The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: We are living in a simulation

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

The Matrix, The Truman Show, and now more recently Westworld. Popular culture has long been captivated by the notion that our lives and the world we inhabit in are nothing more than an advanced computer simulation. But it's also an argument that is being given more credence by world renowned philosophers and scientists. The leading proponents of the “simulation hypothesis” believe that the mathematical nature of the universe is itself the strongest proof we exist in an artificial reality. They point to human DNA and string theory in particle physics as but two of a growing number of so-called naturally occurring phenomena that behave remarkably similar to computer code - too close to be an accident. The mainstream scientific community is taking exception to these claims. They say the simulation hypothesis is based on overly complicated hypotheses that verge on circular reasoning. They argue the universe can be beautiful, even harmonious, mathematically and empirically down to the smallest atom or strand of DNA. Occam's Razor or the maxim that the simplest explanation is usually the right one, is all the proof we need that the universe is real and not a computer program. Arguing for the motion is Rich Terrile, Director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is a voyager scientist and has discovered moons on Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Arguing against the motion is David Kipping, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University where he leads the Cool Worlds Lab. His research focuses on extrasolar planets, the search for life in the universe, and astrostatistics. Sources: HBO, Space.com, The New York Academy of Sciences, Google Zeitgeist, IGN Entertainment Inc., Gave Dev Guide, FragHero The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   For detailed show notes on the episode, head to https://munkdebates.com/podcast. Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts, and animated by smart conversation, all to arm you the listener with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. We are living in a simulation. Do you know where you are? I'm in a dream.

But in my dream. I designed every part of this place. Not a scene park, but an entire world. Hello, I'm your moderator, Red Your Griffiths. Well, you're just listening to Westworld, a popular TV series whose storyline, like the Matrix before it, revolves around the notion that the lives of its characters and the world they inhabit are nothing more than an advanced computer simulation. Popular culture has long been attracted to this picture of reality, and it's an argument that's given. gaining more and more traction among leading philosophers and scientists. Proponents of the simulation hypotheses believe that the mathematical nature of the universe itself

is the strongest proof that we exist, get this, in an artificial reality. They point to human DNA and string theory in particle physics as but two of a growing number of so-called naturally occurring phenomena that behave. remarkably similar to computer code, too close to be an accident. Here is physicist and cosmologist Max Tagmark. The more I learned about later on as a physicist, the more struck I was that when you get deep down under the hood about how nature works, down to looking at all of you

as just as a bunch of quirks and electrons, if you look at how these quirks move around, you know, the rules are entirely mathematical as far as we can say. And that makes me wonder, if I were a character in a computer game who started asking the same kind of big questions about my game world, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical. I would just be discovering the computer program in which it was written. The mainstream scientific community is taking exception to these claims.

They say that the simulation hypotheses is based on an overly complicated theory that verges on circular reasoning. They argue that a simulation hypothesis is not required to explain why the universe is beautiful, even harmonious, mathematically, down to the smallest atom or strand of DNA. Here is theoretical physicist Sylvester James Gates, Jr., speaking about the simulation argument.

So although many people like to say my work supports simulation theory, I actually believe that it's pointing to something far more beautiful and subtle about the nature of the laws of physics. On this installment of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion. Be it resolved, we are all living in a simulation. Speaking for the motion is Rich Turrell, director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is a Voyager scientist and has discovered moons on Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Arguing against the motion is David Kipping, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, where he leads the cool world's lab. His research focuses on extrasolar planets, the search for life in the universe, and astro statistics. Rich, David, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thank you. Thank you very much. I've been really looking forward to this debate ever since we've had it on the books for the last number of weeks to talk with you. It's just a nice opportunity to kind of pull away, peel back from the immediate news of the moment of COVID, of the economy of geopolitics, and think some big thoughts about the nature of the universe, the nature of human existence.

