Living in a Simulation with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Nick Bostrom – Cosmic Queries

[Music] this is star talk cosmic queries edition neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist and i got chuck nice with me of course what's up faithful co-host uh you know you're you're we need you for the cosmic queries so that you can mispronounce everyone's name well that's my uh purpose in life neil i live to butcher names you know those poor questioners so this this is the one packed up for you how would you attack my name oh my goodness uh so uh nick bostrom uh is that what she's how is that how it is it's it's pretty good that's pretty good all right in in in swedish it would be nicklas postrum but that was close okay all right uh and listen it i'll take clothes as far as i'm concerned names are like a game is better than yeah that's like a game of horseshoes for me close is good enough good enough so that was indeed nick bostrom chiming in nick welcome to star talk dude you started something that is got the whole world spinning in a tizzy for birthing the concern that we all live in a simulation and let me just give a fast bio on you uh you're a professor at university of oxford and in the future of humanity institute oh that doesn't that's very kind of what you know sorry sorry nicholas not a lot of not a lot of job security in that buddy looking at the future humanity yo [Laughter] so you you think about artificial intelligence um the ethics of of artificial intelligence biosecurity net what would have macro strategy we'll ask you what that is in a moment just policy ethics uh foundational questions about serious challenges that civilization faces not in the distant future but in the very near future i like the fact that you have a background in theoretical physics so put you in the physics club here that's good also computational neuroscience wow we have some of those at my home institution at the american museum of natural history that's quite the frontier as well and you had a rather influential paper research paper titled are you living in a computer simulation and for me also i remembered your book super intelligence which all of these got people thinking as any good philosopher should do is to get people thinking and so could you just start us off why do you think we might be living in a simulation well i have this thing called the simulation argument which doesn't actually prove that we're in a simulation but it tries to show that at least one of three propositions is true the simulation argument tries to show that one of three propositions is true so let's let's first look at what the conclusion is and then we can see how we get there so the conclusion is that either almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development go extinct before they become technologically mature so that's like one alternative right the second is that amongst civilizations that do become technologically mature there is a very strong convergence they all lose interest in creating a certain kind of computer simulation i call them ancestor simulations these would be detailed simulations of people with the kind of experiences that their historical forebears had so that's the second alternative and then the third alternative is that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation so so that that's the kind of conclusion now how how does one get to to that well suppose that the first of these alternatives does not obtain okay so that means it's not true that almost all civilizations at our stage failed to reach technological maturity some non-trivial fraction make it through okay all right then let's suppose that the second alternative is also false so amongst those who do become technologically mature some non-trivial fraction remain interested in using some of the resources to create these kinds of ancestor simulations then you can show that the kind of computational resources a mature civilization would have would suffice to create millions and billions of detailed simulations ancestor simulations runs of human history and so that if the first two alternatives are false then there would be many many more simulated versions of people with our kinds of experiences than that would be original implemented in basic physical reality people with our experiences and conditional on that if almost all people with our experiences are simulated we should think we are probably one of the simulated ones rather than one of the rare non-simulated ones so that means that if you reject the first two alternatives you would then have to accept the third one and then that shows that it's not the case that all three of them are false so hence at least one of them is true so that that's the strategy why can't why can't there be a fourth other truth that no one gives a rat's ass about simulating anything anywhere exactly so that's the second right i mean so if if all of these technologically mature civilizations are completely uninterested in in simulating then that would be possibility number two but but note that for the second alternative to hold it's not sufficient that most of them kind of are not very interested because even if it were just a one percent of these mature civilizations that were even a little bit interested that they still could produce millions of them and so that would have to be this extremely strong convergence like almost all of them would completely have to lose any interest in doing this in order for the second alternative okay okay so so i have publicly mildly butchered your line of argument there so let me first apologize uh what i had been noting is that we do not have the power yet to create a perfect simulation of a world such as the one we're living in and so i wasn't thinking that everyone would make these ancestor simulations which we would be and so an ancestral civilization in a in a cinematic uh parallel would be uh a movie about spartacus or cleopatra just some something a movie which is modern technology telling a story set in a time when they didn't have movies right so that would be like an i'm guessing that's what you mean by an ancestor simulation