Proposition 6 is the weakest: yes going by entropy alone unhappy brain states might be more common than happy ones, but most conscious beings in the universe will have some influence over their surroundings which they will try to use to make their situation good rather than bad. This is the reason humans have good lives on Earth(relative to maxent, anyway)
First thank you for your feedback. I will answer your point.
Most conscious beings in the universe would be simulated, in this scenario. Moreover, most would simply be what we can call "abominations", because they would have some mental illness or some fundamental problem making them broken shells. Most of the time , they would be simulated only for a few seconds before collapsing into nothingness.
They do not have any real influence on their surroundings, because a few seconds between incarnations is not enough. Also, even assuming the simulation of their consciousness is correct, if the simulation of their surroundings is not (which should be the vast majority of cases), then they would be in some kind of dreamlike state with the world around them not really existing.
I will have to write another article to explain all this step by step
Most conscious beings in the universe would be simulated, in this scenario. Moreover, most would simply be what we can call "abominations", because they would have some mental illness or some fundamental problem making them broken shells. Most of the time , they would be simulated only for a few seconds before collapsing into nothingness.
OK I think I see where you are coming from more, you're thinking of like conscious beings being instantiated out of random noise, like Boltzmann brains. I think your intuition that most beings would arise in this fashion is mistaken: instead the vast majority of beings would find themselves in situations like ours, having arisen in a self-bootstrapping way from a relatively small random fluctuation(the origin of life in our case). The reason being is that far fewer coincidences(that is, unlikely quantum measurements) are required to generate a being in the "normal" way* than in the "Boltzmann brain" way: a relatively small number of fluctuations needed to seed the Earth with favorable conditions for life, say, then a relatively deterministic process of evolution occurring VS an entire brain state appearing out of the void**. This means that beings arising in "normal" scenarios are exponentially more likely than "Boltzmann brain" scenarios.
*Note that "normal" here could include AIs building simulations of people or other weird scenarios, I just mean to exclude "people arising out of random vacuum fluctuations for a yottosecond" or such things.
**of course to explain a particular being's life you need to condition on more details than the origin of life, but the point is that a being's life/brain state has a lot of redundancy which can better be explained/takes fewer coincidences to explain given an evolutionary account of their origins VS Boltzmann brain
You are making very interesting points. It is possible that the vast majority of conscious beings are like us, at least in the sense you are talking about. However, even if I assume that you are correct, it still has no consequence on my reasoning and I'll explain to you why in the next paragraph.
I am talking about a particular individual, that is, you or me. Are most instantiations of you the current you ? (By current you, I mean the full past-present future integral of the possibilities function that defines who you are as a person, think of it like the set of all possible yous across a hypothetical multiverse.) By you, I mean a being that has a continuous function rather than an erratic one being interrupted over and over again. Are most of "yous" on planet earth, living in 2025 ? Once you die, what are the odds that a being identical to you with your memories arises on earth, knowing that the sun will die in a few billion years ? Essentially zero, because a few billion years is far, far too short a timescale for you to be alive again in roughly the same circumstances. Unless you can prove that this is still far more probable than what I described which would mean that, most of your conscious time would be spent in conditions similar to our current conditions right now.
So, basically, once you are dead, I think it is far more likely that you will be instantiated again in broken circumstances rather than in normal ones. So, basically, since it's not possible to feel time passing when not conscious, we should have most of our experienced subjective time being in pain and discontinuity, with perhaps some pockets of happiness and sometimes being incarnated properly with full functions of a "real" living entity (I include simulated ones in this "real").
I'd love to write more articles to go into more far more details, but because of my negative karma I can't.
Unless you can prove that this is still far more probable than what I described which would mean that, most of your conscious time would be spent in conditions similar to our current conditions right now.
So, are you talking here about your and my current conscious experience, or what continuations of our conscious experience will tend to look like past the point at which we would typically die in baseline reality? If you're referring to what we're experiencing right now, that is a relatively "normal" human life, then I think most of the probability mass for that experience is either on (a) relatively "normal" instantiations or (b) possibly simulations, but actual simulations on a computer arising from a "normal" causal history, not Boltzmann brains. Now if you're thinking of possible continuations of our experience past what would normally be our biological death in "baseline" reality, then those would have their probability mass concentrated on scenario (b), simulations on computers arising from a simple causal history(perhaps run by aliens, or future humanity, or an AI built by either).