We're going to do all that and more with the two of you. And it's just such a privilege to have people that, like you, have thought about these things deeply, come to them with your convictions and give us the opportunity to learn. So thank you again. Simple motion. It's short. It's concise. It's to the point. Be it resolved. We are living in a simulation. Rich, you're arguing in favor of our motion today. So I'm going to put a couple minutes on the clock and let you open up this debate. Let's see. In a nutshell, here's the argument for the simulation hypothesis. First, we live in a remarkable universe. It conforms to mathematics and is quantized in a way that allows the universe to be simulated in a computer much smaller than the universe. It's a very, very economical thing to do. Second, assuming that our consciousness, the self-awareness that we have is an emergent property of the complex and elegant neural architecture of the brain, then it follows that there's no required elements outside of the realm of physics or even elegant engineering

for the advent of self-awareness. Okay, it's another assumption we make. Third, in the very near future, we as a society will be able to simulate artificial self-aware minds residing in simulated environments, computational environments, in numbers far exceeding organic brains. So finally, Nick Bostrum of Oxford, he argued. that one of three postulates must be true about our universe. Either one, there's a high probability that the human species will go extinct in the very near future before reaching the point where we can run simulations of our evolutionary history. Or two, any and every advanced civilization is

extremely unlikely to run significant numbers of these kinds of simulations. Or three, we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. Unless we wipe ourselves out, become extinct, or unless we somehow choose never to run these simulations, then we would expect that there would be an astronomically huge number of simulated minds like our own. If we awaken in a universe like ours, we are almost certainly in one of those simulations. Thank you. Great, concise, It's opening there, setting the stage, certainly expanding my mind, a whole bunch of questions already emerging. David, your chance to open this debate up, you're arguing against our motion, be it resolved. We are living in a simulation.

Let's hear your opening remarks. Thank you very much. Well, I'm not going to try and prove to you that we definitely don't live in a simulation because I can't. One can't disprove an unfalsifiable idea. But my opponent will try to prove the affirmative, and so I think the burden of proof relies in his lap. My position is that, yes, it is possible, but it's ultimately unlikely. Look, the simulation hypothesis, it's an intrinsically elaborate and unnecessarily complicated means to explain our existence. It's turtles all the way down.

Yet more, there's no hard evidence to support the idea. Logical consistency does not equate to an ambiguous evidence. For example, you might highlight the mathematical structure of our universe, but that can occur quite naturally without invoking such a convoluted scheme. A guiding principle in science is Occam's razor, and that teaches us that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. And on this basis alone, there's immediate cause for skepticism here. In the absence of any scientific evidence, as we've just sort of heard here, there's many proponents who would highlight the rapid improvements in modern computing, but we shouldn't conflate raw processing speed with the act of creating a genuine,

self-aware consciousness on a computer. That's never been done before, and therefore there's no certainty that will ever be able to accomplish that feat before our demise. And when one assign some uncertainty to that, then it turns out when you go through the statistics that it reveals that it is in fact less likely that we are living in a simulation than the real world. millennia ago we thought that divine beings created the universe just for us and we resided in its center but to me science is a humbling experience that has continuously demoted our place in the cosmos and so once again i'm asking us to remember those lessons and resist the urge the trap to imagine a universe that has been created just for us we're just not that special thank you uh

David, okay, an opportunity now for rebuttals. Rich are going to put another couple minutes on the clock for you, just to react. What of David's comments would you like to focus on in the opening minutes of this debate? Let's talk a little bit about processing speed versus cognition. That's one of the real tenets that we will attain the ability to actually create conscious, self-aware minds, the artificial brain argument, which really says that if the brain evolves, in a straightforward, mechanical, non-miraculous means, okay, there was nothing spiritual or outside of the realm of science to give us the kinds of architectures that led to self-awareness.

Then it ought to be straightforward to be able to recreate this in silico or in computation. We can simulate the same kinds of architectures. We are taking two approaches on this in technology. We're looking at copying the brain by, teasing out the structures of the neural structures, and neurophysics is doing quite a good job of doing that and understanding the connectome of the brain. But a second realm of technology uses the discover approach, that is using things like computational evolution to discover solutions to problems. And this has been very, very effective. We're trying to understand if there are ways of using evolution, trial and error,

and discovery to create neural networks that are cognizant. So I believe the technology is there. We have in our largest supercomputer, a computer which is several hundred times faster in total raw computing power than the human brain. World computational resources are at the million human brain level, and that is increasing every year. So I see no argument to say that there is something outside of something. that will prevent us from developing self-awareness in computers.

