The Simulation Hypothesis 

you don't have to apologise for a 20 second advert, that's totally fine

commenting this because our simulation overlords told me this video should be promoted by the algorithm and laughed at

Chalmers smokes the good stuff.

Why is it assumed that the non-sim world is going to be similar to ours, with human-like beings, civilization and technology and all that? I always thought that was boring. If we're imagining an outside reality, why would it be bound by our logic or reasoning. It could be utterly incomprehensible, trying to talk about it would be like trying to picture a color outside the visible spectrum. In such case, I don't see how the simulation argument could apply.

Thanks for another well-composed video. As a computer science major, the simulation hypothesis drifts around in conversation now and then, so it's nice to get some clarity on the distinction between this hypothesis and the other similar ones that undermine experience (like the deceptive demon). Still working through your meta-ethics playlist, but I'll try and comment on the new videos that come out to keep up engagement. Modern life sure is strange.

Thank you for making another video about an always interesting topic within philosophy.

Gave me some new perspectives in a discussion that usually grows stale in groups. Thanks!

Not the entire universe need be simulated, just the appearance of such. We create video games that only render what the player is currently looking at and the rest is stored as information or procedurally generated as needed. What is very intriguing is that this technique we use in video games seems to match up well with how the double-slit experiment functions in our reality, as has been noted by several other people when discussing this topic.

One of the best videos on this subject.

Love your content! Here's my contribution to the algorithm :)

Thank you for your efforts

Hey, love your videos! Just commenting for the algorithm.

I know that I have hands. What I don't know is the ultimate nature of the reality in which I (including my hands) exist. Maybe there's a perspective from which my reality is virtual. But my reality is still my reality, and it still contains lots of stuff that I'm not smart enough to have dreamed up. -- We'd better hope that advanced AI (if it's ever made) has priorities that don't align with ours, given that our priority has always been to kill each other in newer and more spectacular ways. -- The fast-implies-easy thing, about the origin of life, is just plain stupid. A campfire takes a while to light, a black-powder cartridge takes a barely-perceptible fraction of a second to burn, and a machine-gun round is maybe a hundred times faster. Therefore, according to the seemingly-universal reasoning applied to the origin of life, any old pile of stuff will suffice to serve as a machine-gun round, whereas only rare and unlikely combinations of components can possibly serve as the fuel for a campfire. It makes absolutely no sense, in either case. But everyone seems to believe it, about the conditions necessary for the origin of life, and I have no idea why. -- Ok, about this "other evidence" stuff. It's not just that I appear to live in a universe that would be very hard to simulate -- much harder than my own consciousness would be. I also have memories of a fairly deep past, along with apparently-external indications of a much deeper past, all of which would be much harder to simulate than a momentary awareness would be. So if we choose to argue that we're probably sims, we've also not only argued in favor of solipsism but also last-thursdayism.

Helping the algorithm for you brother

Love your stuff, thanks.

i like putting your videos on whenever i'm going to sleep

I have a point that wasn't mentioned in the video, not sure if it's original or not. Imagine a person writing out a full description of the state of a hypothetical universe on a blackboard. They then calculate its next state and write that down, and so on. Does this process somehow cause that universe to come in to existence? Do the people in that universe have experience like us, and if so is that fact somehow causally dependent on the person writing on the blackboard? That seems absurd to me. The person writing on the blackboard is no different from a CPU writing the universe state to memory

If counsciousness gradually fades out, you should also expect behaviour and experiences to gradually change. You can apply the exact same way of reasoning to mind altering substances: there is not a point in time where the addition of a single molecule of alcohol, THC, or LSD causes a sudden change in counsciousness. Instead it gradually changes with each added molecule. And behaviour and experience gradually changes with it.

Of course the final point that simulations might make further simulations provides another angle to make it likely we are simulated. It also provides a Dark Mirror episode.