and so so i was thinking that every single simulation would ultimately be able to duplicate themselves as a natural evolutionary arc if that's the case then we would either be the original simulation except then we would either be the original universe that hasn't yet simulated anybody yet or we'd be sort of the last one simulated still working our way towards the power of simulating ourselves which would be slightly better odds well a lot better odds than throwing a dart and landing in all the simulations that had enough power to create simulations of themselves so first of all i don't claim that the only simulations that might be made are ancestor simulations i mean that you i mean if you imagine you are technologically mature civilizations you might simulate all kinds of things like real histories as close as you can get fantasy worlds counterfactual histories imaginary alien civilizations i mean you could maybe there are like lots of all of these kinds of simulations um the argument focuses on ancestor simulations just because that's the easiest way to get to the conclusion that one of these three is true but it doesn't imply that there wouldn't be a lot of other simulations as well okay so we we have some data with our own history of cinema and it's some very small percent of movies are set in a time before movies were invented which i would again i would classify as sort of ancestor storytelling very it's like in the low single digits so you would say that there's so many movies even the low signal digits is quite a few and you throw a dart we could easily be one of those yeah so i mean i guess when we extrapolate to these technologically mature presumably post-human civilizations well first of all i'm not sure how much we can infer from the kinds of movies we create to what types of simulations they would run but let's suppose for the sake of the argument that the majority of simulations they run are of people in their contemporary society so it's a i don't know some super advanced space colonizing thing with super intelligence or whatnot and that that's maybe the majority of what they do but that they assign some some smaller fraction of their computational resources to doing these ancestry simulations let's assume that um i still don't think that would defeat the simulation argument um or indeed even the alternative that we are in a simulation because uh um we kind of already know that we are not one of the post-humans i mean you just look around you don't see a lot of sort of starships you know whizzing by outside your window and we are not currently running any simulations ourselves so we can kind of cross those out like all the actual pulse humans we know we're not one of those and we also know we are not in a simulation of the post-humans since that's not the world we experience then that leaves only a the people in original history at the human level of development and also whatever ancestor simulations are at that level of development and so my claim would then be that you know if the first two alternatives of the simulation argument are false the simulated ones at our current level of development would still vastly outnumber the original ones at our stage of development so what is the likelihood that not likelihood because that's the wrong word is it possible that it could just be the way that we create with our limited technology what we feel are simulations of our lives okay and that's computer games and video games and things like that could it be that a civilization so advanced that they have the computational power to create all of this just for the hell of it just because like the same way we do it we do it for entertainment could it just be that or is that just not a part of the philosophy uh it could be i mean so the the simulation argument itself is agnostic as to what the motivation would be okay of the simulators and you could indeed imagine many possible motivations one one would be just entertainment right and you could you could imagine other like maybe some kind of research like historically uh maybe it would be interesting to explore counterfactuals of history or or you could imagine art project so you could imagine moral reasons for i think we know rather little about the psychology and motivations of these hypothetical post-human civilizations and why they would make simulations um and we can speculate about that but yeah either of those would work for for the simulation argument too okay so nick i guess you're allowed to say all this like from your armchair but at some point somebody wants to walk into a lab and make a measurement that says here's the evidence that supports nick's argument is there such a anything we can look for is there a sign is there is there some experiment we can conduct to say yep we're not in charge of what's happening here this is a simulation there certainly is sort of empirical premises that flow into the simulation argument and so evidence for or against the truth of those assumptions you know would be relevant to evaluating the argument so so one empirical premise um is that a technologically mature civilization would indeed have the capability of creating ancestor simulations and i need to create lots of them and so the kind of evidence that would be relevant for that is evidence say of the kind of computational performance you could get from physically possible systems we we're not able to build them currently but we can kind of do first principle modeling of different computational systems based on nanotechnology and so forth and we can place lower bounds on the kind of compute power that they would unlock so so that would be one like element that would flow into this another would be some estimate of the computational cost of running an ancestor simulation i think the largest part of that cost is the cost of simulating human brains at the sufficient level of detail that the simulation would be conscious and we can obviously not precisely determine what the computational expense of simulating a human brain is but we can place some upper bound on that we have various views about what computational tasks the human brain is capable of