Thank you, Rich. Now, David, coming back to you, what would you like to focus on from either Rich's opening statement or his points just now? Thank you. Yeah. Well, I think that last statement is key, that there's nothing that will prevent us in principle from being able to do this. And I can certainly agree with some of those points, but the fact that something won't prevent us from doing it doesn't mean that it will therefore, inevitably happen. Those are different things. There's a couple of reasons or a few reasons why we might think of this not happening.

This really does come down to Bostrom's first Trilemma, as my opponent introduced at the beginning here. It's not quite right there. There was a slight misquite I want to pick him up on. And that's that the first possibility is not necessary that we will go extinct. And that's why we don't produce these simulations. It's simply that we don't. There's some physical. obstacle that prevents us from doing it. It could be our extinction, our self-annihilation, but it could also just be that it's beyond us. It's just something we are never able to achieve. I mean, we have limited capabilities. We have a finite volume in our brains. We are not of infinite intellect. I don't think anybody would claim that. So therefore, it stands to reason there are

some things that will just be beyond us. Technologically, we might not ever be able to build a warp drive, for example. That might just be something which we can imagine being possible, but we'll just never figure it out. So I'm a little bit hesitant to say, just because something is physically possible, that means humanity will achieve it. There could also be a plateau in our development. Already, we're kind of seeing this as Moore's Law. It is slowing down. All of the CEOs and Intel and Nvidia have come out and said the same thing, that it looks like in Moore's law will be ending, if not already, sort of this next couple of years by 2025. Pull the cell phone out of your pocket. It had a

more memory than all the memory made for every computer in the world in 1970. But it's coming to an end. All exponentials have to come to an end. By definition, they have to come to an end. This one is coming to an end. So we're seeing plateaus happen in our own development. And exponential growth isn't something that is inherent to the human condition. For 200,000 years, we were hunter-gatherers, and there wasn't exponential growth in our capabilities

over those times. We had the dark ages where we actually received. in technology. And of course, societies collapse. You can look at the Greenland Norse or the Easter Island Polynesians or the Roman Empire, the mines of Central America. This idea of just unrelenting growth is not necessarily going to happen. But if it was, we'd have flying cars by now, right? And we predicted that in 1960s based off the growth of automobile technology, but it didn't happen. You know, I have to agree that there are certain things that we will never achieved. But the fact is that there is an existence proof. We have achieved this already. We have achieved

consciousness. We all carry a four-pound computer that is self-aware in our heads, the brain. It's made of meat and blood, yet it is able to compute it to tend to the 15th operations per second. We're to surpass this in our computers. It's a matter of discovering, either discovering or engineering, that kind of architecture to simulate that. So I really don't see that as something we can actually believe it will never achieve. I think one of the things that we need to be careful of is not to get too married with the foundational assumptions that we carry in. And you mentioned this earlier. You know, 500 years ago, people were using instruments called equatoriums. And these were little metal wheels with metal wheels attached to them. There were circles within circles. And they would

define, they were used to calculate the position of the planets in the night sky. At that time, it was believed, and this was a foundational assumption in everybody's thought that the earth was the immovable center of the universe. And we have a foundational assumption ourselves, and it has to do with our origin. If one believes that we are the alpha generation that rose up from the primordial ooze and became chemistry, and chemistry evolved into biology, and biology evolved into consciousness and intelligence, then, you know, we have to accept everything in our origin theory. And our origin theory has got some issues. I believe there are many things, particularly in the field of quantum mechanics, that maybe can be addressed by simulation hypothesis. So, David, maybe you could come

back on that. And one thing that comes up in this debate a lot is the measurement problem in quantum physics, that it seems that our consciousness interferes with the quantum universe and how it behaves, whether we're observing it or not, can determine if a quantum phenomena is a wave or a particle. Are those types of things important? Are they not proof points that, as Rich has just argued, some of our underlying fundamental assumptions about how the universe works and our role in it are anything but understood? Yeah, I think there's a danger here of invoking a God of the gaps. Every time we come across something we don't understand

or we haven't yet mastered, it's easy to say, okay, that's just because the whole universe is simulated. And then that's really just the same as saying God did it. So I'm a little bit hesitant to use that until you've really disproven all the possible alternatives. So that's why, you know, I say that I can't completely disprove the simulation idea, but I think it's unlikely.

