So today we will be looking at the Simulation
Hypothesis, also known as the Simulation Argument, the concept that we might be living inside
one immense computer simulation. And this is going to be a fun trip because
it’s a fascinating idea especially when applied to the Fermi Paradox, the apparent
contradiction between the how old and big the universe is and how seemingly absent it
is of any other intelligent life besides ourselves. So to do this we need to first do a basic
introduction to the concept, sweep away some misconceptions about it, explore the concept
a bit, then look at what it means in terms of the Fermi Paradox. Now the inventor of the idea. Nick Bostrom, actually does a wonderful job
explaining this himself and in the video description below I’ve linked his original arguments
and FAQ, which I’d strongly encourage you to browse if you have a chance. I will be mostly summarizing it here and I
also won’t be going through the more formal arguments he offers there, though before I
scare anyone off that with fears of formal logic, Bostrom does an excellent job presenting
it in a very approachable fashion and I would certainly assess him as one of best modern
scholars. Now the concept gets muddled a bit because
Bostrom is actually discussing the specific notion of what is called Ancestor Simulations,
which differs a bit from simulated realities in that it is specifically when you are simulating
some piece of your civilizations past, or a close approximation thereof, as opposed
to simulating entirely different civilizations or whole universes which might have different
physical laws. Today we’ll be looking as much at those
two alternatives as Ancestor Simulations themselves, but if you have difficulty picturing that
notion just think of all the historical dramas or videogames we have. Often we intentionally add a fantastic aspect
to them, but just as often all effort is made for historical accuracy and a very accurate
one would be an Ancestor Simulation and it is quite easy to imagine why an advanced civilization
might do such a thing. In recent videos we’ve spent a lot of time
talking about how much processing power and how little energy might be needed to simulate
a human mind, partially to lay groundwork for today,
In those videos, most notably the recent video on Transhumanism, I mentioned the Landauer
Limit, the apparent absolute minimum energy at any given temperature to flip a bit, or
essentially the absolute minimum cost to perform calculations, and our best current guesses
at how much computing power we need to simulate a human mind, called whole brain emulation. I won’t repeat that now, you can click on
that video link if you want more details on the concept, but we found out that even at
the relatively high temperature you and I live at, as compared to cold deep space, you
could hypothetically run a million human minds for the same energy needed to run a light
bulb. Now obviously achieving that efficiency would
take a lot of improvements in modern technology, and at the same time if we are talking about
ourselves as the simulations we have no idea what the physical laws of our simulators are
bound by let alone the temperature they are running us at, but if we are talking about
it just in terms of a more technologically advanced version of our own civilization interested
in running a near perfect ancestor simulation of us now, with our 7 billion people, they
could conceivably do that for as little as a megawatt. Which in terms of current power cost would
translate as a bit over $100 an hour, or about a million dollars a year. Now ignoring that something like fusion reactors
might make that a great deal cheaper, something we’ve looked at on this channel before,
it is not hard to imagine at all that we might run such a whole planet simulation or indeed
many hundreds or thousands of them simply for entertainment purposes alone. Now in the 1980s and 1990s we saw an great
interest in virtual reality, which probably helped give rise to the Simulation Argument
in the early 2000’s, and we also saw about then the takeoff of Reality TV shows, which
I think all by themselves represent strong evidence in favor of the concept. Some of you may be familiar with older philosophical
concepts like the Brain in a Vat, as well as general thought experiments about how we
can know if everything around us is real or just a dream. You might wonder if Bostrom’s notion is
anything new or just a modern flavor on those old concepts and my mention there of evidence,
in regard to reality TV shows, is a big part of that. The simulation hypothesis is presenting this
concept from the perspective that there are things which could be interpreted as evidence
that we are in such an Ancestor Simulation or that such things are clearly possible. Bostrom presents us basically three scenarios
for the future, one’s that will feel pretty familiar to those of you who have seen the
Fermi Paradox Compendium video where we contemplated ways in which a civilization might continue
after it reached our current technological level. Those are, to paraphrase:
1. That civilizations go extinct before acquiring
the necessary technology to do ancestor simulations, or that they turn out not be possible. 2. That civilizations who can perform ancestor
