03. THE SIMULATION

EVA KELLEY: Hello!

JOHN HOLTEN: Hey Eva.

EK: Hi John.

JH: How did you sleep last night?

EK: Good! Though I woke up super early.

JH: Are you so excited to hear the new episode?

EK: Our much-beloved editor and sound engineer David already sent it over. Let’s listen to it.



JH: Hi Eva! EK: Hi John! JH: How did you sleep last night? EK: Good. Although I had the craziest dream. JH: Oh yeah, like a nightmare? EK: Why would you say that? It depends how you look at it. I dreamed an entire episode of the podcast. So … it could go either way. It started out like always.

JH: Hi Eva.

EK: Hi John.

JH: How did you sleep last night?

EK: Good, good, yeah, though I didn’t sleep much.

JH: Oh no? Why, how come, you woke up?

EK: I just couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that the night sky is just an elaborate curtain put there by aliens blocking out the party everyone else in the galaxy is enjoying.

JH: Oh.

JINGLE

JH: Do you remember the dream scenario we were talking about with aliens having actually come here already? They actually just haven’t let us know that they’ve come, and they’ve built this elaborate curtain in the night sky, so when we look at it, it looks and sounds empty, but in fact, it’s teeming with life.

EK: This is something Josh Tan and I talked about as well. We’ve already heard from Josh a few times throughout this podcast, because he is just so good and has something to say about everything. He is doing his Ph.D. in computer science. When I met him at Harvard a while ago, he said this:

JOSHUA TAN:

I know there is a paper somewhere in the universe, or in the archive, that talks about the idea that if this technology were possible, because some sufficiently advanced civilization could develop simulations that could recreate the universe, then it is very likely that maybe they are making a bunch of these, and it is very likely we are in living in one of them rather than in »the real universe«. Maybe that’s true?

JH: What is this paper Josh is talking about, I hear you all ask. Today’s episode opens in 2003 with the publication of a certain paper by Nick Bostrom titled »Are we living in a computer simulation?«

EK: Bostrom’s paper posits three possibilities about the future: 1) humans go extinct before we could run such a powerful simulation; 2) humans choose not to run simulations for ethical reasons, or perhaps because it will be super boring or time-consuming; 3) we’re living in a simulation.

JH: This paper has gone on to set the debate, and here is Bostrom himself speaking on that paper during an interview held at Oxford University.

NICK BOSTROM CLIP: »There is this article I published back in 2003 presenting the Simulation Argument. This is an argument that tries to show that at least one of three propositions is true, although it doesn’t tell us which one. The three propositions in question are, first, almost all civilizations at our stage of technological development go extinct before they reach technological maturity. A second possibility is a very strong convergence among all technologically mature civilizations in that they all lose interest in creating ancestor simulations, as I call them. These would be very detailed computer simulations of people like their historical forebears, detailed enough that the simulated people in the simulations would be conscious. So the second possibility is that they’d just lose interest in doing this. And the third possibility is that we’re almost certainly living in a simulation.«

JH: What’s the big deal about Bostrom’s paper? You could say it has gone on to set the debate. It has updated an age-old philosophical question mainly about our ability to truly understand reality, and perhaps even what knowledge itself is. This question permeates our collective imagination and culture, and it comes up all the time.

EK: The Simulation Argument is different however, because it doesn’t start from a position of doubt.

JH: Like the classic Cartesian reasonable doubt.

EK: It starts by assuming that everything is as it seems, so that this is reality, and there is no simulation. It’s future-oriented – no simulation yet. It asks, based on the here and now, what we will end up with in the future. One household name, and one of my personal favorite household names, who has helped take this mainstream is Elon Musk.

JH: Your favorite household name, Elon Musk?

EK: One of my favorite household names, yeah. I’m always interested to hear what he has to say.

JH: Ok, because he has another crackpot idea or a breakdown moment. Well, I guess going out with Grimes isn’t a breakdown moment.

EK: Wow. John!

JH: Smoking a joint on camera, that was pretty hard on his shares options.

