Cosmic Queries – Living in a Simulation with Nick Bostrom

Hey, Stark Talkians, Neil here. You're about to listen to an episode, especially drawn from our archives, to serve your cosmic curiosities. The archives run deep. If you enjoy this, take a peek at the full catalog on your favorite podcast platform. There's a lot there to tickle your geek underbelly. Check it out. Welcome to Stark Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Stark Talk begins right now. This is Stark Talk, Cosmic Query's Edition. Neil, the grass Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got Chuck Nice with me, of course, Chuck Mike. What's up, Neil? Faithful co-host. You know, you're, you're, we need you for the cosmic queries so that you can mispronounce everyone's name. Well, that's my purpose in life, Neil. I live to butcher names. Those poor questioners. How would you attack my name? Oh, my goodness. So Nick Bostrom, is that what she's, is that how to, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. And it's, is that all right? In Swedish, it would be Nick Las Bostrom, but that was close. All right. And I listened. I'll take close as far as I'm concerned. Many of them are like a game. Yeah, that's like a game of horseshoes from me. Close is good enough. Good enough. So that was indeed Nick Bostrom, chiming in. Nick, welcome to Star Talk. Dude, you started something that has got the whole world, you know, spinning in a tizzy for birthing the concern that we all live in a simulation. And let me just give a fast bio on you. You're a professor at University of Oxford and in the future of humanity Institute. That doesn't look right. You know, doesn't look very, sorry, sorry, Nicholas, not a lot of job security in that, buddy. No future. You look, looking at the future humanity. Yo. So you, you, you think about artificial intelligence, the ethics of artificial intelligence, bio security net, what have Mac grow strategy? Well, ask you what that is in a moment. Just policy ethics, foundational questions about serious challenges that civilization faces, not in the distant future, but in the very near future. I like the fact that you have a background in theoretical physics. So put you in the physics club here. That's good. Also computational neuroscience. We have some of those at my home institution at the American Museum of Natural History. That's quite the frontier as well. And you had a rather influential paper, research paper titled, are you living in a computer simulation? And for me, also I remembered your book Super Intelligence, which all of these got people thinking as any good philosopher should do is to get people thinking. And so could you just start us off? Why do you think we might be living in a simulation? Well, I have this thing called the simulation argument, which doesn't actually prove that we're in a simulation, but it tries to show that at least one of three propositions is true. So let's, we want to hear your line of reasoning, which ought to be good given your sort of logical background in this universe. So let's, let's hear what you've got. Well, I mean, you probably would be able to explain it better, but yeah, my story is that the simulation argument tries to show that one of three propositions is true. So let's, let's first look at what the conclusion is, and then we can see how we get there. So the conclusion is that either almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development going synced before they become technologically mature. So that's like one alternative, right? The second is that amongst civilizations that do become technologically mature, there is a very strong convergence. They all lose interest in creating a certain kind of computer simulation. I call them ancestor simulations. These would be detailed simulations of people with the kind of experiences that their historical four bears had. So that's the second alternative. And then the third alternative is that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. So, so that that's the kind of conclusion. Now, how does one get to to that? Well, suppose that the first of these alternatives does not obtain. So that means it's not true that almost all civilizations at our stage fail to reach technological maturity. So non-trivial fraction make it through, okay? Then let's suppose that the second alternative is also false. So amongst those who do become technologically mature, so non-trivial fraction remain interested in using some of the resources to create these kinds of ancestor simulations. Then you can show that a kind of computational resources mature civilization would have would suffice to create millions and billions of detailed simulations, ancestor simulations, runs of human history. And so that if the first two alternatives are false, then there would be many, many more simulated versions of people with our kinds of experiences. And that would be original, implemented in basic physical reality people with our experiences. And conditional that if almost all people with our experiences are simulated, we should think we are probably one of the simulated ones rather than one of the rare, non-simulated ones. So that means that if you reject the first two alternatives, you would then have to accept the third one. And then that shows that it's not the case that all three of them are false. The hands at least one of them is true. So that's the structure. Why can't there be a fourth other truth that no one gives a rat's ass about simulating anything anywhere? Well, so that's the second, right? I mean, so if all of these technological and mature civilizations are completely uninterested in simulating, then that would be possibility number two. But note that for the second alternative to hold, it's not sufficient that most of them are not very interested because even if it were just a one percent of these mature civilizations that were even a little bit interested, they still could produce millions of them. And so that would have to be this extremely strong convergence. Like almost all