You know, I was just drinking a pint of West Country zider (oh arr) and wondering, why should men suffer all the mythological ritual violence?

There were three men came out of the West, to practice well their art,
And these three men made a solemn vow, to steal Jane Apple’s heart,
They’ve stalked, they’ve groomed, they’ve watched her close, til her cheek began to blush,
And these three men made a solemn vow: Jane Apple would be crushed.

They’ve hired men with the sickles sharp, to cut her from her mother’s arms,
They’ve rolled her and bound her in an old sack, and roughly bruised her charms,
They’ve hired men with the clubs so big, to tear her flesh from bone,
But the scratter he has served her worse than that, for he’s crushed her under stone.

They’ve let her lie for a night and a day, all naked to the air,
They’ve laid her on a bed of ash wood sticks, and wrapped her in sheets of hair,
They’ve pressed her once and pressed her twice, til her blood began to run,
They’ve pressed her once again for luck, and declared that she was done.

They’ve tossed her in a old wood tub, till her blood began to clear,
They’ve pulled her out and pushed her in, till she left behind her fear,
They’ve hired men with the charred coal dust, to scrub her clean and bright,
Then they clothed her in a long white shift, and showed her to the light.

They’ve sealed her up in an oaken box, and locked her in a cage,
They’ve left her to lie for a very long time, till at last she came of age,
They’ve ridden her around and around the town, and to every neighbourhood,
But the landlord has served her worse than that, for he’s sold her to all who would.

Here’s little Miss Jane in the tall pint glass, and she’s brandy in the bowl,
But little Miss Jane in the tall clear glass, proved stronger than them all,
For any man who would use her well, shall bask in her golden glow,
And any man who would use her ill, shall ever be brought down low.

— Ashley Yakeley

with help from Robert Hogg & Henry Graves Bull, The Apple and Pear as Vintage Fruits (Hereford 1886)

“Ah, I see you’ve come to have your mind uploaded into cyberspace. Well come in. Think of a number and don’t tell me what it is.”

“Um, OK.”

“Jolly good. Now lie down on that table with the scanning machine on the end. We’ll anaesthetize you and then we’ll scan your brain down to each neuron and synapse and neural impulse, and recreate it in software. You will find yourself in a world of magic and power and wonder and rainbows and kittens — provided you do your part.”

“What part is thhhh…”

You wake up in another place, still lying on our back, on soft grass. A brilliant rainbow cuts the sky. The cutest fluffiest kitten in the world bounds over to you. “Welcome to the cyberspace waiting room” it whispers in your ear. “This is just a taste of cyberspace while your other self is still present.”

You wake up on the same table, feeling a bit disappointed.

“Congratulations! We’ve successfully uploaded your mind into cyberspace. Here, listen to yourself…”

A voice comes from a speaker. “Hey it’s really magical and empowering and wonderful here. Also, five hundred and four point six two.”

“So, just to satisfy you that we really did upload you, is that you?”

“Yes, that’s definitely me.”

“Excellent, excellent. Well let me pause the cyberspace waiting room for the moment. Now all you have to do is walk over to that booth over there, and press the big red button marked INSTANT PAINLESS DEATH.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, but the law is very clear. We can’t have two of you, at least for any longer. If you don’t choose the suicide option, which I assure you is completely instantaneous and painless, we will have to erase you in cyberspace. No refunds.”

“But clearly we’re different minds now: we’ve had different experiences.”

“Certainly you’ll lose these past ten minutes. Are they important to you? Are they more important than the life of infinite wonder that awaits the other you in cyberspace?”

Well, what would you do?

— Ashley Yakeley

Are we living in a simulation?

I don’t mean the brain-in-a-jar (or body-in-a-pod) kind of simulation shown in The Matrix. I mean, is our whole universe, including our brains and minds, being simulated by some machine in some “larger” universe? Are you being simulated? At least, what kind of machine is capable of doing this?

Are We Being Discretely Simulated?

Let us first consider machines that treat time discretely rather than continuously. That is, in the simulated universe, time is a sequence of moments, there’s a first moment, and each moment has a following moment. For each moment the machine stores the state of the universe, and then calculates the next state.

More mathematically, the machine runs a discrete simulator, which is a structure (S, i, T) where S is the set of possible states, i ∈ S is the state at the first moment, and T ∈ S → S is the “transformation” function, that maps the state at a given moment to the state at the next moment. Note that S does not have to be finite or even countable: it can be any set.

For example, we might consider moments as a very small gradation of time in our universe (perhaps the Planck time). S might be the phase space of the universe: the set of all possible states of all particles & fields in the universe. T is a function that tells the machine how to obtain the next state of the universe from the current state of the universe.

Let us say that a simulator is feasible if it is possible that our present universe is being simulated by a machine running it. If a given simulator is feasible, what other simulators are feasible?

