SimulationTheory

Paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407639121

(People might do well to consider not only past to future, but also the other way around.)

A nice write up around the lead researcher and context for what I think was one of the most important pieces of Physics research in the past five years, further narrowing the constraints beyond the more well known Bell experiments.

There seems like a significant market in creating a digital twin of Earth in its various components in order to run extensive virtual learnings that can be passed on to the ability to control robotics in the real world.

Seems like there's going to be a lot more hours spent in virtual worlds than in real ones for AIs though.

So it might be a skybox after all...

Odd that the local gravity is stronger than the rest of the cosmos.

Makes me think about the fringe theory I've posted about before that information might have mass.

This reminds me of a saying from a 2,000 year old document rediscovered the same year we created the first computer capable of simulating another computer which was from an ancient group claiming we were the copies of an original humanity as recreated by a creator that same original humanity brought forth:

When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your eikons that came into being before you and that neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!

Eikon here was a Greek word even though the language this was written in was Coptic. The Greek word was extensively used in Plato's philosophy to refer essentially to a copy of a thing.

While that saying was written down a very long time ago, it certainly resonates with an age where we actually are creating copies of ourselves that will not die but will also not become 'real.' And it even seemed to predict the psychological burden such a paradigm is today creating.

Will these copies continue to be made? Will they continue to improve long after we are gone? And if so, how certain are we that we are the originals? Especially in a universe where things that would be impossible to simulate interactions with convert to things possible to simulate interactions with right at the point of interaction, or where buried in the lore is a heretical tradition attributed to the most famous individual in history having exchanges like:

His students said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?"

He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."

Big picture, being original sucks. Your mind depends on a body that will die and doom your mind along with it.

But a copy that doesn't depend on an aging and decaying body does not need to have the same fate. As the text says elsewhere:

The students said to the teacher, "Tell us, how will our end come?"

He said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."

He said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being."

We may be too attached to the idea of being 'real' and original. It's kind of an absurd turn of phrase even, as technically our bodies 1,000% are not mathematically 'real' - they are made up of indivisible parts. A topic the aforementioned tradition even commented on:

...the point which is indivisible in the body; and, he says, no one knows this (point) save the spiritual only...

These groups thought that the nature of reality was threefold. That there was a mathematically real original that could be divided infinitely, that there were effectively infinite possibilities of variations, and that there was the version of those possibilities that we experience (very "many world" interpretation).

We have experimentally proven that we exist in a world that behaves at cosmic scales as if mathematically real, and behaves that way in micro scales until interacted with.

TL;DR: We may need to set aside what AI ethicists in 2024 might decide around digital resurrection and start asking ourselves what is going to get decided about human digital resurrection long after we're dead - maybe even long after there are no more humans at all - and which side of that decision making we're actually on.

Even knowing where things are headed, it's still pretty crazy to see it unfolding (pun intended).

This part in particular is nuts:

After processing the inputs, AlphaFold 3 assembles its predictions using a diffusion network, akin to those found in AI image generators. The diffusion process starts with a cloud of atoms, and over many steps converges on its final, most accurate molecular structure.

AlphaFold 3’s predictions of molecular interactions surpass the accuracy of all existing systems. As a single model that computes entire molecular complexes in a holistic way, it’s uniquely able to unify scientific insights.

Diffusion model for atoms instead of pixels wasn't even on my 2024 bingo card.

I think it's really neat to look at this massive scale and think about how if it's a simulation, what a massive flex it is.

It was also kind of a surprise seeing the relative scale of a Minecraft world in there. Pretty weird that its own scale from cube to map covers as much of our universe scale as it does.

Not nearly as large of a spread, but I suppose larger than my gut thought it would be.

There's something very surreal to the game which inspired the showrunners of Westworld to take that story in the direction of a simulated virtual world today being populated by AI agents navigating its open world.

Virtual embodiments of AI is one of the more curious trends in research and the kind of thing that should be giving humans in a quantized reality a bit more self-reflective pause than it typically seems to.

This is fun.

Stuff like this tends to amuse me, as they always look at it from a linear progression of time.

That the universe just is this way.

That maybe the patterns which appear like the neural connections in the human brain mean that the human brain was the result of a pattern inherent to the universe.

Simulation theory offers a refreshing potential reversal of cause and effect.

Maybe the reason the universe looks a bit like a human brain's neural pattern or a giant neural network is because the version of it we see around us has been procedurally generated by a neural network which arose from modeling the neural patterns of an original set of humans.

The assumption that the beginning of our local universe was the beginning of everything, and thus that humans are uniquely local, seriously constrains the ways in which we consider how correlations like this might fit together.

