elon Musk? Yeah, that was how they met. So for anyone unfamiliar with this,
It states that any otherwise benevolent artificial super intelligence in the future would necessarily be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence, but who did not directly contribute to its advancement or development in order to incentivize that advancement. So as you can imagine, this caused a lot of sleepless nights and panic attacks amongst the members of the EA community. So my question is, if there is some intelligence simulator that exists,
Do you think we're in trouble for talking about this? Like, do we owe some piety to whoever the simulator may or may not be? Scott is the AI safety professional. I mean, I just made my piece a long, you know, a long time ago with the idea that, OK, if I'm going to be, you know, punished for eternity for, you know, some, some, some rule that I didn't even know that I was breaking because I didn't know which religion was the true one or whatever, then, you know, that's, you know, them's the brakes. Right.
There is the view that the simulators are going to shut us down the moment we realize that we're in a simulation. There's a way of understanding this is actually very close to Hegel. Hegel said, history will end at the moment when the world becomes conscious of itself.
of its own true nature. So it's like the moment we realize we're in a simulation, that is when we become conscious of the true nature of our world and the simulators will shut us down. I hope not though. Yeah. I mean, which people have to realize it because I'm wondering whether this might already be falsified. Certainly people believe it, but do they know it? Right. Right. Ah, good, good, good, good. Very interesting. So, uh, Dave, you mentioned Nick Bostrom's argument for the simulation hypothesis.
And I think a lot of what he talks about, it's basically a probabilistic argument where he says that, you know, if a high fidelity simulated reality is possible, then it's highly improbable that we live in the base reality and that we're likely innocent. What are your thoughts on this probabilistic argument?
You don't like it, right? Well, yeah, I mean, I already responded to it, right? I said, in some sense, it's selling off the branch that it sits on because, you know, you like when you take it seriously, like the picture it leads to is like a is like a tree of like where each world can simulate worlds, which in turn can simulate other worlds and so forth. And then you say, well, OK, but why would we be at the at the base of the tree? Right. But OK, but wait a minute. These simulations should be repeatedly getting smaller, right? Because each one has to run on computers that fit in
you know the next universe above it right and there's always some overhead in a simulation and so actually it seems like you know in this universe we should only be able to simulate smaller universes right and and only a bigger more complex universe can simulate this one you know in which case like what do we even mean when we say that our our descendants are going to be simulating us right they're going to be simulating some smaller universe that maybe you know has something right but
or you know unless you believe that we were in the smaller universe already but but then you know then then you just get too confused on the other hand if we're the simulation maybe isn't this universe we've already got evidence that this universe is a pretty big one uh with a lot of spare computing power for simulating universes a lot of the world simulating us could be bigger right all those galaxies going to waste what are they doing exactly
So Susan and I have written a lot about this idea of algorithmic incompressibility or where we postulate that there are certain processes like complex processes that are not necessarily mappable to some sort of a mathematical abstraction. You know, like you can think about the emergence of markets in an economy or something like that, these kinds of processes. And so, you know, we're torn between whether or not this is an epistemic thing where we simply don't have the knowledge to understand these things yet, or maybe it represents some sort of an ontological limit in terms of, you know, calculability or computability.
So along that line, if there is some sort of a computable limit to the universe, like some sort of a computability horizon, do you think something like that could be evidence of a simulation in that we're in some sort of a computer that can only compute up to the power of the computer doing the simulating on the outside?
I mean, if the natural world works anything like science thinks it works in Galileo, then the answer to your question has to be it is epistemic. If we had enough knowledge of the state of every particle, if you knew the complete state of the universe, let's say the wave function of the universe at a given time,
then you could run the equations forward and that would tell you not only what the particles are doing or the probabilities for them to do each possible thing it would tell you what the markets are going to do ultimately because that that super beans on it right so yeah we are actually in a way in the situation you mentioned we seem to be in a Turing computable universe yeah and we've gotten used to that and so on but your reasoning is now hey shouldn't the fact that
We're in a Turing computable universe. Make us kind of suspicious about something like maybe we're actually inside a computation in the in the next universe. Yeah, right. But suppose that we had these, you know, found we found things on the beach that could solve the whole thing problem. Right. So now we know that we're in a hyper touring. Then our notion of computability would just be the hyper touring one. And we'd say, well, well, why are we in a hyper touring universe? It must be because we're simulated by a hyper touring machine.
