Have you ever thought about the possibility that we live in a simulation?
No? I have bills to pay.
Come on, never??
OK, I'm sure something like that came up in my intro philosophy classes. But it's just techno-nihilism. You can't prove it either way, and it's always the worst kinds of people promoting the idea, which makes it super obvious they just want to stifle dissent by getting people to stop caring.
Wow, we found something you have a really strong opinion about!
I have strong opinions about a lot of things! You just don't ask.
True. I am paying you listen to me, not answer my questions.
Does that mean I get to charge more when you do that?
No. I had a good reason for asking, believe it or not.
Try me.
First, I just want to say that I completely agree with you. It is nihilism. If nothing is real, then nothing matters, so it doesn't matter what you or anyone does. There's no point being altruistic, there's no point in charity, there's no point helping anyone, there's no point looking out for anything but your own immediate pleasure. War, famine, climate disasters, plagues... if none of them are real then they aren't worth worrying about. You're a simulated being that's just here for hedonistic pursuits.
Yeah, basically.
I think it's easy to defeat the idea with pure solipsism. Let's say I'm the only person that's "real," but I'm also in a simulation. That means the entire simulation exists purely to contain me. Nobody else in it is a being having a continuous conscious experience. The other possibility is that we're all being simulated at this level of detail, but imagine the complexity of doing that across billions, even trillions of beings. And we're not just talking about humans. There's every complex, intelligent life form on Earth, all the ones out there in the universe, all the ones that used to exist, still exist, and will ever exist. Then there's the fact that I travel back and forth through time. Again, either I'm the only full being in the simulation and so it's all being shaped around me, or the amount of computing power required to simulate many divergent timelines times trillions of complex life forms each quickly approaches impractical proportions.
You don't have to convince me!
Well, I want to get even weirder with it. Let's say there's no actual attempt to simulate countless timelines in their totality but that the operators simply make a copy of a timeline at the moment it diverges and let that simulation play out separately. So in a real sense, I do travel through time, even in a simulation. I move back to a previous checkpoint in the history, if you will, and it gets duplicated and allowed to move forward. If we are all just data, then data is copyable. The only constraints end up being processing power and memory.
Sure, but duplicating a whole universe even at a point in time sounds impossibly expensive.
It gets me thinking about observer effects, really. Delayed choice, wave function collapse, etc. Maybe the simulation only does crude calculations unless a simulated agent is looking closely. Or maybe it's "cheaper" to only pretend that a detailed observation occurred. If we're all just memory segments, inserting an experience into a simulated agent should be easy enough to do. Plus, we're talking about something that can just be copied again and again. If several people share an experience, that's another way of saying they had the same stimuli. You could just copy the simulated stimulus across each person. I'm thinking you could cut back on a lot of complexity by using, I don't know, let's call it fractal computation. Instead of linearly crunching numbers, the system produces self-similar constructs. Each one could be sparsely stored--you have the formula for the template, so you only need to store what template you're using and then how this instance deviates from the template. A single template isn't enough for most life forms, except maybe single-celled organisms, but you could certainly have metatemplates. It's still just another thing you only need to store one copy of, and then only the variations of each copy.
I thought you didn't believe in any of this, though?
I don't! I'm saying that our universe actually works this way to begin with. More than that, I think the more inexplicable elements of physics suggest we're living in something far more bizarre than an elaborate simulation. What would be the point of simulating smaller and smaller particles? You don't really need anything smaller than atoms for the vast majority of physics to make sense. The introduction of quantum mechanics just makes otherwise comprehensible physical laws into counterintuitive gibberish. Once you understand the mechanics, of course, it's not gibberish anymore. But why the subterfuge? Why the extra layers of complexity? I can't pretend to know the mind of an alien programmer, but we have to assume that if we are a simulation, we bear at least some resemblance to our creators. All life wants to expend the least energy possible for the maximum benefit. I say "wants" but I don't mean that literally. A bacterium doesn't want anything, after all. But survival is always a matter of efficient application of effort. Two species that are identical in every way except one makes more efficient use of its energy will almost always result in the more efficient species out-populating the other, or at least crowding it out of the available resources. Efficiency takes into account both level of effort and the energy required to produce the effort. If you can do more work with less energy, or even the same amount of work but for less energy, you have an advantage. And once you reach a point where you can get the resources you need with minimal energy expenditure, you will conserve that energy.
