Albert Einstein once said: âReality is merely
an illusion - albeit a very persistent one.â One of the topics we discuss a lot on this
channel is simulation, be it virtual or augmented reality, uploading human minds to computers,
or simulating whole worlds. Indeed in terms of the Fermi Paradox we often
kick around the notion that we might be living in a simulation, the Simulation Hypothesis
or Argument. In regard to that people often debate whether
we live in one or not, but here we usually say thatâs the wrong question, not âdo
we live in one?â but âIf so, does it actually matter?â As we see with the Fermi Paradox, the apparent
contradiction between our ancient and vast Universe and its seeming absence of any other
civilizations inhabiting it, the answer is basically no. If youâre talented enough to make a simulation
that can fool us into thinking itâs real, you wonât leave glaring holes in the basic
structure of that Universe. Which is to say, the physical laws of that
simulation should have been crafted without blatantly obvious contradictions that allow
no explanation for the state of affairs inside it other than to conclude itâs fake. You donât include an entire universe in
a simulation rather than just a planet unless the rest of the Universe serves some important
purpose. Since any such purpose could only be achieved
by a civilization that has taken a heavy interest in science, it messes things up if they keep
encountering paradoxes. So whatever the answer to the Fermi Paradox
is, it is going to make sense in terms of the known physical laws of the Universe and
those emergent laws of chemistry, biology, and psychology, this will be true whether
it is a simulation or not, unless the purpose of that simulation is specifically to have
folks find those contradictions. Thatâs a pretty probable case actually,
one that I usually dub a Nursery Universe, and weâll discuss that later today. Debating whether or not we live in reality
is not our main interest for today, even in the episode on the Simulation Hypothesis that
wasnât something we focused on as itâs essentially a question you can only answer
if the simulators are either idiots, which is unlikely if they can make such simulations,
or actually tell you, directly or indirectly that itâs fake. In both cases, itâs outside your own control,
you cannot determine you are inside a simulation by any experiment you can perform inside one. Rather our interest today is more about who
might make such simulations, which is inevitably either a post-scarcity civilization or entity. Creating such a thing is intensely resource
expensive and thereâs almost always an easier way to achieve a goal without investing that
much, so itâs pretty much limited to folks who have those kind of super-abundant resources. More to the point though, if you can do it,
you are post-scarcity. At least as weâve previously defined that,
rather than the absolute sense of having no scarcity of resources at all. A common solution to the Fermi Paradox is
to suggest that maybe nobody ventures out into the galaxy because they have everything
at their fingertips at home. Even where normal reality might draw some
limits, they can simulate almost anything theyâd ever want in virtual reality. The flaw in this line of reasoning is that
if you can decently simulate people well enough not to set off an Uncanny Valley reaction
in people interacting with them for hours or even years at a time, it means your computing
is so good you could easily assemble a robot to go out and explore the Universe. A probe smart enough to build more copies
of itself, a von Neumann probe, and able to do exploring or even resource extraction is
simply childâs play to any civilization able to simulate people well enough that most
folks prefer virtual reality to regular reality. Complexity-wise, itâs like wondering if
Intel or AMD can build an Abacus. And they only have to do it once. Thatâs the point of a self-replicating machine. They are also automatically post-scarcity
if they have that because it means they have automation good enough to do virtually all
the mining, farming, manufacturing, and maintenance. This is why we dismiss it as a Fermi Paradox
solution, such a civilization still has a value for raw materials, energy, and information
about the Universe, and even if theyâre terribly lazy, it requires virtually no effort
for them to do this. Also, such laziness is always assumed to come
after they create their Utopia, which relies on that technology to exist. They may well turn into lazy vegetables, though
it seems unlikely everyone would, but even so it wouldnât matter if they do if they
already launched those probes. Our focus being more on post-scarcity civilizations
though, we should address this habit of assuming virtually unlimited wealth and luxury universally
breeds lazy, spoiled idiots. We already have a lot of people with virtually
unlimited wealth and luxury who are not lazy, spoiled, or idiotic. However, a lot of these scenarios for civilizations
collapsing under their own gluttony typically only work if the folks who designed the system
were pretty incompetent, which as with the aforementioned probes runs into a causality
issue. The lazy, spoiled idiocy comes after the technology
and system exist, and would not affect the designers. For this reason we can safely assume that
potential problems any ten-year old could spot will be spotted by those designers who
will try to rectify them. One of the useful things about science fiction
is that it can help us foresee these problems and think of solutions, to become âgenre-savvyâ. As an example, we have a lot of science fiction
discussing how a technology-based Utopia might collapse after a few generations when the