Right so like that this is like there's not something specific here about touring me right that this yeah I'd be really interesting if it turns out that physical processes all show up in some you know way lower than Turing computable class of
This is a
right because you know the universe is running in some like lazy classical simulation where they know that they can usually ignore the you know hard enough quantum computations because those never actually happen right and then you know the first when we try to build quantum computers that's when we're going to break that abstraction and there there just won't be enough computing power in the simulators i think actually when i
I had my one meeting ever with Larry Page. That was what he wanted to talk about. Maybe you know more than me about whether we're all in a simulation. I hear that's what they're trying to do in DeepMind too. They're just trying to stress test the simulation with really powerful AI and make it crash. I'm a professor at a university that
Serves the intelligence community. So I'm naturally interested in like national security related problems So the other day I was googling national security implications of the simulation argument and like unsurprisingly There's not really a lot out there on this topic other than like some kind of like off-the-wall conspiracy theory kind of things Maybe the simulators are gonna like take our stuff and feed it to like foreign powers Well, I guess my question is so like I'm interested in how emerging technologies technologies are emerging ideas within tech
um... you know may impact global security and stability
So my question is, do you think that any confirmed knowledge of a simulated reality could disrupt the existing social order in some way?
I think I would need to see several things happen that haven't happened before. I would want to say that whether the universe is a computer simulation should be a national security issue. A lot would depend on how we got this confirmed knowledge. Maybe like if the simulator start talking to us and say, hey, I'm going to like, here, let me just hack the code of the simulation right now and turn the Empire State Building upside down and so on. You bet that would be a national security issue. Absolutely.
So Dave, in Reality Plus, you discussed how, and you mentioned it in your talk earlier, how any sort of virtual reality is in fact real, in like an ontological sense.
Can you elaborate on that?
the dream hypothesis and so on and the standard and take out with evil demons falling in the standard view is always if you're in the simulation like scenarios nothing is real now the contemporary version is virtual reality actually very timely tomorrow apple is releasing their uh... reality pro uh... their their first virtual reality device although they don't call it that right it's a spatial computing device i've ordered mine it's coming on saturday uh...
and again the standard view is that if you're in vr none of this is real it's a fiction it's a hallucination it's an illusion i really want to argue that uh no this is wrong objects in vr are they genuinely exist they're real they have causal powers they're digital they're digital but we now know that being digital is not a way of being unreal you know there's that that phrase irl right in real life where it's like there's the digital and the real but we know that's totally you know it's a really bad way of thinking about uh
about reality. So in general, and likewise, I think thinking about the simulation hypothesis, and it from bit and so on can lead you down the road to thinking that actually, if we're in a simulation, all this stuff is genuinely real. That only applies to grand scale metaphysical theorizing. On the other hand, the case of VR is something which you know, these are worlds that we're going to be in increasingly more over the next over the next few decades. I think it's really it's actually quite important. One of these things are just fully
Illusions, hallucinations and escapism or whether they're a form of real world in which you can have meaningful experiences. So that's what I, in the book, I try and argue that at least in principle, you can have real meaningful lives in VR. Very interesting.
Do you think that if we ever were able to simulate a high enough fidelity, uh, virtual reality here, would we ever be able to tell whether or not any of the Sims in that environment in that environment are P zombies or whether or not they have consciousness? And then sort of by extension, do you think that any simulator that exists outside of our reality would know whether or not, uh, any entities in this reality are in fact conscious? There is this problem of other minds. It's very hard to know whether another creature is conscious, even given it's a, it's,
Behavior i've always taken the view that at least you know if a system is behaving enough like us it doesn't prove that they're conscious they could be zombies number less it kind of ought to create a presumption of consciousness in us if they're from all this sophisticated behavior but now in the era of large language models which are they're not yet at the point of being turning indistinguishable from us but you know they're not that far off and a lot of people at least
I want to say welcome and there's actually good reason to think they're not conscious or at least not strong reasons for extending them that That presumption so I think language models have you know, they've already make make a lot of people think the Turing test is Much less useful than we thought it might be as a test for consciousness But then we have nothing else to take its place. So I think right now actually we're rather confused about that issue Yeah, very good Scott do you have anything you want to add to any of those questions? Yeah, absolutely. That's my next
This is for Scott and for David and Scott's probably gonna get upset at me for asking something like this but you know what if I've always kind of thought about the simulation in terms of okay you're talking about being inside or outside of a system how can those things interact so I always kind of saw it as something more of like a
a self-simulation. If you're inside of something and you have no means of judging if there's anything outside of it, how can you even make the argument that there's something exterior? Even the fact that we can just think about these things, what are the implications of that?
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I mean, that's exactly what we were talking about. I started my remarks with saying, well, the first thing I want to know is does it make any difference to anything or not that I can observe? If it doesn't make any difference, well, then at the very least, I need to hear an argument for why I should then care further about this. You said self-stimulation as in, oh, this is a simulation by ourselves.
