Consilience: Why I Think We Live in a 'Simulation'

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

We have good reason to believe that we exist in a “simulation” of some kind.1 “Simulation” here should be taken to mean: any kind of intentionally created seemingly-self-contained ‘world’ containing conscious actors with no knowledge of the external world. Note this is not the same as the usual conception/usage of simulation.

I believe this not for any one single reason;2 rather, different ways of thinking about this question each give some evidence, and when combined they make it look very unlikely that we don’t live in a simulation. In the words of the inimitable Linchuan Zhang, “each individual piece of evidence might be explained away, but the consilience of evidence across multiple angles and sources is in my opinion very hard to dismiss collectively.”3 Each of the ideas or “pieces of evidence” I discuss in this piece has some kind of non-simulation explanation, just-so story, or ad hoc rationalization. (“I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool”). But when taken all at once, they’re very difficult to explain sans simulation.

What are these different angles? On the theoretical side, there’s A. the strong philosophic “simulation argument” and B. the existence of deep ontological problems our minds face that suggest our ontology does not capture reality. On the “empirical” side, there’s A. a variety of evidence that suggests we live in an intentionally designed world and B. a variety of reasons to expect superintelligent beings to carry out simulations that look like our world.

The classic simulation argument

Let’s start with the “theoretical” reasons. The biggest thing here is the classic simulation argument, which is worth revisiting as it’s a very powerful argument! The full argument is here; the conclusion it argues for is this:

At least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

I would modify this to remove the “computer” in “computer simulation” and add that ‘simulation’ here should be taken to mean “any kind of seemingly-self-contained ‘world’ containing conscious actors with no knowledge of the external world.”4

Deep ontological problems

Anyways. Let’s now talk about what I referred to as the deep ontological problems we face. We ‘know’5 that there exist true statements that we cannot know, and that there are facts we cannot express in language. We know this from information theory and from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Furthermore, there are very important things we cannot express in language, and I believe there are very important things we cannot even conceptualize within our basic ontology, an ontology to which concepts like “truth” and “exist” are essential. Taoism and Zen make these points rather compellingly, though there’s no strict argument I can point to here; indeed, part of the point is that there is no way to express this stuff in language.

In particular, I think that ‘consciousness’ is an extremely important thing that not only cannot be properly referenced or described by language but cannot even be studied or accessed from a third-person/objective/scientific perspective.

There exist many “big” questions that we just can’t seem to answer. Often a particular theory can answer/reject one/some of them, but cannot answer others and is inconsistent with theories that do answer others. Many of these questions could be said to belong to the domain of physics (or do they belong to the domain of philosophy?). What I’m talking about here are questions like:

  • Why is there something rather than nothing?
  • What created the universe? Or was it never created? If it was never created, why does it exist?
  • Why can’t we unify all of physics in one model?
  • Why do we not see other intelligence in the universe?
  • Why does our universe appear to be fine-tuned?
  • Why does consciousness exist? What is its ontological relation to other things that ‘exist’?
  • What is the relationship between is and ought?
  • How can we know our reasoning makes any sense?6 AKA the problem of induction.
  • What is truth?

Theories that (purportedly) answer some of these questions: Anthropic principle. Mathematical universe hypothesis. Christianity. Illusionism.

(Some of these problems straddle the border into being ‘empirical’/contingent problems, such as the fine-tuned universe, the question of why don’t we see other intelligences in the universe, and the question of the existence and creation of the universe. The theoretical vs empirical distinction is only confusing here.)

Intentional design (this sure would make a great story!)

Our world looks like it was optimized for entertainment:

  • Superentertaining figures; Trump,7 Musk.
  • Nominative determinism: Also Trump, Sam Bankman-Fried, Plotkin, so many more that it strains credulity. Scott Alexander has many good instances sprinkled throughout his writings. Gwern has a nice collection, as does Roland Crosby.
  • Crazy names in general.8
  • Synchronicity.
  • [Many more examples of this world being really entertaining which the reader can think about.]

Note that superentertaining characters, nominative determinism, and crazy names are all typical features of narrative art/entertainment – think of literature and film and limericks and so on. Our world looks like a designed story. It looks narratively optimized.

Besides being entertaining, our world is one that would be of particular interest to a wide swath of simulators. We live in the most interesting time, that being the takeoff to the singularity. This seems like a really important time to study. It’s not hard to imagine how simulations of civilization building ASI would be useful for historians, anthropologists, economists, theologians, cognitive scientists, philosophers, story writers, video game designers, etc. etc. etc.

The names of the CEOs involved in AI development – Altman (alternative to man), Pichai (Pitch AI), Amodei (also Amodei means lover of God) – are truly egregious, especially when one considers that the era of ASI development and the period immediately before the singularity are times of particular interest for multiple kinds of simulators. My collection of strangely related phenomena is consilience; yours is synchronicity; his is coincidence.

