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The Computational Requirements for the Matrix
goombah99 writes "Nick Bostrom discusses the computational requirements needed to simulate human existence. He offers a proof based on the anthropic principle, that you are almost certainly a computer simulation and not "real". The idea is that given that humans don't go extinct in geologically short time then eventually computer capability will allow complete simulation of the human cortex. Consequently, there must be far more simulations running in future millennia than seconds since you were born. Thus its astronomically more likely you are a simulation than real ... if humans don't go extinct shortly. Recalling the 13th floor, Robin Hanson discusses how one should try to live in a simulation. David Wolpert also weighs in on the physical limits of Turing machines for simulation of the universe. This also may explain why time travel seems impossible: we dont meet visitors from the future since only the present is being simulated."
i don't care if the entire universe is real, a computer simulation or an atom in a giant being.
hypothesise all you want, it doesn't change the fact that A is A and you have to go to work on monday. the last thing the current american society needs is a new kantian theory to overtake it.
i'm all about philosophy and learning as much as i can, but no matter what, existence exists. wish all you want, carrie anne-moss isn't going to magically appear, and your troubles won't disappear until you get off your ass.
Are you MORE than your SPINAL COLUMN?
For any religion that believes that we are placed here by a higher being, we essentially are living in a simulation. God created us and is now sitting back watching us run around.
One of the articles mentions ways to change one's behavior upon realization that it is all a simulation... sound familiar?
However, if everyone is a digital projection controlled by a computer program, then how is it the humans inside the matrix are capable of independent thought? Why isn't it like "Big Brother" in George Orwell's 1984, where the Thought Police were always watching for crimethink? Even if the computers' super-advanced AI engine could simulate thoughts *for* the human, and trick them into thinking they came up with it themselves, then why would the system allow a human to discover what is outside the Matrix? Is there a certain amount of "tolerance" built into the system? I guess that would explain the need for "agents."
Soo...this goes back to my initial inquiry -- where does the independent thought come from? Is it somehow hardwired to the person's brain through the matrix? If so, they need subconscious experiences (daydreams, nightmares, etc.) in order to have independent thought. So the Matrix must have had a certain level of tolerance built in.
But.... if the Matrix *was* built by a race of cruel machines designed to control humans, then why was the Matrix programmed the way it is? Are they torturing humans with a life they once knew, before AI came into play and destroyed that which they had?
All this makes me want to see "Revolutions." I hope they answer all these questions, like "Who Created The Matrix?" It's too human, too sympathetic to be built by cold, heartless machines. There is religion in the matrix, so someone had to program that in.
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O.K., aside from the rather schizoid posting, I clicked on the link and actually read some of this stuff. Why? Because it's 1:40 a.m. and I can't read any more real science without it leaking out of my ears. So, at the end of the article, filled with leaky logic and propositions that would get an undergraduate philosophy student in trouble, I get to this:
Another event that would let us conclude with a very high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach the point where we are about to switch on our own simulations. If we start running simulations, that would be very strong evidence against (1) and (2). That would leave us with only (3).
and I have to wonder.....this guy is a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford? Jeez, what are they paying these guys for? Pop culture derivative drivel about a movie whose sequel sucked?. This is like high school philosophy where you would sit around drinking beer in someones mom's basement saying "so, dude, how do we know if we are really here?" Please. I'm all for arts and liberal education, but let's work at thinking about things that can make a difference.
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the number of things that don't exist is vastly greater than the number of things that do. Therefore, statistically speaking, you don't exist. Any evidence to the contrary is just the product of your diseased, nonexistent, imagination.
(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours
(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation."
Obviously this last sentence is meant more to play up the conclusion that we are in a simulation. (2) is the most plausible; it is incomprehensible to me (though admitedly I may be of a lesser mind that those running the simulation) why greater beings would waste CPU time on mere humans.
In all seriousness, though, if we assume 2 to be true and 1 to be false, we can most certainly dismiss 3. And if we assume 1 to be true, where does that leave us?
"Let us consider the options in a little more detail. Possibility (1) is relatively straightforward. For example, maybe there is some highly dangerous technology that every sufficiently advanced civilization develops, and which then destroys them. Let us hope that this is not the case."