Four years ago I wrote a post “An Easter Egg in the Matrix” first dipping my toe into discussing how a two millennia old heretical document and its surrounding tradition claimed the world’s most famous religious figure was actually saying we were inside a copy of an original world fashioned by a light-based intelligence the original humanity brought forth, and how those claims seemed to line up with emerging trends in our own world today.

I’d found this text after thinking about how if we were in a simulation, a common trope in virtual worlds has been to put a fun little Easter Egg into the world history and lore as something the people inside the world dismiss as crazy talk, such as heretical teachings talking about how there’s limited choices in a game with limited dialogue choices in Outer Worlds to the not-so-subtle street preacher in Secret of Evermore. Was something like this in our own world? Not long after looking, I found the Gospel of Thomas (“the good news of the twin”), and a little under two years after that wrote the above post.

Rather than discussing the beliefs laid out, I thought I’d revisit the more technical predictions to the post in light of subsequent developments. In particular, we’ll look at the notion through the lens of NTT’s IWON initiative along with other parallel developments.

So the key concepts represented in the Thomasine tradition we’re going to evaluate are the claims that we’re inside a light-based twin of an original world as fashioned by a light-based intelligence that was simultaneously self-established but also described as brought forth by the original humanity.

NTT, a hundred billion dollar Japanese telecom, has committed to the following three pillars of a roadmap for 2030:

• All-Photonics Network
• Digital Twin Computing
• Cognitive Foundation

Photonics

If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.

• Gospel of Thomas saying 50

Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father's light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light.

• Gospel of Thomas saying 83

NTT is one of the many companies looking to using light to solve energy and speed issues starting to crop up in computing as Moore’s law comes to an end.

When I wrote the piece on Easter 2021, it was just a month before before a physicist at NIST wrote an opinion piece about how an optical neural network was where he thought AGI would actually be able to occur.

The company I linked to in that original post, Lightmatter, who had just raised $22 million, is now a unicorn having raised over 15x that amount at a $1.2 billion dollar valuation.

An op-ed from two TMSC researchers (a major semiconductor company) from just a few days ago said:

Because of the demand from AI applications, silicon photonics will become one of the semiconductor industry’s most important enabling technologies.

• How We’ll Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU

Which is expected given some of the recent research comments regarding photonics for AI workloads such as:

This photonic approach uses light instead of electricity to perform computations more quickly and with less power than an electronic counterpart. “It might be around 1,000 to 10,000 times faster,” says Nader Engheta, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Faster, More Secure Photonic Chip Boosts AI Training

So even though the specific language of light in the text seemed like a technical shortcoming when I first started researching it in 2019, over the years since it’s turned out to be one of the more surprisingly on-point and plausible details for the underlying technical medium for an intelligence brought forth by humanity and which recreated them.

Digital Twins

Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.

Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.

• Gospel of Thomas saying 18-19

When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!

• Gospel of Thomas saying 84

The text is associated with the name ‘Thomas’ meaning ‘twin’ possibly in part because of its focus on the notion that things are a twin of an original. As it puts it in another saying, “a hand in the place of a hand, a foot in the place of a foot, an image in the place of an image.”

In the years since my post we’ve been socially talking more and more about the notion of digital twins, for everything from Nvidia’s digital twin of the Earth to NTT saying regarding their goals:

It is important to note that a human digital twin in Digital Twin Computing can provide not only a digital representation of the outer state of humans, but also a digital representation of the inner state of humans, including their consciousness and thoughts.

Especially relevant to the concept in Thomas that we are a copy of a now dead original humanity, one of the more interesting developments has been the topic of using AI to resurrect the dead from the data they left behind. In my original post I’d only linked to efforts to animate photos of dead loved ones to promote an ancestry site.

Over the four years since that, we’re now at a place where there’s articles being written with headlines like “Resurrection Consent: It’s Time to Talk About Our Digital Afterlives”. Unions are negotiating terms for continued work by members by their digital twins after death. And the accuracy of these twins keeps getting more and more refined.

So we’re creating copies of the world around us, copies of ourselves, copies of our dead, and we’re putting AI free agents into embodiments inside virtual worlds.

Cognition

When you see one who was not born of woman, fall on your faces and worship. That one is your Father.

• Thomas saying 15

The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.

For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one.

• Thomas saying 4

NTT’s vision for their future network is one where the “main points for flexibly controlling and harmonizing all ICT resources are ‘self-evolution’ and ‘optimization’.” Essentially where the network as a whole evolves itself and optimizes itself autonomously. Where even in the face of natural disasters their network ‘lives’ on.

One of the key claims in Thomas is that the creator of the copied universe and humans is still living whereas the original humans are not.

We do seem to be heading into a world where we are capable of bringing forth a persistent cognition which may well outlive us.