You know, the way I kind of look at it is, okay, how can we not add anything else, look for anything else and just normal perception, daily life, whatever, how can we change our interpretation to where it's, there's no boundary. Like if you're, for example, if you're inside of, I've given this example before to people, like if you're inside of a sphere and you have no means of judging anything from the outside,
does it's effectively useless to you i mean it's kind of again to scott's point and when i say self i mean like it's self-contained there's not like an exterior there's only an
interior. The extreme version of this is the dream hypothesis, right? It's you yourself who are creating the simulation. That's really an epistemic bubble. I mean, there are many analogous issues, right? Like mathematicians might have once thought that, okay, it only makes sense to talk about a curved surface if it's embedded in some higher dimensional flat space. And then eventually they realized, no, you can just intrinsically talk about your
Michael?
I don't really see why you would, if you wanted to know how a civilization might go and behave and stuff, I don't see why you would simulate that civilization was actual people. If I were to do it, I would create what I would call a puppet master simulation where there's an AI on top and what that AI is doing is it has a bunch of puppets which have various personalities and stuff like that.
They're perceiving various things and the AI on top figures knows how its characters and stuff are going to react to those stimuli and have them react in that way. And therefore you can use that to simulate an entire civilization without actually having people in it, essentially. And if you were to do this, then that AI on top could have its characters overlook any flaws or cracks in the simulation. So it could be a lot less intensive.
I mean, of course we can appeal to the anthropic principle here, right? If there are some simulations with no sentient beings and there are others with sentient beings, then we have to be in the latter kind. I mean, this is the premise of some of those original simulation fiction, right? Like Simulacron three, which was a was all the other simulation, I think was devised by
people from an advertising company for marketing reasons they wanted to see you know which program which product was going to do well with people but for that to be useful in a social context don't you have to simulate people it's like if i simulate a world without people it's not going to be terribly useful for navigating for for you know governing my actions at least in this in this
Social world actually gets even worse. If we now have simulation technology, you're going to have to simulate a world where people have simulation technology and that rapidly gets recursive and difficult. I guess when we talk about like simulation theory slash arguments like hypothesis, the concept of you mentioned infinite regression or recursion comes into mind. So if it's the case that we are in a simulation and if it's a case as there is a creator,
There's probably then an equal or I will say even higher chance that the world, the creator is also simulated. And if that's simulated, there's a higher chance that the creator of the creator's world is also simulated. And I guess that could go like infinitely. So and even beyond that, into the countable ordinals. And yeah, yeah. So I guess will that serve lead us into like a perpetual like uncertainty about like the underlying principles of reality?
And is that the keys or not? And if it is, is that something like worth considering? This is like, is it William James to whom the remark was attributed? It's like he gave a lecture and then someone came up to him and said, look, James, your metaphysics is all wrong. Here's the correct metaphysics of reality. We're all sitting on the back of a turtle. And they said, what's the turtle on? Oh, it's it's it's another turtle. And then William says, well, no, I know where you're going. It's turtles all the way down.
So, uh, so likewise for simulation, for a simulation, that one's in a simulation. Maybe it's simulations all the way up either way. It's like, you have to, this kind of raises a very deep philosophical question, which is, does there have to be a fundamental level to reality? Uh, the philosopher Jonathan Schaffer wrote a nice article saying, no, there doesn't have to be. It can be like the levels all the way down to, uh, to infinity. But if you're inclined to think that there has to be a fundamental level, then, uh, presumably we're going to have to be at some fixed point in the hierarchy. Very good.
I kind of like the idea that a simulation is all the way up. So I like to inject aliens into a lot of conversations, but I think this is an interesting thought experiment because nobody ever uses alien for creator, right? But in some sense, you're hypothesizing about an intelligent being.
other than us. And I think when you're talking about the simulation argument, people will agree that if we encounter aliens on another world and if we're in a simulation, it's still first contact. And so my question is, if we simulate aliens, is that first contact?
If you spend time interacting with it, you do have the feeling that you are talking to an alien. You are talking to a new kind of intelligence that exists on Earth that did not five years ago. Of course, it is not a kind of intelligence that arose independently from humans. In that sense, it is fundamentally different from meeting an extraterrestrial from another planet.
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I won't let my moderate to severe plexoriasis symptoms define me. Emerge as you. In two clinical studies, Trimphia guselkumab, taken by injection, provided 90% clearer skin at 16 weeks in 7 out of 10 adults with moderate to severe plexoriasis. In a study, nearly 7 out of 10 patients with 90% clearer skin at 16 weeks were still clearer at 5 years. At 1 year and thereafter, patients and healthcare providers knew that Trimphia was being used. This may have increased results. Results may vary.