performing we know how many neurons there are how many synapses how often they fire we can we can roughly estimate that now it turns out that if you estimate the amount of compute power available even if you make rather conservative assumptions about that and then you make conservative assumptions about how much it takes to simulate one human brain and therefore how much to simulate all of the human brains you just multiply that by a hundred billion or something to all of the human brains in history there are a number of orders of magnitude gap between these two so even if you are off a little bit in these estimates it still seems like the the argument holds but so those would be empirical premises that we could you know theoretically obtain evidence against like if we discovered the human brain uses some kind of weird quantum computation that is a lot more expensive than that would flow into it then if in addition you want to conclude not just that one of these three alternative is true which is all the simulation argument itself says but if more specifically you want to conclude that we are in the simulation that the third alternative is true then there is an additional range of empirical questions that become relevant like anything that gives you evidence against the first two or in favor of the first two would be then relevant evidence for evaluating the third right so if we discover that there is some kind of uh big risk some doomsday mechanism that we can ah now we realize this all sufficiently advanced civilizations will stumble on this new technology and destroy themselves that would be argument against the simulation hypothesis because it would make the first alternative more likely well that'd be a really sad argument against it because it would say here's our proof we're not simulated we're about to destroy yeah now nick let me ask you this let me ask you this nick is it possible that you are so smart that you are constantly high and you don't know it [Laughter] i think in some more or less metaphorical sense i think that's very likely to be true if pessimistic meta-induction right so if you look at all humans who have been alive all eras going back in time we can now see from our current vantage point basically they were all very wrong about some big thing i mean like starting with simple physics they thought earth was in the center and then like basically we can see if we look back more than 100 years we see that they all got a whole bunch of really core things wrong and it would kind of maybe be a little bit presumptuous to think that now finally we've gotten all of these basic things right it seems more likely that if people a thousand years from now look back at 2021 they will probably also see big not just gaps in our understanding but like things we were fundamentally confused about and so yeah they'll laugh their ass off everything we're talking about right now yeah or christ so i do think we are in a fundamental sense very much in the dark about the really biggest picture um still we we do what we try we'll take a quick break and when we come back uh we'll transition to our questions that we've solicited from our patreon members and chuck has them all i i haven't seen them i don't know if you've seen them yet um nick either but he's not here to try to stump us he's here to just bring the enthusiasm of our audience into the show so okay we'll be right back we're back star talk i've got the one and the only nick bostrom that i generally regard it as the person who birthed all of our sleepless nights wondering whether we are in a simulation not only from his research papers but from his books on the subject and he's a professor at the university of oxford and and chuck what do we call what is the name of his thing here the future of humanity institute which chuck and i are pretty sure yeah would be very short-lived yeah there's no future for humanity just before we get to the questions that chuck has collected nick if it's one thing to simulate all the brains i get that but it's another thing the fact that i can go into a garden and then look at a flower or dig through the soils and keep digging and reach the mantle of the earth whoever simulating us has to simulate not only what my brain is doing but it has to simulate all the things my brain is experiencing and that's not just for me someone else could dig that same hole and they should be finding the same thing so isn't the total complexity of the world doesn't that have to be part of this simulation even the fact that i as an astrophysicist look out to the edge of the universe decoding the nature of of the big bang and all time and space that followed it so why just limit your estimates to the power of the human brain if everything and the unfolding of the great cosmic story has to also happen alongside it yeah i think you do need some computation assigned to simulating relevant parts of the environment i think the biggest part will be the brains but certainly if you had to simulate the all of the environment um at subatomic detail continuously i mean like quantum simulation of the entire universe would be completely infeasible if the um simulators have anything comparable to the compute power that we could realize in this universe you know what i'm gonna disagree i'm sorry i know you're a genius but here's the deal here's what i'm gonna here's what i'm gonna disagree nick because when movie makers make movies they do not render the detail in every single little thing what they have he didn't get there yet that was the next thing he was going to talk about now you already thought of this like myself jesus christ here i am here i am making a discovery man okay all right okay continue wait chuck finish the point and then we'll pick it up there go well you got both of you already knew where i was going but the deal is this if you actually create a background that background will pretty much be the same for all the characters that are mapped onto that background so that's the way that's that's all i was saying no i mean i i think that's the key for uh to understand this whole simulation argument stuff that if you had to simulate all of the