of them would completely have to lose any interest in doing this, in order for the second alternative to be the... Okay, so I have publicly mildly butchered your line of argument there. So let me first apologize. What I had been noting is that we do not have the power yet to create a perfect simulation of a world, such as the one we're living in. And so I wasn't thinking that everyone would make these ancestor simulations, which we would be. And so an ancestor civilization in a cinematic parallel would be a movie about Spartacus or Cleopatra. Just something, a movie, which is modern technology, telling a story set in a time when they didn't have movies. Right? So that would be like an answer. I'm guessing that's what you mean by an ancestor simulation. And so I was thinking that every simulation would ultimately be able to duplicate themselves as a natural evolutionary arc. If that's the case, then we would either be the original universe that hasn't yet simulated anybody yet. Or we'd be sort of the last one simulated still working our way towards the power of simulating ourselves, which would be slightly better odds, well, a lot better odds than throwing a dart and landing in all the simulations that had enough power to create simulations of themselves. Yeah, well, I... Did anything have that makes sense? Well, so first of all, I don't claim that the only simulations that might be made are ancestor simulations. So I mean, if you're mad in your technological metrics, you might simulate all kinds of things, like real histories as close as you can get, fantasy worlds, counterfactual histories, imaginary alien civilizations. I mean, you could... Maybe there are like lots of all of these kinds of simulations. The argument focuses on ancestor simulations just because that's the easiest way to get to the conclusion that one of these three is true. But it doesn't imply that there wouldn't be a lot of other simulations as well. Okay, so we have some data with our own history of cinema and it's some very small percent of movies are set in a time before movies were invented, which I would again, I would classify as sort of ancestor storytelling. Yeah, so I mean, I guess when we extrapolate to these technologically mature, presumably post-human civilizations, well, first of all, I'm not sure how much we can infer from the kinds of movies we create to what types of simulations they would run. But let's suppose for the sake of the argument that the majority of simulations they run are of people in their contemporary society. So I don't know some super advanced, basic colonizing thing with super intelligence, or whatnot, and that that's maybe the majority of what they do, but that they assign some smaller fraction of their computation resources during these ancestor simulations. So let's assume that I still don't think that would defeat the simulation argument, or indeed even the alternative that we are in simulation, because we kind of already know that we are not one of the post-human, so I mean, you just look around, you don't see a lot of starships whizzing outside your window, and we are not currently running any simulations ourselves. So we can kind of cross those out like all the actual post-humans. We know we're not one of those, and we also know we are not in a simulation of a post-human, that's not the world we experience. Then that leaves only a, that people in original history at the human level of development, and also whatever ancestor simulations are at that level of development. And so my claim would then be that, you know, if the first two alternatives of the simulation argument are false, the simulated ones at our current level of development would still vastly outnumber the original ones at our state-shelf development. So what is the likelihood that, not likelihood, because that's the wrong word? Is it possible that it could just be the way that we create with our limited technology, what we feel are simulations of our lives, okay? And that's computer games and video games and things like that. Could it be that a civilization so advanced that they have the computational power to create all of this just for the hell of it, just because like the same way we do it, we do it for entertainment. Could it just be that? Or is that just not a part of the philosophy? It could be, I mean, so the simulation argument itself is agnostic as to what the motivation would be of the simulators. And you could indeed imagine many possible motivations. One would be just entertainment, right? And you could imagine other, like maybe it's some kind of research, like historically, maybe it would be interesting to explore counterfactuals of history or you could imagine art projects or you could imagine moral reasons for. I think we know rather a little about the psychology and motivations of these hypothetical post-human civilizations and why they would make simulations. Okay, so Nick, I guess you're allowed to say all this like from your armchair, but at some point, somebody wants to walk into a lab and make a measurement that says, here's the evidence that supports Nick's argument. Is there such a, anything we can look for? Is there a sign? Is there some experiment? We can conduct and say, yeah, we're not in charge of what's happening here. This is a simulation. There certainly is sort of empirical premises that flow into the simulation argument. And so evidence for against the truth of those assumptions would be relevant to evaluating the argument. So one empirical premise is that a technologically mature civilization would indeed have the capability of creating ancestral simulations and indeed to create lots of them. And so the kinds of evidence that would be relevant for that is evidence, say, of the kind of computational performance that you could get from physically possible systems. We're not able to build them currently, but we can kind of do first principle modeling of different computational systems based on nanotechnology and so forth. And we can place lower bounds on the kind of compute