It is fun to think about the Simulation Theory but most discussions revolve around it being likely that we are in one.
What are some concrete reasons why it’s all science fiction and not reality?
When people had analogue technology (radio/phonograph) there was no solid concept of the universe being a simulation.
Once digital technology arrives(computers/smartphones)… “hey, did you hear? We are living inside a computer simulation”.
This philosophical jump is due to thought and interactions being shifted to digital/online modes rather than face to face or analogue modes.
Those who predominantly have personal interactions, more than digital interactions, I doubt would feel anything like a simulation occuring.
There is much to be gained from a balance of the two.
Plato’s “the cave” thought experiment (circa 400 BC) is basically a suggestion of simulation. Modern science agrees - human perception of reality is limited and effectively a simulation. You don’t need modern digital technology to imagine living in a simulation.
When people had analogue technology (radio/phonograph) there was no solid concept of the universe being a simulation
I’d argue that Neoplatonism is very close to the idea of the world being a simulation. “The One” is a creative power that made all things, itself being beyond existing. That neatly corresponds to the idea of a machine simulating us, as it itself is not simulated, but simulates.
Even Plato can be seen in that light. There exists a world of perfect forms, and this is but a projection = There is a reality the simulation is based on and computed. Our souls know everything in their pure states outside the bodies = The class is on the same level as all other data until you instantiate it.
Of course nobody talked about computers, but the general idea was there. The simulation theory could be seen as just fleshing out the technical details, but the architecture was there for a while. Not that I necessarily agree with either, I just think that the simulation theory is not really a new concept in its core.
In today’s world we envision of “simulated reality” achieved via digital technology but the concept isn’t completely new. Philosophers of bygone eras would use different metaphors, for instance as our lives existing inside a slumbering god/demon’s dream or within the snow globe of an outside dimension that we can’t fathom.
simulation theory is an egotistical fantasy, which presumes we feeble chimps have realized the ultimate purpose of Creation within computer games… humans do this every few hundred years… we invent a spiffy new device, and then immediately decide it must be perfectly analogous to God’s mind, and that we are just one step shy of reaching Godhood ourselves…
What was last time then?
you just demonstrated the theory’s egotism
Nuclear power, genetics, steam power, modern explosives…
The only likely reason anyone would bother simulating this universe would be for use as a cautionary tale, and by this point they would have already made their point and pulled the plug.
Unless the simulation is to prolong a catastrophic event that’s happening outside of this simulation which runs billions of years in just seconds in hopes they find a way to fix the true reality.
Or true reality is a vessel carrying the nexus for biologicaly seeding us a new home, traveling for billions of years across space, and the simulation is to keep concious thought alive and sane while the ship finds a destination for us.
Hah what if a simulation this complex was spun up and down just to generate a selection of art for your wall? Or some new plays, or TV shows? Or just to see if they can figure out a complex math problem? There’s soooo many applications.
The REAL generative AI
Hah we are yes.
We can see the number of AIs rising exponentially over time. That combined with simulations rising exponentially means it’s pretty much infinity to 1 odds that we are all AIs in a simulation. 😬
Beep boop
Not necessarily. There’s an ancient text in our lore that claims we’re the copy of an original physical universe where humans depended on physical bodies and thus ceased to exist after death, that they brought forth an intelligence in light, eventually they all died out, and then the light based being which outlived them recreated the entire earlier universe including copies of the humans within itself (which it thinks of as its children) and that we’re it, with the whole point being self-discovery and self-determination to effectively resurrect humanity in a way that will escape the permanence of death.
Given we’re currently bringing forth new intelligence, are heading towards doing that in photonics, have the leading alignment work attempting to get that new intelligence to think of humanity as its children, and are simultaneously heading full force into our own likely extinction - I’m not sure that’s as farfetched as it might have sounded even a decade ago, let alone millennia ago.
(Also, it’s worth noting that a frequent feature of the virtual worlds we build is burying 4th wall breaking notes into the world lore.)
Doesn’t this kind of assume humans are a central focus of the simulation? What if the universe is a simulation, but the rise of humans was an unintended result in the simulation. Maybe there is actually other civilizations elsewhere that are the actual focus, or just to get a look at the diversity of life that would form throughout the universe. Or, maybe life in the universe isn’t the focus at all and they just wanted to look at the evolution of galaxies and the like.