environment in subatomic detail continuously it probably would be completely infeasible to do that but i claim that's not needed all you would need to do is to simulate enough of the parts that we are observing when we are observing them that to the simulated creatures it looks real and that they can't tell the difference and that's a lot less all right wait a minute i just thought of something else inside so what that would mean chuck check what there it means if there are whole sections of the pacific ocean where there isn't a boat right right then no one has so it it doesn't exist until someone until somebody has to then see it and process it right so it's a procedural content generation so we use it in our computer games today a lot like you often only render the parts that some character in the game are observing um and maybe you have some very coarse grain simulation of the whole thing continuously but you may fill in details if and when is needed so if like right now i don't have any idea what the atoms in this desk in front of me are doing right but if i took in principle an electron microscope or something i could look and i better see atoms there right but the program would know programmer would know you're about to bring out an electron microscope right so time to up the calculation right in the beam right there right and if if necessary i mean they could even pause the simulation or edit it or erase memories if they really screwed it up but yeah i think um the kind of capability would need to even create anything resembling this kind of simulation is very advanced and i think with that advanced capability would also come the ability to edit and to monitor human thoughts and intentions and then kind of be able to do this kind of procedural generation that even we do in our computer games today that could explain why um i've heard neil say this that we are terrible data takers like as human beings we are awful at taking in information well if i'm programming a simulation i would certainly want to program the people in that simulation to be like that because that way i wouldn't have to program all this detail into stuff it protects it protects the integrity of my simulation yeah although i think to be fair i think the difference between one human and another from the point of view of the simulators it's like well there is one and it's got a few more neurons in this genius and but i mean we are all like ants i think uh so i don't think this difference in cost is that big uh cool very cool uh all right all right chuck bring up bring on a question let's see what you got all right here we go let's uh let's jump into this this is dennis uh gislane and dennis says this spellback uh g-h-i-s-l-a-i-n i said gislane yeah is you just lane it's probably just lane she's laying in this lane okay go on well then it would be just lane okay we'd like to know he says bring it on he says in his papers dr bolstrom talks about post-human stage civilization uh could you please develop on that and situate it in listen uh kardashian of scale now i don't know what any of that means okay i can tell you what the kardashev scale is what is the kardashians yeah when i lead off with that and i'll hand the baton over to you nick so the kardashian scale is a scale of how much energy you have access to and can exploit okay so i think they're five levels so one of them is do you have access to all of the energy sources in your host planet and if you do and you can exploit them your civilization level one so that means you can go into a volcano and tap the energy you can tap the volcano the way you tap a cake you could use the energy and the crust of the earth that would otherwise make volca earthquakes you can tap that and use that for your own means uh storm systems this sort of thing so a level two civilization would control all of the energy that comes from its host star okay okay that's way more energy than what is embedded in your planet a level three civilization would control all the energy of your galaxy that you happen to live in so the the levels of the flag will let the center of the galaxy you could use yeah well yeah exactly exactly and you wield this and the history of civilization reveals that the the nations or the nation-states that had the most power power political power cultural power were those that that actually wielded the most energy per capita in the world at that time so when people say united states we're such energy hogs we use you know four times there five times the energy as anybody else well that correlates with other measures of power that exist in it so let's keep going so one more uh there's level four level five if you control all the energy of the universe and then you know you're indistinguishable from a god that anyone would have uh uh suggested now so what are we we're digging fossil fuels out of the earth we're level point five we're level point three we don't know we're level zero okay we're level zero okay so nick if there's a super intelligence presumably they have better access to energy especially the kind of energy you're talking about they might need this simulation so have you thought about where a superintelligence might fit on the kardashev scale yeah i mean i think that would be higher up just because at that level you would be able to run a lot more of these simulations even if there were some simulations run by i don't know a kardashian scale one civilization like with the dyson sphere around their south and that's all they did you know once the civilization expands beyond that they could run billions of times more and there would be plenty of time for them to expand beyond that so you could imagine almost all simulations that are on are being run by civilizations that have reached the limits of whatever space they have to expand into that that would presumably be kardashian4 or something unless the universe is so crowded that each one only manages just to to get a sort of galactic level volume before it bumps up against its neighbors yeah that's a good point because you can only have one galactic kardashian-scale civilization because anyone else who wants it too bad we're