So, I mean, quantum theory, we have to understand, is under revision right now. And we are almost certain that it's going to be supplanted at some point. We look at things like the plank units and say, well, this looks like a sign of digitization in the universe, which emerges from quantum theory. But we know that quantum theory is incomplete because we can't yet make it work with our largest theories of the universe, which is general relativity. And that's actually one of the major theoretical challenges right now in physics, is to combine these two together, and maybe as in the process of doing that, we'll realize that both of them are really just approximations to some deeper truth.

And that's, you know, that's kind of the story of what's happened in history many, many times before that you look at general relativity was itself supplanting Newton's theory that came before it. Newton's theory seemed to work really well until we studied Mercury's orbit very closely and realized it didn't quite work there. And moreover, I just want to say that theories are approximations. They're not, they don't truly, you know, this is kind of, perhaps a point of philosophy, but in my mind, they don't represent reality. They are just mathematical models that we have created that so far make good predictions at the current level of measurement precision. But that's not the same thing as saying the nature of reality is truly this. It's just that this is a model which works so far. And inevitably, it will break, as I mentioned before, it's some deeper level of measurement. So I think it's tempting to look at, you know, even if the universe turned out to be

It seems to be mathematical, but even computational in nature. I wouldn't accept that as evidence that therefore the universe is simulated. Well, I don't think anyone is saying that there's unambiguous evidence for the simulation hypothesis. This certainly isn't. But let's go back to quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is certainly perhaps incomplete in that it hasn't been merged with general relativity, yet it is one of the most successful theories ever created. When a measurement is made, there is a definiteness of structure. We see particles. We can measure positions.

We have a definitive state of the universe. But when things are not being measured, they tend to merge. They tend to be probabilistic. If we take the analogy of computer games, take something like, you know, Grand Theft Auto has a simulation of the entire Southern California. Grand Theft Auto 5 is a creative triumph. What sets it apart is it's beyond obsessive attention to the tiniest. details that truly make it stand out from other AAA blockbusters.

And every street is there, and every house is there, and every brick has texture to it. That entire universe is many, many millions of times larger than a game system or computer that it's played on. Yet, when we engage in the game, when we look and, in a sense, make measurements, we look one way or the other, the world or the universe, is rendered before us in real time. We see it become what is a probability of something happening to something which is definite.

And this is strangely exactly analogous to the way our universe actually behaves in quantum mechanics. This is something that Einstein pointed out to Neal's Bohr and said that there must be something wrong with quantum mechanics because it predicts this, and this is obviously absurd. It turns out that people like John Bell and Alan Aspect, the experiments actually showed that the world really does behave this way. There's this non-locality in both spatially and temporally.

So I agree that quantum theory is our most successful theory in terms of its predictive capability to date. But, I mean, that was also true of Newton's theory at the time as well. I mean, it was predicting planetary motions to three decimal places. It was only once you really dug down to the fourth decimal place that you started to see errors creep in. And so I just don't accept the idea that these implications can be taken in any way as evidence that or even hints of a simulated reality because the theory is itself approximate. We know it's going to be revised. So imagine that we think about the origin of the Earth as an example. The formation of planet Earth is consistent with an alien civilization visiting the solar system four and a half billion years ago.

and constructing our planet at just the right distance for life using a giant 3D printer. And they do it in such a way that there's no discernible evidence that the planet is artificial in nature. I mean, that is technically consistent with our observations, but I would not claim that Earth's special size and orbit represent meaningful evidence for an alien creator. That just doesn't logically follow. And the same way, the computational nature or the observer problem in quantum physics doesn't necessarily mean there is a simulation behind it. It is consistent, yes, but we can also just accept that this is perhaps the way just naturally the universe is. And perhaps it has to be that way else we wouldn't be here in just

the same way that the Earth has to be at the right orbit and the right size around the sun for us to be here. I just don't think our understanding of quantum theory is sufficiently deep that we could possibly exclude the myriad of alternative explanations. Well, I don't think we have a myriad of explanations. If we look at our origin theories, and just on our observations, we know that our universe is something on the order of 13.7 billion years old. It contains somewhere near a trillion galaxies, each one with 100 billion stars and perhaps a trillion planets in each one. It is a huge universe. It started at an extremely low entropy, an entropy which is almost impossible to actually wait for that amount of time to do this.