simulations do not wish to do so. 3. That they can do ancestor simulations and
choose to do so. In that first option, civilizations simply
ceases to exist, since we appear to have established that such simulations are most likely possible. We’ve looked at those apocalyptic scenarios
before and will look at more of them down the road, but like with the Carter Doomsday
Argument he’s not presenting a specific scenario, just that it could happen. Technological Civilizations able to generate
Ancestor Simulations may either never have a chance to develop that tech before ceasing
to exist or do so shortly thereafter, for whatever reason, nuclear war, plague, etc,
does not matter. So option 1, ancestor simulations don’t
exist because nobody exists able to run them. Option 2, Ancestor Simulation don’t exist
because nobody wants to run them. Now we know that isn’t true for ourselves,
we’d cheerfully simulate any of our old civilizations. However we can’t assume anyone with this
technology would feel the same way. They genuinely might not want to, but more
importantly they also might have serious objections at an ethical level. We discussed the concept of Mind Uploading
in the Transhumanism video and while many would disagree I didn’t make much of a secret
that in my own opinion a Whole Brain Emulation would deserve the benefit of the doubt that
it was a genuine person. We’ll discuss that more in a bit, but in
that context, if they are people, and we assume that’s the case in the Simulation Hypothesis,
then there are a lot of ethical problems. I’d feel pretty bad about recreating someone
to live out a life as a Roman Slave for instance, even though presumably most of those folks
considered that quite superior to not being alive. They might regard us much the same, certainly
I am quite fond of my life but it’s a good deal better than those enjoyed in many of
the less fortunate areas of the world and it might considered quite unpleasant by the
standards of those a century or two down the road. The quality of life of those of us alive right
now is what matters to the Simulation Hypothesis too, since it’s presenting the notion that
we ourselves might be simulations. So we can’t skip the notion entirely that
even assuming many folks did want to run such simulations that they would be banned, and
that probably is a decently enforceable ban at least where simulating an entire planet’s
population at full WBE is concerned. Even ignoring all the difficulties that might
be had acquiring the hardware and software, a megawatt to run it is still a lot of juice
and we’ve talked before about detecting power usage as waste heat in regard to megastructures
like Dyson Sphere. It would be quite hard to conceal that power
use from us right now, with just our modern infrared detection devices and satellites,
if we were looking for it, it would probably be impossible to hide from anyone on the same
planet who had much higher tech then ourselves. Option 3 is that they do run ancestor simulations,
and could easily then run tons of them, which raises the notion that we might be such an
ancestor simulation ourselves. If you’ve got, as an example, a planetary
population of 10 billion people and you’ve mastered this down to near that minimum power
use I mentioned earlier, with a modern day cost of about a million bucks a year per simulated
planet, if each of those folks coughed up $1 a year for running simulations, or only
1% was paying $100 a year, same thing, you’d have 10,000 such simulations running. If, to keep the math easy, we assumed each
of those worlds had about 10 billion people who lived through our modern period, that
would be a 100 Trillion folks out there who lived through the early 21st century or thought
they had with the same certainty we have now. If you were to assume you could randomly be
one of the 10 billion who really lived through this era versus the 100 trillion who thought
they did, there’d be a 99.99% chance you and I would be one of those simulations. And realistically, if you can program something
as complex as a human mind, you can certainly program more simple automated construction
and maintenance robots so you could probably do this way, way cheaper in which case even
our 1% of 1% odds of being the non-simulated people would be optimistic. That’s essentially the Simulation Argument,
if we assume our civilization will eventually be able to make ancestor simulations and wants
to do that, then odds are good the total number of people be simulated in our modern times
down the eons to come will so massively outnumber the handful who really lived through the original
one that we have to assume it is statistically improbable we are the originals and far more
likely we are not. That we are the simulations. Also to clarify on the ancestor simulations,
we’re talking about any occasion someone wants to run a decent simulacrum of 21st century
life, this does not require it include the same people. An advanced society just wanting to know the
usual time table of going from basic computers to whole brain emulations, and what percentage
of civilizations do that, might run tens of thousands of century long simulations. That’s our first connection to the Fermi