So, basically, once you are dead, I think it is far more likely that you will be instantiated again in broken circumstances rather than in normal ones
I think you're conflating subjective time and objective time. There is no 1:1 relationship between your internal subjective "timeline" and time in the external universe. So there's no reason to expect you to be instantiated "again" after your biological death; rather, there exist some weird possible continuations of your experience somewhere else in the multiverse, which would mostly be emulations with a simple causal origin.
Remember, "it all adds up to normality". The hypothesis "we are Boltzmann brains" predicts that we should see our experience degenerate into random static at any moment. Since we do not see this we should update against that hypothesis.
I am not making a statement on our current conscious experience, but on life after the death of our "real" body. Basically, what is more likely, being resurrected fully and accurately ( considering how difficult such a task would be, it would take many failures before getting it right...) or having broken remnants that form the pattern of yourself randomly happening across spacetime ?
If we take into account the Drake equation, and take into account all of our past observations of space, and take into account that if a civilization advanced enough to build dyson swarms/spheres existed or to conquer entire galaxies existed we should have seen evidence of it by now, we can conclude that the rarity of conscious life is extremely high. We can even infer that it is likely we are the only conscious beings in the entire observable universe.
That makes the possibility of our consciousness being simulated correctly... Zero. Like, actual zero.
Even if a civilization decided to simulate humans on a massive scale, the probability of getting someone identical to you through a NON RANDOM process... Is nihil. If a process is completely random, it will eventually produce something like us given infinite time. But if it's NOT, then, it'll NEVER produce something like us , no matter how many quadrillion years we wait.
The probability of such a civilization even existing before killing itself is so low that, if we take their entire lifetime into account, it's not even a blip compared to the potential quadrillion years of "computation" done randomly by the universe.
I am dealing with approximations, as calculating those probabilities is not possible, so there could be a mistake hidden somewhere I didn't see.
Even if a civilization decided to simulate humans on a massive scale, the probability of getting someone identical to you through a NON RANDOM process... Is nihil
You need to consider partially random/partially non-random processes. Imagine an alien civilization that decided what other race to simulate/what history to simulate based on flipping a series of quantum coins. The overall amplitude for that process picking you out will be very low, but still higher than the Boltzmann brain scenario. Why? Because the aliens will intentionally simulate the structured, deterministic parts of your life history and so will need less "random coincidences" to pick you out when compared to pure quantum fluctuations. This is even more so the case if we imagine future AIs simulating us, or humans in an alternate quantum branch who want to simulate alternative histories and decide on the exact person/civilization to simulate by flipping quantum coins. Yes the amplitude for this occurring will be very small, but still exponentially higher than the Boltzmann brain scenario.
Drake equation[...]can conclude that the rarity of conscious life is extremely high. We can even infer that it is likely we are the only conscious beings in the entire observable universe
Have you seen Robin Hanson's Grabby Aliens argument? Basically, he argues that there are likely other aliens civilizations out there(in the observable universe) based on how early we are in the universe's history. But even if we are the only life in the observable universe, it's once again all about the relative likelihood. Life was at any rate likely enough for us to exist, that's enough to see that it has far more relative likelihood compared to purely random fluctuations.
You raise a valid point about simulating species or even simulating life on a planet. However, my argument still stands, because I am specifically talking about simulating an entire individual rather than a planet or a star system.
In order to simulate a particular individual, it would require far more than merely simulating the species homo sapiens. It would require recreating the whole history of earth (and even of the universe, because we'd need the history of asteroids and of sun activity and so on and so on) completely identical to our own. The hypothetical aliens would need to care specifically about YOU, and decide to recreate the whole history of how your parents met, how the environment shaped your epigenetics, how the environment shaped your ideas and way of thinking, etc. They'd need not only to simulate quantum states, they'd need the whole list of all quantum events and their results in the spacetime they are simulating in order to reproduce you perfectly. To simulate you, specifically, would require information that is completely impossible to get, and any approximations of you would not truly be you.
It is impossible to simulate an individual without simulating their entire history. It may sound counterintuitive, but it would be simpler to simulate a whole world rather than reconstruct perfectly a single individual and the history of the whole universe around him.