Of course most mutations die out. This is how evolution works. Obiously, we can assume that if evolution has gotten us this far, it is likely that it will have created similar intelligent beings and perhaps even more advanced than us (or we ourselves will acheive such a level of mental greatness).
This is a fun intellectual debate (and clearly meant to gain the limelight) but its a bit overblown, too, I think.
- you consider the world to be composed of things with surfaces and textures, yet in fact most of everything is interatomic space. Matter is a simulation.
- you consider yourself to be a being, complete and individual, yet you are built from trillions of cells each with a lifecycle, not to mention hosts of other organisms that cohabit your body, even your gene pool. Individuality is a simulation.
- you think you are reading this text, and yet it is just a sprinkling of letters and dots and random ideas. Language is a simulation, the Internet also.
- you believe you exist, and yet we are truly just temporary assemblages of matter acting as hosts for the multilevel game of life. Existence is a simulation.
But none of this means much: as in the Matrix, if I stab your simulated heart with a simulated knife, your simulated body will simulate death. And your simulated consciousness will try very, very hard to avoid that. Welcome to the Real World.
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Thank you for reminding me how good Star Trek used to be :)
What does it matter if what we view and perceive is "reality" or a simulation? You can't detect the difference, you were born into this "reality", simulated or not, and I'd bet that you'll die in it too.
There isn't any evidence of artifacts of some simulation, beyond the existence of the laws of physics. And there certainly isn't any way to break it. If there is a higher power/controlling computer, they don't seem to care about us that much.
In terms of what we mathematically define as computation (given the observed rules of the simulation we know as life), it would be pretty hard to simulate what scientists view, measure, and track with our computational technology. The geometric rate on our computational engineering will probably slow drastically in the next century (to be liberal), so we can't count on a trillion times more space and speed.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I don't see how it's truth would change anything (from your mind's perspective, at least), so I'm not sure why you would find it "too scary." Consciousness built on neurons made of atoms is no more real than consciousness built on simulationed neurons made of simulationed atoms. Consciousness is as consciousness does.
any good art leads you to more. How many people never heard of the cave allegory or gnosticism before seeing the matrix? I mean, for me, it was P.K.Dick that introduced me to the idea, and i never got around to reading -him- until Linklater mentions him in the movie "Waking Life" (yeah, ive had a lot of Dick to catch up on).
There are probably better ways of judging the movie than scoring how much time it spends regurgitating what everyone's said about the cave allegory already, but all of these methods are by and large predicated on waiting for the actual story to finish. You know..see where they're going with it.
my thought exactly. There's no way processor speed can continue at its current pace to that point. It would have to be nearly infinately fast to simulate all the 10000000000000000000000000000000000's of atoms i can see right now, and even put an electron microscope up to and see formations of. There's just too much to simulate, that is, of course judging that this person is saying that WE will be able to do it eventually. I don't doubt that it's possible that processors are a lot faster beyond the matrix (since they use optic processors where the speed of light is a trillion times faster there than it is here). But for someone or something in our universe to accomplish something like that would be ridiculous. There's way too much going on.
Well, you see, the funny thing is that you don't need to simulate the atoms at all. All that you need to simulate visually is the smallest object a person can resolve with his unadied eyes. Everything else is simply mapped on top of that.
For touch, you just simulate the smallest texture difference that a human can feel. For sound, all you need to do is simulate the sounds that a human can hear.
All of these would need to have a certain safely margin to account for people whose senses are better than others, but all that you really have to feed the brain is sense data. As long as it is input propperly,
Now, you would need to physicaly simulate things, but you can reduce the complexity of a model arbitrarily if you are willing to sacrifice quality. The computer detects that we don't need high quality simulations of tables, so it only simulates where the corners would be and fills the rest in as a polygon.
Of course, all of this assumes that you have a more-or-less sentient computer. It would have to be able to decide when we don't need obscenely high quality simulations in order to save its processor power. That wouldn't require true sentience, but it would take quite a bit of clever AI programming.
All of this is a gross simplification. It would still be impossible with modern computing methods because it would require a computer larger than Jupiter, and that's not even with a power source.