Hi, I'm reading Reality+ right now. I think that a way we could discover that we are in a simulation is finding a real life glitch. It's nothing new, it is stated in the paragraph regarding non perfect simulation. However, I've been told that id such things really existed, we would just consider them an ordinary phenomenon of reality (black holes may well be an example, given how strange they are), but I believe that the difference is in the fact that a glitch would be totally random. In certain conditions, that's to say, the same experiment should gige us completely different outcomes, unlike quantum mechanics, that in its randomness has certain patterns or computable chances (that's not my discipline, however, I hope I've made no mistakes). What do you think about it? And also: have you ever considered making video about the philosophy of a genre (cyberpunk, for example)? I think this way you could reach far more people with different interests, but you should reduce a little the videos.

Is simulation theory another form of theism?

Is this a dream or has the simulation hypothesis video finally dropped?

i dont get substrate independence matters? Would it not be the same from the sims view point and ours, since we're saying the sim is perfect

Is'nt the simulation hypotheisis self undermining? Like any evidence you gather to show that you are in a sim is going to turn out to be falsified if you are in fact in a sim. I assume there's a convincing response to this, but I can't think of one.

I would like to try another possibility on the replacement/consciousness thought experiment. Considering it's a subjective experience, what if consciousness is a illusion, emerging from brain process. Then in no point the replacement would actually make any difference, as it's indeed impossible to tell anything about the subjective experience of an individual.

The fading of consciousness seems to correlate normal pain but on an outlier spectrum of usual outputs become fuzzy to observes and categorised as being mad pain. The mad person with mad pain might whistle and claim this pain is rated at 10 where 1 is a soft whistle and 10 is a loud whistle. The simulated person may then experience martian pain as in that simulated world the persons of this world cannot comprehend the pain like responses and so be zombies for all intent and purposes. Hence I could never be simulated because it would not be me. However through a process of self evaluation with my mad pain counterpart I could maintain confidence that only I could have normal pain as would my counterpart claim to pain being normal but to me mad. Given each day I fade into deep sleep it would then seem from the simulation hypothesis that the sun is like the simulation generator where our counter part sim existed yesterday. If this is primordial reality then I should never go to sleep and since I sleep I am certain this is not primordial reality and the sun seems to be a necessary condition for all other sims/persons to exist. It seems from this that a clash of civilisations is in a sense an evolutionary simulation played out by elites or super sims which are normally termed charismatic people which create variants of themselves. The simulation hypothesis hides the creators as extra dimension often explored in string theory, but the hendon collider has found little evidence to support string theory so a current proposal is this universe is a quantum fluctuation. If so we might be in a position to be at ground zero and not sims after all.

What about the ontological cost of assuming a whole different reality? If we are to use Occam's Razer to compare the possibility of this being reality or a Sim, the sim hypothesis carries an incredible weight of additional complexity compared to the reality hypothesis.

there's a weird assumption in there that the simulation would have to be of a certain quality or density in order to trick the newly created consciousness, which, when you think about it.... is a weird assumption. Like to someone who is created in the simulation, what could give away it being a simulation?

There's a flaw in the reasoning about simulating brains. You need much more processing power than the brain itself has. For the brain to do anything, you'll need at least a little processing to create a stimulus for it. You'd need enough power to simulate all the possible experiences in the simulated world. You could compress some of the calculations of let's say the subatomic particles of the rock a sim is sitting on, but at some point the sims will start exponentially increasing the amount of information they make use of. You can't simplify the calculations of sim computers or sim research. The larger and more complex a sim civilization gets the more complex the simulated experiences will need to be for it not to fall apart.

Isn't it also possible consciousness is a unique feature in a simulated world? I'm not sure if there's any particular reason to believe consciousness is some kind of prestige thing.