power that they would unlock. So that would be one like elements that would flow into this. And now there would be some estimate of the computational cost of running an ancestral simulation. I think the largest part of that cost is the cost of simulating human brains at the sufficient level of detail that the simulation would be conscious. And we can obviously not precisely determine what the computational expense of simulating human brain is, but we can place some upper bound on that. We have various views about what computational tasks the human brain is capable of performing. We know how many neurons there are, how many synopsis, how often they fire. We can roughly estimate that. Now it turns out that if you estimate the amount of compute power available, even if you make rather conservative assumptions about that and then you make conservative assumptions about how much it takes to simulate one human brain and therefore how much to simulate all of the human brains. You just multiply that by 100 billion or something to all of the human brains in history. There are a number of orders of magnitude gap between these two. So even if you are off a little bit in these estimates, it still seems like the argument holds. But so those would be empirical premises that we could theoretically obtain evidence against. Like if we discovered the human brain uses some kind of weird quantum computation that is a lot more expensive than that would fly into it. Then if in addition you want to conclude not just that one of these three alternative history, which is all the simulation argument itself says, but if more specifically you want to conclude that we are in the simulation that the third alternative history, then there is an additional range of empirical questions that become relevant. Like anything that gives you evidence against the first two or in favor of the first two would be then relevant evidence for evaluating the third, right? So if we discover that there is some kind of big risks, some doomsday mechanism that we can, ah, now we realize this, all sufficiently advanced civilizations will stumble on this new technology and destroy themselves. That would be argument against the simulation hypothesis because it would make the first alternative more likely. So that I think is actually the main part of that. That would be a really sad argument. But that would be a really sad argument against it because it would say here's our proof we're not simulated. We're about to go into everything. Yeah. Yeah. Now Nick, let me ask you this. Let me ask you this, Nick. Is it possible that you are so smart that you are constantly high and you don't know it? One more. I think in some more or less metaphorical sense, I think that's very likely to be true. If it's kind of the pessimistic meta-induction. So if you look at all humans who have been alive, all eras going back in time, we can now see from our current vantage point. Basically, they were all very wrong about some big thing. I mean, like starting with simple physics, they thought Earth was in the center. And then like, basically, we can see, if we look back more than a hundred years, we see that they all got a whole bunch of really core things wrong. And it would kind of maybe be a little bit for some just to think that now, finally, we've got all of these basic things, right? It seems more likely that if people a thousand years from now look back at 2021, they will probably also see big, not just gaps in our understanding, but like things we were fundamentally confused about. And so... Yeah, they'll laugh their asses. Absolutely. Everything we're talking about. Yeah, or Christ, or whatever. So I do think we are in a fundamental sense, very much in the dark about the really biggest picture. Hey, this is Kevin de Somalia. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. You're listening to StarTalk with Neil de Grasse Tyson. That's before we get to the questions that Chuck has collected, Nick. If it's one thing to simulate all the brains, I get that. But it's another thing, the fact that I can go into a garden and then look at a flower or dig through the soils and keep digging and reach the mantle of the earth. Whoever's simulating us has to simulate not only what my brain is doing, but it has to simulate all the things my brain is experiencing. And that's not just for me. Someone else could dig that same hole, and they should be finding the same thing. So isn't the total complexity of the world? Doesn't that have to be part of this simulation? Even the fact that I as an astrophysicist look out to the edge of the universe, decoding the nature of the big bang and all time and space that followed it. So why just limit your estimates to the power of the human brain if everything and the unfolding of the great cosmic story has to also happen alongside it? Yeah, I think you do need some competition assigned to simulating relevant parts of the environment. I think the biggest part will be the brains. But certainly if you had to simulate all of the environment at subatomic detail continuously, I mean, like a quantum simulation of the entire universe would be completely infeasible if the simulators have anything comparable to the compute power that we could realize in this universe. You know what? I'm going to disagree. I'm sorry. I know you're a genius, but here's the deal. Here's why I'm going to disagree, Nick. Because when movie makers make movies, they do not render the detail in every single little thing. What they have, he didn't get there yet. That was the next thing you're going to talk about. