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Sunday, August 26, 2018

In Defense of the Simulation

In recent weeks, there has been a little bit of discussion about the universe as a simulation.  I wanted to toss a few pennies into the mix and give a defense of the idea.  This is not to argue that I believe the world is actually a computer simulation or part of the Matrix or anything like that, but simply to point out that the idea has more going for it than a lot of people first realize and it is wise to consider rather than just brushing it off as if it has no merit.

The first line of reasoning is something I’ve mentioned before.  It actually fits Elon Musk’s argument on why he thinks the universe is a simulation, and I’ve also heard Neil deGrasse Tyson make a similar claim.  It deals with the statistical likelihood of us being in a simulation and if materialism is true, I believe it is an airtight argument.  The line of reasoning goes like this:

We have already advanced our computer technologies to such an extent that we can do very complex simulations right now.  The rate of computing is increasing so quickly that it seems that in a very short amount of time, we will be able to do such things as fully replicate a human mind.  In fact, we will be able to replicate more than one mind at one time.  The instant we are fully able to replicate a human mind, given materialism, the simulated mind will be self-aware and thinking.  Ultimately, there will be no difference between the simulated mind and our own physical mind.  In fact, in 2013 researchers were able to simulate one second of biological brain processing time using 82,944 processors over 40 minutes.  In theory, again given materialism, that network would have been identical to a normal human being’s brain with the awareness of one second of time passing.

So we are on the cusp of replicating human beings in a digital environment.  If materialism is true, there will be no difference in the mental space of the machine and the biological components.  In fact, materialism stipulates that we are all biological machines as it is.

But here’s where the math comes into play.  If the minds we mimic are indistinguishable from our own, and our own minds are the types of minds that design simulations, then it stands to reason that the digital minds we create are also going to create their own simulations.  And if we are able to simulate ourselves to such an extent that we are indistinguishable from our simulations, then so too our own simulations will be able to create their own simulations that are indistinguishable from themselves.  In short, if it is possible for us to do this, then it is a statistical certainty that we actually have already done this, as have the minds that we have created, and so on.

Given the fact that billions and billions of simulated worlds have therefore been created, the math game is simple.  There is one “real” world and billions and billions of simulated worlds that are indistinguishable from that “real” world.  Thus, the odds that you are in the one “real” world are billions and billions to one against.  Therefore, you are statistically certain to be in a simulation.

As stated throughout, the above line of reasoning only works if materialism is true.  Additionally, it relies on us actually getting to the pivotal point where we can actually replicate a mind exactly like our own.  But this line of reasoning is not the only line of reasoning leading toward the simulation conclusion.  So let me look at the second line of reasoning, which is the quantum world.

The world “quantum” comes from the fact that energy is dispensed in indivisible packets called quanta.  Similar to the concept of atoms, there is only so far you can subdivide until you reach the foundational limit.  But in the realm of pure number, the quanta does not make sense.  You can easily divide numbers on and on and on, until they reach an infinitesimal value, and even at that point you can still divide it an infinite number of times more.

But while you could do that in mathematically theory, in the real world you cannot.  The real world is quantized.  At first glance, it doesn’t make sense why that should be so.  However, those who have studied computers understand this quite easily.

If you use computers for math functions, you quickly realize there is a limit to the size of values.  You cannot divide an infinite number of times because at some point the computer runs out of the resources to hold the data needed to divide further.  Therefore, there is a fundamental limit in place, the absolute smallest amount of data you can go to, which is of course the bit, 0 or 1.

This means that computers, fundamentally, are quantized.  It is impossible to get around this.  The quanta is built into the foundation of how computing works.  So, while it is not apparent why such restrictions would be so in the “real” world, it is extremely obvious why they would be so in a simulated world.

We can even extend this metaphor further when we consider the role of observation in the way that experiments play out.  The most famous example of this is the double-slit experiment.  Briefly, for those who may not know it, when trying to determine if light was a particle or a wave, researchers shone a beam of light through a single slit and onto some photosensitive paper (i.e., a film plate).  What showed up is what you’d expect if light was made of particle-like photons.  However, when light was shone through two slits set a short distance apart, what appeared on the photosensitive paper showed interference zones, which happen with waves.  This held up even when the light was dimmed down so that it was only releasing one photon at a time.  Each photon would make a single distinct point of impact, much like a particle would, but over time the design that built up showed the interference pattern of a wave.

Even this is not truly the most remarkable aspect of this experiment, however.  When scientists tried to determine which of the two slits a single photon went through, the simple fact that they were observing the experiment meant that what appeared on the photosensitive paper no longer showed interference.  In other words, by trying to observe which slit a photon went through, the photon no longer acted like a wave at all: it behaved as if it had always been particles.