The margin for error, in order to simulate you (on purpose) is ZERO. [I put zero in capital to mean that its not 0.00000(arbitrary number of 0) then 1. It's 0.] It would require unimaginable computing power (and when I say unimaginable, I mean literally mathematically unimaginable, a number so big you couldn't even think about it even spending your entire life counting it). That's not something I think any civilization could ever do. So, while aliens could simulate human life, and could simulate countless individuals, there is no conceptual way they could simulate you particularly. Unless some alien civilization ascend to godhood, but that's not how the rules of the universe we live in work. Because of quantum indeterminacy, how would a civilization ever achieve such a thing ? If they want to perfectly reproduce you, the only way to achieve such a thing would be omniscience. That’s not something any physically bounded intelligence could ever do. Even with access to entire galaxies of ressources, even with access to supercomputers which would make ours look like a Babbage machine.
But , yes , there is a possibility that instead of reincarnating as a disembodied brain we get to reincarnate inside a simulation instead. But, there's no escaping reincarnating as disembodied brain, that just means we get to live some normal lives among all the chaotic broken ones.
I heard of the grabby aliens argument because I follow the PBS space time channel. However, I find it fundamentally unconvincing to explain our current observations. I think the probability of life itself isn't low. However, the leap from unicellular organisms to what we can see on earth... Anyone who studied the histories of mass extinction events on earth would know how absurdly low the probability of getting intelligent life is. In fact, the probability of life still existing despite all those mass extinctions is already quite low. But, if those mass extinctions are NECESSARY to produce intelligent life, imagine the consequences on the likelihood of alien life. All of this is another can of worms, that would require several articles to explain.
They'd need not only to simulate quantum states, they'd need the whole list of all quantum events and their results in the spacetime they are simulating in order to reproduce you perfectly
Not really though. Your brain has ~10^15 synapses. It literally doesn't have enough space to store records of its entire past light cone. So there is actually some equivalence class of possible past histories which could produce an identical brain state to the one you have now.
there is no conceptual way they could simulate you particularly
They definitely could, by just randomly sampling human brains they would have some low probability of picking out yours or mine in particular. With a randomized simulation they could pick us out with much higher probability.
In order to simulate a particular individual, it would require far more than merely simulating the species homo sapiens[...]
Yeah but the point is, for however many unlikely coincidences/"coin flips" the aliens would need to get right, the Boltzmann fluctuations would have to get at least that many coin flips right, plus more because they aren't modeling any deterministic parts of the process.
Edit : I am adding a better answer to your argument of equivalent classes. I do not deny that such equivalence classes exist for some phenomena, however, if everything else requires perfect precision... Then we have some margin for error in some unimportant parts and have absolutely zero margin for error in the other parts, which would mean those equivalent classes would not help making the probability of simulating you higher than 0. To illustrate, if P(A)=X, and P(B)=0, P(A and B)=0.
We are not our brain, though. Consciousness does not only come from the brain, as an example we have quite a lot of neurons in our stomach, and even worse, the intestinal flora is known to have an influence on behaviour and thinking. That means that in order to reproduce you exactly, you have to reproduce the whole body, not merely the brain, and even possibly the bacteria inside your stomach... Information about who you are is not only contained in the brain, it is contained in the whole body. It can be argued that the brain would be sufficient to recreate someone, but I have extreme doubts over such a hypothesis, someone who only had a brain and not a body would go insane from the complete absence of stimuli from their body, and any partial copy would not truly be you but only an inferior copy. Assuming such an inferior copy can be considered to be you, then every broken copy arising from randomness is also yourself, so there's no escaping the statistical hell.
Secondly, you still don't understand the problem of simulating one individual. We are the product of so many random events that it is not possible to find out exactly how one particular individual came into existence. Aliens would need to use a rational and deliberate computation process in order to reproduce a conscious being. If you think aliens could recreate you by using enough random coin tosses to get to you, then you're only recreating a Boltzman brain but unlike the universe aliens do not have infinite ressources. The worst thing of them all, and the biggest dealbreaker, is the problem of chaos and the butterfly effect. Even an inaccuracy over a single cell of your body could lead to as an example a cancer killing you before making children and therefore completely changing the whole timeline of events by making people that would have existed in our universe disappear. If, say, your mother has a stray thought and decides to abort you, you simply won't exist. Now, imagine this at every instant of the world you're simulating. A single error can completely change the timeline.
If we look at proposition 1, the weakest form of my argument would be one where the universe has infinite time, but not infinite space nor infinite matter. In such a cyclical universe, I think your point about aliens being overwhelmingly more likely to simulate than random statistical noise is one I would entirely agree with. Because, in such a scecnario, we are not merely talking about one alien civilization, we are talking about potentially infinite alien simulations randomly recreating us over and over and over again.
