Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Universe Is Simulated. Now What? | David Chalmers and Scott Aaronson (Part 3/3)

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Here is a panel between David Chalmers and Scott Aaronson at Mindfest 2024. This discussion covers the philosophical implications of the simulation hypothesis, exploring whether our reality might be a simulation and engaging with various perspectives on the topic.This presentation was recorded at MindFest, held at Florida Atlantic University, CENTER FOR THE FUTURE MIND, spearheaded by Susan Schneider.YouTube: https://youtu.be/7PlmOXQ18jk Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org  Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch  Follow TOE: - *NEW* Get my 'Top 10 TOEs' PDF + Weekly Personal Updates: https://www.curtjaimungal.org - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofeverythingpod - TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeverything_ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything  

The moment we realize we're in a simulation, that is when we become conscious of the true nature of our world, and the simulators will shut us down. History will end at the moment when the world becomes conscious of itself, of its own true nature. Today we have a treat. This is a panel including both David Chalmers and Scott Aronson. This was at MindFest directly following their talks, which are linked in the description. And today they cover the simulation hypothesis as it's distinct from the simulation argument all while taking questions from a live audience. This panel is hosted by Mark Bailey, department chair of the cyber intelligence and data science at National Intelligence University. This talk was given at MindFest, put on by the

Center for the Future Mind which is spearheaded by of Philosophy, Susan Schneider. It's a conference that's annually held, where they merge Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness Studies, and held at Florida Atlantic University. The links to all of these will be in the description. There's also a playlist here for MindFest. Again, that's that conference, Merging AI and Consciousness. There are previous talks from people like Scott Aaronson, David Chalmers, Stuart Hameroff, Sarah Walker, Stephen Wolfram, and Ben Gortzel. My name is Kurt Jaimungal and today we have a special treat because usually Theories of Everything is a podcast. What's ordinarily done on this channel is I use my background in mathematical physics and I analyze various theories of everything from that perspective and analytical one, but as well as a philosophical one discerning

well what's consciousness's relationship to fundamental reality, what is reality, are the laws as they exist even the laws and should they be mathematical, but instead I was invited down to film these talks and bring them to you courtesy of the Center for the Future Mind. Enjoy this talk from MindFest. So you both sort of touched on this in your introductions, and you know some people may argue that if the simulation implies some intelligent designer this talk from some natural phenomena. Do you see any distinction between this naturalistic explanation for a possible simulation versus a theological one? We'll start. Go ahead. Yeah. I like the way that David put it in his talk,

that the simulation hypothesis is like an amalgamation of two things, where you believe the world is computational in a certain appropriate sense. And there was some creator who made a choice to set that in motion, right? You could imagine that this universe is just arises mechanistically out of a different universe with utterly different laws. But in a certain sense, that is what physics already says, right? It's like the classical world, you know, is built out of this quantum world that, you know, that looks, you know, that looks totally different from anything that you, you know,

a priori thought about, right? It was like, you know, is classical physics just all, you know, a big simulation being run by quantum physics? Well, like, you could view it that way. I don't, it that way. I personally don't see where to draw a firm line between that sort of thing, just levels of emergence and one world simulating another world. Okay. David. You can define the simulation hypothesis the way you were suggesting so that it doesn't actually require a simulator.

So interesting question. Just say it turns out that we're contained in a world where just through totally by chance, a simulation of our universe came into existence. Then is the simulation hypothesis true? Well, I think this is kind of, it's a verbal question. We can stipulate, in my book I stimulate, that the simulation hypothesis requires a simulator who designed and created this intentionally. So this would knock out. But it's an interesting question.

Is there, there are certainly going to be hypotheses that don't have a simulator. And it's an interesting question whether any of those are plausible. The one I mentioned is just like a Boltzmann simulation. Maybe could be terrible that way. Maybe there are versions where you said naturalistic version, where somehow universes evolve as on one of those, isn't that Lee Smolin who had the universes evolving?

Maybe that could happen with simulations. Right. I did, I want to say, I mean, so I'm really glad that David covered the quantum mechanics part so I don't have to, right? But I was thinking like there are so many areas of agreement that I was thinking what could we actually have a fight about here? I might have found something.