Paradox, in the absence of direct proof of aliens you might run world after world to
see which evolutionary tracks were possible, and you do ancestor simulation after ancestor
simulation to try to figure out how probable it all was. Nor is that necessary an ethical dilemma. The Simulation Hypothesis gets a lot of comparisons
to theological topics because of the obvious similarities. One common point raised in both would be “Why
would God, or the Programmers, create a world with so much suffering it?”. Now there are a number of counterarguments
where God is concerned but they are less relevant to the Simulation Hypothesis in regard to
ancestor Simulations because the most straightforward answer would be “Because we were replicating
conditions accurately, that was our goal.” And both have the upside that you can keep
going on after death in some place nicer. Even a particularly traumatic and premature
death could be erased or sealed off to limit that trauma. Nor, incidentally, does everyone in such a
simulation have to be a full WBE. You probably don’t need anything nearly
as complicated as a full brain simulation pass casual Turing tests by other people inside
the simulation. Very advanced civilizations might even like
to use such lives as a way of reproducing. If for instance they were trying to instill
a deep emotional tie to their ancient cultural heritage when, considering the available technology,
they might be running entirely on computers themselves. We tend to think a certain amount of hardships,
challenge, and pain are necessary components of a mature mind and they might feel the same,
and anyone who has spent much time contemplating exactly how spoiled a kid might be in a truly
Utopian Post-scarcity society can see where the motive for that might lie. You’d also have to consider that it needn’t
be done in real-time. We’ve talked before about subjective time,
in the Transhumanism video I pointed out that replacing the current means of sending information
around your body with one closer to the speed of light could result in thinking a millions
times faster so that you could experience an entire lifetime in about an hour. In a post-scarcity society where you might
easily have trillions or quadrillions of people hanging around it’s not hard to imagine
several billion of them agreeing to log-in to a simulation for an hour where most of
their memories are temporarily suppressed so they can live a new life for a while. If I offered you a chance right now to go
live in, say, the 19th century, with your memory wiped during the process but to be
re-integrated back into you when you were done, and you’d wake up in an hour, how
many people would say yes? Especially if the reintegration of memories
could delete truly traumatic events or the setup allowed you to pick a general area to
live in or start with some strong suggestion in place, like for isntance. “I’ve always wanted to be a football player,
can we set me up in a body suited to that with a subconscious imperative to pursue that
career?” For those who have been following along the
videos where we talked about Dyson Spheres and available energy and populations of Kardashev
2 civilizations, you know that you’d only need a tiny fraction of the population willing
to do that just a single time to ensure thousands of modern ancestor simulations ran. It’s not hard to imagine a lot of folks
doing this regularly for the experience. Let alone just one time. And remember, we’re not talking about a
re-enactment of our exact history, just an alternate reality in which folks are living
through those same times again, doesn’t have to be the same events, same people, or
anything like that. To re-emphasize, the Simulation Argument is
the notion that the total people who experienced our modern times would massively outnumber
the tiny handful who really had. So much so that the odds you or I are those
original people who actually experienced the genuine original version might be astronomically
tiny. That’s the simulation hypothesis. Now before we look at the Fermi Paradox angles
on this, let’s talk a bit about what consciousness is and also talk about other applications
besides ancestor simulations. A Whole Brain Emulation is pretty much a straight
clone of an entire human brain, where you basically just got a piece of software pretending
to be each brain cell. In many ways it’s not that sophisticated
and it’s probably orders of magnitude more code and processing power than it would take
to create a replica of a person able to have convincing interactions with other people,
a Turing-Compliant piece of software. That’s worth remembering because a lot of
applications where we might want simulated people to interact with aren’t requiring
genuine consciousness, just something way better than we have now. A lot of times when people are thinking of
virtual worlds the sort of responses needed from the facsimiles of people in order to
maintain the illusion doesn’t require anything like full human consciousness. If I want to see and interact with a historical
drama on the Egyptian pyramids I don’t need to simulate anyone living in the Americas
and really even just the people on the worksite need to be able to have conversations, and
most of the time the individual folks in line of sight just need basic facial expressions
