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Bostrom's Simulation Argument
Are we living in a simulation?

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Bostrom's Simulation Argument

thewatcher
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Posted 07/02/09 - 12:18 PM: Subject: Bostrom's Simulation Argument	#1
Dr. Nick Bostrom, of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, has proposed an argument suggesting that there is actually a respectable likelihood of our existing in or being products of a simulated reality. Bostrom's full paper can be found here: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html The gist of his argument is that one part of the following trilemna must be true: 1) Almost no civilization will reach a technological level capable of producing simulated realities. 2) Almost no civilization reaching aforementioned technological status will produce a simulated reality, for any of a number of reasons, such as diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc. 3) Almost all entities with our general set of experiences are living in a simulation. Bostrom arrives at 3 by positing that, absent conditions 1 and 2, a civilization capable of producing simulated realities would be capable of and inclined to produce very many such realities (for education, entertainment and so on). As a result, it is far more likely that we exist in one such simulation that in the real world. What do you think of Bostrom's argument? I am suspicious of it, but I cannot seem to place quite why.... I think there may be some sort of misuse of Bayesianism going on here. In any case, I would appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Death Monkey
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2 of 2 people found this post helpful Posted 07/03/09 - 03:22 AM:	#2
Number 3 does not follow from the negation of 1 and 2 for a simple reason. The argument does not take into account the connection between the complexity of a reality (simulated or "real"), and the likelyhood of a particular reality manifesting a civilization with the technological level capable of producing simulated realities. First, consider that no reality could possibly contain a simulation of a reality equally complex to itself. That is, any simulated reality will necessarily be simpler than the reality that it is being simulated in. For example, imagine that of the "non-simulated" realities, 10% of the civilizations in them will eventually produce simulated realities. Let's further imagine that, on average, they each produce 10 simulated realities with civilizations in them. But imagine that, due to reduced complexity, none of those simulated civilizations are able to produce simulated realities with civilizations in them. As you can see, in this scenario about half of all civilizations would be in simulated realities, and about 5% of all civilizations would produce simulated realities. Of course, these numbers are completely made up, but I think we can agree that 5% is not "almost none", and 50/50 is not "far more likely". And of course the numbers could be far worse. For example, it could be that the "real" civilizations capable of producing simulated realities are nevertheless all incapable of creating simulated realities with civilizations in them. Then 100% of civilizations would be "real" ones. In other words, it is all speculation. Without making unjustified assumptions about where our reality lies in terms of complexity relative to the "real" ones, we cannot even begin to guess as to whether ours is a real one or not. DM
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thewatcher
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Posted 07/03/09 - 10:46 PM:	#3
Death Monkey wrote: Number 3 does not follow from the negation of 1 and 2 for a simple reason. The argument does not take into account the connection between the complexity of a reality (simulated or "real"), and the likelyhood of a particular reality manifesting a civilization with the technological level capable of producing simulated realities. First, consider that no reality could possibly contain a simulation of a reality equally complex to itself. That is, any simulated reality will necessarily be simpler than the reality that it is being simulated in. I dont think Bostrom even gets in to the idea of simulations within simulations although it does add another layer of speculation to the whole thing. The point I take Bostrom to be making is that a sufficiently advanced civilization could run a great many simulations. I do not see any reason why, with few exceptions, a given simulation could not, in principle, depict a civilization of similar complexity to the one that created it (facilitated through the use of typical memory-saving features within said simulation; some proponents of the simulation argument actually suggest that certain features of the observable universe could be explained by such memory-saving features). A simulation producing civilization would not necessarily need to produce these sorts of simulations exclusively. It might be far simpler to produce simulations of comparatively smaller, more primitive and less incredulous societies which would presumably take up much less processing power to create and maintain.

Death Monkey
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Posted 07/04/09 - 06:45 AM:	#4
Then I really don't see any point in mentioning options 1 and 2, since if the simulated civilizations cannot simulate civilizations themselves, then premise 1 will be true anyway. That said, the whole thing still seems to me to be totally speculative. On what grounds can we say that it is more likely that the real world is much more complex than this one, and contains within in it civilizations with both the capability and inclination to simulate many worlds like ours, than that this is simply the real world? DM
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thewatcher
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Posted 07/07/09 - 01:18 PM:	#5
Death Monkey wrote: Then I really don't see any point in mentioning options 1 and 2, since if the simulated civilizations cannot simulate civilizations themselves, then premise 1 will be true anyway. Why do you say that? Doesnt the argument work just as will under the assumption that such civlizations could only create simulations of prior civilizations (such as that of, say, Earth in 2009 AD)?