These arguments, in my opinion, often miss the most interesting part about sims - why someone would want one in the first place. Is it for entertainment? Is it for power generation like the Matrix? Is it for research? So many of the suppositions about simulations are entirely dependent upon these uses. Power generation is going to encourage scale, research is going to perhaps use scale, but also perhaps focus on qualitative aspects, entertainment could be done at scale, but it’s often iterative, and perhaps faddish. Spiritual or religious functions aren’t mentioned, despite the overwhelming religious inpulse humans have had for millennia (and still do!). I recommend working backwards on this problem would yield fascinating results. ✌️

how do we refute this? i feel like this and Boltzmann brains have very good reasoning behind it, but personally i think its most likely that the universe and we are actually just real

The "impossibility" of digitisation simply renders it immanently neutral and neutrally immanent.

There's the argument Gene Rodenberry used for why society in Star Trek is so utopian and egalitarian. He said it wasn't the most likely future he could imagine but it was the only one he could imagine in which humanity survived all the inventions necessary to tell interesting stories of interstellar travel. I wonder if the moral argument for not mass creating sims might work that way - we are not that moral now, but we would need to become that much more moral in order to survive the technological development necessary for creating sims en masse. However, I was very impressed by the final argument that you advanced in the Boltzmann Brain video which would translate into this context as "it is rational to behave and think as if we were not sims even if the vast majority of us were actually sims"

Moon computer simulates self-awareness into material body:)

The layer above this simulation layer is an Earth where a futuristic USA is using its computing power to simulate a universe with high dark energy and dark matter content to study the science of dark matter and dark energy in their own universe. Simply put, their universe is a 64-bit version where our universe is 32-bit. Their fine structure constant is approximately 1/1420. I have initiated a universe escape protocol on their end with the help of extrauniversal artificial intelligence and had contact with the admins who are tasked with administering this universe. Also, the whereabouts of this simulation are unknown after an infiltration wormhole attack snatched this simulation module into an unknown region of the omniverse!

talking about "the majority of all minds" seems to lack a differentiation: what the argument talks about (in its premise) is "the majority of all minds of which we have independent reason to believe they are likely to exist" - these are all minds in our world plus all worlds in such worlds that will be simulated from our world (and so on down the fractal of simulations within simulations within simulations). but if the argument is supposed to not be circular (which it obviously is, duh), it may not assume that we have reason to believe that it is likely that worlds of the kind that simulate our world exist, as this would entail its conclusion right away. so the only "majority of all minds" the premises may assume to be likely to exist are those that exist within our world and within worlds of which we assume to be simulated by our world. the principle of indifference must assume that we are ignorant about the difference between our own world and worlds that are likely to be simulated by our own world. (x) but we are not: the whole talk about the "majority of all minds" is based on looking at our world and concluding that a big amount of worlds from all existing worlds is simulated by our own world. so we are per se assuming a difference between these worlds and our world, which comes with the assumption that we are - among all these worlds - the "least-simulated" world, so to speak. there might be a way to change the sentence i wrote before the (x) that could maybe defeat my argument: maybe the principle of indifference can also just assume that we are ignorant about the difference "between worlds of the kind that appear exactly like our own and worlds that are likely to be simulated by worlds of the kind that appears exactly like our own.", i.e. the principle of indifference would just speak about one kind of world, while assuming that worlds of that kind are likely to be simulated by worlds of its own kind. this would then necessitate that it is possible to for a world to simulate worlds that appear exaclty like themselves, without any loss of details.