civilization forgets how to maintain the equipment. Regardless of whether or not you can solve
that concern, you were certainly aware of it in advance and would have sought out a
solution and implemented it if you could. Such being the case, some rather obvious ones
spring to mind. Which ones you can use depends on your technology
of course. First, many of us would decline to enter something
like that, a virtual utopia, just on general principle, and thereâs no particular reason
to think such groups would die off, since they may very well have access to life extension
technology and even if they decline to use that, they can just pass their preferences
on to their children. Second, those who do still take their skills
with them, and it would seem unlikely theyâd just magically warp into utterly selfish entities,
but even if they did it is clearly in their best interest to make sure the system is maintained. Third, if youâve got amazingly good virtual
reality you also have every teacherâs dream educational system and itâs very easy to
set the system up to force an education and basic ethics on youngsters before letting
them do whatever they please inside it. Fourth, it would be very plausible those folks
were not entirely classically human anymore, and had enhanced intelligence to make learning
and remembering skills easier, or even directly downloadable as in the Matrix. Indeed the very existence of technology good
enough to simulate people plausibly enough for comfortable interaction strongly implies
you can also upload minds to run on a computer or otherwise create AI, which either way now
represent an effectively immortal entity who should not be forgetting things. As well as saved earlier states that could
be automatically awoken even if such entities were prone to turning lazy or stupid, you
just wake up the earlier version that still retains the necessary skills and dedication. Fifth, you could create a guardian caste,
people or AI who had the specific maintenance job for the system and were programmed or
conditioned to resist any temptation which might make them suck at their job. Now in that vein, and of educating people,
we do get a pathway to those Nursery Universes I mentioned earlier. One concern often expressed about high-tech
civilizations is they might under-breed and die off for lack of numbers. Regardless of whether this concern is justified
and scientific, and in my own opinion it is neither, one has to consider that if people
are turning into lazy spoiled brats they probably would not make good parents, even assuming
one would be interested in devoting the time to that. Such a civilization probably doesnât need
a lot of new people to maintain population levels as its population is likely to be functionally
immortal, but they can always resort to growing kids in vats. It offends sensibilities to suggest a machine
could raise a healthy child, though considering that a lot of bright and well-adjusted kids
have emerged from families that are beyond dysfunctional, I donât think the bar is
necessarily that high. This is another example of causality issues
with these Utopias though, as the effect, lazy spoiled people, comes after they have
invented the relevant technology. They are lazy and spoiled because they have
access to virtual realities and automation so good you can craft simulations of people
that are good enough to make them more attractive to interact with than other real people. If it can trick an adult it can trick a two-year
old. So before youâve got people totally cutting
themselves off from civilization, and weâll talk about this more in a moment, youâve
got machines that can raise kids. As mentioned, the notion tends to be fairly
offensive to our sensibilities, and personally Iâd object to using such a pathway, but
thereâs no real logical reason to think it wouldnât work, and itâs certainly preferable
to extinction, unless the programming is botched and produces legions of little sociopaths. But then again if thatâs the alternative
considered attractive enough people are willing to employ it as an alternative to extinction,
it means it is better than normal parents, either because it genuinely is or because
the available parents are content to use it in spite of its obvious flaws, implying they
probably would make awful parents. Essentially, if youâre willing to let a
machine raise your kids, itâs probably the right move. If you do have that, then you have your population
issue licked, along with your colonization issue since it means you can send probes off
to terraform planets or build habitats and then just grow and raise people when the time
comes, a von Neumann colony, if you would. If you canât lick the problem though, you
donât actually have to use machines or virtual people, you can just use digital people instead,
full blown mind emulations. Iâd imagine you could find plenty of folks
with a proven track record of child-rearing you could copy as much as necessary and keep
that state preserved for future copying too. You can make as many copies as you want, so
a volunteer could raise hundreds of kids at once and do that for centuries, if the pool
of decent and willing parents was too low. Weâll bypass any argument of whether or
not a digital copy of a human mind can be an android parent as well as a regular modern
person can. Iâm not being dismissive of the argument
that only flesh and blood people are real, weâve talked about that before, but folks
who feel that way are unlikely to be inclined to go live in a virtual reality anyway. As to the Nursery Universe approach, this
comes down to the big difference between the Simulation Argument and other more classic