using all the energy it's like in the united states right now there's fights over the colorado river basin because it's a water sauce that river flows through multiple states and each state has a pact with the other state how much water they're supposed to use and then there'll be future fights on access to this one source of fresh water and so that's an interesting point you can't have a universe filled with high kardashev level civilizations because they would implode rapidly it seems to me and what level is death star what what what level is death star on the uh kardashian scale oh well in in star wars episode seven it controlled the energy of a star so that would be i guess level two that's the only level two wow awesome okay here we go let's uh let's jump right back by the way in star trek the borg were that's a super intelligence that was cosmic in its influence and so that would be a even even higher here right just to put that in context so chuck give me another one you got another okay this is william d a uh quite easy but letters here we go he says where do you stand on the concept of consciousness and where do you draw the line would a simulated reality change your definition of what possesses consciousness i like that so nick is psychic i presume that means that somehow consciousness is a shared entity that we all participate in as one uh uh panzer is organizing there are different sort of definitions but it's probably the view that everything is conscious oh wow um uh i don't and so how do you how do you put consciousness in is that a natural out flow of a sufficiently uh complex computer simulation of the brain that would be my sort of the default assumption yeah yeah i mean i think for the simulation argument you can kind of plug in whatever your favorite theory of consciousness is and most of them would work um there might be some theories of consciousness which would not work the simulation argument one of its assumptions is what i call the substrate independence thesis which is just the idea that in principle you could implement consciousness not just on you know carbon-based biological structures but on any suitable computational structure that what makes us conscious is not that we're made of carbon but that our brains perform a certain type of computation whoa holy crap wait a minute yeah max ted mark has i was about to say subject uh yeah yeah you're a friend of star talks yeah and his thing is like the entire universe is made of math because it goes down to particles and these particles have spin and you know so you can assign a value to them uh mathematically mathematical entities yeah yeah there's good overlap there yeah yeah okay but as to where to draw the line like i don't really have a very good account of exactly something i think humans are conscious and rocks are not conscious but like exactly where sort of in the hierarchy uh that would be cut off i'm not sure or i'm not sure either that there is a sharp line there it might more be that there is kind of diminishing or more and more strained senses in which lower order organisms have some kind of consciousness and it kind of fades out rather than there being a sharp threshold is what i would guess but so here's here's what i wonder nick i just have a a not deeply thought out hypothesis that having thoughts such as we do that are incomplete and that we wander and we don't have good memory of things or we make stuff up the fact that it's not perfect we interpret as consciousness because if it were perfect it's just data and our brain is a storage disk that occasionally puts information together with a new result but the fact that we we can sit there and say well i feel this and i don't and it's mostly how we reckon our with our ignorance of our environment even when we probe it for knowledge i'm just putting it out there yeah well i mean i guess first of all you could have i mean a lot of artificial even simple systems that would be imperfect in various ways you could have some faulty hard drives that randomly erase various things um you could also have kind of compressed representations that's what you have to do if you're trying to do anything with ai is there's a lot of data coming in and you have to extract some important features based on that and throw the rest away so these things wait wait check with chuck what nick just said i can't stop thinking about it so so chuck every time you and i forget something right the alien's hard drive messed up so every time you go what what did i come upstairs for it's it's a it's a right it's a it's a read write error an i o error in a programmer's disk wow i don't think this is your account of consciousness that somehow what's necessary or sufficient for consciousness is that there is some kind of faulty or limited information processing right right otherwise it's a perfect computer well um i'm saying that computers are also imperfect in certain ways and um i'm not sure that the closer you get to perfection like you would lose consciousness i think in anything it might go the other way around that you might become more conscious if you want more but yeah you might have to if you wanted to sort of um elaborate on that you might want to try to say like which types of imperfection are the ones that are supposedly making a system conscious um and maybe maybe exploring that line of thought further maybe you would get to something that would be uh some kind of possible account of consciousness i'm not sure oh yeah in the film in the film irobot forgive me for not having read the original series of short stories but in by isaac asimov but in the film they hypothesize what could account for free will in a programmed robot and they were describing how many generations of operating systems are layered on top of one another and there's always these dangling parts that you know you don't always clean it up after because it's evolution is like this too the they're dangling parts that worked at some point now you don't need them or that like they could get in the way or they can end up killing you but programmatically they could be lines of code that have long lost their utility but could manifest