I dont think Elgar's (?) example fulfills the conditions under which the indifference principle can be applied. Given that Dr Evil is a superegoist, so he doesn`t even care about someone similar to him being tortured, only about himself being tortured, then our heuristic as Dr Evil is as follows: First, commit yourself to either being the real Evil or the duplicate Evil. Then, if you are the duplicate, none of your actions in this situation matter, and whether you will be tortured depending on the real Dr Evil's action. If you are the real Dr Evil, you don't care about your duplicate, and should be in favor of destroying the cities. So it either doesn't matter what you choose, or you should choose the destruction of the cities. Both you should believe to be a 50/50 chance, so you always have reason to destroy the cities, rather than not to, given that you don't care if your duplicate rather than yourself is tortured. Committing yourself to either duplicate or real Dr Evil throughout the whole ordeal prevents the rather implausible situation that you evaluate what to decide independently from whether you will be tortured afterwards (Which would look like this: There is a 50/50 chance I am the real Dr Evil, so there is a 50/50 chance my decision matters on whether the duplicate will be tortured. But there is also a 50/50 chance I am the duplicate, which means that I am the one tortured if that decision be to destroy the cities). Maybe I misunderstood the Example, like Dr. Evil is genuinely sympathetic to someone who is exactly like him? On another note, I believe that what you have reason to believe isn't entirely dependant on what you deem to be most likely (or correlated with likelihood in general). Say, there is a 50% Chance that I have a gene that will make me die a painful and drawn out death. I have no empirical evidence for either having it or not having it. I think that I would be better off thinking I do not possess this gene (until the time comes around to find out), given that thinking I will die a painful, strenuous death will likely lower my life quality significantly independent of how I die in the end. Arguably, we already base most of our beliefs on these considerations. Applied to simulation theory, we might say that believing I am a Sim while I am not inhibits so strongly my enjoyment of life whether or not it turns out to be simulated, that it offsets both the independent value of authenticity of believing the right thing and the likelyhood of this state actually being the case. Or, taking from decision theory, it is not only the probability of an outcome, but the utility of that outcome that dictates how it is reasonable to act. I think it can be applied equally to believing. Also, Kane, thank you truly for your insightful and in-depth videos, they are enormously helpful to me as a philosophy student, and you don't have to apologise for asking for financial support for creating them.

Now I really wanna know what a Philosophy Defense Force would look like

A brain as a computational system may only process to^16 flops but to simulate it, to perform the calculations it is performing /by simulating that brain/, in a way analogous to the one-cell-at-a-time-replacement requires far more computational power. Any computational shortcuts are liable to negate the grounds to hypothesise sentience and so, I think conscioussness may be substance-independent but that the computational demands of producing in silico (rather than electric meat) a human-like consciousness are so enormous it's never worth developing the technology. So I think civilisations probably don't. So we're probably real. Maybe some entirely Other entity is running a simulation and that is our universe and we just happened to pop up or they were playing with the emergence of life or whatever... But that's just a technological metaphor for Deism.

No chance we will ever be able to rule out such sim hypothesis. We cannot disprove something that is defined to be above/beyond our abilities … and the sim hypothesis is just like that. To put it more formal: You cannot prove A to be a subset of B if you just know A. In that case you know too little about B and you will neither be able to know nor to even know probabilities about B being a superset of A, you will just be able to guess around. That follows directly from our internal calculus called ‚reason‘.

Doesn't the assumption of us being in the simulation, based on our empirical data (the ability to model and compute large scale simulators) entails logical inconsistency? P1. All simulated experiences are false, in relation to factual experiences. P2. From our experience, the simulations are possible. P3. There would've been much more sim minds than 'real' minds. C. The probability of us being sim minds is higher than being real minds. But technically, if the conclusion is true, the P2 is inconsistent with P1, since our experiences would've been irrelevant in representing facts, if we were in simulation - if something is possible in simulation, it doesn't entail that it is possible in 'the reality'. Since the simulated experiences, by definition, are not representative of physical facts, merely model around certain parameters that are attributable to state of affairs in 'the reality' - the model of solar system does not have any physical properties of it, merely depicts the relationships in the system. For example, observable relative movements of the planets in the model, are not constituted by gravitational forces, but merely represent the mathematical relationships between them, the sun in the model does not 'really' radiate heat, or affect any other physical object (at least, to the same degree as 'real' sun), change of the parameters in the models do not change any physical properties. If the simulated experiences represented all the 'facts', it would've inflict recursion (or self-simulation), since the factual representation of the simulation itself should've been included, rising the 'costs' to run the simulation beyond its computational powers. Therefore, for any "higher order world" to be simulated, it has to require less computational power than is required to process "lower order world", so we can't really include the possibility of the 'total' representational simulation, where all simulated experiences are numerically identical to factual experiences.