Why this happens is still not understood.  Clearly, the act of observing the experiment interferes with the experiment and changes things, but it is not clear why putting a measurement device on one slit and not the other changes the behavior of particles going through the slit without any measurement device too.  And if you really want to melt your brain, look up the quantum eraser experiment, wherein by “erasing” the data that one would have learned by the observation so that you cannot use it, the interference pattern reemerges.  Yes, this means that whether or not the interference pattern emerges is completely dependent upon whether or not you can know which slit the photons pass through.  If you can know, there is no interference; if you can’t know, there is interference.

Again, this behavior seems quite confusing and not intuitive at all, at least in our “real” world.  But if you were designing a simulation, it would make perfect sense.  I know this because at one point I was going to design a simulation that would pit two countries in a war against each other.  A player would control one of the countries, controlling the army’s budget and things of that nature.  But because I was thinking of countries with populations of millions, it quickly became apparent that it would be too calculation intensive to replicate millions of units for each country.  Instead, I could use statistics to compress the data.

Each country would have a birth and a death rate.  Therefore you’d have a certain number of citizens at a certain age, with a certain number who could have children, and a certain number in the work force, and so on.  One could easily just make up a bunch of actuary tables to accomplish this.

But the problem is that it would be a very boring game.  If you’re playing the game, you want something rendered on screen.  But what would render?  Easy: what the player is looking at.  So if you zoomed into a specific city looking at specific people in a specific building, then those individuals would be actualized.  Where they come about was based on the statistical likelihood of what would be there, but once rendered they would become definite objects.  At least up to the point when the player was no longer looking at them, at which point they would go back to being nothing but a probability.

What struck me when I was musing on this was that’s exactly how sub-atomic particles seem to behave.  When you’re not looking directly at them, they behave in a statistical manner, having a probability of being in a specific location at a specific time.  But once you “zoom in” and look at them directly, they become definite, specific entities.

This even gave rise to a form of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, because you could only see what was on your screen.  What wasn’t rendered was only probability.  And that meant that if you tracked a single entity with enough precision that it was on your screen, you had no knowledge of what was near it that could affect it (such as an enemy soldier that might “kill” that entity).  And if you zoomed out enough to see what was near it, you would lose the specificity of the location of that entity.

In designing this simulation, this behavior was needed because it would save computer processing time in not having to keep track of millions upon millions of individual entities.  It seems reasonable that if we are in a simulation, the same thing would be in effect now, even if the fundamental computer running our software is trillions of times more advanced than what we have today.

My final stream of evidence involves a similar concept, which is the relativity of time, mass, and length.  We know that time slows down (relative to stationery objects) the faster that an object moves, up to the speed of light where time stops completely.  Equally, the mass of an object increases up to infinity when it is at the speed of light (this is why photons, which move at the speed of light, have to be mass-less, because if they had any mass it would have to be infinite).  Additionally, the length of an object shrinks, relative to a stationery object, the faster that it moves.

All of these things are linked together, therefore, and it’s almost like there is a governor attached.  Again, we see similar things in simulations.  Calculations have caps in place to keep the simulation moving smoothly.  If you use more resources in one area, you have to free them up in another area, or else the whole thing gets bogged down.  This sort of limitation is exactly what we see in computer systems today, put in place to keep things from blowing up and becoming useless.

In conclusion, I’ll just say this.  I’m not advocating that we actually are in a simulation.  By no means.  But if I were going to design a simulation of the universe, the way I would have done it leads toward the very things that we see in the universe around us.  So make of that what you will.

21 comments:

  1. I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately, mostly because I’ve watched more and more atheists (at least online) push for some aspect of it.

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    1. I've seen atheists push it too, which makes no sense to me because if there is a simulation then that clearly implies a programmer of the simulation. Simulations don't just appear out of nowhere.

      Even if you were just going to implement a "turtles all the way down" approach and think it's just an infinite chain of human minds doing this, to go to epistemic despair (as your other comment mentioned) seems to expose the atheist's fundamental biases more than anything else.

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  2. I should qualify that a little more: most often when I see this argument I see it paired with some kind of argument, or attempted argument, toward epistemic despair.

    Kind of a “meh, who can know, so why worry about it?”

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  3. Seems to me the simulated universe idea is basically just an updated form of philosophical Idealism, which many Christian's (including Edwards) held to in one form or another.

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  4. Peter,

    Sorry to change topic but I wasn't sure how else I'd reach you with this question.

    At https://www.calvindude.org/index.php/What-I-Believe/Creation-to-Noah you say:

    "I believe in an instantaneous creation as opposed to six literal days. Primarily, it’s because I do not think that time really has meaning until there is an observer for that time, and since God is outside of time (atemporal and eternal) then He is not such an observer. This means that (as one of my weaker beliefs, as described in the introduction) I believe time began when Adam was created."