To sum it up: if I were a simulator, my simulation might look like the exact world we live in! Seriously, can you think of a more interesting, informative, entertaining world to simulate?

What kind of simulation?

Allow me to (non-exhaustively) list some kinds of simulation that this may be. Note that our ontologies might not apply to whatever is actually going on in the ‘bigger’, external-to-us reality. ‘Art piece’ or ‘God’ might not be good concepts in this bigger reality, but they’re at least pointing at the things that we lack the proper concepts for.

  • Traditional ‘computer’ simulation
  • For research
    • Research around the singularity. Under what conditions does a civilization…
      • Decide to pause AI development?
      • Never build ASI?
      • Die to the ASI they build?
      • Build an ASI that
      • This would certainly be of interest to anyone studying history!
    • Can change parameters to test different theories against each other
      • E.g. great man theory
    • It might also tell you about what you can expect to find elsewhere in your universe.
      • How common is ASI?
      • Great filter?
      • Dark forest hypothesis
    • If you put an Elon Musk archetype in the world in the year 2000, how does that change the 21st century?
  • A thought experiment played out
  • For entertainment
  • For moral reasons – ancestor simulation?
    • Worship; “replaying their lives”.
  • Immersive game
    • Immersive aesthetic experience
  • Training module
  • RPG VR video game
  • “Roy theory” from Rick and Morty.
  • Art piece
    • Immersive aesthetic experience
  • A book (or some other kind of not-acted-by-real-people narrative fiction), and it’s the case that fictional characters actually experience what is being described.
  • Dream / fantasy of some higher being
    • God entertaining themself.
    • God teaching themself.
    • A drug-induced experience of higher being; ‘aliens tripping’.
  • Theatre.
  • Maybe this is how plays are done in the bigger reality. You could imagine that in the future, actors take a drug (or neurological intervention) that makes them temporarily forget their existence as a person outside the play.

And that’s all I have for now.9

Footnote: simulations vs embeddings

I said earlier that by ‘simulation’ I mean any kind of intentionally created seemingly self-contained ‘world’ containing conscious actors with no knowledge of the external world. If we lose the intentionally-created clause, we can think about non-intentionally-created ‘worlds’ as well. I call this broader class of things “embeddings”, as in: our world is embedded in a much greater reality that we don’t have access to. Embeddings are a superset of simulations. (I’m accepting proposals for a word to refer to only the non-intentionally-created worlds.) An iconic conception of this kind of situation is that of Flatland. (Who else watched the super cool movie in school?). I do think it’s reasonably likely that we exist in a non-intentional embedding, though I don’t have any more to say about that right now.

Instead, I bring up embeddings to point out that some of the evidence and all of the possibilities I’ve described for simulation does not apply to non-intentional embeddings. We have reason to believe that we live in an intentionally-created universe. Our world appears to be intentionally designed. (I wonder if this actually the better framing for the whole idea here, rather than the ‘simulation’ framing I used.) Sorry, Christian fundamentalists, you got it wrong. It’s not argument from intelligent design, it’s argument from intentional design.

Footnote: Dream [just found this]

Alan Watts lecture. The key passage is sometimes referred to as “The Dream of Life”:

“[L]et’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure during your sleep. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say ‘Well, that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it’s gonna be’. And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say ‘Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?’.

Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further out gambles to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”

Footnotes

  1. Any ideas for a better word here than ‘simulation’? ↩

  2. Some notes about my own epistemology here. My belief that we exist in a simulation has gradually increased from ~low to ~high over the past many years, although I think this is the kind of proposition that one can’t properly put a probability on. I am not a “woo” person by nature or upbringing. I am quite sane, mentally sound, and non-schizo. ↩

  3. This is from Linch’s piece on the Pope’s AI Encyclical being AI generated. I couldn’t say it better myself (inimitable!), so I quoted him. ↩

  4. Note that this is not how Bostrom intends or presents the argument; still, the argument he gives basically applies as written to this broader class of simulations. And note that it is a broader conception of simulation, which means that it’s weaker than the one Bostrom is making. Furthermore I think that this conception of simulation actually addresses the biggest weaknesses in his argument: A. what if computer simulations can’t give rise to consciousness B. what if intelligent civilization intentionally avoids computer simulations that give rise to consciousness C. there may be infinities or at least recursive, exponentially generators of beings that aren’t computer simulations (such as fiction of various kinds); why is the measure of computer simulated beings larger than these simulated-but-not-by-computer beings? ↩

  5. Although I wouldn’t say I “know” it. I don’t have a ‘proof’ for it. It may well be one of these true unprovable things I’m talking about! ↩

  6. Answer: We can’t, a system cannot prove its own consistency, c.f. Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem. ↩

  7. Donald famously trumped Hillary in the 2016 election. ↩

  8. Ask your friendly neighborhood AI for more samples. ↩

  9. AKA I’m lazy and want to be done with this piece. ↩