Our universe is overly tuned. One would expect to wake up in an average universe or a universe which is just barely has the properties that you want. We don't need a trillion galaxies. We need one galaxy or we need one star or we need one planet or even the concept of a bolshemin brain. It's much easier in a quantum mechanical or an entropy, thermodynamic state,

to form a universe which is much, much smaller. much simpler, much younger, that would have all the properties necessary for us to exist. So there is this issue of our origin. Our origin theory is very, very complex and really stretches credibility as to why we would wake up in such a very, very, very unique and very, very improbable universe. Yeah, well, of course, this kind of gets into multiverse stuff, and physicists have been, of course, arguing about this for a long time, but there is the possibility that there is, of course, a multiverse, and now thinking more of a naturalistic explanation on the simulation

hypothesis, that there is a myriad of universes, and as we heard, they could all have slightly different parameters and rules, and, you know, therefore we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in a universe where things do seem fine-tuned. Overly fine-tuned. We find ourselves in the universe, which is way beyond what's necessary. It is not the average universe that one would expect. Right. Well, I think that's a point of contention. I don't think one can show that the tuning of the universe is to that degree that therefore it requires a designer. To really go all the way through that, you would basically have to be capable of producing an entire universe on a

computer, which of course kind of gets us back to the beginning of this whole conversation, which we can't do. So I don't think we can say with any confidence, I reject that as a premise that the tuning is so precise that it is somehow suspicious to the degree that it requires a creator. And I guess more generally, this is sort of my perspective, is that you allow some uncertainty to the notion that we will one day be able to generate these types of simulations. Then you work through the statistics. You end up with it being actually more probable that we would live in a natural universe. So if you just assign Laplace's principle of indifference, which, you know, you might use if went to the supermarket, you're going to maybe pick a Pepsi or a Coke,

but you've never tasted either one before, you don't know which one you'd prefer, you'd give it 50-50 odds between the two. And so if you do this between the simulation hypothesis, basically Bostrom's first point of the Trilemma, versus us never been able to generate simulations to this degree, then it ends up that there's a slight preference for us being in base reality,

because within the simulation hypothesis, one of the realities is base. And then in the alternative hypothesis, of course, the only explanation is that you're in base reality. That actually means that the odds are slightly greater than 50%. Now, I think that's even being generous, to be honest with you, because it doesn't account for Occam's Razor at all. The simulation hypothesis is intrinsically extremely elaborate.

It has way more parameters in it, way more degrees of freedom. It's a much more convoluted model than just saying it naturally happened. And so, yeah, by Occam's Razor, I have this deep suspicion about any model which has to go to such a high degree of complexity to explain something which we can explain without doing so. Where to begin? All right, let's go back to the idea of what we're going to be doing in the near future. The idea of creating simulations is something that we do today.

We are doing that in our laboratory. We're creating evolutionary simulations using autonomy. And the autonomy we use have simple characteristics. For instance, we can tune the traffic patterns in a city. You might be surprised just how easy it is to make some believable traffic AI with just a few lines of code and some elbow grease. We're going to take a look at how to use a simple waypoint system to build a basic AI behavior for pedestrians and traffic. We can do that by creating drivers with certain properties. A certain number, a certain percentage of them will drive faster than the speed limit.