Okay, well like you said, even I would agree that presumably that it's meaningful whether we're in a simulation or not. Even assuming that there was no way to get any evidence about it. I think for me, I would only say that it's pre-meaningful. Well, I'm willing to hear out the arguments for why it's meaningful, but I know that the answer is going to look like, well, on these philosophical views, it's meaningful and on these other philosophical views, it isn't. Then, is the question, do you guys ever resolve these things?

The logical empiricists or logical positivists of the 1930s had this famous hypothesis, verificationism. For a hypothesis to be meaningful, it's got to be verifiable. And then there's the closely related falsification version, pretty meaningful, it's got to be falsifiable. And I think, yeah, in this case, it looks like the perfect simulation hypothesis may not be falsifiable. Most philosophers these days do not roundly reject this verificationist thesis.

They say things like, is that thesis verifiable or falsifiable? Sure, but I don't have to be like a strict, like an orthodox verificationist in order to say, well, you've given me this hypothesis, but you haven't told me what to do. And therefore, I'm willing to hear you out, but convince me that it's meaningful. What moves me the most is thinking about we could actually create someone for whom the simulation hypothesis is true. We could take a brain in a vat or make a simulated universe in which there is a cognitive system who is precisely interacting with computer simulation in a way which was totally unverifiable or un-falsifiable for

that person. If we do a good enough job with the simulation, they will never know. But it just seems obvious. They are, in fact, in a simulation. This is a coherent way for a being to be. Now, you say, isn't that at least a coherent possibility that we're in that situation? Go. Very interesting.

There's this interesting and I would say very disturbing thought experiment that emerged in the AI safety and effective altruism Community a few years ago called Rocca's basilisk. Have you ever heard of this? So already gotten probably like a hundred thousand times more discussion than it merits Yeah, that was how they met yeah, so for anyone unfamiliar with this, it states that any otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence in the future would necessarily be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence, but who did not directly contribute to its advancement or development in order to incentivize that advancement. So as you can imagine, this caused a lot of sleepless nights and panic attacks amongst the members of the EA community.

So my question is, if there is some intelligence simulator that exists, do you think we're in trouble for talking about this? Like, do we owe some piety to whoever the simulator may or may not be? Scott is the AI safety professional. I mean, I just made my piece a long time ago with the idea that, okay, if I'm going to be punished for eternity for some rule that I didn't even know that I was breaking because

I didn't know which religion was the true one or whatever, then that's them's the breaks, right? Yeah. There is the view that the simulators are going to shut us down the moment we realize that we're in a simulation. There's a way of understanding, this is actually very close to Hegel. Hegel said, yeah, history will end at the moment when the world becomes conscious of itself, of its own true nature.

So it's like the moment we realize we're in a simulation, that is when we become conscious of the true nature of our world and the simulators will shut us down. I hope not though. Yeah. I mean, which people have to realize it? Because I'm wondering whether this might already be falsified. Certainly people believe it, but do they know it? Right. Good. Good. Good. Good. Very interesting. So, Dave, you mentioned Nick Bostrom's argument for the simulation hypothesis. And I think a lot of what he talks about, it's basically a probabilistic argument where

he says that, you know, if a high fidelity simulated reality is possible, then it's highly improbable that we live in the base reality and that we're likely in a sim. What are your thoughts on this probabilistic argument? You don't like it, right? Well, yeah, I mean, I already responded to it, right? I said in some sense, it's selling off the branch that it sits on because, you know, you like what when you take it seriously,

like the picture it leads to is like a tree of like where each world can simulate worlds which in turn can simulate other worlds and so forth. Then you say, well, okay, but why would we be at the base of the tree? Right? But okay, but wait a minute. These simulations should be repeatedly getting smaller, right, because each one has to run on computers

that fit in the next universe above it, right? And there's always some overhead in a simulation. And so actually it seems like in this universe we should only be able to simulate smaller universes, right, and only a bigger, more complex universe can simulate this one, in which case, like what do we even mean when we say that our descendants are going to be simulating us? They're going to be simulating some smaller universe that maybe has something, right? Unless you believe that we were in the smaller universe already, but then you just get too confused.