EK: I wouldn’t classify that as a breakdown.

JH: No, but for some people, it was considered bad for the Tesla image because it was a bit off the rails.

EK: But first of all, his name. Elon Musk.

JH: It sounds like a perfume.

EK: It does. Like an alien perfume. I feel like he has sort of extracted himself from the rest of society. He operates on, not above anyone else, but on another level from the rest of society which is fascinating to me.

JH: So this is the same Elon Musk who has made a fortune from Paypal and other enterprises, runs SpaceX and Tesla, and generally seems to live on a whole other plane of existence. He paints quite an accessible picture of the question at hand.

EK: His argument makes complete sense to me.

ELON MUSK CLIP: »The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation is the following: Forty years ago we had Pong, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, forty years later, we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just instinctual. Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now. Let’s imagine, ten thousand years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale. Given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and these games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC, and there would probably be billions of such devices, it would seem to follow that the odds we’re in base reality is one in a billion.«

EK: Doesn’t that make sense?

JH: I guess it does. It is a very large probability argument, and therefore a bit hypothetical. A little while back, I met Professor Stefan Sorgner, an interesting philosopher at the John Cabot University in Rome who is into the whole transhumanist and posthumanist thing. He is quite a character, very tall with long flowing shoulder-length hair, and has read lots of Friedrich Nietzsche, it seems. We talked about a lot of stuff, but one thing which did come up is this exact idea of Elon Musk’s take on Bostrom’s paper. He wasn’t that impressed, actually. As he’d just put out a book the week before, Schöner Neuer Mensch, which means beautiful new human, it was still fresh for him, so he summarized it. We were in a busy cafe in West-Berlin, and we were getting pretty caffeinated. Let’s have a listen to his takedown of Musk’s argument.

STEFAN SORGNER:



Elon Musk’s idea is to look back in time. Fifty years ago we had Pong, a very simple computer game that was high-end computer graphics during the seventies. Now we have photorealistic computer games. Given the speed of development, even if it is slowed down, in another fifty years time, what can we expect? Now we can expect to be unable to distinguish simulated worlds from the real worlds we live in right now. What does that mean, what does that imply? What are the necessary prerequisites for that? And then, as a further step, he even says: If this is the case, then it could be that we are already living in a simulated world. If he is asked what he thinks, he says: There is one in a billion chance that we are living in a computer simulation. How can that make sense? The basic logic is the following: if the speed of Moore’s law applies –

JH: Moore’s law is important, so we should just jump in here to say quickly that it’s named after Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Processors, after he stated that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years while the costs are halved. It’s why computers and phones and all these gadgets have gotten smaller, faster, and cheaper year in year out, although physics is catching up with it, so some say, it has run its course, they just can’t get any smaller.

STEFAN SORGNER In fifty years’ time, we will probably be able to simulate the base reality as it is. What would still have to apply is that, firstly, we still need to continue to exist. That is important. If we were extinct, then we could not continue to live. Secondly, we would have to have an interest in simulating the past, if we, like scientists, want to find something out about the past, want to understand better where things have gone wrong, how we can influence the world. So people need to have an interest in simulating the past. The third important step is, it needs to be possible for humans to be part of a computer simulation. That third premise is a very problematic one. Because being part of a computer simulation means that your personality is a software which can be integrated into the computer game. This is what I find highly implausible and I can give you reasons for why I think this is problematic. Firstly, to reconstruct the argument, in fifty years’ time, there are a billion people, or a billion computer simulations. Each of the simulations runs a history of the world. In each of them, it is the year 2018, November 30, and there are two people sitting in a coffee place in the center of Berlin talking about computer simulations. With all the various circumstances happening as they are, we could not distinguish the simulated world from the base reality we think we are in right now. Why should we think that it is very likely that we are already living in a computer simulation? Because, if it is the case that this can be developed eventually, and we have a billion simulations running, then in each of the billion simulations, this is occurring: us sitting here could not distinguish base reality from any simulated world. What is the likelihood that we right now are sitting in the real reality, in the base reality? If there are a billion computer simulations running, and in each of them the same thing occurs, the chances that we are in the only base reality is one in a billion. That is the basic logic which is running.