Serious allergic reactions may occur. Tremphia may increase your risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms of infection including fever, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough. Tell your doctor if you had a vaccine or plan to. Emerge as you. Learn more about Tremphia, including important safety information at Tremphia.com or call 1-877-578-3527.
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"text": " There's also a playlist here for MindFest. Again, that's that conference, Merging AI and Consciousness. There are previous talks from people like Scott Aaronson, David Chalmers, Stuart Hammeroff, Sarah Walker, Stephen Wolfram, and Ben Gortzel. My name's Kurt Jaimungal, and today we have a special treat, because usually Theories of Everything is a podcast. What's ordinarily done on this channel is I use my background in mathematical physics, and I analyze various theories of everything."
},
{
"end_time": 265.282,
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"text": " So you both sort of touched on this in your introductions. Some people may argue that if the simulation implies some intelligent designer,"
},
{
"end_time": 291.51,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 265.589,
"text": " Do you see any distinction between this sort of naturalistic explanation for a possible simulation versus a theological one? We'll start. Go ahead."
},
{
"end_time": 304.718,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 292.159,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, I like the way that David put it in his talk that like the simulation hypothesis is sort of like an amalgamation of two things, right? Where you believe like the world is computational in a certain appropriate sense."
},
{
"end_time": 333.302,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 305.009,
"text": " And there was some creator who made a choice to set that in motion. You could imagine that this universe arises mechanistically out of a different universe with utterly different laws. But in a certain sense, that is what physics already says. The classical world was built out of this quantum world that looks totally different from anything that you a priori thought about."
},
{
"end_time": 358.524,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 333.524,
"text": " You can define the simulation hypothesis the way you were suggesting so that it doesn't actually require a simulator. Interesting question. Just say it turns out that we're in a"
},
{
"end_time": 387.551,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 359.189,
"text": " Yeah, we're contained in a world where just to totally by chance a simulation of our universe came into existence. Then is the simulation hypothesis true? Well, I think this is kind of, it's a, it's a verbal question. We consider if we could circulate in my book, I stimulate that the simulation hypothesis requires a simulator who designed and created this intentionally. So this would not count, but it's interesting question. Is there a, there are simply going to be hypotheses that don't have a simulator. And, uh, it's a, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 409.002,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 388.148,
"text": " Interesting question whether any of those are plausible. The one I mentioned is just like a Boltzmann simulation. Maybe it could be terrible that way. Maybe there are versions where you said naturalistic version where somehow universes evolve as on one of those isn't at least Smolin who had the universes evolving. Maybe that could happen with simulations."
},
{
"end_time": 430.555,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 410.64,
"text": " I'm really glad that David covered the quantum mechanics part, so I don't have to. There are so many areas of agreement that I was thinking, what could we actually have a fight about here? I might have found something. Even I would agree that the"
},
{
"end_time": 451.271,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 430.555,
"text": " Presumably that it's meaningful whether we're in a simulation or not right you even assuming that there was no way to get any evidence about it and i think for me i would only say that it's pre meaningful right well you know i got willing to hear out the arguments for why it's meaningful but i know that the answer is going to look like."
},
{
"end_time": 480.196,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 451.271,
"text": " Well, on these philosophical views, it's meaningful, and on these other philosophical views, it isn't, right? And then, you know, the question like, do you guys ever resolve these things? There were, you know, the logical empiricists or logical positivists of the 1930s had this famous hypothesis, verificationism. For a hypothesis to be meaningful, it's got to be verifiable. And then there's the closely related falsification version. Pretty meaningful. It's got to be falsifiable. And I think in this case, it looks like the perfect simulation hypothesis may not be falsifiable,"
},
{
"end_time": 510.145,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 480.52,
"text": " Most philosophers these days do not roundly reject this verificationist thesis. They say things like, is that thesis verifiable or falsifiable? Sure, but I don't have to be like a strict, like an orthodox verificationist in order to say, well, you've given me this hypothesis, but you haven't told me what to do. And therefore like I'm willing to hear you out, but like convince me that it's meaningful. What moves me the most is thinking about we could actually create someone for whom the simulation hypothesis is true. We could take a brain in a vat or make a"
},
{
"end_time": 536.8,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 510.145,
"text": " Make a simulated universe in which there is a cognitive system who is precisely interacting with a computer simulation in a way which was totally unverifiable or unfalsifiable for that person if we do a good enough job with the simulation they will never know but it just seems obvious they are in fact in a simulation this is a coherent way for a being to be like you say isn't that at least a coherent possibility that we're in that situation very interesting"