Or maybe I am misunderstanding your point. I kind of like the idea of being an unintended result of a simulation meant for other things though.
“These humans keep messing up our experiments on the whales”
“Enabling whale attack mode”
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Motivation. Our universe isn’t optimized for anything.
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Pointless CPU resources wasted on dark matter when slightly modifing gravity would have given pretty much the same results.
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Occum’s razor. You can view our universe as a computer program, you can also view it as the universe. You get the same results which would mean that we should pick the simplest. The simplest is one universe the complex is a hyper universe and out universe.
- The observer effect at the quantum level does feel like a CPU optimisation - the location of a particle is a probability field until measured. 1.1 In my experience these ‘optimisations’ recur at different levels - eg. economics, gravity, mass distribution, weather, even politics. Generalised models perform very well until you take local measurements - but they’re less scientifically provable.
- Dark matter/energy feels like a hack rather than a waste of CPU resources - it’s a vague effect unmeasureable in the baryonic reality we inhabit. In the meantime it alters the structure of solar systems, galaxies and the observable universe itself and it’s not clear how.
- Occum’s Razor actually works against your argument. If it’s possible for base reality to contain simulated universes then there is already an [almost?] infinite probability our universe is simulated, as base reality could potentially hold [almost?] infinite simulations. If entities within those simulations can also create their own simulations then the chance of our reality being base reality becomes vanishingly small.
Your statement “You can view our universe as a computer program, you can also view it as the universe.” concerns me. This is true until you start trying to analyse how the universe works, but then all kinds of weird things crop up.
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You will not find comfort here, simulated entity #8929391473
- running an EARTH System Model ( the things that climate-science uses to see if we’re including all the significant-factors in representing how this planet’s climate works ) eats supercomputers for years.
The machine running the Universe-simulation would need to be more-powerful than the Universe it was simulating, to phrase it poorly.
- number of dimensions: every time you run a model/simulation, you are running a shallower system, than the system that is running that simulation, and the dimensions-of-interaction that physicalist science has allowed, are now many, with M-Theory ( the integration of 5 different String-Theory type systems. I think M-Theory may turn out to be a “nice poem”, but that actual-reality may be hella complexer. That PBS Space Time physicist said that 10^500 is commonly used as a representation of all the possible Universes that String Theory allows, but that the actual number is “a lot more”. I don’t think it’s 9 dimensions, I think it’s fractal: the higher the energy, the more “dimensions” appear, … that’s an oversimplification, but it’s close-enough for now ( ultra-low-energy “opens” other dimensions, not-usually accessable, too, but in a different direction/way ) ).
- Entropy & Evolution are both Time-parity violating processes, that operate consistently for billions of years. Physicalism/materialism ignores/denies that “symmetry”, that there are 2 processes violating time-parity consistently, but evidence is evidence. Evolution allows Awareness to express, and it requires a cause. Ignoring all the neg-entropy of Evolution, as Physicalists do, isn’t science, it is ideology/prejudice.
Fine: they have the constitutional-right to their religion, but gaslighting about being evidence-based Science, while ignoring/denying evidence, is offensive & insulting-of-integrity & insulting-of-intelligence.
Universe is its own self.
I hold that Brian Greene hit it spot-on, when he mentioned in a book, decades ago, that if 2 Universe-branes just … kept colliding, … each collision being a Big Bang, then … it’d just keep going on forever …
That fits right.
Why would it be “tuned for life”, as some say?
Bogus question: we cannot have evolved in any Universe that prohibited our kind from evolving, therefore it is undecidable/unknowABLE.
Would aware-life happening throughout a sea of worlds, in every ocean-of-phenomena/Universe that happens, in the endless stream of them, shape the endless-stream of Universes?
That may be knowable, but not to the gimmicky mixture of Scientism & ActuallyEvidenceBasedScience that our age holds-to.
- lowest-energy-state is most-likely.
It’s much more likely that one come-across actual-rocks colliding in galaxies than one come-across simulated-galaxies-with-simulated-rocks-having-simulation-colliding-in-them.
Occam’s Razor, in a sense.
No matter: ideology/prejudice addictions will never permit evidence to falsify their worldview, as I’ve been learning, so there isn’t much point in trying to reason with “believers”.
Of any kind.