A certain number of them will drive slower. A certain number and will have their left blinker on continuously, whatever. By doing this, by doing trial and error and evolutionary computation on this large number of autonomy, we can solve problems. If we want to solve deeper problems, if we want to understand the spread of disease, or we want to understand what is the best way to evacuate a city in a case of an emergency, how much information to give people, when to give that information. We would like that autonomy to have characteristics that are more compatible with human

beings. Ideally, we would love to be able to run these simulations with conscious thinking, cognizant, autonomy. So there is this drive. There is this drive to create these kinds of simulations because they do solve real-world problems. I see this as a driving need, even without Moore's law continuing very far. We already have the computational capability to do this at a fairly, very large scale. There is a great economy of doing this. We don't need a computer. that's as large as a galaxy to compute the universe because we don't have to compute the entire universe all at once. We only have to compute 10 to the 15th operations per second worth,

which is the way we perceive reality. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. And you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members-only podcast

that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. This has been a fascinating conversation, and I want to try to think through a little bit here, what is on the audience's mind having listened to this exchange. And maybe, David, to come to you, let's say this technology is developing. And let's say at some point in the future, decade or two from now, there is that proverbial breakthrough, a kind of Copernician revolution in artificial consciousness.

and we create consciousness in a box. Am I right to understand that according to your thinking about this, that would increase the odds, therefore, that we are in a simulation, that it's not unimportant to you and your thinking that the creation of the ability to simulate reality within a consciousness equivalent in some way to our mental consciousness as physical beings,

that could be a tipping point to give more credence, more statistical probability to the argument that we are living in a simulation. Am I right? Yeah, I'd agree with that. I would, yeah, so if we found out, you know, as we're chinking champagne glasses at the discovery of the first conscious AI on a machine,

you know, in the back of that room, I would be thinking this means that we are probably simulated because then it would represent precedent. there is now a piece of evidence at last that it is possible. And I think that's kind of my whole science here is at the moment we don't have that evidence. And so we're extrapolating trends. We're extrapolating where we're at now. And we're imagining technologies.

And we can certainly say, you know, earlier on it was, you know, Richard said that, you know, we have achieved this ability because it's in our heads. But we didn't really achieve that. That was nature and evolution achieved that. That wasn't by our own hand. I don't think we can take credit for that. It has to be by our intellects that we achieve this. And it's just not obvious that, A, we're capable of doing that,

or B, that we'll even have enough time to do that before either a catastrophe or a plateau in our capabilities. I mean, the largest simulation of a brain at the moment was by the Allen Institute just this year. It has 230,000 neurons in it, artificial neurons, which sounds very impressive. but it would have to increase by a factor of 400,000 to match a human brain. And even if we assumed the 24-month doubling rate, which was what we had with Moore's Law,

that would take four decades to happen. But we already know that Moore's Law isn't holding. It's broken. We know that in the next 50 years, many of these directors and CEOs, for instance, the director of Microsystems Group at DARPA, Robert Colwell, said that, you know, he doesn't expect in the next 30 years to see an increase of 3,500 electronics, maybe another factor of 50, and that's it. If that's it, that's not going to be enough to get us to this point.

So I just think we have to admit the possibility. There is uncertainty associated with us. And when you admit there's uncertainty, then everything changes. Because, as I said, once you go through the math, it really just change everything can make it unlikely. But yeah, the day that if it does happen one day, everything flips around 180. and I would be switching sides in this debate. I certainly agree that there's uncertainty.

There's always uncertainty in science. We're never certain of anything until our theories are always overturned by better theories. But this whole idea that we may not be smart enough to do that. That's under the auspices that we have to understand the human brain in order to copy it. There is this other alternative, and that is the same way we got here,

and that is through evolution, through trial and error. And computationally, Evolution is a very, very powerful tool, and we have discovered solutions to problems that far exceeded the ability of human beings to do that. Even my own group, we design power systems, for instance, for spacecraft. And none of us have any expertise in designing power systems. Yet we use these computational models and designed a power system, which to within 10% was the exact same power system that was flown on the Mars Opportunity Rover. So there is this other alternative without having to have knowledge. to use the power of evolution and computation to discover solutions.