On the other hand, if we're, the simulation maybe, we've already got evidence that this universe is a pretty big one, with a lot of spare computing power for simulating universes. The world simulating us could be bigger. All those galaxies going to waste, what are they doing? So, Susan and I have written a lot about this idea of algorithmic incompressibility, or where we postulate that there are certain processes, like complex processes that are not necessarily

mappable to some sort of a mathematical abstraction. You know, like you can think about the emergence of markets in an economy or something like that, these kinds of processes. And so, you know, we're torn between whether or not this is an epistemic thing where we simply don't have the knowledge to understand these things yet, or maybe it represents some sort of an ontological limit in terms of, you know, calculability or computability. So along that line, if there is some sort of a computable limit to the universe, like some sort of a computability horizon, do you think something like that could be evidence

of a simulation, in that we're in some sort of a computer that, you know, can only compute up to the power of the computer doing the simulating on the outside. I mean, if the natural world works anything like science thinks it works in Scalaeo, then the answer to your question has to be it is epistemic. If we had enough knowledge of the state of every particle, if you knew the complete state of the universe, let's say a wave function of the universe at a given time, then you could run the equations forward.

And that would tell you not only what the particles are doing or the probabilities for them to do each possible thing, it would tell you what the markets are going to do ultimately, because that supervenes on it, right? So yeah. But we are actually in a way in the situation you mentioned. We seem to be in a Turing computable universe. And we've gotten used to that and so on. But your reasoning is now, hey, shouldn't the fact that we're in a Turing computable universe make us kind of suspicious about something? Like maybe we're actually inside a computation in the next universe.

Yeah. Right. But suppose that we had these, we found things on the beach that could solve the halting problem. So now we know that we're in a hyper-touring. Then our notion of computability would just be the hyper-touring one. We say, well, why are we in a hyper-touring universe? It must be because we're simulated by a hyper-touring machine. So, there's not something specific here about touring.

Yeah. It'd be really interesting if it turns out that physical processes all show up in some way lower than Turing computable class of processes. They're all ones that can be executed in a computer with this very small finite memory. That might tell us something. One of the long-running jokes in quantum computing is that when the first person builds a scalable quantum computer and they try to run it to factor,

let's say, a 2,000-digit number, break cryptography using Shor's algorithm, that's going to be the event that crashes the universe. Because the universe is running in some lazy classical simulation where they know that they can usually ignore hard enough quantum computations because those never actually happen and then the first when we try to build quantum computers, that's when we're going to break that abstraction and there just won't be enough computing power in the simulators. I think actually when I had my one meeting ever with Larry Page, that was what he wanted to talk about.

And so I said, okay, well, I guess maybe you know more than me about whether we're all in a simulation. But. I hear that's what they're trying to do in DeepMind too. They're just trying to stress test the simulation with really powerful AI and make it crash. So I'm a professor at a university that serves the intelligence community. So I'm naturally interested in national security related problems. So the other day I was Googling national security

implications of the simulation argument and unsurprisingly, there's not really a lot out there on this topic, other than some kind of like off-the-wall conspiracy theory kind of things Maybe the simulators are gonna like take our stuff and feed it to like foreign powers Well, I guess my question is so like I'm interested in how emerging technologies technologies are emerging ideas within tech You know may impact global security instability So my question is do you think that any confirmed knowledge of a simulated reality? Could disrupt the existing social order in some way. Yes But

Having said that I mean, okay AI, you know I got it used to be laughed off as you know as like, you know AGI is like a science fiction concern that just, this small community of nerds spread about. Within the last couple of years, I think there's been a phase change. Now, no one disputes anymore that it's a national security issue. I think I would need to see

several things happen that haven't happened before. I would want to say that whether the universe is a computer simulation should be a national security issue. A lot would depend on how we got this confirmed knowledge. Maybe if the simulators start talking to us and say, hey, I'm going to like, here, let me just hack the code of the simulation right now and turn the Empire State Building upside down and so on. You bet that would be a national security issue.