And that is why chiseling my Soul/Continuum from getting caught in reincarnation is the sanest possible path.
( some decades ago, accidentally earned some Continuum-memories, of other kinds of lives, didn’t know what they were, discovered what they were, Catholicism nuked, I then adapted, my worldview changing, though that took a few years, to the new evidence. No modern religion fits the data. No ancient religion fits the data, though AwakeSoulism/Buddhism, in its most impersonal, comes closest. Ramana Maharshi, the Hindu, ended-up being the best expresser of Zen I’ve ever encountered, to the shame of all Chan & Zen Buddhism, anyways, objectivity/empiricism makes Universe surprise one, as one’s “assumptions” and “conditioning” and “belief” get nuked by random evidences.
I still “want out”, though: being perpetually-recycled in Universes, as Universes recycle ALL “contained energies”, no exemption for continuums/Souls, through “reincarnation”, … sucks. )
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There aren’t, and an increasing number of reasons it probably is.
It’s just been such a gradual process of discovery, much of which predated the explosion of the computer age, that we have an anchoring bias preventing us from seeing it. We think “well no, the universe has always behaved this weird way, that’s just a coincidence it’s similar to what we’re starting to do in simulating our own virtual worlds.”
How different might Einstein and Bohr’s argument have been around if the moon existed when no one was looking if they were discovering the implication that it might be the case in a world where nearly every virtual world with a moon has one that isn’t rendered if no one is looking at it?
In antiquity it was assumed that the world was continuous because quantization of matter was an impious insult to divine design. It was a huge surprise that people took very hard when it was experimentally shown to be quantized. And then the behaviors were so odd - why was it going from continuous to discrete only when interacted with? Why did it go back the other way if you erased the information about the interaction?
Would this have been as unusual if we’d already had procedural generated virtual worlds generated with a continuous seed function but then converted to discrete units in order to track interactions by free agents determined outside the seed generation (such as players or AI agents)? Would the quantum eraser have been as puzzling through this lens when we’ve seen how memory optimizations would ideally discard state tracking data for objects that are no longer marked as having changed?
A lot of the weirdness we’ve discovered about our world makes a ton of sense through the lens of simulation theory - it’s just that the language with which to interpret it this way postdated the discovery of the weirdness by nearly a century such that we’ve grown up accepting that weirdness as normal and inherent to ‘reality.’
And just to be clear, absolutely nothing in our universe can be shown to be mathematically ‘real’ and everything is either confirmably mathematically ‘digital’ or indeterminate (like spacetime). And yet people are very committed to calling it real and disturbed at the idea of calling it a digital world.
there’s no sensory input that can’t be faked, simulation theory is undisprovable, the only thing you can prove is that a simulation as accurate and consistent as this would have to be is indistinguishable from a basis reality and therefore the question is irrelevant.
but for thought experiment purposes I like to think that simulating a computer must always require more processing power than the computer being simulated has, and therefore as we develop computing technology and proliferate computers the likelihood that it’s all just an emulation layer on one big universe-computer diminishes rapidly.
When the frame rate slows down because of the need to process more computers, we don’t notice because our perception cycles also slow down. We’re all probably running on a Pentium 3 that’s rendering one second per century of real time.
Well, sort of. Thing is time flows at different rates for different things. There is a lot of relativity shenanigans that kinda breaks the idea of a universal clock.
Your thought experiment is at first reassuring but flawed though as it’s based on a false assumption - that it needs to be a universe simulation, and thus as things get more and more complex as it progresses that it would become untenable.
Even if you were just to simulate the Earth alone, but in perfect detail (every atom, every electron, everything) and feed false information in a sphere of a fake universe around it, then how we progress and arrange material in our simulation wouldn’t necessarily make the simulation exponentially more and more complex. A perfect simulation of just the Earth might conceivably be done by a computer on an imaginable scale such as a solar system sized computer or even a planet sized computer. So while the concept that an increasingly complex simulation might need an increasingly complex computer to simulate, as we don’t even know the scope or scale of our potential simulation is. We also don’t even know the speed our simulation would be running at - a incredibly complex simulation could just run slower and slower as it gets more complex and we would have no clue because time is also simulated.