You're missing the point. The idea is that you don't need to simulate the world, but just the part that YOU percieve. For example, I don't need to simulate the tree in the forest (it does NOT make a sound when nobody is there to hear it). If you only simulate things that humans can actually see at any moment in time (ie: feeding impulses into your brain - and making your brain think its reality) then the computation involved isn't that great (well, huge, but isn't impossible).
Just consider current generation of 3D games. Some games can make your heart beat faster, or make you jumpy, etc. The point being that eventhough at a concious level you know it's only a game, your brain is still fooled subconciously into thinking the game might be real, and thus, makes your heart go faster and pumps up the adrenaline (as if you're gonna be running away from that monster for real).
Now, imagine that game with 3D goggles, perfect sound, etc, where YOU are not conciously awear that it is a game...
This is the future, and I think we'll see it far sooner than most people realize (20 years tops).
This is a common misapplication of the anthropic principle. All the weak anthropic principle (which is the only one appropriate) states is this: For you to be here now, conditions in the Universe must be right to allow you to be here. In probabilistic form, it simply states: The probability of your existence being made possible by the history of the Universe is 1.
Most people with something to prove use this to make probabilistic arguments based on the probability of life, or the number of existent civilizations, but these are misguided. The anthropic principle tells you nothing about how many civilizations are out there, or how likely other similar creatures are, it simply says that for you to be here, the Universe must allow your existence.
Arguments such as the ones made in this article are based on a faulty understanding the anthropic principle. They are assuming a probability distribution that they not only have no reason to believe is true, but which the anthropic principle says nothing about.
And why not assume that they did some simplifications? Why should we assume that the universe that we exist in the the one that the simulators run? It could be much different and the laws of physics different as well. It may be able to run simulations of huge amounts of atoms because that may be a trivial amount of processing time to a much more complex universe.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Incorrect. For a more primitive being, perhaps animals at the zoo, such an environment would suffice. However, if you are creating a virtual world where the smallest resolution is only a few microns, you will inevitably run into problems when the intelligent beings of that world attempt to use science to learn. If our world were virtual, and had no detail below 10 microns, or a tenth of one, or a thousandth, scientists with knowledge of what should be, would notice. Experiments could be devised using lasers in such a virtual world to demonstrate the smallest possible "pixel size", and the cat would be out of the bag immediately. For a simulation to run effectively and keep it's inhabitants unaware of their situation, it requires complete, total, perfect simulation of what we think of as reality.
Well, reality is what we perceive. A computer can only simulate worlds which are less complex than the world in which the computer exists, but if the simulation is closed, its inhabitants have no way of proving that it's a simulation. They simply have no way of knowing how things are in the real world. Even bugs in the simulation would appear as an empirically found law of physics to them. A laser in such a world would not exist except as a function of the basic elements that exist in the simulation. However, such a simulation would obviously need to either be seeded without science and develop it by itself or overthrow the science it was seeded with.
Then you simulate what would be seen. Everything could be treated as a surface with a varying transparency and a texture mapped on top of it. You wouldn't have to visually simulate anything smaller than the eye could resolve, but if needed, the simulation could simulate portions in more detail.
It would be easier from a programming standpoint to simulate all of the individual atoms, but that would be prohibitively slow. We're talking tens of thousands of years for less than a second of simulation time using conventional computers on anything less than a planetary scale.
Quantum computers and chemical computers could speed it up greatly, but it would still take massive amounts of raw processing power to keep track of all of those atoms, let alone let anything interact with them.
You can never see anything smaller than the smallest dot that your eye can perceive. However, you can design devices to enlarge objects (or increase the resolution of your eye, depending on how you look at it).
One of the huge problems with The Matrix is the question of how people were actually put into it. If anyone had memories of the real world, then they would undoubtedly find a way to pass them on to their children. So, that implies that none of the first generation of Matrix denizens was ever outside the Matrix at any prior point in their lives. Yet they had parents. The programs in the Matrix aren't compassionate at all, so they certainly couldn't have raised the children. Perhaps they had been imprisoned for millennia, but if that were the case, I would have expected the robots to have wiped out the last of the independent humans. Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage. We can only stop new ones from forming. Perhaps the robots were able to create synthetic sets of memories for the first parents, but again, how? That would require someone in the Matrix in the first place so that his memories could be copied. Perhaps the first parents were willing subjects? I don't really see that as in The Animatrix, the general populace was destroying the robots in the streets. That would be like southern whites agreeing to be slaves to some blacks during the Civil War. Very few would. Perhaps enough did that they were the first generation.