under certain combinations of stimuli that look like the robot just thought of a new idea and i was intrigued by that suggestion when i heard it in the film that that could be the way you end up with what we call uh consciousness but hey we've got to take another break when we come back for the third and final segment uh we're gonna go through a lightning round with our questions and it's it's nick bostrom just schooling us on whether or not we're in a simulation and uh spoiler alert it sounds like we kind of are it sounds like yeah okay when star talk returns we're back star talk i've got nick bostrom in the house actually he's in the uk right now but he's in he's in our zoom house and we're talking about the simulation hypothesis and which he's largely started okay and so we blame him for all of our lost sleep at night i at least i nick i blame you if no one else does so uh so nick the simulation hypothesis requires that every simulation has computers right why is that an obvious thing in fact we've only had computers for like half a century and we've been human for a couple hundred thousand years in our current form why should it be inevitable that a computer is the thing that gets invented that then people want to simulate on i mean i don't know that this is inevitable maybe if there are a lot of humanoid species that never developed computers i i don't know i mean it suffices that some civilizations do develop computers and then more advanced computers of the type we can already see are physically possible although we cannot build but certainly it's consistent with a lot of civilizations failing to reach even our stage of development um i mean i think if you're asking about inevitability even if it's not relevant for the simulation argument it's kind of interesting like it you want to i guess define what what point in time if it's inevitable like it seems like the further back you go if you sort of re-ran evolution from that point the less likely that you would get something similar to what we have today if you started with just bacteria like in who knows maybe the chances would be very small perhaps that you would get an intelligent technological species but if you started like 50 000 years ago then i mean my guess would be we were already pretty well underway and it was just a matter of oh that's an interesting interesting point okay because the contingencies of evolution uh right it would take in fact if it if the asteroid didn't hit 65 million years ago the dinosaurs would be here and we wouldn't for sure they have been having this conversation they need a slightly bigger brain yes but rather than all that proverbial walnut-sized brain that they had but clearly they would still be here they having been around for several hundred million years before the asteroid so but yeah you take it late enough nick that's a good argument started 50 100 000 years ago uh it's i'm i'm good with that we surely that there'd be some evolutionary paths and just for those who are et fans uh consider that we all would judge the roman empire to be an intelligent civilization yet aliens trying to communicate with them with radio waves would conclude that there's no technology on earth right so we spent a lot of time being smart but without the technology and so that's the real question how much longer do we have technology before we exterminate ourselves but anyhow chuck give let's this is cosmic queries bring it on okay nick we're gonna try to bang out a whole lot in this in this third and final segment so let's try to keep the answers tight okay all right bring it down all right this is dylan and gordonville gonna mash up their questions hello everyone from new uh albuquerque new mexico i'm a senior in high school and this question has been bugging me forever do we have free will or is everything set in stone are we living a predetermined life if we are in a simulation and then gordon vu says on top of that if we manage to prove that we are living in a simulation does that mean there is or is not a god thank you talking about some philosophical big big big gun questions theological philosophical so nick i love those questions what do you have to say about yeah well i mean on the latter i think it it wouldn't prove or disprove god i think it's an independent question whether we are in a simulation versus um whether god exists so i don't see any necessary connection there on the freewheel i think we would have as much free will in the simulation as we would with without the simulation um i'm a compatibilist to myself so i think that even if we are living in a deterministic physical universe that that would be consistent with us having in the relevant sense free will but you might have a different view on the metaphysics of free will but i i don't think the fact that we would be in a simulation would necessarily change that well but so but would that mean that the programmers of that simulation would program into our brains a perception of free will even if they know the outcome in advance uh at every moment i don't think that we would need to especially program that did i mean for the same reasons we if we are not in a simulation we would have this this notion of free will the people in the simulation would presumably develop that for for the same kind of reasons um i mean it connects obviously to holding people accountable for certain things they do i mean if you stumble into somebody and bump them we say well you're excused because you didn't intend it but if you go and punch them and achieve the same bruce then you will be held accountable because that's something you did of your own free will um and so and we make choices that we have to actually internally come up on a certain decision so all of those things would hold equally true for people in the simulation as as people outside the simulation right side if you have this way of free will that wouldn't really be a difference i think all right okay all right chuck give me some more uh and nick you're doing great with the short answers good okay oh wait wait let me go back to the god one wait so why can't just the programmers be indistinguishable from god if