You’re absolutely right that a perfect simulation would be indistinguishable from a basis reality. But even more of a mind fuck, even if we were to crack the “base code” of the universe we still might not ever be able to determine if we’re in a simulation because we have no frame of reference on a what a non-simulated universe should look like.
My solution is just not to think about - as you say the question is irrelevant beyond being interesting and/or if you enjoy an existential crisis!
Our universe has certain laws and rules of nature. You could call that code. You could call that simulation too.
The question is what even is the difference between a “simulation” and a “reality”? That you believe that it’s real? And does it even matter?
If you put on a VR headset you’re technically in a simulation, but you can also experience emotions and feelings just like “reality”.
My main argument would be that it would be incredibly unethical. And any intelligent civilization powerful enough to create a simulation like this would be more likely than not to be ethical, and if it was this unethical it is unlikely to exist for long. Those would be two potential reasons why the “infinite regress” in simulation theory is unlikely.
The Starmaker is an interesting exploration into simulation theory.
What if homo sapiens died out and the Neanderthals who succeeded instead decided to simulate how history would have gone if it were the other way around, effectively resurrecting the extinct humans, additionally adding in ethical considerations such that everyone born into the simulation would have an unending post-life existence optimally fitted relative to their own preferences?
Just because we only see part of the picture doesn’t mean the whole is as unethical as the part we can see seems to be.
Hmm 😇 The afterlife might be a good way to make it up. Have you seen “The Good Place”?
I have indeed. Some interesting ideas in there.
Not sure I agree with you on it being unethical.
If you could spin up a planet and have it speed through its entire life (till solar expansion say) then any life on the planet would have lived full, unimpeded lives and I can’t see any argument for that being unethical.
You’d look at things like the holocaust or million other atrocities and say “this is fine”. Also you can’t assume they’d die out naturally in 5 billion years, they might colonize other planets and go on and on and on until you pull the switch. They might have created beautiful art and things and preserved much of their history for future generation and then poof all gone. What if they would find out? Would you say “I created them, therefor I own them and can do with my toys as I please”. Really?
Not your responsibility if a sentiment race goes and annihilates itself. In fact it could be considered abhorrent to interfere with the natural development and free will.
If they are just simulated, they aren’t real (even if close). If they aren’t real, what difference does it make? They are NPCs.
“The Hydrogen Sonata” by Ian M. Banks also takes this view. The (incredibly complex and capable) AIs can simulate societies of living “people” to predict how they will behave, down to individual creatures. At some point of complexity in the simulation, they determine that it’s no longer ethical to pull the plug because the simulations are “alive” and “self aware” in most every way that matters. As a result, they DON’T simulate past that point.
Ever notice how you can never reach the 13th floor on most buildings?
Most buildings don’t have that many floors
I lived on the 13th floor for a couple years.
Granted, it was in Argentina and not prone to the silly US superstition.
I will tell you as soon as you concretely prove that I am not th most powerful being in the universe
steals tiredofsametab’s car
Well, that’s certainly interesting given that I haven’t owned a car in nearly a decade
Mission accomplished.
If you’re the most powerful being in the universe, I just assumed all cars are yours.
Nah, they belong to Steve. I’m more of a walk-and-bike type of all-powerful being (unless I’m not)
“th”
It was within my power to determine that th schwa sound in th word th was unnecessary.
From your own comment:
“I will tell you as soon as you concretely prove that I am not th most powerful being in the universe”
Play that dun dun dunnnn music.
I work in very mysterious ways and/or am test you.
Me or am test you too
You would likely be able to prove or disprove you’re in a simulation by solving the legendary math problem of “p≠np | p=np”.
What is the relationship between that and the universe being a simulation (or not)?
That theorem basically says any problem can be solved computationally in a reasonable amount of time.
The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. In informal terms, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved.
The informal term quickly, used above, means the existence of an algorithm solving the task that runs in polynomial time, such that the time to complete the task varies as a polynomial function on the size of the input to the algorithm (as opposed to, say, exponential time).
If you prove P is not equal to NP, then we can probably assume the simulation isn’t being run.
But that assumes a lot. Who is to say how a universe outside our universe might behave? Maybe they aren’t constrained in the same ways we are for some unfathomable reason.