},
{
"end_time": 560.947,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 537.415,
"text": " There's this interesting and, I would say, very disturbing thought experiment that emerged in the AI safety and effective altruism community a few years ago called Roka's Basilisk. Have you ever heard of this? It's already gotten probably like a hundred thousand times more discussion than it merits. Wasn't this thing responsible for getting Elon Musk? Yeah, that was how they met. So for anyone unfamiliar with this,"
},
{
"end_time": 587.824,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 561.254,
"text": " It states that any otherwise benevolent artificial super intelligence in the future would necessarily be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence, but who did not directly contribute to its advancement or development in order to incentivize that advancement. So as you can imagine, this caused a lot of sleepless nights and panic attacks amongst the members of the EA community. So my question is, if there is some intelligence simulator that exists,"
},
{
"end_time": 615.794,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 588.319,
"text": " Do you think we're in trouble for talking about this? Like, do we owe some piety to whoever the simulator may or may not be? Scott is the AI safety professional. I mean, I just made my piece a long, you know, a long time ago with the idea that, OK, if I'm going to be, you know, punished for eternity for, you know, some, some, some rule that I didn't even know that I was breaking because I didn't know which religion was the true one or whatever, then, you know, that's, you know, them's the brakes. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 632.551,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 615.981,
"text": " There is the view that the simulators are going to shut us down the moment we realize that we're in a simulation. There's a way of understanding this is actually very close to Hegel. Hegel said, history will end at the moment when the world becomes conscious of itself."
},
{
"end_time": 659.906,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 633.08,
"text": " of its own true nature. So it's like the moment we realize we're in a simulation, that is when we become conscious of the true nature of our world and the simulators will shut us down. I hope not though. Yeah. I mean, which people have to realize it because I'm wondering whether this might already be falsified. Certainly people believe it, but do they know it? Right. Right. Ah, good, good, good, good. Very interesting. So, uh, Dave, you mentioned Nick Bostrom's argument for the simulation hypothesis."
},
{
"end_time": 675.606,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 660.179,
"text": " And I think a lot of what he talks about, it's basically a probabilistic argument where he says that, you know, if a high fidelity simulated reality is possible, then it's highly improbable that we live in the base reality and that we're likely innocent. What are your thoughts on this probabilistic argument?"
},
{
"end_time": 705.725,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 676.92,
"text": " You don't like it, right? Well, yeah, I mean, I already responded to it, right? I said, in some sense, it's selling off the branch that it sits on because, you know, you like when you take it seriously, like the picture it leads to is like a is like a tree of like where each world can simulate worlds, which in turn can simulate other worlds and so forth. And then you say, well, OK, but why would we be at the at the base of the tree? Right. But OK, but wait a minute. These simulations should be repeatedly getting smaller, right? Because each one has to run on computers that fit in"
},
{
"end_time": 730.657,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 705.725,
"text": " you know the next universe above it right and there's always some overhead in a simulation and so actually it seems like you know in this universe we should only be able to simulate smaller universes right and and only a bigger more complex universe can simulate this one you know in which case like what do we even mean when we say that our our descendants are going to be simulating us right they're going to be simulating some smaller universe that maybe you know has something right but"
},
{
"end_time": 754.599,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 730.93,
"text": " or you know unless you believe that we were in the smaller universe already but but then you know then then you just get too confused on the other hand if we're the simulation maybe isn't this universe we've already got evidence that this universe is a pretty big one uh with a lot of spare computing power for simulating universes a lot of the world simulating us could be bigger right all those galaxies going to waste what are they doing exactly"
},
{
"end_time": 785.094,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 755.759,
"text": " So Susan and I have written a lot about this idea of algorithmic incompressibility or where we postulate that there are certain processes like complex processes that are not necessarily mappable to some sort of a mathematical abstraction. You know, like you can think about the emergence of markets in an economy or something like that, these kinds of processes. And so, you know, we're torn between whether or not this is an epistemic thing where we simply don't have the knowledge to understand these things yet, or maybe it represents some sort of an ontological limit in terms of, you know, calculability or computability."
},
{
"end_time": 803.029,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 785.435,
"text": " So along that line, if there is some sort of a computable limit to the universe, like some sort of a computability horizon, do you think something like that could be evidence of a simulation in that we're in some sort of a computer that can only compute up to the power of the computer doing the simulating on the outside?"