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. Now, see, you already thought of this. Like I said, Jesus Christ, here I am. Here I am making a discovery, man. Okay, continue with Chuck. Finish the point. And then you got both of you already knew where I was going. But the deal is this. If you actually create a background, that background will pretty much be the same for all the characters that are mapped onto that background. So that's the way that's that's all I'm saying. No, I mean, I think that's the key to understand this whole simulation argument stuff that if you had to simulate all of the environment at subatomic detail continuously, it probably would be completely infeasible to do that. But I claim that's not needed. All you would need to do is to simulate in us of the parts that we are observing when we're observing them, that to the simulated creatures, it looks real and that they can't tell the difference. Oh, and that's a lot less. All right, wait a minute. I just thought of something else in support. So what that would mean, Chuck? Chuck, Chuck, what that would mean? Whole sections of the Pacific Ocean, whether it isn't a boat, right? Then no one has, so it doesn't exist until someone has to then see it and process it. So it's a procedural content generation. So we use it in our computer games today a lot, like you often only render the parts that some character in the game are observing. And maybe you have some very coarse grain simulation of the whole thing continuously, but you may fill in details if and when is needed. So if like right now, I don't have any idea what the atoms in this desk in front of me are doing, right? But if I took in principle an electron microscopes, I think I could look and I'd better see atoms there, right? The programmer would know you're about to bring out an electron microscope. So they're trying to up the calculation right in the beam right there. Right. And if necessary, I mean they could even post a simulation or edit it or erase memories if they're really screwed it up. But yeah, I think the kind of capability would need to even create anything resembling this kind of simulation is very advanced. And I think with that advanced capability would also come the ability to edit and to monitor human thoughts and intentions and then kind of be able to do this kind of procedural generation that even we do in our computer games today. That could explain why I've heard Neil say this that we are terrible data takers. Like as human beings, we are awful at taking in information. Well, if I'm programming a simulation, I would certainly want to program the people in that simulation to be like that because that way I wouldn't have to program all this detail into stuff. I protest the integrity of my simulation. Yeah, although I think to be fair, I think the difference between one human and another from the point of view of the simulators, it's like, well, there is one and it's got a few more neurons in this genius and we are all like answering. So I don't think the difference in cost is that big. Cool. Very cool. All right, Chuck, bring on a question. Here we go. Let's jump into this. This is Dennis Gisling and Dennis says this. It's probably Gisling. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. The knees. We like to know. Okay. He says he says in his papers, Dr. Postram talks about post human state. The first human state civilization. Could you please develop on that and situate it in? Listen, a cardess of scale. Now, I don't know what any of that means. Okay. I can tell you what the cardess of scale is. What is the cardess of scale? Yeah. When I lead off with that, and I'll hand the baton over to you. Nick, so the cardess of scale is a scale of how much energy you have access to and can exploit. Oh. Okay. Okay. So I think they're five levels. So one of them is, do you have access to all of the energy sources in your host planet? And if you do, and you can exploit them, your civilization level one. So that means you can go into a volcano and tap the energy. You can tap the volcano the way you tap a cake. You could use the energy and the crust of the earth that would otherwise make volcanoes, earthquakes. You can tap that and use that for your own means. A storm system, this sort of thing. So a level two civilization would control all of the energy that comes from its host star. Okay. Okay. That's way more energy than what is embedded in your planet. A level three civilization would control all the energy of your galaxy that you happen to live in. The massive level four center of the galaxy, you could use that. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And you wield this. And the history of civilization reveals that the nations or the nation states that had the most power, power, political power, cultural power were those that actually wielded the most energy per capita in the world at that time. So when people say, United States, we're such energy hogs. We use four times, they have five times the energy as anybody else. Well, that correlates with other measures of power that exist in it. So let's keep going. So one more level four, level five, if you control all the energy of the universe, and then you're indistinguishable from a god that anyone would have suggested. Now, so what are we? We're digging fossil fuels out of the earth. So we're going to control. We're level 0.5. We're level 0.3. No, no, we're level zero. Okay. We're level zero. Okay. So Nick, if there's a super intelligence, presumably they have better access to energy, especially the kind of energy you're talking about that might need this simulation. So have you thought about where a super intelligence might fit on the Kardashian scale? Yeah, I mean, I think that would be higher up just because at that level, you would be able to run a lot more of these simulations. And so even if there were some simulations run by, I don't know, a Kardashian scale, one civilization like with a Dyson sphere around their southern, that's all they did. Once the civilization expands beyond that, they could run billions of times more, and that would be plenty of time for them to expand beyond that. So you could imagine almost all simulations that are on are being run by civilizations that have reached the limits of whatever space they have to expand into that that would presumably be Kardashian for something unless the universe is so crowded that each one only manages to get the sort of galactic level volume before it bumps up