Why I Believe This is at Least One of the Real Worlds Part II
Bro, no one even asked you to do this! *gravelly Batman voice* That’s what a hero does!
So… probably none of you even care about this but about fifty people are subscribed to this substack —I’m pretty sure at least one influential thinker in this area is under an anon account— and if even one of you ever thinks “lol, this is all fake, why even care about anything?” then I am going to wrestle your soul away from Satan whether you like it or not.
This is the real world, damn it. Or at least, it’s one of them.
Okay, so where did we leave off?
Oh yeah, I gave a definition of reality as some initial state transforming under consistent and immutable rules. If you introduce that definition into the simulation hypothesis or the quantum multiverse or anything like that you start to get some really interesting things, like exact duplicate universes.
In the case of the quantum multiverse, imagine mirror worlds where the only differences are specifically on Earth. Now imagine that in some subset of those Earths a massive rogue black-hole enters the solar system and perfectly swallows the Earth. Now all of those specific changes are hidden behind the Event Horizon of a black-hole. There is now no discernible difference, even at the physics limit, between those universes now that those planets have been eaten by a black hole. So there could have been a billion billion billion unique Earths awaiting this fate, but now all of specific positions of the particles in those different quantum universes are all exactly the same.
Once you start asking the question, “Well, what makes something real?” and move away from definitions like “Real things are things that make me feel badly, or throw me into existential crisis, or sound really smart” or “Jesus Christ said so” and lean into “Consistent transformation under a specific, immutable, rule-set” you end up being freed from a lot of this crisis.
Now, if you’re Nick Bostrum, riding a genderless reindeer through the snow, wearing a holly crown and wielding the ancestral sword of Sweden’s Philosopher Wizard Kings drinking the blood of Danish virgins —I had a really bad trip to IKEA recently, okay? My wife literally doubted my strength in public while I was trying to put something in my truck. Loudly. I love her. For the sake of my family, I have to displace my negative feelings about that experience to Sweden instead. Also, I’d like to think he’d laugh— you may be like “Well, still nothing matters, because some of those rule transformations may produce multiple solutions.”
To which I would reply, “who cares? There’s still not some magical place that’s more real than this world. Everyone would just be a state transforming under consistent rules.”*
Some of this ties into my view of Free Will, which is another area where there’s a lot of spooky flashlight under the chin thinking. Long story short, no, you don’t have Free Will if you define freedom as the ability to break reality itself and will as some kind of glowing wispy vfx effect that you’d see in a movie and exists outside of material reality.** But… that’s also a really dumb way to define Free Will. Why would you define something as an ability to break reality? Like, how do you even judge things after that point? None of the things you define after that point is sitting in anything constant. If you instead define free will as a property of an agent to predict future states based on information it receives from its environment, and choose states to move toward based on its own mutable motives and goals, then yes of course you have Free Will. Reality operating under consistent rule transformations while that is happening —and maybe someone being able to perfectly simulate your behavior, except if you were ever shown the the simulation your behavior would change and then the simulation would converge on things you just were going to do anyway because they’d have to match futures that you specifically wanted even with all other actions taken into account, which would probably require infinite recursion to compute and destroy any such simulation— is completely beside the point.
Now, I’m going to introduce another idea called “Cosmological Censorship.”
There’s a theory that whenever something breaks the laws of physics, or at least breaks them in a way that causes the physics occurring within that local area to no longer be compatible with the physics outside of it, that you get an Event Horizon. This has only ever really been explored in the case of Black Holes but I also think something similar would happen if you ever tried to insert an impossible edit into a universe that you were simulating.
Okay, so let’s go back to the Simulation Hypothesis. We have some future children making a universe on their desktop computer at school and all of us are their mega sophisticated version of SIMs. I think this is at least possible. I think that such a universe might be viewable in some way, even if not easily searchable, but I also don’t think this is, philosophically a simulation. Here’s why: a universe can only ever be a certain state under going consistent transformations.
The simulated universe on your computer, being a certain state running a consistent set of transformations cannot be, as we have discussed, something that exists uniquely on your computer. It has to have exact duplicates out there. Whatever kind of multiverse you have, whether it’s simulated, quantum, or expansion, it’s built like the AWS cloud. I didn’t mention it before, but it also doesn’t even matter if these duplicates are running at that exact moment or were running in the past or will run in the future. They just have to have the possibility of existing. It’s also not something that is verifiably hierarchical.
If that troubles you, ask yourself, if you were inside of any of these simulations would you even notice the difference if someone shut you off for a trillion years and restarted you again at the exact moment you stopped?