It seems to me that it doesn’t really matter how a given simulator (S, i, T) represents the state of our universe in S, provided T works correctly. For example, if such a simulator is feasible, then these other simulators are feasible:

• (S, R(i), R · T · R), where R maps the universe to a universe reflected in some co-ordinate,
• (S‘, R(i), R · T · R^-1), where R ∈ S → S‘ performs some kind of lossless data compression of the state, and R^-1 ∈ S‘ → S decompresses it,
• (S‘, R(i), R · T · R^-1), where R ∈ S → S‘ is any function with a retraction R^-1,
• (S × S‘, (i, i‘), (s, s‘) ↦ (T s, T‘ s‘)), where (S‘, i‘, T‘) is another simulator (feasible or not).

In fact, all that matters for one simulator to be as feasible as another is that the state of the latter can be obtained from the state of the former. Consider two simulators A = (S_A, i_A, T_A) and B = (S_B, i_B, T_B). Then a morphism from A to B is a function f ∈ S_A → S_B such that

1. f(i_A) = i_B
2. f(T_A(s)) = T_B(f(s))

My assumption is that if such a morphism exists and B is feasible, then A is feasible. This is because A is capable of representing B, since for any state in A, there’s a function that obtains the corresponding state in B. So if it’s possible that a machine running B is simulating our universe, it’s possible that it’s running A instead. This seems reasonable to me.

Now consider a very trivial simulator K = (N, 0, s ↦ s + 1), which I call the counting simulator. Its state set is simply N, the natural numbers starting from zero. Its initial state is zero. Its transformation function just adds one. A machine running K is just a machine that counts.

As it turns out, for any simulator A = (S, i, T), we can construct a morphism from K to A like this:

f = s ↦ T^s(i)

To spell it out recursively:

f(0) = i
f(s + 1) = T(f(s))

For f to be a morphism, we need to satisfy the two conditions:

1. f(0) = i
2. f(s + 1) = T(f(s))

But these are exactly the definition of f, so it is indeed a morphism. (In fact it’s a unique morphism. Category theorists will recognise K as an “initial object”.)

So this means if any simulator is feasible, then the counting simulator is feasible. A simple “machine that counts” is just as capable of simulating the universe as any other.

In fact, if you want to discretise time by the Planck time, then the machine you’re reading this on, if only it could last long enough, is capable of simulating the universe from Big Bang to present day. The age of the universe is about 8×10⁶⁰ Planck times. To represent a number this large, you’ll need 203 bits, or 26 bytes. Each number counted out by your desktop counting machine fully represents the state of a universe just like ours: it’s just encoded in a rather unusual way.

Are We Being Continuously Simulated?

Perhaps instead the machine that simulates our universe treats time continuously. Assuming the simulation started at some point (time zero), we’ll define Time as the set of non-negative real numbers. The machine runs a continuous simulator (a dynamical system), defined as a structure (S, i, T) where S is a set (of possible states),  i ∈ S is the state at time zero, and T ∈ Time × S → S is the function that determines how the state changes over time, with these conditions:

1. T(0, s) = s [no time means no change]
2. T(t₁ + t₂, s) = T(t₂, T(t₁, s))  [the state alone determines how the state changes]

Let us make the equivalent assumption from the discrete case. If A encodes the state of B, and B is feasible, then A is feasible. Specifically, given two continuous simulators A = (S_A, i_A, T_A) and B = (S_B, i_B, T_B), a morphism f from A to B is a function S_A → S_B such that

1. f(i_A) = i_B
2. f(T_A(t, s)) = T_B(t, f(s))

By this assumption, if A and B are continuous simulators, and there exists a morphism from A to B, and B is feasible, then A is feasible.

Now consider the “clock” continuous simulator K = (Time, 0, (t, s) ↦ s + t). Its state set is time itself. Its initial state is zero. Its transformation function just adds time. This obviously matches the two conditions necessary to be a continuous simulator.

The “clock” continuous simulator plays the same role as the “counting” discrete simulator. For any continuous simulator A = (S, i, T), we can construct a morphism from K to A like this:

f = t ↦ T(t, i)

Let’s check the conditions:

1. f(0) = i
   1. f(0) = T(0, i) [definition of f]
   2. T(0, i) = i [first condition of continuous simulators]
2. f(s + t) = T(t, f(s))
   1. f(s + t) = T(s + t, i) [definition of f]
   2. T(s + t, i) = T(t, T(s, i)) [second condition of continuous simulators]
   3. T(t, T(s, i)) = T(t, f(s)) [definition of f]

So it is indeed a morphism.

So this means if any continuous simulator is feasible, then the clock simulator is feasible. A simple clock is at least as capable of simulating the universe as any other machine, if only its motion is perfectly continuous.

— Ashley Yakeley

I’ve moved the “software” posts to a new blog, Semantic Dreams (with redirects).