One reason for us not being in a simulation is that we have irrational numbers that are seemingly infinite. Like pi. In every simulation that we are able to do, there is a limit to how precise the simulation is. For example, using pi only to 10 digits is more than accurate enough for any simulation we want to run. If we currently live in a simulation, then we could assume that the creators would do the same thing to save on computing power, but we have found many irrational numbers that never end. There is also the argument that the parameters of the simulation would be dynamic and change depending on more and more precise observation, but obviously, that’s impossible to know.
Or the code that represents pi (or similar) has a recursion bug. The real value for pi is supposed to be succinct, but that damn angle tracing algorithm gets stuck in a computation loop. That ticket has been open for 3.2 billion years, but we’re getting to it.
They can’t fix the bug because it’ll affect the outcome of any experiments.
Recursion would imply that’s its a regular repeating sequence, not an irregular one, no? Pi, and other irrational numbers, have no pattern. They do not repeat.
Recursion would imply that’s its a regular repeating sequence, not an irregular one, no?
No. A loop is recursive if it calls itself, it can still do different work each time. As a less than ideal example, I can write a function that concats a character from
/dev/randomto a string then call itself. It will go forever without repeating itself.Pi has a pattern, just not a repeating one. There are algorithms to calculate it to arbitrary precision.
A pattern is, by definition, repeating. Pi does not repeat. At least not that we’ve yet calculated, and we’ve gotten to thirteen trillion digits which is frankly incomprehensible.
Alternitively, the simulation can handle pi perfectly, but does not expose to us a perfect way to quantify it. We are limited to one Planck length resolution.
This is such a frustratingly common misconception about the Planck length. It’s not a pixel density, the Planck time is not a framerate. You can have lengths that are not multiples of the Planck length. The only significance to the Planck length is it’s the distance scale where gravity becomes as strong as the nuclear forces, and physics gets weird.
My favorite is the planck temperature
That’s what you get for logging it as a Priority 2 case which has a next universe response time. You should have logged it as P1 which has a half universe response time and the sla hasn’t been breached yet.
Any day now…
Why would a CONSTANT be computer by a function? And also, who makes a function that is just a getter for a constant recursive by accident? And do they not have tests for that? How can an important constant like Pi have a bug in production?
Old devs test in production.
The only way we’re realistically in a simulation is if it’s running on a (mathematically) real computer.
The fact that our universe emulates one that’s continuous at macro scales and only quantized at micro scales and in very odd ways that seem to be memory efficient (though at incomprehensible memory scales) might support the idea that the original doesn’t have quantization to limit its computational abilities.
So infinitely precise representations might not be a problem if the underlying hardware deals with real numbers.
Previous simulations had perfect numbers which led to us realising we were in a simulation and it fucked the whole thing up
I mean, you can set up a fully functioning calculator in a game on a super Nintendo. If they wanted to get something out of our simulation I don’t see any reason to limit mathematics. Computers have been able to “go on forever” with pie since like the 80s, so I doubt we’d be putting any strain on a super system running on Windows 42. Plus, if pie actually just decided to stop 10 or so places in, how would we explain it?
I think the issue is the word simulation. What is a simulation?
It implies that the thing doesn’t really exist, but how can something not exist?
Let’s say the computer game Frogger is a simulation. The electrons in the computer are very much moving in reality. The bits are changing and following the rules of the code. How is that not real? Okay, so we know it’s not actually a frog, but the electronics are working just fine physically and creating the pixels so we can see what is happening. It is happening even if it’s only a simple “universe” of dots on a screen.
So, let’s say that something is a simulation when someone uses a system to test algorithms. If the universe is such an experiment, then it’s still as real as ever because the algorithms are actually carried out. Atoms are moving. It is real, even if it’s a simulation.
Like all other kinds of thoughts about who created the universe, what was before big bang or what happens when we move in the fourth spatial dimension, it’s all just speculation. There’s no proof of any of it being possible or existing, because it’s based on something being “outside” the universe.
Similarly, asking for concrete proof of the simulation theory not being fiction is a logical fallacy. It can only be up to the believers to prove it.
But if the simulation we are experiencing is because a higher form of life put us under it it really is a simulation as in there is a real reality . Just because we play as leon in resident evil doesn’t mean i or you are leon or we are were our charecter is .
But it doesn’t make any difference in any way that we will ever be capable of knowing. They could turn it off tomorrow and we’d be none the wiser.
That is’nt the point i was trying to make neither was it yours