So, Rich, another possible thought going through our listeners' minds. So let's say we are in a simulation. We're the product of some advanced society that has crossed this computational threshold and produced consciousness. Then why wouldn't they give us the ability to create simulations in our own reality? Why would they have denied that to, us. But we do have that capability. We have a capability to design artificial simulations. We have the ability to do artificial reality. We haven't progressed to the point where it is indistinguishable

from real reality. That's more of a technical problem than... But I guess what I'm trying to ask is why in this simulation are we required to progress? I don't know. There seems to be a series of assumptions here about a priori of our reality. set of rules that's been established. And I guess one has to wonder then, you know, A, who's setting the rules? Why are they setting them that way? And in a bizarre way, the rules seem kind of human, don't they? Like, we're pondering them. We're seemingly understanding the rules that they've set for us. I mean, that seems bizarre. Well, let's just freewheel for a minute. Suppose I'm a post-human civilization now, and I have, I can live in any artificial reality that I want. I can fly a

I can do magic, I can do anything. I doing an ancestral simulation of where I came from, of humans. What would be more interesting than to go back to the stage just before humans have the capability of reaching that stage where they can, they can now launch their own simulations, where they can choose to live wherever they want, the singularity before, you know, 50 or 100 years before the singularity? This is a very, very trying time for us. We have to navigate through technologies that can both be heaven and hell. They can progress us to a paradise of capabilities and potentials, or we can destroy ourselves. This is a very, very interesting time and perhaps one of the most interesting times in order to run simulations.

So, you know, in a universe that is 13.7 billion years old, and we're here maybe a century away from being able to have this capability, you know, that's one part in 100 million. So what is the probability you would be that close to a threshold and not be over it? It's like, you know, losing the lot of irony. So you're almost kind of touching on William Poundstone wrote a book about the use of priors and Bayesian inference. And he had a whole chapter about the simulation argument. And he almost, adverbatim, sort of describes your conundrum there, that if indeed we imagined ancestor simulations being a common activity.

for post-human civilizations, he actually argues that it's more likely that they would prefer to simulate more recent times than very late times. And his argument was sort of thinking about when you go to the theater or the cinema, what are you more likely to watch? Are you more like to watch a movie, a recreation, essentially, of events that took place 10,000 years ago, or are you more likely to watch a movie of something that happened recently? I just say I don't really buy into Poundstain's argument too much. I guess it's the same reason why I might disagree with what Rich just said there. And that's that in both cases, you're kind of doing xenocycology, I might say.

We often think of this in our search for alien life, that it gets really dangerous when you try to predict what the activities are of a completely essentially alien civilization twist. We really don't know. Another listener question that comes from my mind, Rich, is, are we the center of the simulation? Like, you know, what about my cat? Like, is my cat the center of the experiment they're running? Or, like, why is it me? Why is it humanity? You know, we've invoked Copernicus a lot of this conversation, which is great.

But there seems a kind of self-centeredness that these simulations are all about us. Well, that's the old conundrum of what is really. and what isn't. Consciousness is a first-person experience, and there is no way for me to know that anyone other than myself is self-aware like I am. There is no definitive test for self-awareness consciousness. A model of reality where I am the only conscious person or you are the only conscious person and everything else is a simulation is just as consistent with everyone else being conscious. We're seeing that in our video games today. where you can be playing

and you don't know whether other opponents in the video game are CPUs or they're real people playing. Non-playable characters, also known as NPCs, are a core element that make many gameplay scenarios work and feel natural. The AI system of a video game has to be good enough to render credible scenarios populated with viable, lifelike characters that can act in an organic way, as if they were living beings and not just lines of code.

And as these simulations get more and more higher and higher fidelity, it'll be less and less likely that you'll be able to distinguish that difference. David, anything you want to come back on that point? I'm conscious of our time and moving to closing statements. I just say there's two things that come to mind there.

One is that this is kind of this act of sloppism in philosophy that just to challenge everything, extreme skepticism about the very nature of reality. And that, as we've heard about, has been with us for a very long time. You know, since Plato's cave, we've been thinking about whether reality is real or not. And you can go even further.

You can say that my memories aren't real. I just came into existence two seconds ago. And my memory of debating right now is all just an implant. And my entire existence might be just a few seconds before I'm terminated. So you can really like push this to an extreme, but it becomes increasingly egocentric. Because you're making yourself ever more special that you're basically in a universe that's just for you. and just from our understanding and lessons from history of studying the universe, that has always been a mistake whenever we thought that something was special about who we are in the universe.