If, however, the universe is "strongly infinite", (Infinite time + infinite space + infinite matter), then no matter what aliens do, there is no way to surpass statistical hell. Every alien civilization would have finite ressources, whereas the universe has infinite ressources. No matter how efficient aliens would be with their technology, I don't think it is possible to beat a "cubic infinity". The aliens would have access to infinite time, with finite ressources in space and energy. Whereas, the universe has access to infinite time*infinite ressources*infinite space.
The reason disembodied individuals win, is because they can simulate one person perfectly without having to simulate their surroundings perfectly. Statistical noisy random processes do not need to retrieve ANY information about your past to remake you. Meanwhile, aliens have to somehow find your information again and reproduce it exactly, through a computation process. There is an asymetry. Aliens need to retrieve information that is impossible to get, whereas the universe doesn't need to care about that.
Then we have some margin for error in some unimportant parts and have absolutely zero margin for error in the other parts
But all of the parts would have some margin for error because bounded physical processes can't store infinite information(Bekenstein bound). Adding in your guts, microbiome etc. doesn't fundamentally change the argument, they still have a far smaller number of degrees of freedom than your past light cone.
If you think aliens could recreate you by using enough random coin tosses to get to you, then you're only recreating a Boltzman brain but unlike the universe aliens do not have infinite ressources
Flipping a quantum coin a bunch of times doesn't actually require that many resources though, assuming you already have enough computational resources to store the brain. And aliens have a crucial advantage over vacuum fluctuations in that they can model dependencies that would be found in actual brains and only sample from brain states that would likely occur. Like if (made up numbers) there are 2^(10^15) possible brain states but only 2^(10^9) of them would be likely to occur in reality, the aliens can sample from that narrower space and thus get a relative factor of ~2^(10^15) more probability. (Yes aliens can't perfectly sample from the actual state space but it doesn't matter, any improvement over pure randomness will give a large increase in probability)
The first part of my answer will answer your point about Bekenstein's limit. The second part of my answer will concede your point, and look at the logical consequences.
In our assumptions, the Bekenstein's limit theorem is false. This theorem fundamentally assumes that the universe is pixelated, that it is possible to separate it into finite parts. But, in Proposition 5 bis, I assume that real numbers exist. It is basically a limited version of platonic realism. I consider the universe to merely be a mathematical structure. In the end, there is a fundamental chasm between reality itself, and the theories we can make about reality. My opinion is that physics is not the study of reality, but rather, the study of what we are able to measure and the informational patterns we are able to infer from those measurements. That would make the Bekeinstein's limit a fundamental limit on physical epistemology rather than on ontology.
The hypothetical aliens wouldn't need to merely flip a quantum coin a bunch of times. They'd need to do that across all the spacetime they are simulating. I think that, because quantum states involve uncountable infinities rather than countable infinities, that it would not be possible for a quantum computer to calculate "more" than a linear sum of infinities that depends on the volume of spacetime/energy that defines the computer's upper limit of computation. By using a binary computer it is fundamentally impossible to simulate those things, because binary computers can only calculate "countable infinities". However, my reasoning is shaky, because I do not have the mathematical prowesses necessary to, actually calculate all those things. Basically, aliens would be using some kind of analogical computers in order to force the universe to do the dirty work of calculations for them rather than trying to create an algorithm that does it.
In such a case, simulating a whole person... Could be possible. With a big enough quantum computer that would neutralize infinities using other infinities. In all honesty, you may have gotten me with this. There is no way for me to prove that broken simulations would vastly outnumber the "normal" ones. But, in that case, "waking up again" after your death is still inevitable from your own perspective. You'd have a random mix of both (infinite?) alien simulations (both broken and unbroken. But you'll be at their complete mercy, if they want to torture you for fun they can) and infinite disembodied reincarnations of a few yottoseconds.
Now, I'll look a the consequences if I concede your point. Here is the massive problem : as your simulation "ages", in order to compute the older version of yourself accurately with all the memories it'll take more and more computing power until it will eventually exceed what any civilization is capable to do. However, the universe is not bound by those limits, since it is infinite. Therefore, as you get reincarnated more and more, the odds that an alien civilization happens to reincarnate you become more and more impossible. Because everyone has eternal life (from the point of view of a deceased time does not pass), the more time passes, the worse the conditions for reincarnating get.