they have power over everything yeah uh that i mean depending on what you make into the concept of a god yeah in many ways that would be analogous to how some people have traditionally conceived of god right in the sense that they would kind of have created our world um although they wouldn't have created the whole world just the parts that we see they would presumably maybe not be omniscient but they would know a lot like they could sort of see everything that is going on inside our simulation and they would not be omnipotent they would themselves be subject to the physical constraints operating at their level of reality but they could intervene in our reality including in ways that contravene the laws of physics that we perceive but so in one sense and thereby producing miracles and that would be interesting yeah but the things that appear to us in the simulation as a miracle so in one sense there is a kind of structurally similar relationship on the other hand they would be subject to all these they would presumably be finite and subject to all these kind of limitations and constraints and in that sense kind of being infinitely far removed from a lot of the traditional conceptions of god which is like a literally infinite and omnipotent and omniscient being um so i think that whatever the truth is about the simulation hypothesis it wouldn't settle the question of whether there is this this kind of more traditionally conceived literally infinite god okay perfect there you go okay chuck keep it going uh frederick johansson wants to know is general a.i really a question about hardware and processing speed if it was wouldn't a computer to today be able to simulate a few seconds of a.i like it had a thousand years to process yeah um it's a good question um i think compute is a very important factor in driving ai progress over the last eight years or so with the whole deep learning revolution i think it's maybe two thirds of the progress we've seen is due to uh we are applying more compute and then maybe one-third is algorithmic progress um it's not it even if it were all computer it doesn't necessarily follow that we would be able to with our current compute run at least a small fraction of a human level mind because there are two things you need to compute for so one is to run the ai right like to actually have it do but you also need to train up the neural network that becomes the ai so if you don't have enough uh compute to do the full training run you might not even be able to develop the system which then if run would constitute some kind of human equivalent level agi right because the calculation or the decision is not made in a vacuum it's it's been completely pre-loaded with the world's life experience or whatever is sitting right behind that one decision isn't is that a fair way to think about this well so for humans to arrive at some sort of normal adult level of performance we need 20 years or 15 years to kind of grow up and learn and our current neural networks are similar in that although they are probably less efficient in learning so they might need instead of 15 years of experience maybe they need like a thousand years equivalence although you can run it faster but you still need a lot of compute just to be able to complete something analogous to like a human maturation process so even if we had enough compute to run a agi a human level ai we might not have enough compute to sort of create it i think also though in addition to more compute we also need some additional algorithmic insights but it's not all or nothing like like the better the algorithms the less compute you need to achieve this result and right now the amount of compute you need would be like way more than we can currently afford and then it comes down as we make algorithmic progress at the same time as our computers become faster and at some point you'll these lines will intersect you just made a point embarrassingly clear that humans require like a fourth of our lives just to function as participating humans and civilization that's that's embarrassing but true right right you no one trusts your decisions you make until you're at least 20. and even then some for some people never yeah i mean the brains are really not working even after right as a kind of collective we have just kind of barely you know uh intelligence to be able to create a technological civilization i think we look like we're right on the cusp of that and it's not so surprising maybe because like if you imagine our ancestors had a lot less abstract reasoning ability and it gradually improved over biological time scales right and then as soon as we became capable of creating a technological civilization then we pretty much did it or after you know 10 000 years or something so so we should kind of maybe expect that we are at the lower end of what is needed to do this at all and that maybe explains some of what we see in the world that we're kind of fumbling our way a lot of what we see in the world yes yes all right chuck give me more more i've got a few minutes left skyler gravatt says if this is a simulation why are the people running the simulation so patient the universe is estimated to be 13 point something billion years old and they waited almost 10 billion years to simulate life huh well so first uh there's no particular reason to think that those ten million years were simulated they could just have started picked up at a later point right you don't need to do it from the big bang onwards you could start the simulation from a later point but you'd embed the simulation with evidence that that simulation scientist would then interpret as an old universe but it's all just fake yeah obviously you probably don't want to show through like 10 billion years of just uh gas clouds congealing like that would be a pretty kind of boring right yeah but even even when you get into the um say that we're interested like in all of human history right for the sake of the argument that that's the 100 thousand years ago onward like doesn't mean that for them it would take 10 000 years to do this they could run the simulation at a higher speed like maybe you know one minute