Fascinating stuff. Okay, let's go to closing statements. This has been a terrific debate, and I'm going to have you, David, go first. So sum up any of the key points you want to leave our audience with, any final lines that you'd like to draw under the arguments that Rich has made. Sure. Thank you for this wonderful debate. It's been fun to discuss this. To me, something I want to come back to is this basic tenet in science that's often actually attributed to the 18th century polymath, Pierre Simon Laplace, and it is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now, to me, the idea that we live in a simulated reality coded by some higher beings and created in such a way to perfectly resemble a natural universe as far as we can. tell is undoubtedly an extraordinary claim. It's also an idea without any precedent or example from our own history. We can't simulate conscious beings on a computer yet, nor is it an idea with any hard observational evidence from our own study of the cosmos. Frankly, I don't see any compelling

evidence to support the notion, let alone extraordinary evidence. The mathematical nature of our universe is not evidence of a crater any more than rain is evidence of a crying deity in the clouds. Astronomer Carl Sagan comes to mind during this debate because he once famously said that faith is belief in the absence of evidence. And by that definition, to me, belief in the simulation hypothesis is a position of faith and indeed shares many qualities of faith-based religions, such as an intelligent designer and humanity being of special great import. skepticism is a guiding light in science. I cannot prove to you that the simulation hypothesis is definitively false, because by design,

it is unfalsifiable. But in the absence of any evidence, the simple fact that this idea is more convoluted, that alone should ring alarm bells in your mind. And this is true whether we're talking about the simulation hypothesis or the latest conspiracy theory or supernatural claims. These seductive ideas, they excite our imaginations and our hearts, but I'm asking the audience to approach it with cool, calm, rational deliberation and a very healthy dose of skepticism.

Thank you, David, for that closing statement. Rich, we're going to put a couple minutes on the clock and give you the last word in this debate. I think skepticism is really the key here, and it's interesting to debate another scientist. we rarely debate hypotheses, but I'm just as skeptical about our origin ideas and waking up in the peculiar universe that we're in. I believe that there is value in probing the consequences of simulation hypothesis, and I think there are really two-fold reasons. The first is that it allows us to question foundational assumptions about our origin.

We believe that we're direct descendants of a universe that came into existence in an impossible. possibly low entropy state 13.7 billion years ago. Okay, this universe is vast. It holds a trillion galaxies, each with perhaps a trillion planets. Yet, as far as we know, it's empty of any space-faring civilizations. As I said, we're probably within a century of being able to create vast numbers of simulated self-aware minds. In the history of the universe, this is an unreasonably tiny time frame.

100 millionth of being close to that threshold, but not over it. Perhaps it's a coincidence, but it's the most interesting time to be aware. Could we be wrong about the assumption of where we came from? Our ideas of origin are predicated on the assumption that it happened to us. But what if we're not the first? The simulation hypothesis compels us to both look at our origins, where we came from, question our foundational assumptions, but it also compels us to look forward, to look into our future.

So secondly, we will soon be the architects of our own simulated worlds. We'll be the creators and stewards of self-aware minds. I believe that there are signatures in the universe that could be telling us fundamentally that the universe has been engineered for consciousness. And we are both the children of that universe and the architects of its future. And that perspective, I think, would make us better stewards of worlds that we will eventually create and inhabit. Well, thank you, Rich, David. I think this is the first hour in nine months that I haven't thought about U.S. politics, COVID, the future of China-U.S. relations.

Instead, you've given me, and our audience, just a wonderful mind-expanding conversation. This has been a civil, substantive debate. I've learned so much on behalf of the Monk debate community. Thank you for coming on the program. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, David.

Wow. Was that a great debate or what? Thanks to Rich and David for a mind-expanding conversation, to say the least. It's going to take me a little while to recover from moderating this debate. To do so, I hope you'll join me in going to the Monk Debates website, W.wmunk Debates.com to access dozens of terrific debates on topics ranging from climate change to the future of U.S.-China relations to whether or not the Republican Party can survive in the era after Trump. All those debates free for downloading and listening at monkdebates.com. You can also find show notes for today's debate on our website.

Thank you for being part of the monk debates community and for joining us in all. our mission to expand the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffith and Christina Campbell are the producers. Api Raheja is our associate producer. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Kieran Lynch. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox.

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