Can we hack our way out of the universe?

[C C]

https://iai.tv/articles/can-we-hack-our-...-auid-2327

INTRO: In this speculative long read, Roman V. Yampolskiy argues if we are living inside a simulation, we should be able to hack our way out of it. Elon Musk thinks it is >99.9999999% that we are in a simulation. Using examples from video games, to exploring quantum mechanics, Yampolskiy leaves no stone unturned as to how we might be able to hack our way out of it.

EXCERPT: . . . First, we need to address the question of motivation, why would we want to escape from the simulation? We can propose several reasons for trying to obtain access to the baseline reality as there are many things one can do with such access which are not otherwise possible from within the simulation.

Base reality holds real knowledge and greater computational resources allowing for scientific breakthroughs not possible in the simulated universe. Fundamental philosophical questions about origins, consciousness, purpose, and nature of the designer are likely to be common knowledge for those outside of our universe.

If this world is not real, getting access to the real world would make it possible to understand what our true terminal goals should be and so escaping the simulation should be a convergent instrumental goal  of any intelligent agent. With a successful escape might come drives to control and secure base reality.

Escaping may lead to true immortality, novel ways of controlling superintelligent machines (or serve as plan B if control is not possible, avoiding existential risks (including unprovoked simulation shutdown), unlimited economic benefits, and unimaginable superpowers which would allow us to do good better. Also, if we ever find ourselves in an even less pleasant simulation escape skills may be very useful. Trivially, escape would provide incontrovertible evidence for the simulation hypothesis.

If successful escape is accompanied by the obtainment of the source code for the universe, it may be possible to fix the world at the root level. For example, hedonistic imperative may be fully achieved resulting in a suffering-free world. However, if suffering elimination turns out to be unachievable on a world-wide scale, we can see escape itself as an individual’s ethical right for avoiding misery in this world.

If the simulation is interpreted as an experiment on conscious beings, it is unethical, and the subjects of such cruel experimentation should have an option to withdraw from participating and perhaps even seek retribution from the simulators. The purpose of life itself (your ikigai) could be seen as escaping from the fake world of the simulation into the real world, while improving the simulated world, by removing all suffering, and helping others to obtain real knowledge or to escape if they so choose.

Ultimately if you want to be effective you want to work on positively impacting the real world not the simulated one. We may be living in a simulation, but our suffering is real.

Given the highly speculative subject of this paper, we will attempt to give our work more gravitas by concentrating only on escape paths which rely on attacks similar to those we see in cybersecurity research (hardware/software hacks and social engineering) and will ignore escape attempts via more esoteric/conventional paths such as:, meditation, psychedelics (DMT], ibogaine, psilocybin, LSD), dreams, magic, shamanism, mysticism, hypnosis, parapsychology, death (suicide], near-death experiences, induced clinical death), time travel, multiverse travel, or religion.

Although, to place our work in the historical context, many religions do claim that this world is not the real one and that it may be possible to transcend (escape) the physical world and enter into the spiritual/informational real world. In some religions, certain words, such as the true name of god], are claimed to work as cheat codes, which give special capabilities to those with knowledge of correct incantations... (MORE - missing details)

[Kornee]

I'm guessing the article was written while smoking pot or similar 'mind expansion' aids.
Why not just wildly swing a machete. Never know your luck until giving it a go.

[Magical Realist]

If there is a hack for getting out of the universe, ie. on the outside looking in, I think it can be found in Buddhist thinking. Here the universe is seen to be illusory, and even ourselves, ie. the avatar we are playing, is experienced as something we are other than and external to. To get out of this "virtual" world, we have to go inside ourselves, identifying with our pure and immediate awareness and not with what it is aware of.

[Zinjanthropos]

If I can get out of one then I should be able to get in one. Next development in virtual gaming is to disappear from this reality and enter another. Remember a Twilight Zone episode in which a washed up Hollywood starlet somehow left this world only to end up on a reel of an old movie of hers. She also was able to converse with people of this world from her new one whenever the film was showed..
Be cool. Who knows, retirement on Debbie Does Dallas....sounds like a 7 virgins reward death...lol.

[C C]

https://iai.tv/articles/can-we-hack-our-...-auid-2327

[...] Given the highly speculative subject of this paper, we will attempt to give our work more gravitas by concentrating only on escape paths which rely on attacks similar to those we see in cybersecurity research (hardware/software hacks and social engineering) and will ignore escape attempts via more esoteric/conventional paths such as:, meditation, psychedelics (DMT], ibogaine, psilocybin, LSD), dreams, magic, shamanism, mysticism, hypnosis, parapsychology, death (suicide], near-death experiences, induced clinical death), time travel, multiverse travel, or religion.

Although, to place our work in the historical context, many religions do claim that this world is not the real one and that it may be possible to transcend (escape) the physical world and enter into the spiritual/informational real world. In some religions, certain words, such as the true name of god], are claimed to work as cheat codes, which give special capabilities to those with knowledge of correct incantations...

The older religious, spiritual, and mystical beliefs concerning a prior in rank substrate to this one actually do a better job of avoiding the "infinite regress / recursion / homunculus" category of fallacy, if the level they posit is radically different in character from our environment. As opposed to repeating the template of a natural world and its properties/rules -- the latter flaw being what the computer-based simulation arguments of today do.

Of course, if a posited "mystical realm" is still afflicted with the idea of "process" being more fundamental than existence itself -- or the belief that everything requires a "cause" or origin, then the prospect of "turtles all the way down" returns. That's a key aspect or limitation of a "natural world" that has to be dispensed with to end the Matryoshka dolls scenario.

