Nick Bostrom: Why Our Brains Themselves May Be Simulated

the Joe Rogan experience but I think if I was in the future some weird dystopian future where artificial intelligence runs everything and and human beings are you know linked to some sort of neurological implant that connects us all together and we long for the days of biological independence and we would like to see what was it like when they first started inventing phones what was it like when the internet was first opened up for people what was it like when people saw when when when someone had someone like you on a podcast and was talking about potential artificial intelligence and where it could lead us and what could the most interesting time is now time yeah that's what's cool about it to me is it we seem to be in this this really Goldilocks period of great change where we're still human but we're worried about privacy we're concerned our phones are listening to us we're concerned about surveillance dates and you know people people put stickers over the laptop camera we see it coming but it hasn't quite hit us yet we're just seeing the problems that are associated with this increased level of technology in our lives which is yeah that that is a strange thing if we add up all these pieces it doesn't fit doesn't is very really special position yeah and you wonder hmm it's a little bit too much of a coincidence I mean it might be the case but yeah it does put some strain on it when you say a little too much of a quail that's how so I mean I guess the intuitive way of thinking about it like what way like what what are the chances that just by chance you would happen to be living in the most interesting time in history being like a celebrity like whatever like well I got that's pretty low prior probability like mostly for me well from you are mean form for it but for all of us really and so that could just be I mean I if there's a lottery somebody's gotta have the ticket right yeah but more or yeah or or we are wrong about this whole picture and there is some very different structure in place that's which would make our experience it's more typical that's where I was getting to yeah I so I gathered yeah so how much have you considered the possibility of a simulation well a lot I mean I I developed the simulation argument yes back in the early 2000s and so yeah but I mean I know that you developed this argument and I know that you've spent a great deal of time working on this but personally the way you view the world how much how much how much does it play into your vision of what reality is well it's hard to say I mean for the majority of my time I'm not actively thinking about that I'm just like you know living and now I have this weird that my work is actually to think about big-picture questions so it kind of comes in through my work as well when you're trying to make sense of our position our possible future prospects the levers which we might have available to affect the world what what would be a good and bad way of pulling those levers then then you have to try to put all of these constraints and considerations together and in that context I think it's important I think if you are just going about your daily existence then it might not really be very useful or relevant to constantly like try to bring in hypotheses about the nature of our reality stuff like that because for most of the things you're doing on a day to day basis like they work the same whether it's inside a simulation or in basement level physical reality like you still need to get your car keys out you still need it right so in some sense it kind of factors out and is irrelevant for many practical Tencent purposes what do you remember when you started to contemplate the possibility of a simulation no I I mean I remember when when the simulation argument occurred to me says which is less it's not just I mean it's as far as long as I can remember it like yeah I mean maybe possibility like oh it could all be a dream it could be a simulation but but but that there is this specific argument that that kind of narrows down the range of possibilities and where the simulation hypothesis is then one of only three kind of options what are the three options well one is that there is almost all civilizations at our current stage of technology development go extinct before reaching technological maturity that's like option one kind of would be design technological maturity well say having developed at least all those technologies that we already have good reason to think are physically possible so that would include the technology to build extremely large and powerful computers on which you could run detailed computer simulations of conscious individuals so that that kind of kind of would be a pessimistic high like if that's if if almost all civilizations is our stage failed to get there that's bad news right because then we'll fail as well almost certainly that's one possible yeah so that's option one option two is that there is a very strong convergence among all technologically mature civilizations in that there all is interest in creating ancestor simulations or these kinds of detailed computer simulations of conscious people like their historical predecessors or variations so so maybe they have all of these computers that could do it but for whatever reason they all decide not to do it maybe there is an ethical imperative not to do it or some other I mean we don't really know much about these posthuman creatures and what they want to do and don't want to do so host humans well I imagine that by the time they have the technology to do this yes they would also have enhanced themselves in many different ways right and so perhaps enhancing their ability to recognize the consequences yeah of creating yeah I'm sorry that would almost certainly have cognitively enhanced themselves for example well is the concept of downloading consciousness into a computer it almost ensures that there's going to be some type of simulation if you're if you have the ability to download consciousness into a computer once it's contained into this computer when what it what is was to stop it from existing there as long as there's power and as long as these chips are firing and electricity is being transferred data is being moved back and forth you would essentially be in some sort of a simulation well I mean if you have the capability to do that also the motive it would have to simulate something that resembles some sort of a biological interface otherwise it's not going to know what to do right yeah so so so we have these kind of virtual reality environments now that are imperfect but improving yeah and you could kind of mean imagine that they get better and better and then you'll have a perfect virtual reality environment but imagine also that your brain instead of sitting in a box with big headphones and some glasses on like that the brain itself also could be part of the simulation the matrix well I think in the matrix there are biological humans outside that plug in right right but if you you could include in