false reality scenarios like life just being a dream. The Simulation Argument is specific to what
are called âAncestor Simulationsâ, cases where someone is simulating a past version
of Earth, namely modern times. This does not necessarily mean itâs identical
to their own past, just that it represents a plausible alternative history. The original might have had totally different
individual people for instance. It should also be noted that not every person
inside one has to be fully sentient, technically it just means that you have to be since you
know youâre sentient but canât be sure about anyone else, especially folks living
far away from any place youâve ever visited. Such a simulation could have started billions
of years ago or the year you were born, or even sooner, though that last rather eliminated
the need for the specific teaching-style Nursery Universe. Now the Simulation Argument says we have 3
reasonable scenarios to consider. Option 1, such simulations simply arenât
possible, either because they genuinely are not for reasons unclear to us, or theyâre
freakishly impractical, or thereâs nobody alive in any civilization advanced enough
to do one, like theyâve nuked themselves out of existence before getting the simulation
tech. Option 2 is that they do have that tech but
simply have no motivation to use it for simulations. So they do it rarely or not at all. They might consider it unethical, pretty impractical,
or simply have no interest. A Strong AI like Skynet taking over the planet
probably has no desire to invest the resources to run a simulation, the whole premise for
that in The Matrix, using people for batteries, is simply ludicrous. Good movie, silly plot. The ethics one is pretty plausible though
as itâs pretty hard to justify creating whole planets of essentially real people for
fun or experimentation, when a virtual reality running pretty good approximations is likely
to be good enough. If you want to visit the medieval era and
go jousting, your opponent doesnât need to have hopes and dreams and emotions to try
to stick a lance through you. Option 3 is that civilizations can do simulations
and do them pretty often. Now we donât have a clue which of these
is true yet or how likely each option is, so we usually apply whatâs called âThe
Principle of Indifferenceâ, which is where you assume that various scenarios that seem
plausible are all equally likely till you have data indicating otherwise. 3 options, and each one is one third as likely. In option 3, where they might have made millions
of simulated Universes, there is still a non-zero chance you live in the original real one,
so the odds you live in a simulated Universe, if those assumptions are true, would be about
33%. One in three that option 3 is right, minus
a tiny probability that it is but you are the original reality. You or your descendants will later make simulated
Universes. Obviously this is very simplified, and even
if you can do this you have to have some motive for doing so, one that justifies the huge
cost compared to alternatives and which your society, or at least the simulator, considers
ethical. That tends to be a short list and one of those
is the Nursery Universe approach. You want to raise kids who are reasonably
ethical and social and normal, and also wonât have a total nervous breakdown when plucked
out of the simulation into the âreal worldâ, so you pick an ancestor period close enough
to your own time that they share a lot of your basic principles and familiarity with
technology, but not one quite far enough along so that fake realities are obvious options
to them. Similarly a period like now still has a lot
of hardships and need for human social interaction, but not so much youâd feel guilty about
it, like if you dumped people off in ancient Rome or Egypt to live as a slave. The common objection to this is that an awful
lot of people nowadays lead very bad lives, but keep in mind you can only use your own
personal existence as a gauge for that hardship, as you donât know that any of those people
are real. Not everyone in a simulated Universe has to
be sentient, just good enough to pass inspection if you meet them, and only while youâre
actually talking to them. After all, if you make a virtual paradise
planet to live in, you arenât going to waste the processing power to make someone even
match a modern chatbot when youâve never met them, and they can be boosted up if you
do. In such a Nursery Universe you can just yank
people out as they graduate, but you might do whole batches or classes, as it were, stick
a hundred thousand people in one with 7 billion virtual folks, beginning, say, 1984, all of
whom are 34 right now, and just end and reset the thing when all or most have gotten to
the necessary mental development. If you want them to be mentally ready for
realizing their reality isnât the real deal, you might then include some clear signs of
that being the case, subtle paradoxes that make them wonder but probably not overt enough
to make it certain. I sincerely doubt it would be the Fermi Paradox,
but that would be one example of how your simulated Universe might have things going
on inside it that werenât explainable under the apparent physical laws governing it. Now if you do happen to have a civilization
where people are prone to turning into lazy self-absorbed jerks after a while, no matter
how well you prepare them, these ancestor simulations give you a good replacement option,
as once you raise a batch you can use them to do all the maintenance on the system and
grow the next batch as a way of paying their dues before entering their own personal Utopia. I donât happen to find this scenario particularly