Absolutely. It just feels like we would have bigger fish to fry than, you know, like, what is simulated China doing against us now, right, or whatever. This is like an intro world, what's the word, not international security issue, but intro world, intro cosmos security issue. Interworld. Interworld. So, Dave, in Reality Plus, you discussed how, and you mentioned it in your talk earlier,

how any sort of virtual reality is in fact real in like an ontological sense. Can you elaborate a bit on that? Yeah, you know, the standard view of virtual reality, I mean, as I was saying, this whole idea of like simulated worlds goes back to, you know, there was Plato in the cave and Zhuangzhu with the dream hypothesis and so on. And Descartes with evil demons falling in. The standard view is always if you're in these simulation like scenarios, nothing is real.

Now, the contemporary version is virtual reality, actually very timely. Tomorrow, Apple is releasing their Reality Pro, their first virtual reality device, although they don't call it that, right? It's a spatial computing device. I've ordered mine, it's coming on Saturday. Again, the standard view is if you're in VR,

none of this is real, it's a fiction, it's a hallucination, it's an illusion. I really want to argue that, no, this is wrong. Objects in VR, they genuinely exist, they're real, they have causal powers, they're digital. They're digital, but we now know that being digital is not a way of being unreal. There's that phrase IRL, right?

In real life, it's like, is the digital and the real? But we know that's totally, it's a really bad way of thinking about reality. So in general, and likewise, I think thinking about the simulation hypothesis, and it from bit and so on can lead you down the road to thinking that actually if we're in a simulation,

all this stuff is genuinely real. That only applies to grand scale metaphysical theorizing. On the other hand, the case of VR is something which, these are worlds that we're gonna be in increasingly more over the next few decades. And I think it's really, it's actually quite important whether these things are just fully illusions, hallucinations, and escapism, or whether they're a form of real world in which you can have meaningful experiences.

So that's what in the book I try and argue that at least in principle, you can have real meaningful lives in VR. Very interesting. Do you think that if we ever were able to simulate a high enough fidelity virtual reality here, would we ever were able to simulate a high enough fidelity virtual reality here, would we ever be able to tell whether or not any of the sims in that environment are pee zombies or whether or not they have consciousness? And then sort of by extension, do you think that any simulator that exists outside of our reality would know whether or not any entities in this reality are in fact conscious. There is this problem of other minds. It's very hard to know whether another creature

is conscious even given its behavior. I've always taken the view that at least if a system is behaving enough like us, it doesn't prove that they're conscious. They could be zombies. But nonetheless, it kind of ought to create a presumption of consciousness in us if they're from all this sophisticated behavior.

But now in the era of large language models, which are, they're not yet at the point of being Turing indistinguishable from us, but you know, they're not that far off and a lot of people at least wanting to say, well, Kevin, there's actually good reasons to think they're not conscious or at least not strong reasons for extending them that, that presumption. So I think language models have, you know, they've already made a lot of people think the Turing test is much less useful than we thought it might be as a test for consciousness. But then we have nothing else to take its place.

So I think right now actually we're rather confused about that issue. Yeah, very good. Scott, do you have anything you want to add to any of those questions? I mean, are we going to open things up? Yeah, absolutely. That's my next thing. Oh, wow, we have a lot. Scott do you have anything you want to add to any of those questions? I mean are we going to open things up? Yeah absolutely that's my next thing. Oh wow we have a lot. Okay do we have a microphone for? Okay awesome.

Alright this is for Scott and for David and Scott's probably going to get upset at me for asking something like this. But you know what if I've always kind of thought about the simulation in terms of okay you're talking about being inside or outside of a system, how can those things interact? So I always kind of saw it as something more of like a self-simulation. I mean, if you're inside of something and you have no means of judging if there's anything outside of it, how can you even make the argument that there's something exterior? Even the fact that we can just think about these things, what are the implications of that?

I mean, that's exactly what we were talking about, right? I started my remarks with saying, well, the first thing I wanna know is, does it make any difference to anything or not, right, that I can observe? If it doesn't make any difference, well then, at the very least, I need to hear an argument for why I should then care further about this. Right? Yeah.

You said self-simulation as in, oh, this is a simulation by ourselves? You know, the way I kind of look at it is, is okay, how can we not add anything else, look for anything else and just normal perception, daily life, whatever, how can we change our interpretation to where it's, there's no boundary? Like if you if, for example, if you're inside of, I've given this example before to people, like if you're inside of, inside of a sphere and you have no means of judging anything from the outside, does, it's effectively useless to you? I mean, it's kind of, again, to Scott's point. And when I say self, I mean like it's self-contained. There's not like an exterior. There's only an interior, but you can't even.