JH: That’s a lot of numbers. Or you could just say, it’s a very, very, very small chance that we live in a simulation.

EK: I’m leaning toward Elon’s theory though.

JH: Actually, it’s Nick Bostrom’s theory, Musk just appropriated it.

EK: It’s a bit scary, but in the end, does it even matter if reality is a simulation or not?

JH: That’s why it’s an interesting thought experiment to have. It raises questions of free will and determinism. If we were in fact inside a simulation and knew it, would this change anything at all? It would just give us a better understanding. We would see things as they »truly are«. But that’s about it. My mother would still be disappointed if I took to a life of crime, so I wouldn’t – I wouldn’t want to upset my mom.

EK: Never. But you wonder: What even is a simulation exactly? How is the world represented in maths or code? I asked Josh Tan about this.

EK: What would it mean to simulate the world – what is a simulation?

JOSHUA TAN:



What is a simulation. That is a good question. I think about it in a slightly weird way. Before talking about simulations, you might ask, what is a mathematical model, or a model, in general? It is a description of the world, usually in a technical or mathematical language. That doesn’t really matter. It’s a model of something out there, a description. A database has a model. It’s a description of something in the world. An economics model – just simple models of GDP or money supply, that is a model. It is a static description of what is going on in the world. And similarly, when we talk about simulations, we usually mean it in the sense of something describing something outside in the world.

EK: Outside of reality?

JH: Outside in the world, in the real world. The simulation is a description. It’s trying to describe something. So the simulation, like the model, is something outside of reality.

I think of a simulation as a collection of models that are arranged together in a very nice way. The easy way to think about it: at this time period, I have a description of this world. I go one second forward, I have a new description of the world. I go another step forward, a new description of the world. That is what a simulation is. I have a description of the world here, that is what the simulation looks like. I might look at a game like SEED or RimWorld, and I am able to pause my game and say, this is what the game looks like right now. This is the state of the world. Press play, and the little people will do their thing, dwarfs will mine things, people will farm. Pause it again, and – oh it is a new world. It is a new description of what is going on inside that world. That is what we typically regard as a computer simulation.

EK: When I think of a simulation, I think of the Matrix. That is as far as my imagination goes.

JOSHUA TAN:



The Matrix is also this. Think about a movie. When you roll out the movie into tape, each little frame is a picture. A movie is a set of pictures that are ordered in a very nice way. A simulation is a set of models which are ordered in time. And a model can be anything you want. It can be really complicated things like a video game, but it could also be extremely simple things. These simple things are what you actually work with when you are a scientist. Trying to come up with fairly simple models of the world and run these forward in time.

EK: How do maths and algorithms mirror or simulate the world?

JOSHUA TAN:



That is a really good question, because it’s unclear. The usual way maths and algorithms simulate something is you first take that maths and translate it into a set of computer instructions, put that into the computer, and tell the computer: do this. The computer just does it, and that is your simulation, translating a mathematical concept into a piece of code. That is what that simulation actually is.

EK: So, for example, in gaming, the coding would be the math that creates the simulations?

JOSHUA TAN:



The code is just the code, more the game in a game. It is more that somebody understands: this is what the game should be doing. I have an idea of what the game should feel like, I have a sense that when I press this button, this thing should explode, but when I press that button, the man on the screen should throw a grenade and should go forward this far. And someone then puts that into code. That code is then an object in the simulation.

EK: What would be more examples of maths systems doing this?