against the world. Yeah, that's a good point because you can only have one galactic Kardashian scale civilization because anyone else who wants it too bad, we're using all the energy. It's like in the United States right now, there's fights over the Colorado River basis because it's a water source that river flows through multiple states and each state has a pact with the other state, how much water they're supposed to use. And there'll be future fights on access to this one source of fresh water. And so that's an interesting point, you can't have a universe filled with high Kardashian level civilization because they would implode rapidly. And what level is Death Star? What level is Death Star on the Cardassum scale? Oh, well, in Star Wars Episode 7, it controlled the energy of a star. So that would be, I guess, level two. Absolutely level two. Wow, awesome. Okay, here we go. Let's jump right back in here. And by the way, in Star Trek, the Borg, that's a super intelligence that was cosmic in its influence. And so that would be even higher air, just to put that in context. So Chuck, give me another one. Okay, this is William D.A. quite easy. Nothing but letters. Here we go. He says, where do you stand on the concept of consciousness and where do you draw the line? Would a simulated reality change your definition of what possesses consciousness? I like that. So Nick is pants psyched. I presume that means that somehow consciousness is a shared entity that we all participate in as one. Pants psychism. There are different sort of definitions, but it's broadly the view that everything is conscious. Oh, wow. And so how do you, how do you put consciousness in? Is that a natural outflow of a sufficiently complex computer simulation of the brain? That would be my sort of default assumption. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think for the simulation argument, you could plug in whatever your favorite theory of consciousness is and most of them would work. There might be some theories of consciousness, which would not work. The simulation argument, one of its assumptions is what I call the substrate independence thesis, which is just the idea that in principle, you could implement consciousness, not just on. You know, carbon based biological structures, but done any suitable computational structure that what makes us conscious is not that we're made of carbon, but that brains perform a certain type of computation. Whoa. Hold on. Yeah. Wait a minute. So, how's it about to say? It's a good point on that very subject. Yeah, your buddy Matt. He's the friend of StarTalk. And his thing is like the entire universe is made of math because it goes down to particles and these particles have spin and, you know, so you can assign a value to them. Mathematically constructed entities. Yeah, there's good overlap there. Yeah. But as to where to draw the line, like I don't really have a very good account of exactly something. I think humans are conscious and rocks are not conscious, but like exactly where sort of in the hierarchy that would be a cut off. I'm not sure or I'm not sure either that there is a sharp line there. It might more be that there is kind of diminishing or more and more strain senses in which lower order organisms have some kind of consciousness and it kind of fades out rather than being a sharp threshold is what I. I guess but now all I can think about is a conscious rock. I just love the idea. So here's here's an I wonder Nick. I just have a not deeply thought out hypothesis that having thoughts such as we do that are incomplete and we wonder and we don't have good memory of things or we make stuff up. The fact that it's not perfect. We interpret as consciousness. Because if it were perfect, it's just data and our brain is at storage disk that occasionally puts information together with a new result. But the fact that we we can sit there and say, well, I feel this and I don't and it's mostly how we reckon our with our ignorance of our environment even when we probe it for knowledge. For now, I'm just putting it. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess first of all, you could have a lot of artificial even simple systems that would be imperfect in various ways. You could have so full the hard drives that randomly rates various things. You could also have kind of compress representations. That's what you have to do if you're trying to do anything with AI is there's a lot of data coming in and you have to extract some important features based on that and throw the rest away. Chuck, what Nick just said, I can't stop thinking about it. So Chuck, every time you and I forget something, the aliens hard drive and that stuff actually. So every time you go, what did I come upstairs for? It's a right, it's a read right error, an IO error and the programmers disk. So I don't think so. I was just exploring the your account of consciousness that somehow what's necessary are sufficient for consciousness is that there is some kind of faulty or limited information processing. Right. And so it's a perfect computer. Well, I'm saying that computers are also imperfect in certain ways. I'm not sure that they closer you get to perfection that you would lose consciousness. I think in anything it might go the other way around that you might become more conscious. But yeah, you might have to if you wanted to sort of elaborate on that, you might want to try to say like which types of imperfection are the ones that are supposedly making a system conscious. And maybe maybe exploring that line of thought further, maybe you would get to something that would be some kind of possible account of consciousness. I'm not sure. Oh, wow. Yeah, in the film, in the film, I robot for going for not having read the original series of short stories, but in the by Isaac Asimov, but in the film, they hypothesize what could account for free will in a programmed robot. They were describing how many generations of operating systems are layered on top of one another. And there's always these dangling parts