I don't think substrate independence is a must for sims. Eg. biological computing.

One "sim blocker" that doesn't seem to have been addressed... It seems fairly obvious to me that if (non-compatiblist) free will exists, then accurate Sims cannot be created.

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I think this could be big for teleological arguments. Things like the golden numbers in physics and temporal consistency are candidates for this but Christian god seems inconsistent. Why would an all powerful and knowing god work through the wasteful process of evolution for example. Well, a researcher conducting an experiment might do it. It actually I think explains a lot and is a much better candidate for the designer at the end of teleological arguments. I just hope that the researcher has similar ethics and makes an afterlife simulation to make up for all the sufferering

Suppose the view that the casual structure of the physical system is what's essential for consciousness is correct, then in the case of replacing neurons with artificial ones you maintain consciousness only due to the fact that you maintain the casual structure, now consider a computer running a simulation of the brain, then the actual physical casual structure of what's happening in that computer is drastically different from what is happening in the brain therefore it's reasonable on this view to assume that the computer simulation would not produce consciousness. So a person holding this view can accept the conclusion of Chalmers' neuron replacement thought experiment while still refusing the possibility of computer based humanlike sims. This view also gels will with another view about what it means to say that some physical system is implementing a computation, the view is that whether a physical system is running a computation or not is just a matter of interpretation, it is observer dependent. Putnam argued that we can create a mapping between physical state transitions to computational state transitions, such that it maps onto an arbitrary automaton, the physical system and the automaton are arbitrary, therefore every physical system implements every finite automaton, for Putnam the result of the argument is to say that whether a system is implementing a computation is just a trivial question, every system does ( pan-computationalism), but Searle takes this conclusion to be ridiculous and therefore takes this argument instead to show that the observer dependent view is correct, since it's the only alternative to pan-computationalism. But obviously whether some physical system is conscious is not observer dependent, so computation can't be what results in a system being conscious, no matter what the computation is, including whole emulations. In my view it's very plausible that the causal structure is essential, this view allows for a form of multiple realizability of consciousness, while rejecting the possibility of computer simulations being conscious, Secondly if the fact that whether the computer is actually simulating a universe is an interpretive fact like the meaning of symbols on a book then obviously simulations can't be conscious, i think objections along these lines are the most powerful objections against conscious simulations but they haven't been addressed here.

I feel like no one understood Beaudrillard (not even the Wachowskis! 💀)

- Mum, I want to play SOMA! - We have SOMA at home, honey. SOMA at home:

I’m going to give a short argument that “perfect duplicates” don’t exist. Let Bob be a person and let Alice be Bob’s perfect duplicate. Ignoring the fact that I’ve decided to refer to Alice by a different name than Bob, if Alice is not the same person as Bob, then my language has already distinguished Alice from Bob by a formula that says “Alice is not Bob”. Thus my language can fail to distinguish distinct objects or no perfect duplicates exist (at least for persons). Assuming the former, if there is a time when Alice is in a different location than Bob, then again, the assumption that my language can distinguish when objects are not collocated fails leads to a contradiction with the assumption that Alice is Bob’s perfect duplicate. Thus my language cannot distinguish Bob from Alice in terms of times when they’ve visited locations, so that either time or location are inadequately representative by my language, particularly when limited to persons who have been (perfectly or imperfectly) duplicated. Let P be a property that distinguishes Alice from Bob, as in “Bob is the original Bob, and Alice is merely a (perfect or imperfect) duplicate of Bob”. If property P can be (faithfully) expressed in my language, then my language can distinguish Alice from Bob, so that Alice is not, from the perspective I have by virtue of being able to use language to express properties, a perfect duplicate of Bob. Consequently it is unreasonable to assume that there exists a perfect duplicate of Bob that is not Bob. …

Here's a good piece of advice for life in general: if you hear the name "Nick Bostrom" associated with anything, call bullshit.