Hell, there are limits to our own understanding of both the extremely small and the extremely large. What if those limits are not that far from the limits of our "simulation"? How would you tell? Build bigger accelerators/telescopes? How big would they need to be?
Our knowledge of "what should be" is based purely on obseravtion. We're always testing the boundaries of our knowledge. But who's to say that when we delve deeper into the depths of the cosmos we won't discover a message:
orDescartes, ( Born March 1596, died Feb 1650)
This all goes down to the old questions:
- Do I really exist?
- Does the world around me exists?
- Is the world as i percieve it to be?
Descartes tried to answer the first question.While trying to explain the other two, don't forget that the only proof that you have that the world out there exists comes through your senses. For all you know, there are no other people out there - maybe your senses are being mislead:
- by a complex computer simulation
- by a powerfull telephatic entity
- by a drug
- by yourself - you've suffered psychological trauma this is all a dream
- ...
According to Descartes, the only thing you can be sure about is that you exist.Incorrect. All that needs to be simulated is what you actually perceive. In modern games, the engine calculates what can and can't be seen and doesn't draw the things that can't be seen. A simulation would use a much more sophisticated version of that algorithm. If you're looking through a microscope, microbes are individual simulated. If you aren't looking through the microscope, then they aren't simulated, or are simulated in the aggregate to calculate gross effects that might be perceivable (such as tainted meat causing food poisoning.)
Remember, the simulation has to know exactly what you're doing and what you're perceiving in order to feed the information to your brain. If you turn your head, that isn't a physical motion. The simulation detects the impulses that indicate you desire to turn your head, and adjusts your visual and physical feeds to simulate that motion. So it's certainly capable of determining that you are peering through a microscope and adjusting the level of detail accordingly. How detailed is the simulation? Precisely as detailed as it needs to be, but no more.
One interesting result of this is that observation would affect the behavior of the universe. Also, changes in the environment, such as the presence of a second slit in a screen, might alter the algorithm used to calculate the behavior of, oh, I don't know, maybe photons.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Cause and effect transcend observation. The only reliable way of simulating a world with certain basic rules is to simulate these rules all along, not simplifying them when no one looks. Simplifying the calculations removes information about the state of the simulation. That is most likely going to be detected at some point, and then the rules you want the inhabitants of your simulation to perceive would be invalidated. If you don't simulate all quarks, then the inhabitants will sooner or later realize (sic!) that quarks are not what you want them to be.
C'mon, he must be right, he's got equations and everything.
Oh, but wait . . . The quantities in the equations are completely made up and meaningless. So, let me rephrase my earlier assessment: This is complete hookum. Because the number of hypothetical "ancestor simulations" is large compared to the number of actual developing civilizations, we are "almost certain" to be in a simulation rather than real? Huh?
Let me present an alternative, equally plausible hypothesis: The entire universe is being run by tiny, invisible pixies, who implement all the laws of physics by grabbing things and moving them around in exactly the right way when we perturb our environment. (Why they do this is unknown.) Unfortunately, there is no empirical test that can distinguish between this situation and one in which the laws of physics arise just because of the way real particles interact.
Let's all just agree to pretend that we're not living in pixie-world or The Matrix, OK? It makes no difference, anyway, and it's a whole lot simpler. And if you want to kill your neighbour or your boss, you can't console yourself that they were just simulated anyway.
I work at a computer architecture and networking research lab at a university. I write simulators to simulate more advanced computer architectures that haven't been built yet. I run those simulations on computers I have access to now. Sure, it takes a minute of real time to simulate a milisecond of simulation time, but the "simple" computer is simulating the "complex" comptuer.
This could certainly apply to a simulation of our universe, also. Maybe we're all running in slow motion in our simulation, because it takes a minute of real time to simulate a milisecond of our time.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.