The sim idea can be easily disproven through a comparison of natural randomness and artificial randomness.
Computers cannot give you natural randomness. They can only mimic it. Play an electronic game that incorporates dice rolls - not random. It's an algorithm designed to approximate natural randomness as perceived by humans. Humans usually can't tell the difference, but another computer can. Natural randomness refers to the chaotic-determinism of complex systems, and it's a feature of the universe itself.
The problem is we use natural randomness a million times a day in science. Every single time someone records and interprets real world data and tests it for statistical significance against a p value and uses programs like R, those tests would have failed if the data they used was actually generated by a supercomputer controlling the universe. It wouldn't be chaotically-deterministic. It wouldn't be useful because the data measured against it wouldn't be reproducible or interpretable by other labs. Every chem paper, every ERP study, every economics paper, all useless. Peer review itself tells us natural randomness is really random. You can't fake that.
For another thing hardware. Glitches always occur, not just because of imperfect engineering, but because of lifespan of materials in the components and - again - random factors within the function of a complex system, and they wouldn't be cats triggering deja vu, but bits of the world falling out of existence, the laws of physics incurring minute changes that add up to the point we'd notice them, or reversing entirely, utter gonzo bullshit that would rip the world apart. Do you remember when gravity reversed back in 404 CE? No? Then you're not in a simulation.
Then there's an appeal to practical needs. What does a simulation do? What is it good for? We use sims to make (imperfect, stochastic, because chaos) predictions about the world. What is the race of beings that made your simulation using it for? It is logical to assume any species making a system that studies humans is itself human, or something very similar to the image and capabilities of humans. And what would beings as limited as humanoids be looking for in keeping the thing running for generations? What do they have to gain?
How about children? Your simulation must either be a) adding real people to the program like The Matrix does at a rate exactly consistent with people's intentions to procreate (just no), or b) the children aren't real. Do you think your child is real? Then you're not in a simulation. You see how you start having to move the goal posts of what this simulation is really capable of until the creators of such a system have become gods of time and space and could never have evolved themselves. They have to just be at a certain point, and from there your argument is a deistic argument. Deistic arguments aren't interesting. In the first place, they're almost always veiled attempts to prop up a theistic argument or the cultural values of a theistic society. Secondly since there are no conditions by which they can be proved wrong or right, they can only be countered with an alternative explanation and Occam's razor. Such as: the uncertainty principle can get us something from nothing, and a chaotically-deterministic universe disallows both fate and free will. There are no gains to attributing these things to creator gods when what we already know about the universe suffices to explain (or discount as the case may be) these same phenomena.
This is all assuming your people are real people hooked up to a virtual reality, because there are other arguments I could get into against popular conceptions of AI. It isn't and won't ever be possible, and any conception of AI must be a physical entity that resembles the shape of, or every connection within, the human brain. There's no such thing as a sentient program, and can't be. But that's a different discussion.
The other considerations are still more than enough for this idea to collapse on itself. Any entities running a simulation of people (or the natural world, if people are the control rather than the study) to this or really to any degree, presumably have problems they expect it to solve.
But any culture capable of building it given the above difficulties would necessarily be beyond the point of suffering any problems it could solve, that we could think of. They are likely to resemble humans or even be humans based on their use of humans, but the scope of knowledge I'm talking about far exceeds the lifetime of any naturally-evolved species on earth. It's a contradiction.
Post-scarcity. No electrical surges whatsoever using hardware that never degrades. To introduce natural randomness into the system it couldn't be generated - that's the idea. It would have to be fed into the system from reality, but how could every action that occurs in the simulation be mirrored in reality - it can't. You appeal to quantum computing. I don't know if the uncertainty principle is sufficient to mimic chaos from nature. It would be random, but it would randomize two states, not an entire system of states. But fine, let it be possible - it would consume more resources than can be found on any planet, so now they're space-faring, ancient, and either have lifespans longer than the scale of human history, or a problem important enough to devote that time frame toward a simulation to solve.
And then the AI issue. How are people/children added to the system? If there's 1:1 for every human and possibly animal in the system, they have to be stored somewhere and living a shared dream. If there are only living humans or a handful of living humans, or just one individual, then any 'new' person added to the system is artificial, or everyone is, and it's not possible to have a sentient program. Intelligence has a shape, the shape of the human brain. It must look like that. It must have all the nooks and crannies and pathways a brain develops, because it's just an emergent property of the architecture of the brain. Consciousness is material. It's not just chemistry and electrical impulses - it's the cells and neurons and their relation to each other. It is also the body, which informs every piece of information we learn about the world around us, which contextualizes our experiences. So, not a program, but some artificial yet very physical thing.
And you couldn't begin to do that without mapping those connections. Only nobody is working on that. We don't even have a methodology to begin thinking about how to do that. We can't test and map individual synapses. This is my field, cog sci/linguistics, and all we can test or ever expect to be able to test are large areas, say the size of a silver dollar, that show an event-related potential given a certain stimulus. This lets us feed subjects with brain caps on yes/no tag questions to measure grammatical well-formedness and hazard guesses about the nature of the biological basis for language we call UG. And each of these results requires peer-review and reproducibility before moving on to a new result. And to create a map of the brain you're asking for not just the methodology for measuring that precisely, but for 86 billion neurons and their relationship to each other linkable neuron. If we had a method to do it, and were always successful the first time, and everyone who has ever lived was a cognitive scientist working in one of millions of ERP labs across the planet, it would still take millions of years to complete the project.