the simulation just as you have maybe simulated coffee mugs and cars and cetera you could have simulated brains that if and and so it here is one assumption coming in from outside the simulation argument and one can talk about it separately but it's the idea that I call it's the substrate independence thesis that you could in principle have conscious experiences implemented on different substrate it doesn't have to be carbon atoms as as is the case with the human brain it could be silicon atoms or them that what creates conscious experiences is some kind of structural feature of the computation that is being performed rather than the material that is used to underpin it so in that case you could have a simulation with detailed simulations of brains in it where maybe every neuron and synapse is simulated and then those brains would be conscious possibility number two well no it's a possibility number two is that these posthumous just are not at all interested in doing it and not just that some of them don't do it like of all these civilizations that reach technology maturity that is kind of pretty uniformly just don't do that and what's number three that we are in a simulation the simulation hypothesis and we're you lean well I I generally had to punt on the question of precise probabilities there I mean I think it would be a probability thing right yes it assigns some to each but yeah I've refrained from giving a very precise number part partly because I mean if I said some particular number it would get colder and it would create this maybe sense of false precision mm-hmm the argument doesn't allow you to derive this the probabilities XYZ it's just that at least one of these three has to obtain so yeah so that that narrows it down not because you might think you know what do we know the future is big you could just make up any story and we have no evidence for but but it seems that there actually if you start to think everything through quite tight constraints on what probabilistically coherent views you could have and it's kind of hard even to find one overall hypothesis that fits this and and various other considerations that that we think we know the idea would be that if there is one day the ability to create a simulation that it would be indiscernible from reality itself that if like say if we are not in a simulation yet if this is just biological life which is extremely fortunate to be in this Goldilocks period but we're working on virtual reality in terms of like oculus and all these companies are creating these consumer based virtual reality things that are getting better and better and really kind of interesting that you gotta imagine that twenty years ago there was nothing like that twenty years from now it might be indiscernible you might you might be able to create a virtual reality that's impossible to to discern from the reality that we're currently experienced or are maybe 20,000 years at 20 million years like the the argument makes no assumption at all about how long retic yeah but one day yeah if things continue to improve yeah computational power the ability to replicate experiences and even feedback in terms of like biological feedback touch and feel and smell if they figure out a way to do that one day they will have an artificial reality that's indiscernible from reality itself and if that is the case how do we know if we're in it right that that is roughly the the gist of it now as I said I think if you simulate the brain also you have a cheaper overall system than if you have a biological component in the center it was surrounded by a virtual reality gear so you could for a given cost I think create many more ancestry simulations with simulated brains in them rather than biological brains with VR gear so most in in this norris where there would be a lot of simulations most of those nars which would be the the kind of where everything is digital because it's just cheaper with mature technology to do it that way this is one of the biggest for lack of a better terms mind Fox when you really stop and think about reality itself that if we are living in a simulation like what what is it and why and where does it go and how do I respond how do I move forward if I really do believe this is a simulation what am I doing here yeah those are big questions huge questions that some of them are eyes even if we're not in a simulation yeah and aren't there people that have done some strange impossible understand calculations that designed to determine whether or not there's a likelihood of us being involved in a simulation currently yeah I I think it slightly misses the point so the I think so there are these helped to try to figure out the computational requirements that would be required if you wanted to simulate some physical system with perfect precision so if we have some human a brain a room let's say and we want to dissimulate every little part every atom every subatomic particle the whole quantum wave function what would be the computational load of that and would it be possible to build a computer powerful enough that you could actually do this I think the way that this misses the point is that it's not necessary to simulate all the details of this environment that you want to create in an ancestry simulation you would only have to simulate it insofar as it is perceptible to the observer inside the simulation so if if some post human civilization wanted to create a Joe Rogan doing a podcast simulation that need to simulate Joe Rogan's brain because that's where the experiences happen and then whatever parts of the environment that you are able to perceive so surface appearances may be off the table and walls may be they would need to simulate me as well or at least a good enough simulacrum that I could sort of spit out words that would sound like they came from a real human right I don't know that now we're getting quite good with this GPT to like this kind of AI that just spews out words with I don't know whether anyway so see you that but but but like what what is happening inside this table right now is completely irrelevant you have no idea of knowing whether they're even or atoms Terra now you could take a big electron microscope and look at finer structure and then then you could take an atomic force microscope and you could see individual atoms even and you could perform all kinds of measurements and it might be important that if you did that you wouldn't see anything weird because physicists do these experiments and they don't see anything weird but then you could kind of fill in those details like if and when somebody were performing those experiments that would be vastly cheaper than content running all of this and so this is the way a lot of computer games are designed today that they have a certain rendering distance like you only like actually simulate the virtual world when when the character goes close enough that you could see and so I might in these kind of super intelligent post-humans doing this obviously that would have figured that out and a lot of other optimizations