plausible or ethical, but people propose this line of reasoning a lot, about post-scarcity
civilizations collapsing under their own bliss and divorcing themselves from their civilization,
so it is worth pursuing the concept and seeing that thereâs a lot of steps you can take
to circumvent that. The collapse that is, the divorcing themselves
from society is a bit harder. An awful lot of our civilization revolves
around our inter-dependency for basic survival, and to be blunt thatâs out the window for
a post-scarcity civilization. Once technology hits a certain point, you
donât need anyone else to live. Not for basic survival needs anyway. Not a new concern there, Isaac Asimov played
around with this idea with the Solarians, a planet full of people who lived in near
isolation from each other, enjoying total luxury granted by their armies of robots. The planet wasnât particularly full either,
as I recall they considered their world fully populated with 20,000 people when first introduced
in The Naked Sun, and had less when we see them again tens of thousands of years later,
as a sub-race of hermaphrodites in Foundation and Earth. Incidentally, the former is a great book while
the latter is not. This doesnât mean you donât need those
other people for basic social interaction and sanity though, humans need that and our
whole existence as a technological species almost certainly derives from that basic family
and tribal system. The same would also likely be true of alien
civilizations, though in spite of us talking about the Fermi Paradox, this is not an episode
about that. It does highlight though that while you might
be able to remove that dependency through technology youâd expect it to be the norm
throughout the Universe, though not necessarily universal. That dependency on social interaction to be
happy and stable does provide a limited safeguard though. Much as it is possible nowadays to live without
even talking to anyone face to face, few of us voluntarily do that, at least exclusively. We can at least assume people will want to
interact with other real people at least until the available sims and chatbots get so good
that they let most folks achieve a comfortable suspension of disbelief. The downside is that this almost certainly
does not require those virtual people be fully sentient and sapient, and our relationships
with our pets pretty much prove that, though we are likely to be far more sensitive to
inhuman quirks in virtual humans than we are in pets, hence the Uncanny Valley. It doesnât even have to seem fully human
though, for many interactions this hardly matters anyway, but the thing about a real
person is that they can get on your nerves, they do have rights and feelings, they wonât
be in the mood to go on a trip or play a game or whatever just as you want and when you
want. So a lot of times that slight inhumanity would
be preferable to the real deal who is essentially unavailable, and a personâs own mind is
going to gloss over a lot of flaws and inconsistencies if they want it to be very real. This represents a real problem for post-scarcity
civilizations as it probably takes far less processing power to simulate a whole civilization
to a comfortable level of human interaction then it takes to emulate a single human mind. Nothing is fully rendering where the person
experiencing it isnât at, and everything just downgrades to minimum upkeep. I donât care if the forest I just left ceases
to exist when I walk out or if on returning the trees no longer perfectly match their
prior layout and leaf count, let alone if the anthills have the same number of occupants
or the chemical composition of some rock I sat on has slightly changed. If I did, such specifics could be saved, and
you just run these at a level necessary for most people to be comfortable and kick up
those aspects of the virtual reality and its continuity a given individual is more sensitive
to. A geologist or botanist would be more likely
to notice such things and be bothered by them, after all. In other words, everybody probably has these
in their house, and this very same level of computational power means everything in their
house is being easily cleaned and maintained by robots as are all the farms and factories. They can easily connect to other people if
they want, assuming those other people want to talk to them, but you could live your life
quite comfortably as king or queen or God-Emperor of some realm where everyone acts plausibly
enough. Whatâs more, it would be very likely that
one of the first things folks would start working on was some drug or hypnosis method
or implant that made people tend to ignore flaws or forget they were in a simulation. Not to trick people, but at their own request,
so they could better enjoy these vacations or retirements. You either donât remember that youâre
from Earth, not Westeros, or you actively donât care, your brain just kind of ignores
it. Again, this doesnât prevent you colonizing
other solar systems or anything, because that can be done through automation, but it does
tend to mean society would start falling apart. More technology is always better but when
you get to this kind of level you donât really need more so you might not care that
everyone has stopped doing new research or even maintenance. That said, you would tend to think a lot of
folks would keep up the system as it was their passion, and those folks would probably be
the best of your researchers since passion for a topic is pretty much the biggest prerequisite
to excelling at it. And you can always go that paying your dues
route we discussed a little while ago, where new folks are expected to help maintain things
for a while until they get to escape to a virtual Utopia. And you can always require everyone wake up