You'd have a random mix of both (infinite?) alien simulations (both broken and unbroken. But you'll be at their complete mercy, if they want to torture you for fun they can) and infinite disembodied reincarnations of a few yottoseconds
I think the probabilities will be heavily tilted towards the aliens(or really, humanity/human-descended AIs in the future or an alternate timeline). But yes, I agree with the overall point that continuations of your stream of consciousness might become very weird and unpredictable past the point at which you would normally die on Earth(and probably even weirder as time goes on into the distant future)
It seems we are done for this particular debate. I would like to thank you for all your thoughts, which have been a precious help, and for giving a chance to my essay despite its negative karma.
If anyone has good counterarguments, on failures from my reasoning, I would gladly take the time to see if they are valid or if they can be refuted.
Infinities are tricky. Once you get to "every possible local configuration of space-time will occur an infinite number of times", you kind of lose the meaning behind the intuition that suffering is bad - everything just is, whether good or bad, it happens. Over and over, with no meaningful variation. What's to judge?
If some configurations are more common than others (different degrees of infinite, I suppose), you could have beliefs about WHY they're more common and preferences among them. But it still feels pretty abstract to me.
If there's any significant chance that the universe is finite and some things don't happen, then you're back in normal intuition land, and you probably won't be resurrected.
To understand this essay : the metaphysical framework is materialism, we do not assume any religious framework to be correct and we do not assume God or gods exist. "Or" is to be taken in the mathematical sense, so two propositions linked with or are not mutually exclusive.
Definition : Hell is defined as being in pain for eternity without any hope of ending one's life.
Proposition 1 : Either Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is correct, or the universe is truly infinite (the universe being infinite is different from the universe expanding infinitely into the future. If the universe is infinite, it's always infinite and it never has a relevant "size". If it expands infinitely, it can have a finite size at time T, but it'll simply keep increasing without stopping), or eternal inflation is correct, or the big crunch theory is correct. The logical consequence is that the universe and its laws continously exist for eternity.
Proposition 2 : Matter and energy are not fundamental. The fundamental thing is information. For a simulated being, there is no difference between an atom and a simulated atom as long as it thinks it is interacting with an atom.
Proposition 3 : Conscious beings such as humans can be simulated or created from code.
Proposition 4 : Any Turing-complete language can simulate a conscious being.
Proposition 5 : As long as something is statistically possible, given infinite time, it will happen.
Proposition 5 bis : Real numbers exist. They are not merely an abstraction to approximate reality but truly exist in this universe. This hypothesis has a consequence that means that any event with a probability higher than 0 can happen. It is possible to create more contriving events that will have any arbitrarily low probability and as long as the probability is not 0, given infinite time it should happen.
Proposition 6 : Being in good health or happy is rarer than being in bad health or unhappy. There are millions of different kinds of illnesses that one can have, uncountable ways a person can be unhappy or unsatisfied even when healthy (being hungry, being cold, being sad...) , therefore the overwhelming majority of conscious beings must be in pain in one way or another.
Proposition 7 : The holographic principle is correct.
Proposition 8 : It is not possible to experience the feeling of time passing when dead. Therefore, even if millions of years or hundreds of millions of years pass before being alive again, from their point of view time passes instantly between incarnations.
P1 means the universe is running for an infinite amount of time and never stops. P2 means that any part of the universe could be a simulation of something, (The movement and position of air particules can contain information of a program, temperature increase/decrease themselves can contain information, water molecules can contain it, random quantum fluctuations, etc). P3 means a general AI is possible. P4 means a general AI doesn't care what is used as a medium for its code, it can be python or C, it can be on a classical computer or a quantum computer or even on a mechanical computer. P5 means that statistical thermodynamics are correct, P6 simply means that most of our life we'll be sick or unhappy or unsatisfied in some fashion. P7 is not strictly necessary, it is a hypothesis that makes information compression across dimensions easier and which increases the likelihood of such things happening. P8 means that there is no "resting" for the dead, one simply cannot experience time passing when not alive.
From those, we conclude that every one of us will live forever, or at least be reincarnated repeateadly for all eternity. Pain, then non existence, then pain, then non existence, non stop for eternity. It doesn't even matter if there are hundreds of millions of years, or even quadrillion years, between every incarnation.
Please feel free to criticize any of the propositions, tell me which proposition is the weakest in your opinion and why, or if there is a flaw in my reasoning that I didn't spot.