JOSHUA TAN:



Let’s go off the deep end. CERN is a big experiment that is trying to replicate the conditions at the very, very beginning of the universe – fancy way of talking about it. But there are also lots of physics simulations that try to simulate from the ground up, from primary elements, what the universe looked like at its very moment of creation. These are simulations which are based on very complicated maths. That is one example. There are also examples, which I hesitate to call math, of economics models (I hope economists don’t hate me for this). When I look at the models, I cannot tell where the math is. Surely, it must be in there, somewhere, but it is just a bunch of code with a bunch of assumptions – twenty different numbers, and you do not know where they came from, they just magically appear in this document. They get put into a model, for example of households, the rental market, and the land market in the UK. It’s a whole-country simulation of all the renting, purchasing, and moving in together. It’s really cool. A micro level, fine-grained simulation of things going on in the UK. It is there to help you make predictions about: oh, maybe if I increase taxes this much, what would happen? That is another kind of simulation.

EK: But you don’t see the math in that?

JOSHUA TAN:



I do not necessarily regard it as math. Kind of in the same way that there are people who write novels, that is a great thing, and then there are people who write about novels, that is also a great thing. The thing I call math is like the critic. It is the thing talking about something universal or abstract, or analyzing a piece of the universe, rather than trying to recreate it or construct it.

EK: And the novel is …

JOSHUA TAN:



The novel is like economics in this case. Or things that are quantitative.

EK: What do you think of Elon Musk saying that there is a one in a billion chance that we are not living in a simulation?

JOSHUA TAN:



I do not think it is a very interesting proposition. And also I think it is kind of disrespectful to the real world.

JH: Let’s go back to Stefan Sorgner. He also seemed to think that Musk’s and Bostrom’s thinking was… a little superfluous.

STEFAN SORGNER:



It’s not about implanting and integrating the computer into the human body, but rather the other way around. Putting the human person onto a hard drive. That is where the simulation argument comes in, and I am very critical of that. This is just a way of Elon Musk and his friends from Oxford of getting into the media. It is highly overrated. I am not personally excluding the possibility, but I would compare the debate of the simulation argument to a discourse which took place in the Middle Ages when they discussed how many angels fit onto the head of a needle. Of course, from the basis of the cultural paradigm present in the Middle Ages, that was a sensible debate. In the same way, given our current cultural framework, it makes sense to talk about the possibility of mind-uploading. I can reconstruct the arguments leading to the simulation argument which originated in Oxford. However, the premises are highly dubitable. It makes sense, obviously. This is a very probabilistic calculation taking that argument seriously. So it can be rationally reconstructed. Now, I am not saying, it is a stupid argument. But a stupid argument does not have to be a good or plausible argument. It is fun to engage with in the same way as it is fun to engage with how many angels fit onto the head of a needle pin. It is a very intellectual challenge like an intellectual game. But is it actually the case that we can – and that is the tricky challenge – continue to exist, getting uploaded into a computer game? That we can be simulated in an identical manner? Why do we have a reason that life can continue to exist on a silicon basis? So far, all life which is known is carbonate-based. This is one of the necessary prerequisites for us to be part of a simulated world. We do not know any life form which exists on a silicon base. Even this does not exist. But we would not only have to continue to be alive on a silicon base, we would also have to be conscious, self-conscious within a computer game – come on! I cannot even conceptualize what it means to be a silicon-based self-conscious being. We do not have any reason whatsoever to believe that this is the case. Ray Kurzweil thinks we can realize it within thirty years time. I am sorry, so far we have realized very specialized artificial intelligence. Ar the end of the nineties, a specialized AI was beating us in chess. Then we have had a specialized AI beating us in Jeopardy. Now we have Go as a next step, even using deep learning, a much more complex process. We would have to have realized the self-conscious AI. Come on! There is no reason to believe that is possible. We do not have any reason to have even a living being on a silicon basis. And in thirty years we should have uploaded minds? That is science fiction. That is as relevant to our discourses today as it is to talk about how many angels fit onto the head of a needle. That is the only reason they are doing the discourse, and they are doing it in a fine way. Probably to get us talking about some interesting stuff in contrast to them getting the power. And it is a very good way of getting people talking about very intellectual fun games in order to get into the media.

EK: Wait, but what is the point of this argument?

JH: I guess there is some stuff in physics the Simulation Argument can be used for. To explain some stuff such as the idea that space and time show up as being a little grainy, which it shouldn’t be?