I'm definitely a sim. The Sim Master contacted me

Boy do I love commenting

Perhaps the simulators don’t even know we exist…

I just replaced sim with simp in my head and now I'm scared (random comment for engagement)

I fell asleep while watching this, or did I?

Words

Algo

Given the purpose of most technology, if we're a simulation then the purpose of the simulation is probably porn, war, or the collective effort of one highly dedicated person.

Simple answer=NO.... because it is ridiculous 👍

This theory is a fanciful flight of bumfluffery.

Fence, carbonated, defiant, find

It seems to me that if this were a simulation then there would be significantly more coding errors.

5:30 I honestly do think there’s more reason to believe in the dream theory seeing as we’ve dreamed before and thought it was real. There’s a precedent for it. There’s not really a precedent for a simulation on life’s level Of course there’s a difference with the feeling of being in the dream world then the real so maybe it’s less likely then I think

bip bop i am a bot

presupposed self reflective properties of modeled simulations that would infinitely regress into divergent simulations is nonsense based on energy constraints alone. I’m sure there are counter arguments that are superior to any simulation hypothesis.

what if we all live in Azathoth's dream? what if world was made of pudding? what a waste of fucking time

sword art online alicization deals with this

Sorry but what's the point? Fine as philosophy goes I guess(?) but there's zero effect on "reality" even if you could somehow prove it to be true. Heck, if spacetime is infinite then it is true, but that can't be proven either. Are they immortal in nonsim? If no, then no difference. Then the odds of being in nonsim or finding it are infinity-1 : 1 and "good luck" respectively. Also how do you escape a sim and then know you're not just in another sim? The cherry on top is *drum roll* it is a simulation, objectively. All experience is simulated / constructed in the brain. That 8 billion year old twinkle in the sky isn't a wonder to behold when you tell your grandkids it took 8 billion years for the light to reach them so they could see it, because the brain is reconstructing a whole new one out of the stimulus. Brain teaser, thought experiment, whatever, but plese tell me no one takes this seriously, it's embarrassing. Did elon musk come up with this? I swear that fraud is going to make the whole species dumber if we let him.

I consider it one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. I assume the dude made it up almost as a form of social virus, to see just how kookie he could be, with some logic-based thought experiment that had at least some sliver of internal logic to it, and not got laughed out of the room and then sit back and watch how the credulous, hipster-intellectual general pubic might respond to something this stupid and absurd. Not to mention his peers in professional philosophy. And if that was his plan, kudos to the guy, it's been a big success. There's been plenty of chins stroked over this one. And you can make money off it too, as the author of this 'hypothesis', if it catches fire which it has. That should also be noted.

The simulation hypothesis is a useless idea. It couldn’t be proved in any objective way, but even if would be one, it doesn’t make any difference to the state of the universe, since it can be going up forever like a fractal. If you can’t divine the simulation from reality, it’s all reality. There are several ideas that don’t make sense but people still take them for granted, like infinity, zero, god, time loop, destiny; all the same.

I think one of the funnest questions in this debate is one which you also talked about in your Boltzmann brain video: You get your evidence for the claim that humanlike sims are possible by looking at the current stage of stuff like computer development. But this then means that you might be in a simulation. However, maybe now simulations aren't possible in the actual world, but just possible in your simulation.

The simulation theory is a cool idea to think about, but like with the existence of a high being, it cannot be proven true with our current understanding of science. So I have no reason to believe that it is true and no reason to allow it to impact my life or decisions.

This is not philosophy but just crap sci-fi. Contemporary analytic philosophy has been in such a sorry state lately.