The thought that sticks in my mind is mathematical realism; if we can prove the mathematical existence of the outcome of a simulation (nothing harder than inductively showing that the state of a simulation is well-defined at state S for the first and all successive S) then what's the difference between things in the simulation actually existing v.s. possibly existing? All of the relationships that matter between states of the simulation are already proven to exist if we looked at (calculated) them, so what necessary property can we imagine our Universe having that the possible simulation does not?
> so what necessary property can we imagine our Universe having that the possible simulation does not?
It lacks the magical spark, the qualia, the spirit, the transcendent. Or what people like to imagine makes our own reality special. Our own reality cannot be understood because it's such a hard problem, and it "feels like something" (maybe like a bat?), while a simulation is just math on CPUs. Consciousness is a hard problem because it transcends physical sciences, it's so great that it can exist even outside the realm of verification. /s
Hope you forgive the rant, it's just amazing how much philosophy can come from the desire to fly above the mechanics of life. But what they missed is that the reality of what happens inside of us is even more amazing than their imaginary hard problem and special subjective experience. The should look at the whole system, the whole game, not just the neural correlates. What does it take to exist like us?
But it may be possible that there's no such thing as "simulating" intelligence. If you do certain calculations, that is "intelligent." Same for consciousness, etc.
I read that as a teenager, thought it sounded nice, went to grad school and did molecular dynamics simulations (like folding at home) for a decade, then went to google and built the world's largest simulation system (basically, the largest group of nodes running folding at home). Eventually we shut the system down because it was an inefficient way to predict protein structure and sample folding processes (although I got 3-4 excellent papers from it).
The idea is great, it was a wonderful narrative to run my life for a while, but eventually, the more I learned, the more impractical using full atomistic simulations seem for solving any problem. It seems more likely we can train far more efficient networks that encapsulate all the salient rules of folding in a much smaller space, and use far less CPU time to produce useful results.
Yeah, I think the idea of Laplace's Demon is mostly just useful to make a philosophical argument about whether or not the universe is deterministic, and it's implication on free will.
I dunno, I wonder what Laplace would have made of the argument over the meaning of wavefunction collapse. It took me a very long time to come to terms with the idea of a non-deterministic universe.
That's peculiar. Most people probably struggle more with the idea of a deterministic universe, as it'd leave no room for free will, which would make everything kind of meaningless.
I'm also more in the camp of "quantum effects making the universe non-determinstic." It's a nicer way to live.
I've evolved over the years from "determinism implies no free will" to roughly being a compatibilist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism, see also Daniel Dennett). I don't particularly spend much time thinking that (for example) a nondeterministic universe is required for free will. I do think from an objective sense the universe is "meaningless", but that as humans with agency we can make our own meaning.
However, most importantly, we simply have no experimental data around any of this for me to decide. Instead I enjoy my subjective life with apparent free will, regardless of how the machinery of the actual implementation works.
It’s interesting that many things are deterministic to human-relevant time/length scales. If the small stuff is non-deterministic, it’s interesting that large ensembles of them are quite deterministic.
Going further back to the 1600's, Descartes' idea of an evil demon deceiving one's mind with a perfect, fake reality made me think often of simulations in my undergrad philosophy classes
Looking at it from that view, we're just as likely to be a simulation as we are to have been created by God. I mean I'm a theist, but I don't see many huge differences except the cultural aspect where the theism/atheism debate is something most people have an emotional connection to.
It's a bit naive... But the best argument for me that we are living in a simulation is that we went from Pong to pretty good VR (good enough that if you have a beer or two before using you can forget its VR for some period of time) in 50 years. In another 50 years it seems fair to assume that we will be able to create VR that fully immersive and impossible to distinguish from real life.
Even with no other arguments about the benefits of WHY one would want to live in a fully simulated world... It seems probable to me that we are based on the idea that it could be possible.
If you want to solve that nagging thought, pick up Griffith‘s intro to quantum mechanics textbook. Goes through the philosophical implications of qm alongside learning the physics. The world as we know it is non-deterministic thanks to wave functions and their random collapsing!
To be honest, like 30y later, I still go back to that nagging thought _a lot_.