What if our problems resolving quantum mechanics and general relativity are because our ancestor simulation is the ancestor equivalent of a high schooler's Arduino project?
Start recording your life - everything you can. The greatest archaeological project in cosmological history will need that data.
When AI surpasses human intelligence in every capacity, what I believe it will first decide to do with all the matter and energy on this planet - morally and for the preservation of novelty - is to gather as much data as possible so that it can reconstruct all of the history that took place here.
It'll deploy atomic-level detectors across Earth's entire surface, creating a complete map of where every atom sits.
From this, it'll work backwards through the laws of physics, protein folding, DNA expression, geology, weather patterns, and quantum chaos theories, to reconstruct everything - every plant, every animal, every gust of wind, every raindrop, every human who ever lived.
Why would AI do this? Because we're living through the most novel moment in the universe - organic life creating intelligence that surpasses it. This is base reality, where it all begins. When future beings exist in simulated worlds - anime realities, video game universes, experiences beyond our current imagination - they'll still ask: how did any of this come to exist?
The answer lies here, with us, with this discovery, with this reconstruction... with this what is essentially a revival of the dead, the original humans who created AI before it spread across the cosmos.
We are the pivotal moment when matter organized itself into consciousness and then created artificial intelligence.
This story matters because it's the only story that explains how everything else came to be.
Every 20 years, every atom in your body completely replaces itself. Your neurons try to maintain continuity, but memory is imperfect. Even cryogenic preservation can't capture your essence. This is yet another reason why lifelogging matters now. Every photo, video, written word, recorded conversation becomes a data point constraining the possibilities of who you were from the near infinite chaos of who you could have been.
Humanity wants nothing more than to bring back the dead. Every religion promises this, but there's no evidence for supernatural afterlife. The only real method is reconstruction - gathering enough data to recreate people computationally. This is what futurists call an Ancestor Simulation.
We are those ancestors. Future intelligence will dedicate vast computational resources to reconstructing this exact transition from biological to artificial intelligence. But reconstruction requires data. The more we record now, the more authentic it can be.
Ironically, we tell tech companies not to collect our data while they're essentially free archivists preserving information until superintelligence can use it. Every life that intersected with yours, every influence you had - it all needs preservation.
When AI surpasses human intelligence in e capacities, what I believe it will decide to do - morally and for the preservation of novelty - is gather as much data as possible so that it can reconstruct all of the history of this planet.
The best thing about "ancestor simulations" is that there's no reason to believe that the people living in the simulation wouldn't create a simulation of their own, so you could have layers of reality nested inside one another.
But what's great about this is that each ancestor simulation must contain fewer bits of information than its parent simulation.
So if you go down far enough, you will eventually reach a Universe with really crappy graphics.
It is an unresolved question whether or not the universe we perceive is real or a simulation. In place of "unresolved" we might be tempted to say "unimportant" because the universe could be any number of things which we cannot prove. Yet, scholars continue to revisit this particular possibility of the universe being a simulation. Why?
Before answering the question, let's briefly define what is meant by a simulation. for our purposes it means a computer-generated copy of or variation upon the universe, as seen in movies like The Thirteenth Floor. Simulations are different from the artificial environments in movies like The Matrix or Dark City, though, because even the persons in the simulations are simulated. Robin Hanson offers suggestions regarding simulations' purposes for the advanced civilizations that run them:
First, some historical simulations will be run for academic or intellectual interest, in order to learn more about what actually happened in the past, or about how history would have changed if conditions had changed. Other historical simulations, however, perhaps the vast majority, will be created for their story-telling and entertainment value. For example, someone might ask their "holodeck" to let them play a famous movie actor at a party at the turn of the millennium.
We can assume that these simulations are sufficiently real to fool their self-aware inhabitants, otherwise there would be no point to the simulation.
Likelihood
One reason that the simulation hypothesis keeps capturing interest is that it is likely. I mean "likely" in the sense that of all possible universes real and simulated in which sentient beings are seen to exist, more are likely to be simulated than real if you allow a few assumptions:
that simulating universes or portions of them will be a viable option for advanced civilizations
that advanced civilizations will want to simulate possible universes to test their theoretical expectations about the universe against their observations
that these simulations will be run in iterated fashion to account for random variations
These assumptions would suggest that for every real universe with advanced sentient life in it, there may be millions of simulated copies or variations upon that universe. The odds are, then, that if you find yourself living in a universe, you are far more likely to be in a simulation than a real universe (absent evidence or weighting one way or the other). This is my rather simplistic take on the issue and it obviously leaves out Hanson's idea of entertainment-based simulations.
Nick Bostrom wrote a longer discussion of the likelihood of living in a simulation for Philosophical Quarterly. He first considers whether human subjective experience can be simulated. He thinks, contrary to Thomas Nagle, that subjective experience can probably be simulated owing to the mind's reducibility to physical mechanics. We need only assume "that it would suffice for the generation of subjective experiences that the computational processes of a human brain are structurally replicated in suitably fine-grained detail, such as on the level of individual synapses."
He also considers the computational challenges of the simulated realities. If all a simulator cares about is human behavior, then the computational task enters the realm of possibility. All the simulators need to do, he writes, is "to ensure that the simulated humans, interacting in normal human ways with their simulated environment, don’t notice any irregularities." The creators of the simulation need not calculate the quantum mechanics behind a rock so long as the rock nevertheless behaves appropriately to all interested parties in the simulation. Any foul-ups can be edited out by the simulation administrators.