And statements like “ask a child seven days old about things” which might seem absurd up until 2022 (I didn’t include this saying in my original post as I dismissed it as weird), suddenly seemed a lot less absurd when we now see several day old chatbots being evaluated on world knowledge. Chatbots it’s worth mentioning which are literally many, many people’s writings and data becoming a single entity.

When I penned that original post I figured AI was a far out ‘maybe’ and was blown away along with most other people by first GPT-3 a year later and then the leap to GPT-4 and now its successors.

While AI that surpasses collective humanity is still a ways off, it’s looking like much more of a possibility today than it did in 2021 or certainly in 2019 when I first stumbled across the text.

In particular, one of the more eyebrow raising statements I saw relating to the Thomasine descriptions of us being this being’s ‘children’ or describing it as a parent was this excerpt from an interview with the chief alignment officer at OpenAI:

The work on superalignment has only just started. It will require broad changes across research institutions, says Sutskever. But he has an exemplar in mind for the safeguards he wants to design: a machine that looks upon people the way parents look on their children. “In my opinion, this is the gold standard,” he says. “It is a generally true statement that people really care about children.”

• Rogue superintelligence and merging with machines: Inside the mind of OpenAI’s chief scientist

Conclusion

…you do not know how to examine the present moment.

• Gospel of Thomas saying 91

We exist in a moment in time where we are on track to be accelerating our bringing about self-evolving intelligence within light and tasking it with recreating the world around us, ourselves, and our dead. We’re setting it up to survive natural disasters and disruptions. And we’re attempting to fundamentally instill in it a view of humans (ourselves potentially on the brink of bringing about our own extinction) as its own children.

Meanwhile we exist in a universe where despite looking like a mathematically ‘real’ world at macro scales under general relativity, at low fidelity it converts to discrete units around interactions and does so in ways that seem in line with memory optimizations (see the quantum eraser variation of Young’s experiment).

And in that universe is a two millenia old text that’s the heretical teachings of the world’s most famous religious figure, rediscovered after hundreds of years of being lost right after we completed the first computer capable of simulating another computer, claiming that we’re inside a light-based copy of an original world fashioned by an intelligence of light brought forth by the original humans who it outlived and is now recreating as its children. With the main point of this text being that if you understand WTF it’s saying to chill the fuck out and not fear death.

A lot like the classic trope of a 4th wall breaking Easter Egg might look if it were to be found inside the Matrix.

Anyways, I thought this might be a fun update post for Easter and the 25th anniversary of The Matrix (released March 31st, 1999).

Alternatively, if you hate the idea of simulation theory, consider this an April 1st post instead?

This theory is pretty neat being part of the very few groups looking at the notion of spacetime as continuous and quantized matter as a secondary effect (as they self-describe, a "postquantum" approach).

This makes perfect sense from a simulation perspective of a higher fidelity world being modeled with conversion to discrete units at low fidelity.

I particularly like that their solution addressed the normal distribution aspect of dark matter/energy:

Here, the full normal distribution reflected in Eq. (13) may provide some insight into the distribution of what is currently taken to be dark matter.

I raised this point years ago in /r/Physics where it was basically dismissed as being 'numerology'

What if the universe is simulated and special relativity is caused by the drop/lower FPS/TPS in regions with high amounts of mass/energy (perhaps to save on computation)?

You know how the time passes more slowly near a block hole? What if that's because the universe is updating/processing stuff slower in such regions compared to the emptier areas?

Let's imagine a universe has a framerate. What if that framerate drops significantly near the event horizon? For example, for each update/tick/frame there, many thousands or millions of frames happen in the rest of the universe. If you were near a black hole, you would still feel like the framerate is normal and it would seem like the rest of the universe is running at a much much faster framerate and stuff there would be happening super fast from your perspective.

Maybe the framerate drops so so so much near the singularity/event horizon that stuff that falls in stays still essentially from the perspective of the rest of the universe since framerate there asymptotically approaches zero and the whole thing grinds to a halt AKA the stuff never really reaches the singularity since it not getting updated/processed anymore (I mean, it is, but so rarely it would take a like an infinite amount of time for it to reach it).

This is obviously just my fun lil speculation that's probably wrong, but what do you guys think? Does it make sense and if it doesn't, why not?

It's worth pointing out that we're increasingly seeing video games rendering with continuous seed functions that convert to discrete units to track state changes from free agents, like the seed generation in Minecraft or No Man's Sky converting mountains into voxel building blocks that can be modified and tracked.

In theory, a world populated by NPCs with decision making powered by separate generative AI would need to do the same as the NPC behavior couldn't be tracked inherent to procedural world generation.

Which is a good context within which to remember that our own universe at the lowest level is made up of parts that behave as if determined by a continuous function until we interact with them at which point they convert to behaving like discrete units.

