What if we live in a simulation, then our universe should have an artifact? Before trying to answering that, we have to clarify what an ‘artifact’ or ‘residue’ of living in a simulation- a program is? Well, within the abstract world of programmed mathematics, the processing speed of operations per second will be observed, felt, experienced, noted as an artifact of underlying physical computing machinery.
This artifact will appear as an additional component of any operation that is unaffected by the operation in the simulated reality. The value of this additional component of the operation would simply be defined as the time taken to perform one operation on variables up to a maximum limit that is the memory container size for the variable.
So, in an eight-bit computer, for instance to oversimplify, this would be 256. The value of this additional component will be the same for all numbers up to the maximum limit. The additional hardware component will thus be irrelevant for any operations within the simulated reality except when it is discovered as the maximum container size. The observer within the simulation has no frame for quantifying the processor speed except when it presents itself as an upper limit.
So, to answer “What if we live in a simulation” … then our universe should have an artifact. We can begin to articulate some properties of such an artifact that would help us in our search for such an artifact in our universe.
- The artifact is as an additional component of every operation that is unaffected by the magnitude of the variables being operated upon and is irrelevant within the simulated reality until a maximum variable size is observed.
- The artifact presents itself in the simulated world as an upper limit.
- The artifact cannot be explained by underlying mechanistic laws of the simulated universe. It has to be accepted as an assumption or “given” within the operating laws of the simulated universe.
- The effect of the artifact or the anomaly is absolute. No exceptions (Tree of Knowledge)… indeed!
Now that we have some defining features of the artifact, of course it becomes clear what the artifact manifests itself as within our universe. The artifact is manifested as the speed of light.
Space is to our universe what numbers are to the simulated reality in any computer. Matter moving through space can simply be seen as operations happening on the variable space. If matter is moving at say 1,000 miles per second, then 1,000 miles worth of space is being transformed by a function, or operated upon every second.
If there were some hardware running the simulation called “space” of which matter, energy, you, me, everything is a part, then one telltale sign of the artifact of the hardware within the simulated reality “space” would be a maximum limit on the container size for space on which one operation can be performed. Such a limit would appear in our universe as a maximum speed.
You know the movie The Matrix, right? Well, it has done its part to popularize the notion of simulated realities. And the idea has deep roots in Western and Eastern philosophical traditions, from Plato’s cave allegory to Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream.
Astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University decided to resort to Bayesian reasoning. What is that? Well, its a type of analysis named after Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century English statistician and minister. Bayesian analysis allows one to calculate the odds of something happening (called the “posterior” probability) by first making assumptions about the thing being analyzed (assigning it a “prior” probability).
Kipping began by turning the trilemma into a dilemma. He collapsed propositions one and two into a single statement, because in both cases, the final outcome is that there are no simulations.
Thus, the dilemma pits a physical hypothesis (there are no simulations) against the simulation hypothesis (there is a base reality—and there are simulations, too). “You just assign a prior probability to each of these models,” Kipping says. “We just assume the principle of indifference, which is the default assumption when you don’t have any data or leanings either way.”
So each hypothesis gets a prior probability of one half, much as if one were to flip a coin to decide a wager.
The next stage of the analysis required thinking about “parous” realities—those that can generate other realities—and “nulliparous” realities—those that cannot simulate offspring realities. If the physical hypothesis was true, then the probability that we were living in a nulliparous universe would be easy to calculate: it would be 100 percent. Kipping then showed that even in the simulation hypothesis, most of the simulated realities would be nulliparous.
That is because as simulations spawn more simulations, the computing resources available to each subsequent generation dwindles to the point where the vast majority of realities will be those that do not have the computing power necessary to simulate offspring realities that are capable of hosting conscious beings.
Plug all these into a Bayesian formula, and out comes the answer: the posterior probability that we are living in base reality is almost the same as the posterior probability that we are a simulation—with the odds tilting in favor of base reality by just a smidgen.
These probabilities would change dramatically if humans created a simulation with conscious beings inside it, because such an event would change the chances that we previously assigned to the physical hypothesis. “You can just exclude that [hypothesis] right off the bat. Then you are only left with the simulation hypothesis,” Kipping says. “The day we invent that technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50–50 that we are real to almost certainly we are not real, according to these calculations. It’d be a very strange celebration of our genius that day.”
The best part of Kipping’s analysis is that, given current evidence, Musk is wrong about the one-in-billions odds that he ascribes to us living in base reality. Bostrom agrees with the result—with some caveats. “This does not conflict with the simulation argument, which only asserts something about the disjunction,” the idea that one of the three propositions of the trilemma is true, he says.
But Bostrom takes issue with Kipping’s choice to assign equal prior probabilities to the physical and simulation hypothesis at the start of the analysis. “The invocation of the principle of indifference here is rather shaky,” he says. “One could equally well invoke it over my original three alternatives, which would then give them one-third chance each. Or one could carve up the possibility space in some other manner and get any result one wishes.”
*ONLINE SOURCES~ The above texts have largely been cut and paste and integrated here on this blog to stir the social imagination about what reality is. I have posited numerous times on past posts that we live in the social imagination... an agreement reality based on incoming and outgoing (shared) information that has an absolute source; but, one that has been strained over time and or strained due to our living in an entropic universe, a fallen condition. Having fallen away or fallen farther from that absolute source causes glitches in the matrix but there is a reboot coming...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-we-live-in-a-simulation/