that you don't always clean it up after because it's evolution is like this too. The dangling parts that worked at some point now, you don't need them or that night they could get in the way or they could end up killing you. But programmatically, there could be lines of code that have long lost their utility. And it could manifest under certain combinations of stimuli that look like the robot just thought of a new idea. And I was intrigued by that suggestion when I heard it in the film that that could be the way you end up with what we call consciousness. But then we got to take another break when we come back for the third and final segment. We go through a lightning round with our questions and it's Nick Boastram just schooling us on whether or not we're in a simulation and spoiler alert, it sounds like we kind of are. It sounds like yeah, okay, when starts off with the third. There used to be very little visibility and control in treasury. Today, JP Morgan payments delivers real time dashboards and control at your fingertips. That's the power of clarity. That's JP Morgan payments copyright 2025 JP Morgan Jason company all rights reserved JP Morgan Chase bank and a member FDIC deposits held non US branches are not FDIC insured non deposit products are not FDIC insured. This is not a legal commitment for credit or services availability varies eligibility determined by JP Morgan Chase visit JP Morgan dot com slash payments disclosure for details. We're back start talk. I've got Nick Boastram in the house actually is in the UK right now, but he's in a he's in our zoom house and we're talking about the simulation hypothesis and which he's largely started. Okay, and so we blame him for all of our lost sleep at night I at least I Nick I blame you if no one else does so so Nick the simulation hypothesis requires that every simulation has computers right why is that an obvious thing that we've only had computers for like half a century. And we've been human for a couple hundred thousand years in our current form why should it be inevitable that a computer is the thing that gets invented that then people want to simulate on. I mean, I don't know that this inevitable maybe if there are a lot of humanoid species that never developed computers I don't know I mean it's a crisis that some civilizations do develop computers and then more advanced computers. Of the type we can already see are physically possible although we cannot build but certainly it's consistent with a lot of civilizations failing to reach even our stage of development. I mean, I think if you're asking about the inevitable even if it's not relevant for the simulation argument it's kind of interesting like it you want to find what what point in time if it's inevitable like it seems like the father back you go if you sort of rerun evolution from that point. The less likely that you would get something similar to what we have today if if you started with just bacteria like in the hinaus maybe the chances would be very small perhaps that you would get an intelligent technological species but if you started like 50,000 years ago then I mean my guess would be we were already pretty well underway and it was just a matter of time. Oh, that's an interesting interesting point. Okay, because the contingencies of evolution right it would take fact if it if the asteroid didn't hit 65 million years ago the dinosaurs would be here and we wouldn't for sure you take it late enough Nick you that's a good argument started 50,000 years ago. It's I'm good with that we surely there'd be some evolutionary path and just for those who are the tea fans consider that we all would judge the Roman Empire to be an intelligent civilization yet aliens trying to communicate with them with radio waves would conclude that there's no technology on earth right so we spent a lot of time being smart but without the technology. And so that's the real question how much longer do we have technology before we exterminate ourselves. But anyhow Chuck this is cosmic queries bring it on and Nick we can try to bang out a whole lot in this in this third and final segment so let's try to keep the answers tight. Alright, this is Dylan and Gordonville gonna mash up their questions hello everyone from new Albuquerque New Mexico. I'm a senior in high school and this question has been bugging me forever. Do we have free will or is everything set in stone are we living a predetermined life if we are in a simulation and then Gordonville says on top of that if we manage to prove that we are living in a simulation does that mean there is or is not a God thank you. Wow talking about some of those soft cool big big big gun questions. Theological philosophical so Nick I love those questions. Well, I mean on the latter I think it wouldn't prove or disprove God I think it's an independent question whether we are in a simulation versus whether God exists. So I don't see any necessary connection there on the free will I think we would have as much free will in the simulation as we would with without the simulation. I'm a compatibleist myself so I think that even if we are living in a deterministic physical universe that that would be consistent with us having in the relevant sense free will. But you might have a different view on the metaphysics of free will but I don't think the fact that we would be in a simulation would necessarily change that would that mean that the programmers of that simulation. Would program into our brains a perception of free will even if they know the outcome in advance at every moment. I don't think that would be especially program that in I mean for the same reasons we if we are not in a simulation would have this this notion of free will people in a simulation presumably develop that for the same kind of reasons. I mean it connects obviously to holding people accountable for certain things that do I mean if you stumble into somebody and bump them. We say well you are excused because you didn't intend it but if you go and punch them and achieve the same