so these in other words these calculations are experiments I think don't really tell on the hypothesis without assigning a probability to either one of those three scenarios what makes you think when you if you do stop and think I think we're in simulation what what are the things that are convincing to you well it would mainly go through the the simulation argument that if it extended I think the alternative two hypotheses are improbable then that would kind of shift the probability mass on the third remaining is it really only three so the Intel the ones are we that human beings go extinct and other civilizations at our stage in the cosmos or whatever yes hey this is strong yeah strong filter that they either go extinct or they decide not to pursue all this interest yeah or it becomes a simulation this is that really the only way I think the only three live options now so you can I I I could kind of unfold the argument a little bit more and look more granular so suppose that the first two options are false so some non-trivial fraction of civilizations at our stage do get through and some non-trivial fraction of those are still interested then I think you can convincingly show that by using just a small portion of the resources they could create very very many simulations and you can show that or argue for that by comparing the computational power of systems that we know are physically possible to build we can't currently build them but we could see that you could build them with nanotech and if you have planetary sized you know resources on the one hand and on the other hand estimates of how much compute power it would take to simulate a human brain and you find that a mature civilization would have many many orders of magnitude more so that even if they just used one percent of their compute power of one planet for one minute they could still run you know thousands and thousands and thousands of these simulations and and they might have billions of planets and they might last for billions of years so so the numbers are quite extreme it seems so then then what you get is this implication that if the first two options are false it would follow that there would be many many more simulated experiences of our kind than that would be original experiences of our kind so the idea is that if we continue to innovate if human beings or intelligent life in the cosmos continues to innovate that creating a simulation is almost inevitable no no I mean the second might be that we decide not and others with the same capability but what if they don't decide not to don't decide to not to if we the first option if human beings do figure out a way to not die and stay stay innovative and we don't have any sort of natural disasters or man-made created disasters then step two if we don't we don't decide to not pursue this if we continue to pursue all various forms of technological innovation including simulations that it becomes inevitable if we get past those two first options becomes inevitable that we pursue it well so if they have the capacity then they will do it and the the motive and I'd like to a desire to you yes yeah so that then that would they create hugely many of these so not just one simulation right but because it's so cheap at the technological maturity if you have a cosmic Empire of resources it doesn't have to have a very big desire to do this they might just think well you know well that was the big question that Ilan said he would ask official intelligence said what's beyond the simulation okay that's the the real question if this is a simulation if there's many many simulations running currently what's beyond the simulation well yeah you might be curious about that I mean I think the more important question would be like what do we all things considered I have the most reason to do in our situation like what would it be wise for us to do is that like some way that we can be helpful or have the best life or whatever is ridiculous to even consider maybe it's beyond us what the question of what is outside yes well I mean I don't think it's ridiculous to consider I think it might be beyond us but maybe we would be able to form some abstract conception of what it is I mean in fact if if we if there is the path to believing the simulation hypothesis is the simulation argument and we have a bunch of structure there that gives us some idea like that would be some advanced civilization that they would have developed a lot of technology over time including computer technology ability to do virtual reality very well we'd imagine probably they would have used that technology for a whole host of other purposes as well you wouldn't just get that technology and you know not be able to create a train or something like I said okay they'd probably be super intelligence and have the ability to colonize the universe and do a whole host of other things and then for one reason or another they would have decided to use some of the resources to create simulations and inside one of those simulations perhaps our experiences would be taking place so in in UK you could more speculatively fill in more details there but but I still think that fundamentally our ability to crack this whole thing would be very limited and there might be other considerations that we are oblivious to that would I mean if you think about the simulation argument is it quite recent right so it's like it's only it's less than 20 years old sorry if you think that so suppose is correct for the sake of argument and up to this point everybody was missing something like hugely important and fundamental yeah right very smart people hundreds of years like just looked like this this massive piece right in the center but what's the chances that we now have figured out the last big missing piece like presumably that must be some father big giant realization that is like beyond those currently so I think having some yeah I mean that that looks kind of possible but maybe there are further big discoveries or revelations that that would kind of maybe not falsify this emulation but maybe change the interpreter or like do something that is hard to know in advance what that would be now is the concept that if there is a simulation that all the historical record is is simulated as well well or when did it take in well this is their different options there right and there might be many different simulations that configure differently that it could be once that run for a very long time once that run for a short period of time once that simulate everything and everybody others that just focus on some particular scene or person you like just a vast space of possibilities there and which ones of those would be most likely it's really hard to save much about because it would depend on the reasons for creating these simulations like what would the interests of these hypothetical post-humans babe [Applause]

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Id: Td_qaNy1W9U

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2019

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