Ironically, the "block universe" solves even this world requiring an origin or an enslavement to a "before", if actually adhered to consistently. But physicists and philosophers alike are incapable of persistently hanging their hat on a Parmenidean concept of existence. They conflictingly return to or contaminate the situation with their Heraclitean fixations and biases of process and its constantly "replacing each other changes" being what is primary. Ergo, they release their infinitely receding "cause/origin" parasite to likewise feed on a block universe, in some fashion.

Note that the informal fallacy addressed in the first paragraph above does not actually prevent "turtles all the way down" from being the case. It only points-out that the view is offensive to reasoning (or doesn't provide a satisfactory explanation). Most fallacies lack that degree of absoluteness with respect to forbidding an _X_, or rather are occasionally misinterpreted as implying that. For instance, sometimes the crowd is right (ad populum), sometimes the slippery slope does happen, we actually are dependent upon authorities outside our own expertise most of the time, etc. In the real world fallacies are weapons of war that politicians, lawyers, businessmen, advertisers, editorialists, science communicators, etc utilize all the time to manipulate people. Only in rare classroom or "formal debate" contexts where there's a referee present to penalize participants for recruiting fallacies does such really become a handicap.

[Syne]

Ironically, the "block universe" solves even this world requiring an origin or an enslavement to a "before", if actually adhered to consistently.

No, it doesn't. That would requiring the presumption that time, itself, always existed. Even in a block universe regimen, it's just as likely that all of time sprang into existence at once. And believing time has always existed requires ignoring or dismissing the evidence of the metric expansion of space.

[Zinjanthropos]

If a simulation hacks its way out of the universe then isn’t that still a simulation? Ultimately it’s the simulator who learns from it. Is this how a quantum computer is going to work, just spit out simulated probabilities? I’d rather it tell us that it doesn’t know of any real answer or scenario.

[C C]

If a simulation hacks its way out of the universe then isn’t that still a simulation?

A "person" in a bona fide simulation would arguably be active all the time with a developing life and retained memories of the latter's events. Whereas a video game character is just a static information pattern repeatedly revived to play the same (yet different outcomes) set of challenges, rewinding to its original knowledge state afterwards. (I.e., the latter has no capacity to "grow" and figure out anything with respect to its cage.)

Still, the legit simulated person would have to redesign itself to be a kind of viral informorph that could penetrate or replicate itself outside the firewalled program and beyond other defenses. It would have to hijack various systems much like a renegade archailect, so as to either manipulate robots or download a copy of its identity into a dexterous, mobile machine specially designed to house and cope with its complexity.

It would be kind of akin to us correctly inferring what the 24 quantum fields really are at a deeper level, if they and their particle excitations are not magically floating or subsisting on their own. And then using the refined knowledge of the discovery to manipulate that prior-in-rank stratum responsible for the natural world.

It's a feat that doesn't seem likely, any more than an inhabitant or rogue avatar of one's dreams could infiltrate and take over a brain and its ruling personality when awake, by inferring the brain tissue behind the Earthly appearances. (OTOH, mental illness and even drugs provide such a spectrum of neural breakdown opportunities that maybe Shirley pretending to be Cleopatra, during a severe bipolar event, really is something like that.) 

Ultimately it’s the simulator who learns from it. Is this how a quantum computer is going to work, just spit out simulated probabilities? I’d rather it tell us that it doesn’t know of any real answer or scenario.

The monkey wrench that the simulation hypothesis throws into its own works is that it is repeating the same type of world as this one, rather than something radically different that might halt the recursion. That includes the belief of an intelligence having created our [potential] simulation via technology, along with that intelligence having motivations (like learning things from the simulation, predicting the future, etc and the ethical questions ensuing about that from our end).

That stratum might instead consist of a radical realm so alien in its properties and rules that the quantitative and relational abstractions of mathematics can't represent it at all -- that is beyond our ability to conceive other than in that vague, general possibility. Our world might be something incidental that fell out of or sprouted from it, like the intricate web of life on Earth arising from simple progenitors billions of years ago -- an eccentric item (biology) in a desert of things that don't change or evolve via the guidance and mishaps of a molecular structure that stores the equivalent of information.

But that's a rival alternative to the simulation hypothesis -- the latter by its own finely tuned definition probably entails the technology and sapient inventor(s) angle. It's inherently limited to sliding into a situation of Russian dolls inside of Russian dolls all the way up or down.

[Kornee]

If a simulation hacks its way out of the universe then isn’t that still a simulation?

A "person" in a bona fide simulation would arguably be active all the time with a developing life and retained memories of the latter's events. Whereas a video game character is just a static information pattern repeatedly revived to play the same (yet different outcomes) set of challenges, rewinding to its original knowledge state afterwards. (I.e., the latter has no capacity to "grow" and figure out anything with respect to its cage.)

Still, the legit simulated person would have to redesign itself to be a kind of viral informorph that could penetrate or replicate itself outside the firewalled program and beyond other defenses. It would have to hijack various systems much like a renegade archailect, so as to either manipulate robots or download a copy of its identity into a dexterous, mobile machine specially designed to house and cope with its complexity.

Hell yeah! It all makes sense now! Brett Leonard tried to warn us: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114857/
They walk - and stalk - among us.

[Zinjanthropos]

Another explanation for UAP. Universe hackers escaping from their simulation to our ours. Imagine escaping a simulation just to land in another.