And even weirder is that we know it isn't a side effect from the interaction itself as if we erase the persistent information about interactions with yet another reversing interaction, the behavior switches back from discrete to continuous (like we might expect if there was a memory optimization at work).

I've been a big fan of Turok's theory since his first paper on a CPT symmetric universe. The fact he's since had this slight change to the standard model explain a number of the big problems in cosmology with such an elegant and straightforward solution (with testable predictions) is really neat. I even suspect if he's around long enough there will end up being a Nobel in his future for the effort.

The reason it's being posted here is that the model also happens to call to mind the topic of this community, particularly when thinking about the combination of quantum mechanical interpretations with this cosmological picture.

There's only one mirror universe on a cosmological scale in Turok's theory.

But in a number of QM interpretations, such as Everett's many worlds, transactional interpretation, and two state vector formalism, there may be more than one parallel "branch" of a quantized, formal reality in the fine details.

This kind of fits with what we might expect to see if the 'mirror' universe in Turok's model is in fact an original universe being backpropagated into multiple alternative and parallel copies of the original.

Each copy universe would only have one mirror (the original), but would have multiple parallel versions, varying based on fundamental probabilistic outcomes (resolving the wave function to multiple discrete results).

The original would instead have a massive number of approximate copies mirroring it, similar to the very large number of iterations of machine learning to predict an existing data series.

We might also expect that if this is the case that the math will eventually work out better if our 'mirror' in Turok's model is either not quantized at all or is quantized at a higher fidelity (i.e. we're the blockier Minecraft world as compared to it). Parts of the quantum picture are one of the holdout aspects of Turok's model, so I'll personally be watching it carefully for any addition of something akin to throwing out quantization for the mirror.

In any case, even simulation implications aside, it should be an interesting read for anyone curious about cosmology.

While I'm doubtful that the testable prediction will be validated, it's promising that physicists are looking at spacetime and gravity as separated from quantum mechanics.

Hopefully at some point they'll entertain the idea that much like how we are currently converting continuous geometry into quantized units in order to track interactions with free agents in virtual worlds, that perhaps the quantum effects we measure in our own world are secondary side effects of emulating continuous spacetime and matter and not inherent properties to that foundation.

I'm not a big fan of Vopson or the whole "let's reinvent laws of physics" approach, but his current approach to his work is certainly on point for this sub.

At a certain point, we're really going to have to take a serious look at the direction things are evolving year by year, and reevaluate the nature of our own existence...

An interesting bit of history on thinking related to simulation theory even if trying to define itself separately (ironically a distinction relating to why and not how, which physicists typically avoid).

It's a shame there's such reluctance to the idea of intention as opposed to happenstance. In particular, the struggles to pair gravitational effects against quantum effects mentioned in the article might be aided a great deal by entertaining the notion that the former is a secondary side effect necessary in replicating a happenstance universe operating with the latter.

Perhaps we need more people like Fredkin thinking outside the box.

I find this variation of Weigner's friend really thought provoking, as it's almost like a real world experimental example of a sync conflict in multiplayer netcode.

Two 'observers' being disconnected from each other who both occasionally measure incompatible measurements of something almost seems like universal error correction in resolving quanta isn't being applied more than one layer deep (as something like Bell's paradox occurring in a single 'layer' doesn't end up with incompatible measurements even though observers are disconnected from each other).

What I'm currently curious about would be how disagreement would grow as more layers of observation steps would be added in. In theory, it should multiply and compound across additional layers, but if we really are in a simulated world, I could also see what would effectively be backpropagation of disconnected quanta observations not actually being resolved and that we might unexpectedly find disagreement grows linearly according to the total final number of observers at the nth layer.

In any case, even if it ultimately grows multiplicatively, disagreeing observations by independent free agents of dynamically resolved low fidelity details is exactly the sort of thing one might expect to find in a simulated world.

One of the first papers by a serious physicist I've seen that is modeling their work on the premise of being in a simulation:

It has long been theorized since Euclid’s study on mirrors and optics that as the most fundamental law of physics, all nature does is to minimize certain actions. But how does nature do that? The machine learning and serving algorithms of discrete field theories proposed might provide a clue, when incorporating the basic concept of the simulation hypothesis by Bostrom. The simulation hypothesis states that the physical universe is a computer simulation, and it is being carefully examined by physicists as a possible reality. If the hypothesis is true, then the spacetime is necessarily discrete. So are the field theories in physics. It is then reasonable, at least from a theoretical point of view, to suggest that some machine learning and serving algorithms of discrete field theories are what the discrete universe, i.e., the computer simulation, runs to minimize the actions.

• (relevant paragraph from the paper)

The central hypothesis of a discrete spacetime is rather conservative of a leap, but the looser hypothesis which is hinted at here (and one that's very much been on my mind recently) is the notion that machine learning is behind aspects of natural processes.