chuggnutt.com

Stuck with me (again) since watching Inception (not to mention other movies and sources like The Matrix) is the notion of simulated reality, and more specifically, the (perhaps surprising) idea that it's statistically more probable than not that we are in fact living in a simulation.

From Wikipedia:

Simulated reality is the proposition that reality could be simulated—perhaps by computer simulation—to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality. It could contain conscious minds which may or may not be fully aware that they are living inside a simulation. In its strongest form, the "simulation hypothesis" claims it is entirely possible and even probable that we are living in a simulated reality.

This is quite different from the current, technologically achievable concept of virtual reality. Virtual reality is easily distinguished from the experience of "true" reality; participants are never in doubt about the nature of what they experience. Simulated reality, by contrast, would be hard or impossible to separate from "true" reality.

...the philosopher Nick Bostrom investigated the possibility that we may be living in a simulation. A simplified version of his argument proceeds as such:

i. It is possible that an advanced civilization could create a computer simulation which contains individuals with artificial intelligence (AI).

ii. Such a civilization would likely run many, billions for example, of these simulations (just for fun, for research or any other permutation of possible reasons.)

iii. A simulated individual inside the simulation wouldn’t necessarily know that it is inside a simulation — it is just going about its daily business in what it considers to be the "real world."

Then the ultimate question is — if one accepts that the above premises are at least possible— which of the following is more likely?

a. We are the one civilization which develops AI simulations and happens not to be in one itself?

b. We are one of the many (billions) of simulations that has run? (Remember point iii.)

Kind of crazy, huh? I'm not advocating one way or the other but it's tremendously interesting to read and speculate about. In particular, the question of, "How would we know or find out we're living in a simulated reality?"

The Matrix, for instance, posits bugs and artifacts of various sorts present in the system that might well reveal the simulation (though the general populace is completely unaware). Inception raises the good point that in a dream reality, even the craziest dream seems completely normal to the dreamer, so there may well not be any way to determine what is real (other than by waking up, although the use of the totem can help if you suspect you are in a dream... maybe).

Of course, this all spirals into much more existential philosophical points (the nature of consciousness, perception vs. reality, and so on) than I'm going to go into here. Suffice to say, it's pretty thought-provoking.

This article from the NY Times (link is good at the moment, though I'm not sure it won't disappear behind some paywall at some point and be inaccessible) covers the sufficiently weird theory/philosophy proposed by Nick Bostrom that we are likely (actually, almost mathematically certainly) living inside a computer simulation.

("Living" wouldn't quite be the correct term, of course.)

It's a theory I've encountered before, though the NY Times does a good job of simplifying it and squirting it out into the public consciousness:

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

I don't know about this "virtual ancestors" scenario necessarily—I mean, why not just run a simulation for the heck of it, a là The Sims or something? The author considers that:

And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

Anyway. I followed this up by finding Simulated reality on Wikipedia, which contains a rundown of Bostrom's theory as well as broad coverage of others. Interesting stuff, and it got me thinking as to how one would go about determining whether one lives in a computer simulation.

(As a start, consider how one might determine whether or not one is dreaming. After all, dreams are a type of simulated reality, no?)

Of course, it all hinges on whether or not consciousness itself is a computable phenomenon. I'm a little torn on that question; I certainly think the brain is a computational entity of some sort—Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works is an excellent book, by the way—but does that make consciousness computable as well, or something more? Or is it merely an illusory side-effect of some process? Or is it ultimately indeterminable?

From a science fictional standpoint, I like the idea of the brain being an advanced quantum computer of some sort, with whatever wackiness extending from that. That's probably neither here nor there, but I just wanted to throw that out there.

Hmmm... I guess it doesn't all hinge on the computability of consciousness.

Would the simulations (ie, us) becoming aware that they are a simulation qualify as becoming "self aware" in the "real world"? I mean, we have a term for it when a computer program does: Strong Artificial Intelligence. (Okay, that's theoretical too, since we don't currently have Terminators or a Data running around.) Does "self awareness" count if it's only theoretical and there's no way to prove it?

Good thoughts. Random, but good.

This panel from my daily Peanuts calendar struck me as being pretty philosophically deep for Charlie Brown.