Is Our Universe A Newcomb’s Paradox Simulation?

Thanks for this post! I've been meaning to write something similar, and have glad you have :-)

I agree with your claim that most observers like us (who believe they are at the hinge of history) are in (short-lived) simulations. Brian Tomasik discusses how this marginally makes one value interventions with short-term effects. 

In particular, if you think the simulations won't include other moral patients simulated to a high resolution (e.g. Tomasik suggests this may be the case for wild animals in remote places), you would instrumentally care less about their welfare (since when you act to increase their welfare, this may only have effects in basement reality as well as the more expensive simulations that do simulate such wild animals) . At the extreme is your suggestion, where you are the only person in the simulation and so you may act as a hedonist! Given some uncertainty over the distribution of "resolution of simulations", it seems likely that one should still  act altruistically.

I disagree with the claim that if we do not pursue longtermism, then no simulations of observers like us will be created. For example, I think an Earth-originating unaligned AGI would still have instrumental reasons to run simulations of 21st century Earth. Further, alien civilizations may have interest to learn about other civilizations.

Under your assumptions, I don't think this is a Newcomb-like problem.  I think CDT & EDT would agree on the decision,^[1] which I think depends on the number of simulations and the degree to which  the existence of a good longterm future hinges your decisions. Supposing humanity only survives if you act as a longtermist and simulations of you are only created if humanity survives, then you can't both act hedonistically and be in a simulation. 

1. ^{^}

   When taking the lens of "I control my policy" as discussed here 

If we choose longtermism, then we are almost definitely in a simulation, because that means other people like us would have also chosen longtermism, and then would create countless simulations of beings in special situations like ourselves. This seems exceedingly more likely than that we just happened to be at the crux of the entire universe by sheer dumb luck.

 Andrés Gómez Emilsson discusses this sort of thing in this video. The fact that our position in history may be uniquely positioned to influence the far future may be strong evidence that we live in a simulation.

Robin Hanson wrote about the ethical and strategic implications of living in a simulation in his article "How to Live in a Simulation".  According to Hanson, living in a simulation may imply that you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.

If some form of utilitarianism turns out to be the objectively correct system of morality, and post-singularity civilizations converge toward utilitarianism and paradise engineering is tractable, this may be evidence against the simulation hypothesis. Magnus Vinding argues that simulated realities would likely be utopias, and since our reality is not a utopia, the simulation hypothesis is almost certainly false.  Thus, if we do live in a simulation, this may imply that either post-singularity civilizations tend to not be utilitarians or that paradise engineering is extremely difficult.

Assuming we do live in a simulation, Alexey Turchin created this map of the different types of simulations we may be living in. Scientific experiments, AI confinement, and education of high-level beings are possible reasons why the simulation may exist in the first place.

This falls under anthropics, in case you're interested in related writing. It doesn't seem very close to Newcomb's problem to me, but I'm not that well acquainted with these areas.

One question I'd have is: Who counts as an observer for these observer selection effects? Do they need to be sufficiently intelligent? If so, an alternative to us being in a simulation that's about to end or never making it off Earth is that we're in base reality and the future and/or simulations could be filled with unintelligent conscious beings (and possibly unconscious but sufficiently intelligent AI, if observers also need to be conscious), but not astronomically many intelligent conscious beings. Unintelligent conscious beings are still possible and matter, at least to me (others might think consciousness requires a pretty high level of cognition or self-awareness), so this argument seems like a reason to prioritize such scenarios further relative to those with many intelligent conscious beings. We might think almost all expected moral patients (by number and moral weight) are not sufficiently intelligent to count as observers.

The simulation dilemma intuitively seems similar to Newcomb's Paradox. However, when I try to reason out how it is similar, I have difficulty. They both involve two parties, with one having more control/information advantage over the other. They both involve an option with guaranteed rewards (hedonism or the $1,000) and one with an uncertain reward (longtermism or possible $1,000,000). They both involve an option that would exclude one of two possibilities. How the prediction of a predictor in Newcomb's Paradox that may exclude one of two possibilities directly correlates with the mutually exclusive possibilities in the simulation dilemma is not clear though.

Simulations might be useful to find out what factors were important/unimportant and alternative trajectories of critical periods of history. For that reason, it is an appealing idea that it is more likely that we are just in a simulation of our current period and not really in it.

The way I presented the problem also fails to account for the fact that it seems quite possible  there is a strong apocalyptic fermi filter that will destroy humanity, as this could account for why it seems we are so early in the cosmic history (cosmic history is unavoidably about to end). This should skew us more toward hedonism.

Anatoly Karlin's Katechon Hypothesis is one Fermi Paradox hypothesis that is similar to what you are describing. The basic idea is that if we live in a simulation, the simulation may have computational limits. Once advanced civilizations use too much computational power or outlive their usefulness, they are deleted from the simulation.