Bruce then you will be held accountable because that's something you did off your own free will. And so and we make choices that we have to actually internally come up on a certain decision so all of those things would hold equally true for people in a simulation as people outside a simulation right so. If you have this free will that wouldn't really be a difference I think interesting okay why can't just the programmers be indistinguishable from God if they have power over everything. I mean depending on what you make into the concept of a God yeah in many ways that would be analogous to how some people have traditionally conceived of God right in the sense that they would kind of have created our world although they wouldn't have created a whole world just the parts that we see they would presumably maybe not be omniscient but they would know a lot and they would not be omnipotent they would themselves be subject to. The physical constraints operating at their level of reality but they could intervene in our reality including in ways that contravene the loss of physics that we receive and thereby produce miracles yeah yeah but things that appear to us in the simulation as miracles in one sense there is the kind of structurally similar relationship on the other hand they would be subject to all these can that would be fine items object to all these kind of limitations and constraints and in that sense kind of being infinitely far removed from a lot of the. Traditional conceptions of God which is like a literally infinite and omnipotent and omniscient being so I think that whatever the truth is about the simulation hypothesis it wouldn't settle questions of whether there is this this kind of more traditionally conceived literally infinite God okay. Got it perfect alright okay Chuck keep it going Frederick Johansson wants to know is general AI really a question about hardware and processing speed if it was when the computer to today be able to simulate a few seconds of AI like it had a thousand years to process yeah I mean it's a good question I think compute is a very important fact that I think it's a very important thing to do is to make sure that I'm not going to be able to do it. A very important factor in driving AI progress over the last eight years so the whole deep learning revolution I think it's maybe two thirds of the progress we've seen is due to we're applying more compute and then maybe one third is algorithmic progress even if it were all computer it doesn't necessarily follow that we would be able to with our current computer on at least a small fraction of human level mind. Because there are two things you need to compute for one is to run the AI right like actually have it to be also need to train up the neural network that becomes the AI so if you don't have enough. Compute to do the full training run you might not even be able to develop the system which then if run would constitute some kind of human equivalent level a GI. Right because the calculation of the decision is not made in a vacuum it's been completely preloaded with the world's life experience to whatever is sitting right behind that one decision is that a fair way to think about this. So for humans to arrive at some sort of normal adult level of performance we need 20 years or 15 years to kind of grow up and learn and our current neural networks are similar and I don't know that although they are probably less efficient in learning so they might need instead of 15 years of experience maybe they need like a thousand years equivalent but you still need a lot of compute just to be able to complete something analogous to like a human maturation process. So even if we had enough compute to run a GI human level AI we might not have enough compute to sort of create it. I think also in addition to more compute we also need some additional algorithmic insights but it's not all or nothing like like the better the algorithms the less compute you need to achieve this result and right now the amount of compute you need would be way more than we can currently afford and then it comes down as we make algorithmic products at the same time as our computers become faster at some point these lines will intersect. So we need to point embarrassingly clear that humans require like a fourth of our lives just to function as participating humans and civilization that's that's embarrassing but true right right no one trust your decisions you may until you're at least 20 and even then for some people. I think it's really not working even after as a kind of collective we have just kind of barely you know intelligence to create a technical civilization I think we look like we're right on the cost of that and it's not so surprising maybe because like if you imagine our ancestors had a lot less abstract reasoning ability and it gradually improved over biological time scales right and then as soon as we became capable of creating a technical civilization then we pretty much just created or after you know 10,000 years or something so we should kind of maybe expect that we are at the lower end of what is needed to do this at all and that maybe explain some of what we see in the world that we kind of something our way a lot of what we see in the world yes yes all right Chuck I mean more okay we got a few minutes left Skyler Gravats says if this is a simulation why are the people running the simulation so patient the universe is estimated to be a 13 point something billion years old and they waited almost 10 billion years to simulate life well so first there's no particular reason to take that those 10 million years were simulated you don't need to do it from the big bang onwards you could start the simulation from a later point you'd embed the simulation with evidence that that simulation scientist would then interpret as an old universe yeah but it's all just yeah I mean you probably don't want to say like 10 billion years of just gas clouds congealing like that would be a pretty it's kind of wasteful right yeah yeah but even even