and tasks. So by and large virtual realities don’t
require whole simulations of consciousness to interact with. That is one strike against the Simulation
argument because by and large people going into one for entertainment purposes or educational
purposes won’t need anything like a true human brain to interact with and doing so
would probably waste tons of processing power, energy, and money. But we don’t really know where the line
of consciousness begins and ends. We just assume that a whole brain emulation
must be because it is genuinely emulating every brain cell, and in more extreme and
probably total unnecessary versions would be emulating every molecule or even atom. It’s a computer doing this but it technically
does not need to be. Or rather, it does need to be a computer but
a computer is a much vaguer term than most realize when we picture the modern devices
of that name. Back before the era of modern home desktops
it was actually a job title given to people who performed computations. I think I’ve mentioned this before on the
channel, and if you look at some older science fiction, like Isaac Asimov’s 1955 novel
“The End of Eternity”, two of the main characters have that as a job title as do
a whole bunch of the folks involved in the organization the book mostly revolves around. Anything a computer can do, humans can do
slower. Every calculation can be performed on paper
or with an abacus. So hypothetically, in a situation much like
the infinite number of monkeys typing out Shakespeare, you could have room after room
of people just churning through the same calculations our computer would be to produce a Whole Brain
Emulation. Is that consciousness? Are those billions of people, each quite conscious
themselves, producing an independent and slow running human mind? For that matter if I take a whole bunch of
monkeys and train them to perform a couple simple calculations, basically just the trio
of basic Boolean operations, AND, OR, NOT, are they busy running a human consciousness
far beyond their own intellectual abilities? It’s a weird way to look at it, to imagine
warehouse after warehouse of thought accumulating on paper to form contemplations and memory
of some very ethereal person, but it is as valid as a computer doing it. And it is essentially what we argue our brain
cells are doing to. Each one a little monkey pounding out simple
operations for reasons it does not understand or care about. You could even presumably do this with ants. Each bit could be a tiny red or blue kernel
coming down to shafts, one at a time each, to produce a pair. And it is programmed to see two blue, or two
red, or one of each, and for each take and drop a single orange, yellow, or purple ball
down another shaft. Basic binary operation, very basic logic circuit. A very large hive of ants might conceivably
emulate an entire human brain that way. A hive mind, not as we often see this as somehow
centered on the queen but a genuine mind separate and distinct from them and not interested
in their problems any more than we are in our own cells. Which is to say we have to make sure all those
cells are protected and fed for our own continued existence. But it doesn’t matter to that over consciousness
if all those ants are replaced over the years, or if the whole hive moves with time to somewhere
else. This gets us back to the notion of personhood,
and in a modern example, an incorporated village or city or company or church has a somewhat
distinct identity from its individual human components. The people might move in and out, be born
or die, the boundaries or location or buildings may change, but it’s still arguably the
same group entity. Now there’s a lot of notions for how we
should regard identity but one of the most popular is from John Locke, the 17th century
English Philosopher whose work was heavily influential in the construction of modern
democracies and concepts of human rights. While the science was still new, Locke was
already aware that our bodies change over the material they are made of. Most of the cells in your body replace themselves
every several years and the ones that don’t still replace the atoms they are made from. The substance of our body and mind, the material
it is made from, changes over time. So Locke argues that personal identity can’t
rely specifically on substance of the body or mind, because the bits change. A Tree is still the same tree even as it grows
bigger and cycles out material or gets a branch cut off. And he also argues identity isn’t reliant
on the soul. He says it relies on consciousness and in
that context the concept of continuous identity gets a bit murky, because it relies on gradual
change without anything terribly radical going on. Even if a persons behavior and opinions change,
they are still the same person. Reckless or naive childhood behavior and opinions
being abandoned with time no more changes your identity then watching this video does,
even though the content of your brain is certainly changing a little and possibly your opinions
on the Simulation Argument. Our tree is still the same tree, and our village
the same village, our hive mind the same hive mind, and our personal identity the same identity,