    Are you able to elaborate on this or point to some resources?

    Thanks

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    1. Hello AMC,
      Well, as I stated in the paragraph, I hold to this view first because there is no such thing as objective time. This has been demonstrated by relativity, and we have experimental confirmation of it too. In fact, GPS only works because the satellites are programmed to adjust for the difference in time given the relative speeds the satellites have to move to stay in a geosynchronous orbit over Earth. Because of that, time only makes sense to a subject experiencing it. An hour for one observer is not going to be the same as an hour for another observer, and neither of them will match what is observed by an observer completely outside of the system (i.e., external to the universe) since all of it changes depending on relative motion.

      Yet, importantly, causality is not affected by this. In other words, if X causes Y, then even if X and Y are simultaneous because no time has elapsed, the chain of causality stays intact. So, temporal language works better to describe logical sequences than time sequences. And temporal language naturally is used to describe logical precedence too. Genesis does this with the "In the beginning", but it's even more obvious in John 1:1, whereby you have "In the beginning was the Word" (that "was" being a past tense verb, such that the meaning of the passage is closer to "When everything began, the Word already was"). In either case, we don't have a way to describe events preceding time other than by using terms like "before", which are temporal terms.

      In the time of Genesis, there were no clocks, so the natural division was days. (Yes, there could be hours too, but in ancient times hours were not fixed units of time. The Romans, for example, divided sunup to sundown into twelve parts, despite the fact that this meant summer daylight hours were longer than winter daylight hours.) Given the natural basic division of days, I think Genesis 1 is describing a logical sequence using temporal language, and that Moses gives some clues to this (such as defining the day by "there was evening, and there was morning" which surface-level would be a reference to the *NIGHT*, not day; and yet which also could be signifying the conclusion of the first step of a sequence so the next could begin).

      Again, I don't make too much hay over this one if someone disagrees since it's not a fundamental of Scripture either way.

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  5. It's also amusing to me that materialists are becoming functional immaterialists, which arguably undermines the whole project of natural science on which Materialism is based

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    1. Yes. I'm not sure how much materialists realize Quantum Mechanics has undercut their position. Even though most reject the simulation concept, the most popular view right now appears to be the many worlds interpretation, and that simply means anything that is possible on the quantum level is actualized in some universe and it's impossible for us to know which one we are in. This strikes the core of what science is supposed to investigate. Literally it's impossible to predict anything if every single possibility happens SOMEWHERE. (Furthermore, how do you falsify anything in that system?)

      But it's not like they have many other alternatives to choose from.

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    2. 1. I've heard Sean Carroll say (I think it might've been in his debate with William Lane Craig) something along the lines of the MWI is the most minimalistic or simplistic interpretation of quantum theory. I've heard that echoed by other less prominent physicists.

      Physicists like Max Tegmark take the MWI to mean that anything that can happen will happen in one parallel universe or another.

      2. If the MWI is correct, then it's possible Christianity is true, Jesus was raised from the dead, etc. However, that would seem to be paradoxical, given their atheism!

      3. Of course, even if the MWI is true, that only pushes the question back a step, for what would explain the existence of these parallel universes? What would explain the very first split that led to the very first parallel universe? What would explain the very beginning of it all? What preceded the very beginning?

      4. Currently, the standard big bang cosmological model is primarily based on Einstein's general relativity. Yet, in the very first micro seconds of the universe (before Planck time), general relativity isn't relevant. Rather, physicists have to look to quantum theory.

      5. However, the problem is there's no consensus on what would bring together general relativity and quantum mechanics into a quantum theory of gravity, which in turn would unite the physical forces which act on the very small to the very large into a theory of everything (TOE).

      The frontrunner seems to be one version of string theory or another (e.g. M-theory which unites several string theories).

      Another contender is the Hartle-Hawking model. Hartle and Hawking use a mathematical trick called Wick rotation, from which they argue the use of imaginary (rather than real) values for time (t). This then results in the beginning of time not needing to be a singularity, but rather time can be eternal in both forward as well as backwards directions. Hawking describes the result as having "no boundary or edge", "neither beginning nor end". It's like how one can travel east to west or west to east forever.

      These (and other) models have significant problems. Not least of which is how fantastical they are, how illogical it is to substitute imaginary time for real time, etc.

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    3. Epistle of Dude said:
      ---
      If the MWI is correct, then it's possible Christianity is true, Jesus was raised from the dead, etc.
      ---

      I think you can state it even stronger. If MWI, then every single historical claim Christianity makes did happen in some universe somewhere.

