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In my opinion this seems all pretty pointless. To be able to differentiate between a simulation and reality you have to know at least how one of those works in
by danbruc 10y ago
In my opinion this seems all pretty pointless. To be able to differentiate between a simulation and reality you have to know at least how one of those works in quite some detail. What if we discover floating point rounding errors in the laws of physics we observe? Who is to say that this is not a feature of reality? What if it is the other way round, what if we live in a simulation with laws of physics made out of real real or complex numbers but the reality outside of our simulation has laws of physics behaving like floating point numbers? It seems pretty impossible to ever figure out what reality or a simulation must look like so that we can determine what surrounds us. Maybe there is some incredible self-consistency law at the bottom of reality, forcing reality to be what it is because there is one and only one way reality can be. But besides something like that?
- pmontra 10y agoNot so pointless. Think that one of the NPC in a computer game gets intelligent. It could learn how to trigger bugs or cheats in the game or features thought only for the player. Examples: crash the game, which hopefully restarts from the last save. Get where no NPC was supposed to be, only players, and get teleported somewhere else. Trigger a stack overflow and perform actions in the host, maybe changing the programming of the game or the data in the save files. In our case it could be the way to FTL. Did any Sci-fi author considered that yet?
- Smaug123 10y ago"hopefully restarts from last save" - that's an awfully big gamble to take when the stakes are all of human existence.
- danbruc 10y agoBut how would that NPC know that it is in a game? What if we figured out how to do teleportation or time travel? How would you determine whether that is a feature of reality or whether we discovered a bug in a simulation?
- pmontra 10y agoGut feeling: it can't know. But the simulation in some way is part of reality and maybe that's why it couldn't be known. I guess there has been plenty of philosophical research on this subject.
- danbruc 10y agoBut exactly that was my point - unless you know what either reality or a simulation really looks like, you can not look around and draw conclusions whether we live in reality or a simulation. People trying to do this make the assumptions that a simulation would have properties similar to simulations we perform and that reality would have properties similar to the laws of physics as we know them, but neither assumption seems really justified.
- cwmma 10y agoForever Free by Joe Haldeman does something similar, an attempt to leave the galaxy causes the simulation to be terminated
- pmontra 10y agoThanks!