So today we will be looking at the Simulation Hypothesis, also known as the Simulation Argument, the concept that we might be living inside one immense computer simulation.
And this is going to be a fun trip because it’s a fascinating idea especially when applied to the Fermi Paradox, the apparent contradiction between the how old and big the universe is and how seemingly absent it is of any other intelligent life besides ourselves.
So to do this we need to first do a basic introduction to the concept, sweep away some misconceptions about it, explore the concept a bit, then look at what it means in terms of the Fermi Paradox.
Now the inventor of the idea.
Nick Bostrom, actually does a wonderful job explaining this himself and in the video description below I’ve linked his original arguments and FAQ, which I’d strongly encourage you to browse if you have a chance.
I will be mostly summarizing it here and I also won’t be going through the more formal arguments he offers there, though before I scare anyone off that with fears of formal logic, Bostrom does an excellent job presenting it in a very approachable fashion and I would certainly assess him as one of best modern scholars.
Now the concept gets muddled a bit because Bostrom is actually discussing the specific notion of what is called Ancestor Simulations, which differs a bit from simulated realities in that it is specifically when you are simulating some piece of your civilizations past, or a close approximation thereof, as opposed to simulating entirely different civilizations or whole universes which might have different physical laws.
Today we’ll be looking as much at those two alternatives as Ancestor Simulations themselves, but if you have difficulty picturing that notion just think of all the historical dramas or videogames we have.
Often we intentionally add a fantastic aspect to them, but just as often all effort is made for historical accuracy and a very accurate one would be an Ancestor Simulation and it is quite easy to imagine why an advanced civilization might do such a thing.
In recent videos we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how much processing power and how little energy might be needed to simulate a human mind, partially to lay groundwork for today, In those videos, most notably the recent video on Transhumanism, I mentioned the Landauer Limit, the apparent absolute minimum energy at any given temperature to flip a bit, or essentially the absolute minimum cost to perform calculations, and our best current guesses at how much computing power we need to simulate a human mind, called whole brain emulation.
I won’t repeat that now, you can click on that video link if you want more details on the concept, but we found out that even at the relatively high temperature you and I live at, as compared to cold deep space, you could hypothetically run a million human minds for the same energy needed to run a light bulb.
Now obviously achieving that efficiency would take a lot of improvements in modern technology, and at the same time if we are talking about ourselves as the simulations we have no idea what the physical laws of our simulators are bound by let alone the temperature they are