      The implication of this is that every single historical claim now becomes irrelevant. There is a universe somewhere where matter just happened to arrange itself is such a way that Joseph Smith actually found gold plates that had some strange markings, etc.

      In fact, there exists a huge number of universes wherein every single time a scientist makes a measurement he gets Newtonian results and therefore experimentation will never yield Quantum Mechanics, let alone MWI! And when I say a huge number of these exist, I mean *huge*. When you think of how many subatomic particles there are and how many of them could show quantum behavior when not being measured directly by scientists, each of which is creating a universe that differs by one particle from another, then the number of universes that fits this criteria is truly staggering. (Example: a universe where every single particle behaved like Newtonian physics would have it, and a universe where all but a single quark making up the molecular structure of a helium atom floating around Alpha Centauri behave like Newtonian physics will never be differentiated by scientists. And that's not even getting into the second order where *two* particles become QM-like, but not the rest, and so on. And according to this interpretation of MWI, not only *could* these universes exist, but they *do* exist.

      So how can we be sure that we're in a universe that is actually capable of giving us objective data? Assuming our view is right, there are uncountable universes that prove a lie, and there is no way for us to tell we are not in such a universe now.

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    4. Good points, Peter!

      In fact, according to the MWI, I suppose it's even possible that in one parallel universe another interpretation of quantum theory is the correct one rather than MWI!

      If so, then perhaps there is a more fundamental interpretation of quantum theory that explains all the various interpretations of quantum theory. If so, then what explains this fundamental interpretation?

      At the end of the day, it seems the best card atheists have left to play is the "brute fact" card. But that's not an explanation. That's like coming across Van Gogh's "Starry Night", and when asked to explain how it got here, the atheist replies "it's just a brute fact". It just is, and that's all there is to it. I would imagine the most fundamental mathematical equations which describe our universe are surely at least as beautiful as Van Gogh's "Starry Night".

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    5. Epistle of Dude,
      In one alternate universe, I agree with you. In another, I disagree with you. In yet another one, just as I hit "Publish" a meteor strikes your house and kills you. Sorry, Dude.

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    6. And in another, I am the meteor! :) I have a weblog called Epistle of Meteorman, where I skewer fallen meteorites, then in my spare time I lay waste to other planets too.

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    7. I can't remember how many times I've caused the dinosaurs to become extinct or been the subject of documentaries directed by Michael Bay and starring Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, etc.

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    8. MWI necessitates there’s a universe wherein I do not like Seinfeld or The Three Stooges. That is unacceptable.

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    9. However, faith alchemist from dimension C-137 inhabits a universe where he Seinfeld and The Three Stooges are just "okay", but his absolute favorite television show is a mash-up of Breaking Bad, Harry Potter, and a screen adaptation of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist which mixes chemistry with magic called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Faith Alchemy. :)

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    10. I may have a nervous breakdown because of this comment.

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    11. If it's better, there is a parallel universe in which the comment led you to become a world famous psychiatrist who helps thousands suffering from nervous breakdowns! :)

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    12. And in another parallel universe, this exact same sentence was written, but the pixel location at the end of my sentence burned out so it looks like this sentence ends with a period, even though it doesn't, while another universe has the period which renders this sentence a lie and in both universes this sentence isn't considered a run-on sentence which I will now turn into a run-on sentence fragment by not even

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  6. WittenbergsDoor mentioned Idealism. There's actually a growing number of theists (many of whom are Christians) who argue for theistic idealism based on the implications of quantum mechanics. A good introduction to a Christian version is the following video:

    Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism: https://youtu.be/4C5pq7W5yRM

    I've collected more videos here: https://misclane.blogspot.com/2014/09/scientific-evidence-against-materialism.html

    One of them includes a lecture by Dr. Bruce Gordon where he argues against materialism and physicalism. And at the end, to my surprise, ended up affirming a form of theistic idealism:

    The Incompatibility of Physicalism with Physics: A Conversation with Dr. Bruce Gordon
    https://youtu.be/wk-UO81HmO4

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    1. Many atheists appeal to randomness in quantum mechanics in arguing for their worldview (e.g. random quantum fluctuations causing the universe to come into existence).

      Sure, depending on what's meant, there is intrinsic uncertainty in the quantum world (e.g. Schrödinger's cat, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).

      At the same time, quantum mechanics is built on supremely ordered mathematical equations. Equations that make astoundingly accurate predictions. Equations that have been empirically proven over and over again. Equations which perfectly illustrate "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" (to use the title of Wigner's famous paper).

      As such, there is tremendous rationality, intelligibility, and order even in quantum mechanics. That calls for an explanation. As far as I can see, atheistic materialism ultimately can't deliver a good explanation.

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