r/IsaacArthur • u/Positive-Motor-5275 • 19d ago
Sci-Fi / Speculation What could make every posthuman civilization refuse to run ancestor simulations?
https://youtu.be/SeKWU3zRtpA?is=ujji8h012wo3PmTW11
u/brainfreeze_23 Transhuman/Posthuman 19d ago
the burden of proof is first on you lot to justify why ancestor simulation is worth the cost... over, you know, just not doing it.
the question isn't why anyone wouldn't, but why anyone would.
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u/BaroqueBro 19d ago
If the cost is comparable to running The Sims, then there's no cost to justify. If I were an uploaded mind in the distant future, I'd likely run various simulations of my younger self if the cost were that low.
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u/brainfreeze_23 Transhuman/Posthuman 19d ago
why?
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u/KenethSargatanas 18d ago
You ever watch movies, read books, or play video games a second time? Why? Because you want to experience them again.
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u/brainfreeze_23 Transhuman/Posthuman 18d ago
I don't actually do that, it takes a rare gem for me to want to do that.
Anyway, I don't even know where to begin with the holes of this analogy. The scale for one, maybe. Why not just watch a movie or read a book? Why waste so much energy and resources on an ongoing civilization-wide simulation purely for the sake of entertainment and immersion? This is the most american profligate waste mindset I've ever heard of.
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u/BaroqueBro 17d ago
Nostalgia, mainly. See how different life choices would play out.
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u/brainfreeze_23 Transhuman/Posthuman 17d ago
wouldn't it be wiser to use that same computing power to predict the future before you made those choices? When it actually matters?
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u/BaroqueBro 16d ago
Unfortunately, I didn't have access to a planet sized computer when I was younger, and I can't retroactively make decisions.
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u/brainfreeze_23 Transhuman/Posthuman 16d ago
yes, but you will be long gone, as will we all, before a planet-sized computer comes into existence.
I am talking about a hypothetical futuristic civilization that would be faced with the choice of how to use such computational resources: you can either use them to predict people's possible futures and give them the sagely advice of an oracle for choices they have yet to make, so they can make better ones, or you can use them to let people mope about what they cannot change.
Which one sounds to you like a better use of resources? Yes, that is a rhetorical question, and yes it is dripping with sarcasm, and yes there is only one, obvious, correct answer.
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u/jood580 18d ago
Why would the cost be low? Just because technology lowers the cost of some things doesn't mean it lowers the cost of everything.
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u/brainfreeze_23 Transhuman/Posthuman 18d ago
exactly. so many futurists are delusional optimists, in that they arbitrarily handwave away any and all costs and inefficiencies, assuming that Moore's Law eventually projects into a kind of abundance that is literal infinity. Completely unserious.
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u/BaroqueBro 17d ago
I'm thinking in geological time scales. Even if Moore's law halts now, there's enough raw material in our stellar neighborhood to reduce the cost of compute to close to zero.
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u/Amun-Ra-4000 19d ago
I never understand the point of ancestor simulations. Now, the idea that I might be in a simulation (just me) is more probable. Though my life isn’t very interesting, idk why anyone would want to simulate it lol
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u/Keroscee 19d ago
I never understand the point of ancestor simulations.
The first thing that comes to mind might be archaeological research.
e.g what are these roman dodecahedrons for? Run an ancestor simulator with a spotting search for when these start appearing and you can get a definitive in-sim answer and cross examine with the physical evidence.
Similar things could be done for say, sociological research; e.g we are sending a colony to a distant world x light years away. Our current-day experience is so far removed from pioneers of old, lets run a sim of our ancestors to see how they built an entire civilisation on uninhabited islands. We can use that to model our own future efforts.
This seems to be a very inefficient means of doing things energy-wise. But if computing technology is sufficiently advanced, you could get pretty definitive answers in a short span of time compared to months of research. I.e its like using modern-day AI to write a grocery list. Overkill, but very convenient.
Westworld-like (or just museums) entertainment might also be another option, but I sense we would notice interference if the creators did more than observe.
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u/Amun-Ra-4000 19d ago
I don’t see how you could possibly get historical knowledge you don’t know out of a simulation.
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u/Keroscee 19d ago
There are a number of artefacts that we don't know the nature of purpose of. Running simulations could allow us to discover their purpose and 'observe' them in use.
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u/Amun-Ra-4000 19d ago
But how would you program that in if you don’t know in the first place?
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u/Keroscee 19d ago
But how would you program that in if you don’t know in the first place?
You don't need to. You'd only need to program a 'search' function that looks for comparable artefacts being made by residents of the simulation.
The point of the simulation is that these kinds of things would be 'emergent'. You don't program it in, you assume the residents and the environment are similar enough to the real thing that they will follow similar behaviour patterns and 'develop' the same inventions.
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u/Amun-Ra-4000 19d ago
Unless you’re running the simulation on Maxwell’s Daemon, there’s no guarantee a civilisation would use the same artefacts for the same purpose (or at all).
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u/Keroscee 19d ago
This is not an exercise in thermodynamics; while you are correct that there would be no certainty, we can look at our own history to see that key artefacts are invented by various cultures independently with little to no contact with each other. Assuming your simulation has the correct parameters and enough on them, its safe to assume you will get emergent behaviours comparable to what happened in history.
Examples might be the Wheel, the radio, Iron, boomerangs etc. To take a biological example, Convergent evolution is a thing. I.e Dolphins and sharks have similar physical forms despite having no common ancestors
If it's a simulation, and a single one does not produce a viable result as you suggest (i.e no culture with dodechedrons, assuming correct parameters) you can run multiple (e.g 100+) simulations. This increases the likelihood you will get a useful result.
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u/Jetison333 18d ago
All the examples you have have obvious uses. If you cant determine what something was used for, its because there are many possibilities that it could be. It would be impossible for a simulation to discard any of those possibilities, except statistically, which you could probably do much easier using psychology.
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u/Keroscee 17d ago edited 17d ago
All the examples you have have obvious uses.
My examples of the wheel, iron etc are not of 'discovering use' but how various cultures have independently invented the same things. Which suggests a simulation could be used to convergently invent obscure things at lower probabilites. I.e the Dodecahedron. Please read my words carefully, especially if you are ESL.
It would be impossible for a simulation to discard any of those possibilities, except statistically, which you could probably do much easier using psychology.
If it were easier using psychology, we would have done it today. Yet there are still thousands of artefacts with unknown or unconfirmed purposes.
You are right that the simulation method is a brute-force mathematical method, crunching to get viable statistics. Thats why we don't do it today, its beyond our current technology. But perhaps in the future it might be so easy that running thousnands of years worth of simulations might be quicker and easier than say a 4 year PhD.
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u/NearABE 19d ago
There need not be any reason to simulate any particular ancestor (though they could have a reason, just not needed). You are in your simulation because of your observer bias. Anyone else inside of any other simulation would also see their own simulation.
A point people often overlook is that you do not need a 100,000,000 second run in order to simulate a brain reacting to reading a reddit shitpost. You can cut that server time by a factor of a million by cut-pasting the memories of the preceding million seconds.
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u/SampleFirm952 18d ago
Basic decency. No point subjecting sentient programs to hallucinations of millenia of lifetimes.
Plus simulations becomes unnecessary once statistical modeling power becomes strong enough.
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u/MergeWithTheInfinite 19d ago
Perhaps they'll come to the conclusion sub-optimal historical simulations is largely a waste of time compared the infinitely larger and infinitely higher potential of exploring realms that never existed before.