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0 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 07/07/09 - 04:12 PM:	#6
Off-hand, because I haven't read the paper yet, I have a few concerns: 1.) simply because something is possible it does not follow that it must be the case. 2.) I would want to know why experiences such as ours make it likely that the experiences are simulated. has he determined, for example, how to distinguish between simulated and actual experience from the POV of the experiencer? 3.) granting #1 and #2, and given the likelihood of intelligent life in general (low) and stipulating that all intelligent life would share our moral intuitions (dicey that one) it seems that it is extremely unlikely that any experience such as ours is simulated.
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Kwalish Kid
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Posted 07/07/09 - 06:30 PM:	#7
One real problem is that Bostrom seems to be assigning probabilities without any basis for those probabilities.
"Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things." - KM, V, P and P Can you pass Religion 101?

Death Monkey
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Posted 07/08/09 - 06:45 AM:	#8
thewatcher, Why do you say that? Doesnt the argument work just as will under the assumption that such civlizations could only create simulations of prior civilizations (such as that of, say, Earth in 2009 AD)? Not really. In effect, what comes into question here is two figures: R = The fraction of civilizations that create simulations of other civilizations. N = The average number of civilizations that a civilization that does simulate other civilizations, will simulate. So R is essentially the value that premise 1 & 2 in the opening post have as being "almost zero". If N sounds a bit unclear, basically it means if you consider all of the civilizations that do simulate other civilizations, how many simulated civilizations, on average, do they each produce? Now, assuming that simulated civilizations do not, themselves, produce simulated civilizations, we can say the following: If RN is approximately 1, then about 50% of all civilizations will be simulated. If RN is very small, then most civilizations will be real. If R*N is very large, then most civilizations will be simulated. The opening post talks about what will happen if R is not "almost zero". However, since this still allows R to be quite small, what we see is that for the conclusion that most civilizations are simulated to be correct, N must be much larger than 1/R. For example, if R is 0.1, meaning that only 1 in 10 real civilizations produce simulated civilizations, then even if the average number of civilizations those 10% produce is 10, still only about half of the civilizations will be simulated. Now, 10% is clearly not "almost none". So for the conclusion to hold, we would have to assume that the expected number of simulated civilizations per civilization that produces them, must be a lot bigger then 10. So how big? What qualifies as "almost none"? 1%? 0.1%? One in a million? What factors, other than simply the inclination to do so, determine how many simulated civilizations each one will produce on average? What about limited resources? Or limited technical ability? Of those that can do it, how many of them just barely manage to do it, as opposed to those that can do it so easily as to be able to basically mass-produce them? It should be clear by now that there are a huge number of speculative assumptions involved in such an argument. DM
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Posted 07/08/09 - 07:21 AM:	#9
Should technology advance in our civilization that one day we should create simulated civilizations, would we then conclude that our civilization is one that is real and not simulated? That is, can a simulated civilization create a lower level simulated civilization as part of the progress of that the simulated civilization? I suppose the answer is, it depends upon how the higher level civilization programmed the lower level civilization. The point of this is that you can never assert that any society, whether higher level (the creator) or lower level (the created) is actual and not simulated. No civilization would ever be immune from the possibility that it was really nothing other than a great big brain in a vat. It strikes me that the questions raised in the paper you summarized (that I admittedly didn't read, so excuse me if these issues are all adequately addressed) are no different from DesCartes' question of how do you know if you are being subject to manipulation by an evil genius, and Paley's argument that complexity (in this case the existence of a simulated civilization) entails a more complex creator of that civilization that for some reason is not simulated itself.
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ughaibu
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Posted 07/15/09 - 09:52 PM:	#10
thewatcher wrote: Dr. Nick Bostrom, of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, has proposed an argument suggesting that there is actually a respectable likelihood of our existing in or being products of a simulated reality. If we live in a simulated reality, then the world is discrete. But our best physical theories appeal to real numbers, so in order to accept the simulation hypothesis we must first allow that all our best physical theories are fundamentally flawed. There is also the motivation problem, that the simulators equally occupy a simulation, with the entailed regress.

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