even as all the components change so long as it is gradual. Locke says consciousness is the perception
of what passes in a person’s own mind. This is often restated as basically meaning
your memories. Obviously if you can tinker with those, copying
them to other people or deleting them, you’ve got a break in that and some problems. Now Locke’s thinking on this is hardly unchallenged,
there are many other schools of thought, and there are problems with it, but it is one
that most of us are pretty familiar with and comfortable with. But again, and especially in the context of
high technology, it is hardly perfect or without its problems. In a non-organic case let’s say I knock
off the top two thirds of the statue of liberty and steal it to hide in my underground treasure
trove. The people of New York come by and rebuild
it. Many would argue that it is, in rebuilt form,
still the Statue of Liberty. This gets a bit stranger though if they decide
copper is too expensive to build and maintain and opt for plastic instead. Now imagine the city gets nuked and a century
later the people of New New York twenty miles north go in to the ruins and reclaim their
statue and move it to New New York. It’s even further complicated if in that
same time people found my stolen two-thirds of the Statue and congress ordered the Statue
of Liberty erected on new legs in the middle of the Potomac so that fifty years before
the folks of New New York came into the radioactive ruins of Old New York to retrieve their ‘original’
mostly plastic version there’s been one sitting near Washington DC claiming the mantle. Which is the original? Are either of them the original? Are they both the original? And in the case of a person, while in the
John Locke view of things if I am slowly replacing bits of your brain with machines that simulated
the same behavior would maintain identity it gets a bit murkier if I do that instantly,
just replacing the whole brain at once. Now imagine you were running a small but growing
business when you got diagnosed with a terminal illness and decided to get frozen till there
was a cure. A year or two later a company figures out
how to do brain scans accurate enough to read your frozen mind and put it into a nice duplicate
body and your spouse is happy and decides to dispose of your frozen body, but your daughter
doesn’t accept that it is the new you and fights it. The cryonics company in the meantime accidentally
mixes up their files and starts copying your mind into a new duplicate of someone else,
the lab tech realizes halfway through and stops it and starts transferring the right
mind, ending with some scrambled memories. While they are sorting out this mess they
leave your digital copy running to compare, and since you were half expecting some sort
of high-tech brain emulation or nanotech to be what resurrected you when you went on ice
you, or your simulation, figure out what’s up and demand to be left on. So we’ve now got that first duplicate, the
memory scrambled duplicate, and the strictly digital duplicate, and someone figures out
how to cure your illness and how to safely restore damaged frozen bodies and minds. Your daughter gets you resurrected. Now there are four of you, and the original
duplicate, who has turned your small business into quite an empire, falls over dead, and
angered that the daughter never treated him as he father writes her out of the will. You’ve got three living and one dead person
all with the same original memories of starting that business and you go into the court demanding
a portion of that empire and to nullify the will in regard to your daughter too. And the probate judge just stares at you,
your very different looking memory scrambled duplicate, and the digital you testifying
by TV, and probably has a stroke trying to sort things out. Like I said, difficult concepts, deep thoughts
tend to follow that are best assayed with a lot of coffee and aspirin on hand. Trying to deal with something like a murder,
if the person had gotten themselves scanned before plotting out the crime, or after plotting
it but before doing it, can get pretty hazy. What do you do if a murderer gets killed in
prison and his spouse has his brain scan uploaded into a duplicate? One who does not have the memories of doing
the crime or maybe even of plotting it? I should probably add that identity gets even
screwier in the context of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, or its
lesser known sibling called Many Minds, when we try to decide if the virtually identical
two people living in a pair of parallel realities, or the very nearly infinite numbers of you
in those near infinite realities, are the same person and when that breaks off, when
you could be said to be distinct individuals. Okay, so what does all this have to do with
the Fermi Paradox? Since the Fermi Paradox is about trying to
find alien civilizations or why they don’t exist, Simulation Hypothesis can come up in
a lot of ways, but we usually mean why would we, if we are ancestor simulations, experience
an absence of aliens? And that’s tricky because again it splashes
over into motivations and can get very close to theological contemplations of the idea. The big one is would God, or the programmer,