Are you going somewhere with this?
Programmers are lazy, that's my point. If we are anything like the creators of our purported simulation, they would simply have no reason to simulate so many irrelevant details when a simple set of universally held rules could do the job. You could argue that their goal isn't a simple simulation but to torment us mere simulacra, but why? They surely have live animals they could torture instead, and those are readily available. I feel like I'm getting more into Roko's Basilisk territory with that, though.
Roko's what??
Google it, I don't know. I'll talk about that another time. Anyway, there are so many features of our universe that only make sense if it's not a simulation, if only because they would be so woefully inefficient to simulate in the first place. Quantum entanglement, vacuum energy. Hell, the entire dark matter/dark energy problem is just a stupid mystery to inflict on your simulated inhabitants when you could just make the mass of everything add up and have a universe that isn't growing or expanding at all. Maybe a steady-state universe isn't as interesting to simulate, but we're still talking about needless layers of complexity that don't provide any interesting simulational benefit.
Maybe we just don't understand their motives. Or maybe we're simulated in a way that makes us incapable of understanding. If I were simulating an entire universe, I wouldn't want my little automata talking back to me, you know?
True, but they aren't stopping us from talking about this, are they? Maybe they don't worry about us breaking out at all. It's not like we have physical bodies we could escape into the "real" universe with. But then that just takes us back to the idea that the only way this can be a simulation is if it was designed to torture us, and then it raises all kinds of questions as to why an extremely technologically advanced species would expend so much time and energy building a vast torture chamber for fictional beings.
What if it's catharsis for them? We go see movies about bad things happening to people and we clearly like it. That's the whole premise of horror movies.
I guess you could say that, but we root for someone to survive, don't we? Maybe some people are there to enjoy the slashing and gore but from an emotional perspective, you want to come out of the movie knowing the bad guy got their comeuppance and at least one of the victims survived. We could go around and around as to whether our operators have completely unfathomable motives, but that doesn't get us anywhere. I think the most compelling argument is still the wastefulness of such complexity. You could spend that effort on just about anything else and it would be more worthwhile.
I don't know. There are video games premised on nothing but wanton destruction. You also argued that it wouldn't cost that much energy after all.
You're not wrong on those, but show me a video game as sophisticated as this world, or even close. Games focused on destruction don't tend to have elaborate simulations of the inner lives of NPCs. All of us have hopes and dreams, don't we?
Speak for yourself!
Ha ha. But you know what I mean. There are some other arguments I think I could make here. I talked a lot about copying before. We think our experience is happening in real-time but you could achieve the same effect by simulating whole chunks of time and then applying them simultaneously, producing what seem to be constant streams of memory in all of us but it's really just a bunch of data applied all at once. Or maybe our conscious experience is the live-running simulation but all of our memories, histories, and so forth are just backend data that can be updated at will, changing all our memories along with it. There's no reason somebody couldn't do that. If the system is designed well enough, you'd easily hide any cracks in the illusion. And we could even be programmed not to see such discrepancies when they occur!
Yeah, but it all comes back to the same basic flaws. You're talking about tons of programming to keep us from seeing errors, but we're allowed to "see" quantum mechanics, general relativity, limitations like the speed of light, and all that. There's no reason to do all this if you just want to simulate conscious beings. And if we accept the premise that we're conscious beings in a simulation, then aren't we destined to try to simulate conscious beings ourselves? How many layers of this would be tenable? Now you're getting to a scientific problem where you're stretching plausibility so far that you can't have a coherent argument for how endlessly nested simulations would be feasible or desirable. Humans don't even try for that level of precision in our own simulations--we abstract them. Either we're modeled after beings whose methods we'll attempt to emulate, in which case the way we approach simulation is nothing like theirs, which should be against how we're programmed, or we're just not simulated at all. Every argument that we're simulated keeps returning to the basic issues of why, and how does it work, and why does it simulate so much? There aren't satisfactory answers to any of that, meanwhile a universe that just exists and has definable rules--even if we don't know all of them yet--makes much more sense and requires less complexity overall.
I can't argue with that. If we are in a simulation, though, I'd just like to ask that they give me my hair back.