of their time could could simulate a thousand years it depends on how fast the computer is that you run the simulation on right so when we had a great revelation when computing power was adopted by astrophysicists in the 1970s we were early out of the box on this there were these galaxies in the universe that were kind of funky looking and we made catalogs called peculiar galaxies we didn't you know maybe we just thought galaxies were made that way only after we were able to simulate the collision of two galaxies did we realize that this is like the the the crash scene leftovers of what happens when galaxies collide and we simulate a billion years in a matter of minutes and in so doing we were able to populate the entire catalog of galaxy parts and and nasty twisted looking galaxy forms simply by seeing what happens when they collide and speeding up the time to do so that's just a little aside i thought wow are you patient or what this is nathaniel mitchell who says if we could ever simulate an exact replica of our universe down to the spin on the components of quantum particles could we speed it up and then use it to predict our future as we now do with simulations for climate and otherwise but yet on a cosmic scale well so that kind of thing wouldn't fit into our universe like a computer that simulated all of our universe it wouldn't be possible to build that in our universe that's a philosophical challenge that's like saying well yeah i mean how detailed do you want your map to be right if you have a map the size of the uk then it have all the detail of the actual island but then you could just use the island right the map is no longer useful to you you like that so you yeah i mean i mean so and yeah i think it would be very infusible to simulate our world at the level of you know quantum properties at least if the simulator's universe looked anything like our universe but maybe the physics at that their level of reality is different i mean maybe they have more maybe it's possible to build more powerful computers in at we could even imagine hyper computation being possible in some other kind of physics so that they could run literally infinite computations and then maybe they could simulate a world like ours at full quantum detail but that and then run it forward and watch the future everything i mean from our point of view it would presumably not make much difference whether they did it that way or the much cheaper way that would only render things at a sufficient level to be convincing to the people inside and in fact even if you imagine that there were some simulators that could do this at full quantum detail it would cost them so much more compute that it would still likely be the case that almost all stimulations would run in the more efficient way that would only simulate things at the coarser grain so so even if there were some fully full grain simulations we would probably be in one of the other ones because that would be a lot cheaper and so you could create orders of magnitude more and how much of this relates to the fact that it's hard for something to understand itself like can the brain the human brain actually come to understand the human brain is that or do you need a higher intelligence than the human brain to then study the human brain as a thing outside of itself understanding is a matter of degree right so we know some things about ourselves and obviously there's a lot that we don't know and we understand a bit about ourselves now we could understand more i mean obviously you couldn't have a full simulation of all the details in the human brain stoved away in a part of the human brain right that that's i guess that's that's that's the map of the uk that would be as big as uk yeah if you wanted all the details right right i've been to paradise but i've never been to me thank you chuck so we got to land this plane let me just offer my best evidence for why i think we live in a simulation we're going to go public on this i think right when civilization is kind of going smooth then something happens okay a politician rises up there's a war there's a world war there's tsunamis and i think they the aliens program that in for their own entertainment because that's what we did in the sim in the sim games in sim city where you're mayor of a city and everything's going fine on announce godzilla trout trounches through your city and now you have to deal with it the fire and the police and the to rebuild the schools and that's you running the software um no the programmer sending that in without telling you that's going to happen i think all of the troubles we have in the world is evidence that the programmers need entertainment yeah well nick uh like i said we got to land this plane thank you for coming out to star talk this conversation was long overdue i wanted to get you a few years ago but you were in high demand and you still are for sure but um if if any of us discover something like a we part the curtain and we see like a cpu there that when it was supposed to be a couch i'll call you up if anybody hearing that does that contact neil rather than me i [Laughter] for sure all right it's been a delight uh nick is is the super intelligence the book you would have people sort of check out in terms of the foundations of this thinking yeah well not specifically on the simulation argument there the article is online just google it simulation argument you'll find it um but if you want to read a book about the future of ai and stuff then super intelligence would be the one i would point to excellent excellent all right good and chuck we can find you a chuck nice comic on twitter thank you sir and everywhere else yes social media excellent all right uh nick again thanks for joining us i'm glad we could do it yeah yeah finally this cosmic queries episode i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always keep looking up [Music] you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 418,830

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, the matrix, simulation, nick bostrom

Id: g2rJITW9viw

Length: 55min 54sec (3354 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 23 2021