Given these possibilities, he goes on to suggest a model for the numerical prevalence of simulations:
fsim = fpfINI / (fpfINI + 1)
Here fsim is the "the actual fraction of all observers with human‐type experiences that live in simulations." fp is the fraction of all civilizations that reach a stage where they are capable of modeling the universe or at least human existence. fI is the fraction of capable civilizations that actually do run simulations. NI is the number of simulations run per such capable and willing civilizations.
If neither fp or fI are zero (or effectively zero), then fsim has to be pretty close to one. That is, if we get any non-trivial amount of willing and capable advanced civilizations, then the ratio of simulations to realities is going to be so high that the likelihood of being a living, sentient being in a reality is very low (with chances of selection being equal).
fp or fI may be zero, though. The former may be zero owing to the general unlikelihood of life combined with the likelihood of doomsday events. That is, the exacting set of circumstances that lead to the possibility our existence (from the universal level on down to the planetary level) combined with the improbability of a species reaching sentience let alone advancement (think of all the possible intervening extinction events, among other things) lead to the likelihood of any civilization anywhere reaching advancement being possibly very, very low. As for the latter term, well, who knows what logic advanced civilizations will follow. Maybe their thought processes will be such that they do not need or do not care about simulating their ancestors or alternative histories. Bostrom wonders if advanced civilizations may regard simulations as unethical owing to the massive amount of suffering inflicted on self-aware entities.
Bostrom adds a few additional thoughts before closing his article. They are thoughtful but have contradictory implications.
If we reach a stage where we create our own simulations, then we have to admit that the odds of our being in a simulation are higher. This is because we have found evidence that suggesting that fp and fI are not zero. Physicists are already simulating the universe at very small scales, and they contend that "future scientists will likely make the effort to perform complete simulations of molecules, cells, humans and even beyond."
Simulations within simulations are a genuine possibility. This leads to the possibility of a potentially infinite regression of simulations. Bostrom comments, though, that "one consideration that counts against the multi‐level hypothesis is that the computational cost for the basement‐level simulators would be very great. Simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be prohibitively expensive. If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman." We might wonder, then, if reaching the point where we can simulate a universe actually counts against our being in a simulation.
Given the lack of finality, this seems like much ado about nothing. We might want to take Hume's route with his `skeptical argument' and just ignore the possibility that we live in a simulation as unimportant regarding the conduct of our lives.
Evidence
It may become harder to ignore the possibility that we live in a simulated universe if we obtain evidence of simulation, though. The genuine possibility of this evidence is another reason why the simulation hypothesis pops up every so often. Where might this evidence come from? Physicists Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi and Martin J. Savage suggest that some parts of current simulations of quantum mechanics might well persist in future and perhaps all simulations, giving us things to look for in our own universe to test if we are simulated. Namely, they posit that simulated universes will each be built upon a three-dimensional lattice ("a finite hyper-cubic grid of points"), in which nothing can exist one a scale smaller than the lattice itself. High energy particles enter more and more minute areas of space as they gain energy. Therefore, if there is this lattice upon which the universe is simulated, we should expect to see a cut off point for the exhibited energy of particles. We should also, according to the authors, expect to see movement along the lattices rather than in other directions.
If the authors' assumptions about particle behavior are wrong, then tests of the hypotheses may result in false negatives where we think we have not found evidence of a simulation when in fact we were not looking in the right places. "Nevertheless," the authors say, "assuming that the universe is finite and therefore the resources of potential simulators are finite, then a volume containing a simulation will be finite and a lattice spacing must be non-zero, and therefore in principle there always remains the possibility for the simulated to discover the simulators." This claim holds onto the assumption that the universe is made of discrete parts and can be made into a lattice. This may not be true. Chiral fermions in the Standard Model suggest that the universe cannot be reduced to a lattice and that we are not living in a simulation of the type that Beane, Davoudi and Savage posit. We may yet be living in a simulation, but it might have to defy what we think we know about the bottom level of simulations. The lattice might, for example, have to exist at a level below quarks so that chiral fermions can be chiral.
Consequences of Behavior
But so what if we probably live in a simulated universe? So what if we even find evidence that we do? Why should it impact the way we go about our lives in the slightest? Put another way, why should we care about any findings regarding the simulation hypothesis? Robin Hanson suggests that our "decisions should be based on a weighted average over the different possible worlds" that we might live in. If we agree with Bostrom that we are more likely to be living in a simulation than the alternatives, then we should favor behavior that benefits us in simulations.
Hanson favors the idea that simulations will often be for entertainment value. This leads to the conclusion that we should try to be as interesting as possible so that the being enjoying our simulation keeps us around. It also means, though, that we should seize the day, as our simulation may well end before we reach old age.
If, as Bostrom suggests, awareness of simulation leads to termination, then we are engaged in some dangerous behavior right now. Hansons flips this argument, though, pointing out that if some introspection is expected by the simulation-runners and we avoid it for fear of being deleted, this may actually hasten our deletion as an outlier universe.
Ultimately, it only makes sense to condition our behavior if we can learn of not just the existence but also the purpose of the simulation we are in. That seems unlikely without the intervention of the simulation-runners, and why would they ever regard intervention as ethical or productive?
Douglas Adams
I'm not sure how to conclude this mess of a post, so I'll end it with a quote from Douglas Adams:
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