The extreme version of this is the dream hypothesis, right? Right, yeah. It's you yourself who are creating the simulation. That's really a epistemic bubble. I mean, there are many analogous issues, right? Like mathematicians might have once thought that, okay, it only makes sense to talk about a curved surface if it's embedded in some higher dimensional flat space.

And then eventually they realize, no, you can just intrinsically talk about your curved manifold and however many dimensions and it could be embedded in something higher dimensional, but you also, you don't even have to think about that if you don't want to. Very good. Michael? I don't really see why you would, if you wanted to know how a civilization might go and behave and stuff, I don't see why you would simulate that civilization was actual people.

If I were to do it, I would create what I would call a puppet master simulation where there's an AI on top and what that AI is doing is it has a bunch of puppets which have various personalities personalities and like stuff like that and the they're perceiving various things and the AI on top figures like knows how like its characters and stuff are going to react to those stimuli and have them react in that way and therefore you can like use that to simulate an entire like civilization without actually having like people in it essentially

And if you were to do this then that AI on top could have its characters overlook any like flaws or cracks in the simulation So it could be a lot less intensive. I Mean, of course we can appeal to the anthropic principle here, right? If there are some simulations with no sentient beings and there are others with sentient beings, then we have to be in the latter kind. I mean, this is the premise of some of those original simulation fiction, right? Like Simulacron 3, which was all, yeah, the simulation I think was devised by people from an advertising company for marketing reasons. They wanted to see, you know, which program, which product was going to do well with people. But for that to be useful in a social context, don't you have to simulate people?

It's like if I simulate a world without people, it's not going to be terribly useful for navigating, for governing my actions, at least in this social world. Actually, it gets even worse. Because if we now have simulation technology, you're going to have to simulate a world where people have simulation technology, and that rapidly gets recursive and difficult. I guess when we talk about simulation theory slash arguments like hypothesis, the concept of you mentioned infinite regression or recursion comes into mind.

So if it's the case that we are in a simulation and if it's the case that there is a creator, there's probably then an equal or I will say even higher chance that the world of the creator is also assimilated. And if that's simulated, there's a higher chance that the creator of the creator's world is also assimilated. And I guess that could go like infinitely. And even beyond that into the countable ordinals. Yeah. So, I guess, will that sort of lead us into like a perpetual like uncertainty about like the underlying principles of reality? And is that the case or not?

And if it is, is that something like worth considering? This is like, is it William James to whom the remark was attributed? It's like, he gave a lecture and in the end someone came up to him and said, look James, your metaphysics is all wrong. Here's the correct metaphysics of reality. We're all sitting on the back of a turtle. And they said, what's the turtle on? Oh, it's another turtle.

And then William James says, no, I know where you're going. It's turtles all the way down. So likewise for simulation, for a simulation, that one's in a simulation, maybe it's simulations all the way up. Either way, it's like you have to, this kind of raises a very deep philosophical question, which is does there have to be a fundamental level to reality? The philosopher Jonathan Schaffer wrote a nice article saying, no, there doesn't have to be, it can be like there could be levels all the way down to infinity.

But if you're inclined to think that there has to be a fundamental level, then presumably we're going to have to be at some fixed point in the hierarchy. Very good. I kind of like the idea that a simulation is all the way up. So I like to inject aliens into a lot of conversations, but I think this is an interesting thought experiment because nobody ever uses alien for creator, right? But in some sense, you're hypothesizing about an intelligent being other than us.

And I think when you're talking about the simulation argument, people will agree that if we encounter aliens on another world, and if we're in a simulation, it's still first contact. And so my question is, if we simulate aliens, is that first contact? Interesting. You've done that already, right? I don't know.

Radio games? Well, no, or a GPT. I mean, you know, if you spend time interacting with it, I mean, you do have the feeling that you are talking to an alien, right? You are talking to a new kind of intelligence that exists on Earth that did not five years ago. Of course, it is not a kind of intelligence that arose independently from humans. So in that sense, it is fundamentally different from meeting an extraterrestrial from another planet. All right.

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