EK: Why shouldn’t it be grainy?

JH: If you think of a photo, you zoom in far enough, and you soon get to the pixels. When physicists look at reality and zoom in, they get to the scale of quantum mechanics, beyond classical physics. Something called the Planck Length doesn’t appear to be all that smooth or as smooth as it should be.

EK: So the picture is classical physics, and the pixels are the quantum effects?

JH: I think so. In short, there are still things that physics can’t explain, that we don’t know about the universe. These could hypothetically be glitches in the simulation running.

EK: Or I guess it could be… god?

JH: Yeah, right. Back to the original point: it could be god, or some super smart alien friends who are just keeping us happy in our cage.

EK: The alien baby’s toy zoo!

JH: In the end, it’s just an argument. You can take it or leave it. It’s a question of belief whether it’s comforting or not that we might be living in a big simulation. I think there is a bit of comfort to be found in it, even if it’s just as a metaphor. And it’s an old metaphor going back to ancient Greeks and Plato’s cave, and in general, how we tell made up stories and share our dreams with other people.

EK: If we did in fact find out we were in a simulation, would we fight back? Could we even take control, like in the Matrix? Can we bend reality to whatever we want it to be?

STEFAN SORGNER: Why do we have a reason that life can continue to exist on a silicon basis? So far, all life which is known is carbonate-based. This is one of the necessary prerequisites for us to be part of a simulated world.

JH: But he’s wrong! Hasn’t it been proven that we can put consciousness on silicon?

EK: Yeah, we’ve become posthuman. Or at least intelligence has. Now it’s time to go out and conquer space. Remember Timothy Leary’s SMI2LE from Episode #1?

JH: It’s really interesting for our podcast and what we’re looking at. The SM stands for Space Migration.

EK: The SM in SMILE.

JH: Yeah. Wow, what an episode. See you later, Eva.

EK: In a while, crocodile John.

JH: Consciousness on a chip, space migration? What the hell, you dreamed all of this? Far out dream.

EK: I’m not sure how much of it is a dream, though. People are working to make the mind an interface we can interact with.

JH: We should really go and meet them. They could help us on our journey.

EK: Meanwhile, it’s like Josh Tan knew I would dream this.

JOSHUA TAN:



A simulation is just a slightly fancy way of talking about dreams or imagined worlds, or all those adventures we used to have as kinds in the sandbox. There is this idea that we could have a world to our own, a Terrabithia or something like that. We could make it with our hands and we could see it, run it. I am sure other people will come with different flavors and different motivations. I think simulations, at least the essence of what is going on, are something that is very basic to how we behave as people.

EK: We’re human after all.

JH: Thank the non-existent gods –

//

JH: Wait, press pause here.

//

EK: Yes, we’re back to where you say, »far out dream«.

JH: … Far out dream.

EK: I’m not sure how much of it is a dream, though. People are working to make the mind an interface we can interact with –

//

JH: Wait, I need to press pause. This could basically be the intro to the next episode. There should be another reprise of Musk before the end credits.

EK: What if we go back to the argument one last time, but this time, he is saying it while smoking a joint on Joe Rogan.

JH: Yes, let me just bring up that clip. David sent it over.

ELON MUSK CLIP »Maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation. Because otherwise, either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.«

EK: The apocalypse ... where we always seem to end up.

JH: Remember to like and subscribe. You can email us at contact@thelifecyclepodcast.com. We’re always happy to hear from you. The Life Cycle podcast is produced by Klang, and it was written, hosted, and produced by Eva Kelley and myself, John Holten.

EK: This has also been produced by the one and only David Magnusson who also did the mix and sound engineering. Special thanks to Professor Stefan Sorgner, and Joshua Tan.

JH: And Theresa Kampmeier, thank you for your excellent transcription work. We’d like to thank our executive producer, Mundi Vondi, for having given us the opportunity to do this.

EK: This episode was recorded at Harvard University, MIT, a café in West Berlin, and the Klang headquarters in Berlin Kreuzberg.