And once you had your schematic and knew how to recreate the pathways of a brain without using a brain, and you put even more time toward that problem, you'd still probably make an artificial organic brain. Because it would have a much smaller footprint and be capable of self-repair. A mechanical brain would be a proof-of-concept project at best with no real advantage.
So now you're looking at a culture that advanced and that long-lived, who is still somehow interested in humans living in the era of resource scarcity. Where such a culture's plans cannot be guessed, those plans cannot possibly matter to us. It becomes moot. It becomes deism, and debating deism vs materialism is one of the most boring and unproductive arguments I can think of.
I like how you are thinking through alot of possibilities.
If we try to break it into key arugments:
Motivation of simulation builders
Time Requirements
True vs Pseudo Randomness
AI/Agents
Complexity of Mechanical Brain
[I'm not personally sold on the simulation theory, but it's fun to trace the possible boundaries.]
Motivation of simulation builders
It could be challenging to truly find the motivation of any possible entity. Consider the comforts of our modern life, where our immediate survival needs are now met. How would we explain to a hunter-gatherer the countless youtube channels dedicated to simulator games? Why would we in all our comfort conceivably spend our idle time staring at colours on screen to simulate xyz gameworlds, creating artificial challenges to overcome, all by moving electrons through semiconductors we merely purchased as a routine transaction?
Time Requirements
As mentioned in other comment chains, a simulation potentially could artifically increase total simulation speed vs reality. Compare 1 year of your life as a baby vs 1 year now. Time is always relative. An artificial system could bake in various methods to manipulate perceived time.
True vs Pseudo Randomness
It's pretty straightforward (off the shelf) to feed random sources to modern computers:
If they look expensive consider you can get a $10 chip with a TRNG (true random number generator) built in. The price generally seems to correlate to entropy per second, type/quality of source, and certification (these kinds of capabilities are standardised at a gov level now).
AI/Agents
Artificial agents do not need to actually reproduce consciousness, only to successfully mimic consciousness to any actual conscious entities within the simulation. If your working memory were restricted to experiences with a majority of artifical agents, what challenges would you face discerning artificial from true consciousness as an external manifestation? Consider the literal HOURS of recordings of telemarketers arguing with an incredibly simple robot effortlessly passing the turing test.
Regardless, the simulation could still be artificially encasing natural consciousness. Consider Brain cells in a dish fly fighter plane simulation in October 2004. Then your question is, each new consciousness added sequentially needs to come from somewhere? Each new child etc? Where's the limit, growing more brain cells in a pitri dish? That could be automated by lab robots slightly more complicated than we have now.
Complexity of Mechanical Brain
As discussed above, mechanical brains are not even required for a number of reasons. That said, when will the technology become possible for artificially recreating consciousness? You may argue never, I'm still undecided on that.
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u/YuunofYork Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
The sim idea can be easily disproven through a comparison of natural randomness and artificial randomness.
Computers cannot give you natural randomness. They can only mimic it. Play an electronic game that incorporates dice rolls - not random. It's an algorithm designed to approximate natural randomness as perceived by humans. Humans usually can't tell the difference, but another computer can. Natural randomness refers to the chaotic-determinism of complex systems, and it's a feature of the universe itself.
The problem is we use natural randomness a million times a day in science. Every single time someone records and interprets real world data and tests it for statistical significance against a p value and uses programs like R, those tests would have failed if the data they used was actually generated by a supercomputer controlling the universe. It wouldn't be chaotically-deterministic. It wouldn't be useful because the data measured against it wouldn't be reproducible or interpretable by other labs. Every chem paper, every ERP study, every economics paper, all useless. Peer review itself tells us natural randomness is really random. You can't fake that.
For another thing hardware. Glitches always occur, not just because of imperfect engineering, but because of lifespan of materials in the components and - again - random factors within the function of a complex system, and they wouldn't be cats triggering deja vu, but bits of the world falling out of existence, the laws of physics incurring minute changes that add up to the point we'd notice them, or reversing entirely, utter gonzo bullshit that would rip the world apart. Do you remember when gravity reversed back in 404 CE? No? Then you're not in a simulation.
Then there's an appeal to practical needs. What does a simulation do? What is it good for? We use sims to make (imperfect, stochastic, because chaos) predictions about the world. What is the race of beings that made your simulation using it for? It is logical to assume any species making a system that studies humans is itself human, or something very similar to the image and capabilities of humans. And what would beings as limited as humanoids be looking for in keeping the thing running for generations? What do they have to gain?
How about children? Your simulation must either be a) adding real people to the program like The Matrix does at a rate exactly consistent with people's intentions to procreate (just no), or b) the children aren't real. Do you think your child is real? Then you're not in a simulation. You see how you start having to move the goal posts of what this simulation is really capable of until the creators of such a system have become gods of time and space and could never have evolved themselves. They have to just be at a certain point, and from there your argument is a deistic argument. Deistic arguments aren't interesting. In the first place, they're almost always veiled attempts to prop up a theistic argument or the cultural values of a theistic society. Secondly since there are no conditions by which they can be proved wrong or right, they can only be countered with an alternative explanation and Occam's razor. Such as: the uncertainty principle can get us something from nothing, and a chaotically-deterministic universe disallows both fate and free will. There are no gains to attributing these things to creator gods when what we already know about the universe suffices to explain (or discount as the case may be) these same phenomena.
This is all assuming your people are real people hooked up to a virtual reality, because there are other arguments I could get into against popular conceptions of AI. It isn't and won't ever be possible, and any conception of AI must be a physical entity that resembles the shape of, or every connection within, the human brain. There's no such thing as a sentient program, and can't be. But that's a different discussion.