when you get into the say they were interested like in all of human history for the sake of the argument that that's the city 10,000 years ago on work like doesn't mean that for them it would take 10,000 years to do this they could run the simulation at the higher speed like maybe you know one minute of their time could simulate the thousand years depends on how fast the computer is that you're on the simulation. That's you well right so when we had a great revelation when computing power was adopted by astrophysicists in the 1970s we were early out of the box on this there these galaxies in the universe that we're kind of funky looking and we made catalogs called peculiar galaxies we didn't know maybe just thought galaxies were made that way only after we were able to simulate the collision of two galaxies did we realize that this is like the the crash scene leftovers of what happens when galaxies collide and we simulate a billion years in a matter of minutes and in so doing we were able to populate the entire catalog of galaxy parts and nasty twisted looking galaxy forms simply by seeing what happens when you're in the world. And they collide and speeding up the time to do so that's just a little aside. Wow. Are you patient or what? This is Nathaniel Mitchell who says if we could ever simulate an exact replica of our universe down to the spin on the components of quantum particles could we speed it up and then use it to predict our future as we now do with simulations for climate and otherwise but yet on a cosmic scale. Well, so that kind of thing wouldn't fit into our universe like a computer that simulated all of our universe. Okay, it wouldn't be possible to build that in our universe. Oh, that's a philosophical challenge that's like. Well, yeah, I mean it's also how detailed do you want your map to be if you have a map the size of the UK. Then it have all the detail of the actual island, but then you could just use the island. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, like that. So, so yeah, I mean, so yeah, I think it would be very infeasible to simulate our world at the level of, you know, quantum properties. At least if the simulator's universe looked anything like our universe. But maybe the physics at that level of reality is different. I mean, maybe they have more, maybe it's possible to build more powerful computers in at you could even imagine hyper computation being possible in some other kind of physics so that I could run the truly infinite computations and then maybe they could simulate a world like ours at full quantum detail. But that that we wouldn't forward in much the future. I mean, from our point of view, it would presumably not make much difference whether they did it that way or the much cheaper way that would only render things at the sufficient level to be convincing to the people inside. And in fact, even if you imagine that there were some simulators that could do this. At full quantum detail, it would cost them so much more compute that it would still likely be the case that almost all simulations would run in the more efficient. That would only simulate things that of course are great. So, so even if I were some fully full-grained simulations, we would probably be in one of the other ones because that would be a lot cheaper. So you could create orders of magnitude more of that. And how much of this relates to the fact that it's hard for something to understand itself? Like, can the brain, the human brain actually come to understand the human brain? Is that, or do you need a higher intelligence than the human brain to then study the human brain as a thing outside of itself? Understanding is a matter of degree, right? We understand a bit about ourselves now. We could understand more. I mean, obviously you couldn't have a full simulation of all the details in the human brain, stoved away in a part of the human brain, right? And that's the map of the UK that would be as big as the UK actually wanted all the details. I've been the paradise, but I've never been to me. Thank you, Chuck. We got to land this plane. Let me just offer my best evidence for why I think we live in a simulation. I'm just going to go public on this. I think, right, when civilization is kind of going smooth, then something happens. Okay, a politician rises up, there's a war, there's a world war, there's tsunamis. And I think that the aliens program that in for their own entertainment. Because that's what we did in the sim games, in sim city where you're mayor of a city and everything's going fine. On an ounce, Godzilla trounces through your city. And now you have to deal with it, the fire and the police and the rebuild the schools. And that's the programmer sending that in without telling you what that's going to happen. I think all of the troubles we have in the world is evidence that the programmers need entertainment. Yeah, well, Nick, like I said, we got to land this plane. Thank you for coming on to start talk. This conversation was long overdue. I wanted to get you a few years ago, but you were in high demand and you still are for sure. But if any of us discover something like a, we part the curtain and we see like a CPU there that when you were supposed to be a couch. I'll call you. Well, if anybody viewing that does that contact Neil, rather than me, I don't need more. For sure. All right, it's been a delight, Nick. And is it super intelligence? The book you would have people sort of check out in terms of the foundations of this thinking? Yeah, well, we're not specifically on the simulation argument. There the article is online, just Google it's simulation argument, you'll find it. But if you want to read a book about the future of AI and stuff, then super intelligence would be the one I would point it. Excellent, excellent. All right, good. All right, Nick, again, thanks for joining us. I'm glad we could do it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, finally, this Cosmic Query's episode. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking. You