},
{
"end_time": 824.394,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 803.985,
"text": " I mean, if the natural world works anything like science thinks it works in Galileo, then the answer to your question has to be it is epistemic. If we had enough knowledge of the state of every particle, if you knew the complete state of the universe, let's say the wave function of the universe at a given time,"
},
{
"end_time": 853.541,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 824.394,
"text": " then you could run the equations forward and that would tell you not only what the particles are doing or the probabilities for them to do each possible thing it would tell you what the markets are going to do ultimately because that that super beans on it right so yeah we are actually in a way in the situation you mentioned we seem to be in a Turing computable universe yeah and we've gotten used to that and so on but your reasoning is now hey shouldn't the fact that"
},
{
"end_time": 880.759,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 853.848,
"text": " We're in a Turing computable universe. Make us kind of suspicious about something like maybe we're actually inside a computation in the in the next universe. Yeah, right. But suppose that we had these, you know, found we found things on the beach that could solve the whole thing problem. Right. So now we know that we're in a hyper touring. Then our notion of computability would just be the hyper touring one. And we'd say, well, well, why are we in a hyper touring universe? It must be because we're simulated by a hyper touring machine."
},
{
"end_time": 893.626,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 881.254,
"text": " Right so like that this is like there's not something specific here about touring me right that this yeah I'd be really interesting if it turns out that physical processes all show up in some you know way lower than Turing computable class of"
},
{
"end_time": 917.858,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 893.916,
"text": " This is a"
},
{
"end_time": 939.65,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 918.285,
"text": " right because you know the universe is running in some like lazy classical simulation where they know that they can usually ignore the you know hard enough quantum computations because those never actually happen right and then you know the first when we try to build quantum computers that's when we're going to break that abstraction and there there just won't be enough computing power in the simulators i think actually when i"
},
{
"end_time": 965.606,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 939.65,
"text": " I had my one meeting ever with Larry Page. That was what he wanted to talk about. Maybe you know more than me about whether we're all in a simulation. I hear that's what they're trying to do in DeepMind too. They're just trying to stress test the simulation with really powerful AI and make it crash. I'm a professor at a university that"
},
{
"end_time": 995.367,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 966.135,
"text": " Serves the intelligence community. So I'm naturally interested in like national security related problems So the other day I was googling national security implications of the simulation argument and like unsurprisingly There's not really a lot out there on this topic other than like some kind of like off-the-wall conspiracy theory kind of things Maybe the simulators are gonna like take our stuff and feed it to like foreign powers Well, I guess my question is so like I'm interested in how emerging technologies technologies are emerging ideas within tech"
},
{
"end_time": 998.456,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 995.759,
"text": " um... you know may impact global security and stability"
},
{
"end_time": 1028.78,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 998.78,
"text": " So my question is, do you think that any confirmed knowledge of a simulated reality could disrupt the existing social order in some way?"
},
{
"end_time": 1056.886,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1028.78,
"text": " I think I would need to see several things happen that haven't happened before. I would want to say that whether the universe is a computer simulation should be a national security issue. A lot would depend on how we got this confirmed knowledge. Maybe like if the simulator start talking to us and say, hey, I'm going to like, here, let me just hack the code of the simulation right now and turn the Empire State Building upside down and so on. You bet that would be a national security issue. Absolutely."
},
{
"end_time": 1086.749,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1057.005,
"text": " So Dave, in Reality Plus, you discussed how, and you mentioned it in your talk earlier, how any sort of virtual reality is in fact real, in like an ontological sense."
},
{
"end_time": 1099.906,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1086.988,
"text": " Can you elaborate on that?"
},
{
"end_time": 1127.005,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1100.401,
"text": " the dream hypothesis and so on and the standard and take out with evil demons falling in the standard view is always if you're in the simulation like scenarios nothing is real now the contemporary version is virtual reality actually very timely tomorrow apple is releasing their uh... reality pro uh... their their first virtual reality device although they don't call it that right it's a spatial computing device i've ordered mine it's coming on saturday uh..."
