5 ms·

This sort of thing fascinates me. If the universe is a simulation, is this not to be understood as the processor clock speed? (I've not read much of Nick Bost

by ak39 11y ago

This sort of thing fascinates me. If the universe is a simulation, is this not to be understood as the processor clock speed? (I've not read much of Nick Bostrom's work nor do I claim to know much about reasoning that the universe is in fact a computer simulation.)

joshmarlow 11y ago
I don't think so; the passage of 'time' measured in the simulation could be quite a bit faster/slower than on the hardware underlying the simulation (I would assume quite a bit 'slower'). So if we were in a simulation, I'm skeptical that we could guess much about the properties of the 'host' system.
- ak39 11y ago
  But we can determine the maximum speed of causality, can't we? I was watching a (Bostrom, I think ?) presentation where the vocabulary used to explain Einstein's "c" (the speed of light) included words like "maximum speed of causality". That blew my mind. Because light moves as fast as it theoretically can (many Newtonians believed there was no ubound to the speed of light), light speed still cannot breach the absolute limit of 299 792 458 m/s. That speed limit is embedded directly into the action-reaction architecture of our universe. (Anyway, didn't mean to hijack)
  - joshmarlow 11y ago
    That's a super interesting point actually. I'd never thought of the "maxium speed of causality". Thanks for sharing! We could determine the maximum speed within our terms, but again that doesn't necessarily translate to how things happen in the underlying substrate. Thought experiment: let's imagine we create our own simulated environment and put a sentient AI into it (which is implemented in the physics of that environment). The AI gets curious and does some experiments and figures out the maximum speed that causality can propagate in it's environment. Suppose the speed of light in the simulation is as fast as the speed of light in our environment. So something takes 1 in the simulation and 1 second in ours. Cool. Now, suppose you and I as the developers put in a 'sleep' call into the event loop or whatever so that the simulation runs at 1/10 the speed of real time. Light in the simulation is now 10 times slower than it was by our clock time. Now the code operates considerably slower - but any entity in the code wouldn't perceive the slowdown because it has slowed down too in the same way. Same thing - any slowdown in the simulation would not be noticeable to us because it's also a slowdown in us.
toth 11y ago
Not really. If we are inside a simulation running on some CPU in the "real world" and they move the simulation to a CPU that's half as slow, from our point of view nothing changes. From the point of view of whoever is running the simulation, it now takes twice as long to simulate a day, but the people inside it cannnot tell.

by ak39 11y ago

joshmarlow 11y ago

I don't think so; the passage of 'time' measured in the simulation could be quite a bit faster/slower than on the hardware underlying the simulation (I would assume quite a bit 'slower'). So if we were in a simulation, I'm skeptical that we could guess much about the properties of the 'host' system.

ak39 11y ago
But we can determine the maximum speed of causality, can't we? I was watching a (Bostrom, I think ?) presentation where the vocabulary used to explain Einstein's "c" (the speed of light) included words like "maximum speed of causality". That blew my mind. Because light moves as fast as it theoretically can (many Newtonians believed there was no ubound to the speed of light), light speed still cannot breach the absolute limit of 299 792 458 m/s. That speed limit is embedded directly into the action-reaction architecture of our universe. (Anyway, didn't mean to hijack)
- joshmarlow 11y ago
  That's a super interesting point actually. I'd never thought of the "maxium speed of causality". Thanks for sharing! We could determine the maximum speed within our terms, but again that doesn't necessarily translate to how things happen in the underlying substrate. Thought experiment: let's imagine we create our own simulated environment and put a sentient AI into it (which is implemented in the physics of that environment). The AI gets curious and does some experiments and figures out the maximum speed that causality can propagate in it's environment. Suppose the speed of light in the simulation is as fast as the speed of light in our environment. So something takes 1 in the simulation and 1 second in ours. Cool. Now, suppose you and I as the developers put in a 'sleep' call into the event loop or whatever so that the simulation runs at 1/10 the speed of real time. Light in the simulation is now 10 times slower than it was by our clock time. Now the code operates considerably slower - but any entity in the code wouldn't perceive the slowdown because it has slowed down too in the same way. Same thing - any slowdown in the simulation would not be noticeable to us because it's also a slowdown in us.

toth 11y ago

Not really. If we are inside a simulation running on some CPU in the "real world" and they move the simulation to a CPU that's half as slow, from our point of view nothing changes. From the point of view of whoever is running the simulation, it now takes twice as long to simulate a day, but the people inside it cannnot tell.