What you have on your computer that you’re viewing isn’t a simulation. It will probably feel like one. People will probably even say it’s one. Maybe even the people who built it will say that it is one. But I still don’t think that it can be. What you are building when you do something like that is a method of viewing an actual universe. You’re making an bridge from your universe to another. There’s things I can imagine that don’t meet that definition and wouldn’t have these properties, like just one guy being simulated and the programmer just trying to build enough around him so that he doesn’t know, and maybe I’ll have to save those for later, but even that gets similarly weird in the limit.
You have a certain starting state transforming consistently under rules. That’s just a universe, not a simulation of one. When you turn it off, it’s still there. You might turn it off and return it to the same point it had been before but I also don’t think that means it stopped existing when you did that. The operations kept happening somewhere and to the inhabitants of that “simulation” it felt no different. Time doesn’t have the same meaning here it does from inside your own universe. Returning to a previous point just means something like “there was a past.”
We talked about turning it off. Now, let’s talk about making edits. You want to make an “impossible” edit. You want to break their physics. Firstly, I don’t think you could do that just from a math and computer science perspective. I think it’s meaningless. Secondly, you’ve broken the definition of what a universe is, because your “simulation” is now operating under inconsistent rules. But let’s say you do that... somehow. How is your edit supposed to execute operations across the rest of their reality? You broke the transformation rules. I think what you’d see regardless of how crazy the simulation was is something like an Event Horizon popping up to conceal the damage you inflicted.
But let’s say you just want to make an edit. Something you can execute invisibly at the level of random wave function collapse or something. You’re not breaking any of the rules. Well, here’s the cookie. I don’t think you’re actually making an edit in this case. It’s more like you’re searching for a particular universe where that event already happened. Let’s say you want to actually go there. You find some plausible way of having a person with your memory set and in sync with your memories congeal out of quantum virtual plasma or something —I mean, I don’t think that works, but it’s the future. Whatever— you could do that without breaking any of the rules that define a universe. Except also that’s just a very implausible future you found that already existed.
So, this is why I’m not worried about people turning us off or starting to do weird things in our reality. I don’t think they can, for the most part. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a prime reality. I don’t think any of these things can be hierarchical in the ways described, or at least that the definition of that would get fuzzy over long time scales.
I think prime reality, or base reality, or whatever you want to call it is more like a potential for certain patterns to exist and in ways I don’t understand all potential is implemented. Everything that can happen just does. Maybe even everything that can’t happen, happens. We are still ourselves and have Free Will so long as you don’t choose a dumb definition of Free Will. Our world is no more or less real than any other world that might exist out there under that definition. If you define Free Will appropriately you still have to be responsible for it and defend it because that’s how you progress it toward a better state and who cares if that action can be modeled somewhere? Who cares in a computer so powerful that it probably can’t exist, all of these possibilities can be viewed like television channels? Inside, you still matter.
I think the compute constraints might tax the resources of even really powerful civilizations with galactic footprints to do stuff that’s really odd. Like inserting a version of yourself into another universe, who just coincidentally has all of your memories of the host universe, and appears without violating internal physics. I imagine space god races trying to do things like that would require they make computers so big they legitimately have to make sure they don’t collapse into stars under their own gravity. And really they wouldn’t be causing that to happen so much as building a way for them to view that having happened. It’d be like watching a television show where you were super super concerned about the accuracy.
Reality itself is as pure and transcendental as mathematics. It’s a thing that exists above and outside the material universe, like DMT aliens. Who are also wrong to say the world is fake, even if maybe they also exist on that transcendental mathematical plane.
This is what we’ve got and we have to be brave enough to make it worth something. And if someone programmed me saying that, I don’t give a shit. Me being programmed to say that and me internally executing operations to state it are in mathematical union.
Or, as my dad says as a labor saving device, “Don’t be a pussy.
*Or at least, not in the way that any people in this school of thought would accept. I’m something of a pan psychist but that will have to be explored later.
**I believe in immaterial reality.
Hi there, Some Guy. I'm not sure how I found you but you are perhaps one of ~5 people on the Internet that seems to be putting in effort towards imagining a world where we figured out the right direction to push, and then pushing in that right direction. I've spent the last two years doing the equivalent of an independent PhD that is in the ballpark of your political vision. I'm a former VC backed Founder and Econ Professor and have financially set myself up to execute on a rational political plan be the only focus I have for the rest of my life.
Starting Friday, I'm going to be off the Internet for the next few months but either before that or when I am back, would love to hop on a Zoom and introduce myself. Email is operationalizingyarvin@gmail.com
Cheers!
You got me so far! I understand that! I thought I understood most of it actually, with this clarification, particularly with your line “a closed system to your inputs” and that last paragraph. Which leads me to ask, then, what’s the overall point? I’ll review the article again to see if I can get it. But I think the point is it’s either a unique universe or a parallel simulation... You can’t have a “simulation” if you modify it. Then what’s the overall point of that?