Option 2

By | August 14, 2007
3 Comments

There’s some good discussion here on Nick Bostrom’s argument concerning whether our universe is or is not a simulation. We discussed that idea here. A quick recap of Bostrom’s argument:

Bostrom argues that one of the following three propositions is most likely true:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;

(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);

(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

I’m starting to like Option 2. Advanced civilizations might run partial simulations of universes, but why simulate an entire universe? Assuming the Many Worlds Hypothesis to be true, any simulation you might want to create is already out there. Accessing and observing those other universes would be no easy task, but then neither would running a simulation of an entire universe.

So I think posthuman civilizations don’t run universe-level civilizations, for the same reason that nobody is trying to build a fully operational replica of Hawaii out in the Pacific. Why go to the trouble? Hawaii is already there.

  • http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=27 steven

    Accessing parallel worlds is physically impossible according to our current understanding of QM. Also, if it were possible, you’d have to ask yourself why it hasn’t happened already.

    They don’t need a sim of an entire universe for the argument to work, just a sufficiently good sim of Earth and some outside inputs.

    I could still see either 2 or 3 being true. Not 1, though.

  • Phil Bowermaster

    Accessing parallel worlds is physically impossible according to our current understanding of QM.

    Well, I SAID it wouldn’t be easy. Sheesh, it’s like people can’t read or something. :-)

    But seriously. Quantum computing might provide some interesting compromises between simulating and accessing parallel worlds. We have a lot to learn first.

    They don’t need a sim of an entire universe for the argument to work, just a sufficiently good sim of Earth and some outside inputs.

    What I love about this is the possibility that the programmer operating the sim had to run a more robust moon simulation during the Apollo program, and is constantly having to upgrade the Mars sim whenever we throw a new probe at it. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why we kept losing Mars probes there for a while…

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine MikeD

    What if this universe isn’t a direct simulation of anything intentional? Perhaps this is just how we perceive the operation of a bit operation in a vastly more complex machine – along the line that everything we experience is just a side effect of what happens when the Universal Turing Machine writes to tape.