make such a huge Universe just for us? Now the obvious answer would seem to be no,
but one has to remember two things. First, if it is a simulation, it doesn’t
mean everything else is equally simulated. I don’t really need to simulate every atom
on Earth to do a very convincing job of it, I certainly don’t need to for the atoms
in a galaxy a billion light years away, and it is kind of creepy how our physical laws,
the speed of light and the unpredictability of quantum mechanics, especially when viewed
as a sort of maximum resolution of the simulation, seem to almost conspire to be handy for the
purpose of simulation that isn’t running everything fully but only simulates stuff
in more detail when its being deeply examined. If you’re a physicist it can be very unnerving
at times just how fine-tuned our Universe is in a lot of ways to allow for intelligent
life, and the counterargument is essentially the Anthropic Principle, something Nick Bostrom
is also heavily associated with. The general notion that it doesn’t matter
how many universes might exist that aren’t possessing the right quantities for intelligent
life, since only the ones with them will have people in them who can notice this freaky
improbability. The second thing to remember is that just
because we only use a small part of the Universe now, it doesn’t mean we still will be in
the future. We discuss human expansion off planet and
out into the galaxy and beyond a lot on this channel and what we’ve mostly found is that
the evidence is pretty good we will eventually be able to do this. If we can, then making a universe even though
you only occupy one planet right now is no more indicative that this is or isn’t a
simulation then a few microbes dropped in a Petri dish should assume that there are
other microbes elsewhere in the giant Petri dish just because it is so huge and empty
when they arrived. We made that Petri dish specifically so they
could expand into it. And we don’t want anything else growing
in there to interfere with the experiment. But at the same time it doesn’t mean there
aren’t aliens in the simulation, since someone might have simulated us, and several other
intelligent species elsewhere, just to see how we’d interact or who would evolve to
intelligence and technology first and how each unique species handles the problem. So the short answer, much akin to when we
contemplate the idea that some intelligent agency might have made humans to begin with,
is that you can only make predictions regarding the Fermi Paradox if you know that Creator’s
motivation for making people to begin with. Ultimately though, it doesn’t tell us much
about the Fermi Paradox if we are assuming it is a genuine simulation from start to finish. You’d expect everything in it do have been
following the rules of reality the whole time or best approximated to do so or not look
like tinkering if someone wants to see how things play out naturally. Now the focus of the Simulation Argument is
on Ancestor Simulations but for the Fermi Paradox we need to extend that to include
even wildly differing scenarios where someone has simulated a Universe in full right from
the Big Bang but with different physical laws, in order to see what claws its way up Darwin’s
ladder. So simulated reality or not, it doesn’t
make much difference since we can only see outside the box if the Creator of the box
has either made a mistake and opts not to fix it or voluntarily pops in to inform you
that you’re a simulation. So fundamentally the Simulation Hypothesis
is just not a good solution to the Fermi Paradox because even if true it still doesn’t let
us determine why things are so silent in this Universe, since all the other solutions we’ve
previously discusses work just as well in a simulated Universe as a real one. Because while someone might have left our
Universe empty except for us, we’d also expect them to keep things self-consistent
so that the science of that reality can explain the silence in that reality. If you want only one intelligent species in
the Universe you configure the laws to make it incredibly unlikely to happen so you don’t
have extra unwanted ones popping up everywhere draining your processors. If you do want it, then you make sure the
physical laws match that, to either produce multiple intelligent species or make it seem
logical that they could have been produced. So while the Simulation Argument is definitely
interesting in the context of the Fermi Paradox, especially when you contemplate simulations
running their own simulations who run their own simulations, it sadly doesn’t help us
contemplate it much. And on that note, we’re going to wrap things
up for the day. Next week we’ll be looking at a somewhat
similar concept with the Carter Doomsday Argument. If you want alerts when that video come out,
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with others if you enjoyed it. While you’re waiting for that next video
you can try out some of these other videos and if you want to learn more about this topic,
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bunch who will probably give you a good response on questions too or be happy to chat about
the subject. So I hope you enjoyed the video, have a great
day, and as always Thanks for Watching and we’ll see you next time!