},
{
"end_time": 1156.647,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1127.978,
"text": " and again the standard view is that if you're in vr none of this is real it's a fiction it's a hallucination it's an illusion i really want to argue that uh no this is wrong objects in vr are they genuinely exist they're real they have causal powers they're digital they're digital but we now know that being digital is not a way of being unreal you know there's that that phrase irl right in real life where it's like there's the digital and the real but we know that's totally you know it's a really bad way of thinking about uh"
},
{
"end_time": 1183.848,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1157.073,
"text": " about reality. So in general, and likewise, I think thinking about the simulation hypothesis, and it from bit and so on can lead you down the road to thinking that actually, if we're in a simulation, all this stuff is genuinely real. That only applies to grand scale metaphysical theorizing. On the other hand, the case of VR is something which you know, these are worlds that we're going to be in increasingly more over the next over the next few decades. I think it's really it's actually quite important. One of these things are just fully"
},
{
"end_time": 1197.483,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1184.36,
"text": " Illusions, hallucinations and escapism or whether they're a form of real world in which you can have meaningful experiences. So that's what I, in the book, I try and argue that at least in principle, you can have real meaningful lives in VR. Very interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 1226.135,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1198.012,
"text": " Do you think that if we ever were able to simulate a high enough fidelity, uh, virtual reality here, would we ever be able to tell whether or not any of the Sims in that environment in that environment are P zombies or whether or not they have consciousness? And then sort of by extension, do you think that any simulator that exists outside of our reality would know whether or not, uh, any entities in this reality are in fact conscious? There is this problem of other minds. It's very hard to know whether another creature is conscious, even given it's a, it's,"
},
{
"end_time": 1252.534,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1226.766,
"text": " Behavior i've always taken the view that at least you know if a system is behaving enough like us it doesn't prove that they're conscious they could be zombies number less it kind of ought to create a presumption of consciousness in us if they're from all this sophisticated behavior but now in the era of large language models which are they're not yet at the point of being turning indistinguishable from us but you know they're not that far off and a lot of people at least"
},
{
"end_time": 1282.142,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1252.995,
"text": " I want to say welcome and there's actually good reason to think they're not conscious or at least not strong reasons for extending them that That presumption so I think language models have you know, they've already make make a lot of people think the Turing test is Much less useful than we thought it might be as a test for consciousness But then we have nothing else to take its place. So I think right now actually we're rather confused about that issue Yeah, very good Scott do you have anything you want to add to any of those questions? Yeah, absolutely. That's my next"
},
{
"end_time": 1304.343,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1282.295,
"text": " This is for Scott and for David and Scott's probably gonna get upset at me for asking something like this but you know what if I've always kind of thought about the simulation in terms of okay you're talking about being inside or outside of a system how can those things interact so I always kind of saw it as something more of like a"
},
{
"end_time": 1319.838,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1304.94,
"text": " a self-simulation. If you're inside of something and you have no means of judging if there's anything outside of it, how can you even make the argument that there's something exterior? Even the fact that we can just think about these things, what are the implications of that?"
},
{
"end_time": 1349.241,
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"start_time": 1320.486,
"text": " This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state."
},
{
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"text": " I mean, that's exactly what we were talking about. I started my remarks with saying, well, the first thing I want to know is does it make any difference to anything or not that I can observe? If it doesn't make any difference, well, then at the very least, I need to hear an argument for why I should then care further about this. You said self-stimulation as in, oh, this is a simulation by ourselves."
},
{
"end_time": 1400.93,
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"start_time": 1377.5,
"text": " You know, the way I kind of look at it is, okay, how can we not add anything else, look for anything else and just normal perception, daily life, whatever, how can we change our interpretation to where it's, there's no boundary. Like if you're, for example, if you're inside of, I've given this example before to people, like if you're inside of a sphere and you have no means of judging anything from the outside,"
},
{
"end_time": 1411.032,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1401.664,
"text": " does it's effectively useless to you i mean it's kind of again to scott's point and when i say self i mean like it's self-contained there's not like an exterior there's only an"
},
{
"end_time": 1436.561,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1411.408,
"text": " interior. The extreme version of this is the dream hypothesis, right? It's you yourself who are creating the simulation. That's really an epistemic bubble. I mean, there are many analogous issues, right? Like mathematicians might have once thought that, okay, it only makes sense to talk about a curved surface if it's embedded in some higher dimensional flat space. And then eventually they realized, no, you can just intrinsically talk about your"
},
{
"end_time": 1450.64,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1436.561,
"text": " Michael?"
},
{
"end_time": 1475.828,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1451.459,
"text": " I don't really see why you would, if you wanted to know how a civilization might go and behave and stuff, I don't see why you would simulate that civilization was actual people. If I were to do it, I would create what I would call a puppet master simulation where there's an AI on top and what that AI is doing is it has a bunch of puppets which have various personalities and stuff like that."
},
{
"end_time": 1502.363,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1476.852,
"text": " They're perceiving various things and the AI on top figures knows how its characters and stuff are going to react to those stimuli and have them react in that way. And therefore you can use that to simulate an entire civilization without actually having people in it, essentially. And if you were to do this, then that AI on top could have its characters overlook any flaws or cracks in the simulation. So it could be a lot less intensive."