and be useful every so often. As mentioned, these tends to be flaws and
problems everyone would notice long before you did this, so youâd expect them to prepare
things to handle it. It does tend to strongly imply though that
the way most of them would handle it would be to try to raise new members to a certain
degree of ethics and responsibility in advance, rather than raising some kid in a pure virtual
utopia where they are effectively a god and your whole species is composed of kids who
never grew up and are used to being able to wish people away to the cornfield, like in
that classic Twilight Zone episode, âItâs a Good Lifeâ. This remains one of the big issues facing
any post-scarcity civilization though, that each of its members can probably exist entirely
on their own because they have all the data and automation needed to see to all their
needs, and a vast archive of entertainment, classic or virtual reality, to entertain them. Such a civilization has a risk of collapsing
not because its members might all die, but simply because none of them have any sense
of dependency on each other. If faced with a threat they can probably just
board a spaceship they owned or had made and take off with all the information and production
capacity they need to live happily on that ship or whatever destination, if any, it has. They donât even have to feel guilty about
the species potentially ceasing because they are a seed quite capable of germinating a
branch of us elsewhere. They can just tell their ship to stop somewhere
at some point to refuel and take some extra time to set up a von Neumann colony. This requires no effort on their part after
all and was probably part of the template for such a ship they yanked out of an archive
before fleeing. Not the prettiest portrait of the future,
in some ways, though keep in mind that while it sounds rather horrifying in many ways,
these folks are all enjoying very happy lives and thereâs also no reason to think that
divorcing yourself from the rest of humanity is inevitable or universal. Some folks might, some might not, I wouldnât
expect everyone to go the same path. A lot of it is likely to depend on how these
folks regard reality, for many folks a simulation, no matter how good, isnât an acceptable
substitute, and you could make a good case that a civilization getting better at making
believable realities would tend to naturally stop getting better as they lose folks to
those personal paradises. Those not in them grow to dislike the idea
more and more and arenât interested in further funding their improvement and youâd expect
that to happen before they reached a point where virtually everyone joined in. The same applies to regular reality too, again
virtual reality is not the only aspect of this, a simple rise in automation catering
to your every need can make folks grow divorced from reality but as it improves and more folks
do that, youâd expect to lose both your research pool for improving it as they enjoy
it themselves and the support of those still not using it as they dislike where its taking
people. You could have 99.99% of a civilization in
such circumstances and that still leaves you 70,000 people who arenât, by modern populations,
and trillions if youâre looking at a Kardashev 2 civilization. The former is more than enough to rebuild
with, especially since they have all that technology still, and the latter is thousands
of planets worth of people to serve as wardens and safeguards for everyone else. So again we see a post-scarcity civilization
that clearly has a lot of things going for it, but also some serious challenges too. Okay, next week weâll be returning to the
Fermi Paradox to discuss some of the solutions that revolve around aliens having actually
visited us, particularly the notion of aliens visiting our ancestors in the distant past,
in Ancient Aliens. The week after that weâll be discussing
Mind Uploading and some of the more interesting implications of that which often get skipped
in fiction, along with our June Book of the Month, the Singularity Trap, the newest novel
from Dennis E. Taylor, author of the excellent Bobiverse trilogy. For alerts when that and other episodes come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like
button and share it with others. And if youâd like to help support future
content, you can donate to SFIA on Patreon or purchase some fun SFIA merchandise, and
Iâll link those below. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
Another awesome episode.
This was posted on another sub so i am going to copy paste my comment from that post here:
From 3:18 he tries to explain why the creators should build robots (van neuman probe) which would search for resources and self replicate etc , but that's a flawed reasoning.
He fails to see that creators of our universe are not (can not be ) from this universe and for us they are god like and searching for resources in a universe which "they , themselves have created " would be meaningless.
It would be like us trying to search in minecraft for resources for ourselves.
It seems to me that the author (narrator) seems to be confusing the "creators" of our universe, who has to be outside of this universe , with aliens in this universe , who are in a galaxy somewhere inside of this universe.
Simply put the creators of our universe can not be from within this universe otherwise they would also have to create themselves which would be impossible.
The way he is trying to combine the simulation hypothesis with the Fermi paradox (aka existence of aliens) is flawed in my opinion.
Why did you link 17 minutes into the episode?
good show!, this is fuel for brainstorming and creative ideas ))