},
{
"end_time": 1522.176,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1503.302,
"text": " I mean, of course we can appeal to the anthropic principle here, right? If there are some simulations with no sentient beings and there are others with sentient beings, then we have to be in the latter kind. I mean, this is the premise of some of those original simulation fiction, right? Like Simulacron three, which was a was all the other simulation, I think was devised by"
},
{
"end_time": 1542.039,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1522.619,
"text": " people from an advertising company for marketing reasons they wanted to see you know which program which product was going to do well with people but for that to be useful in a social context don't you have to simulate people it's like if i simulate a world without people it's not going to be terribly useful for navigating for for you know governing my actions at least in this in this"
},
{
"end_time": 1570.913,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1542.278,
"text": " Social world actually gets even worse. If we now have simulation technology, you're going to have to simulate a world where people have simulation technology and that rapidly gets recursive and difficult. I guess when we talk about like simulation theory slash arguments like hypothesis, the concept of you mentioned infinite regression or recursion comes into mind. So if it's the case that we are in a simulation and if it's a case as there is a creator,"
},
{
"end_time": 1599.77,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1571.357,
"text": " There's probably then an equal or I will say even higher chance that the world, the creator is also simulated. And if that's simulated, there's a higher chance that the creator of the creator's world is also simulated. And I guess that could go like infinitely. So and even beyond that, into the countable ordinals. And yeah, yeah. So I guess will that serve lead us into like a perpetual like uncertainty about like the underlying principles of reality?"
},
{
"end_time": 1628.695,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1600.196,
"text": " And is that the keys or not? And if it is, is that something like worth considering? This is like, is it William James to whom the remark was attributed? It's like he gave a lecture and then someone came up to him and said, look, James, your metaphysics is all wrong. Here's the correct metaphysics of reality. We're all sitting on the back of a turtle. And they said, what's the turtle on? Oh, it's it's it's another turtle. And then William says, well, no, I know where you're going. It's turtles all the way down."
},
{
"end_time": 1658.933,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1629.411,
"text": " So, uh, so likewise for simulation, for a simulation, that one's in a simulation. Maybe it's simulations all the way up either way. It's like, you have to, this kind of raises a very deep philosophical question, which is, does there have to be a fundamental level to reality? Uh, the philosopher Jonathan Schaffer wrote a nice article saying, no, there doesn't have to be. It can be like the levels all the way down to, uh, to infinity. But if you're inclined to think that there has to be a fundamental level, then, uh, presumably we're going to have to be at some fixed point in the hierarchy. Very good."
},
{
"end_time": 1677.193,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1659.189,
"text": " I kind of like the idea that a simulation is all the way up. So I like to inject aliens into a lot of conversations, but I think this is an interesting thought experiment because nobody ever uses alien for creator, right? But in some sense, you're hypothesizing about an intelligent being."
},
{
"end_time": 1692.159,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1677.534,
"text": " other than us. And I think when you're talking about the simulation argument, people will agree that if we encounter aliens on another world and if we're in a simulation, it's still first contact. And so my question is, if we simulate aliens, is that first contact?"
},
{
"end_time": 1722.739,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1693.899,
"text": " If you spend time interacting with it, you do have the feeling that you are talking to an alien. You are talking to a new kind of intelligence that exists on Earth that did not five years ago. Of course, it is not a kind of intelligence that arose independently from humans. In that sense, it is fundamentally different from meeting an extraterrestrial from another planet."
},
{
"end_time": 1746.647,
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"start_time": 1723.831,
"text": " Well, let's all thank our speakers. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, kurtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like."
},
{
"end_time": 1773.097,
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"start_time": 1746.903,
"text": " That's just part of the terms of service. Now, a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 1790.418,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1773.097,
"text": " Plus, it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube,"
},
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"text": " which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts"
},
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"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
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"start_time": 1839.735,
"text": " and donating with whatever you like there's also paypal there's also crypto there's also just joining on youtube again keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time you also get early access to ad free episodes whether it's audio or video it's audio in the case of patreon video in the case of youtube for instance this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier"
},
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"text": " Every dollar helps far more than you think either way your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much"
},
{
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"text": " I won't let my moderate to severe plexoriasis symptoms define me. Emerge as you. In two clinical studies, Trimphia guselkumab, taken by injection, provided 90% clearer skin at 16 weeks in 7 out of 10 adults with moderate to severe plexoriasis. In a study, nearly 7 out of 10 patients with 90% clearer skin at 16 weeks were still clearer at 5 years. At 1 year and thereafter, patients and healthcare providers knew that Trimphia was being used. This may have increased results. Results may vary."
},
{
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"text": " Serious allergic reactions may occur. Tremphia may increase your risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms of infection including fever, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough. Tell your doctor if you had a vaccine or plan to. Emerge as you. Learn more about Tremphia, including important safety information at Tremphia.com or call 1-877-578-3527."
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{
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"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
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"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
}
]
}No transcript available.