4 ms·
It's pretty simple: If you live inside the system and the system knows the experiments you are conducting it can modify the "results" of these experiments to fi
by stanfordkid 10y ago
It's pretty simple: If you live inside the system and the system knows the experiments you are conducting it can modify the "results" of these experiments to fit a perceived set of axioms that hide the "true axioms".
Think of it like Geometric level of detail in video games: when the observer is viewing a character from very far away a low-polygon mesh is displayed -- this is because the mesh only takes up a few pixels of screen space for the observer so rendering a high polygon mesh or a low polygon mesh is indistinguishable.
Now when the character is closer to the observer a high polygon mesh with more detail is substituted.
The observer can never tell that this trick is happening. If they designed an experiment to test for this the universe could simply spend more time fooling the observer.
I am quite sure if we are living in a simulation it makes a lot of approximations. When we conduct complex experiments it simply computes better approximations so that our observed results fit the "axioms of physics".
- ibgib 10y agoI like your video game view of mesh counts, and I assume you're also including clipping as a special case of a 0-count mesh. And since we're programmers, I think there is another very useful vocabulary to use when talking about this: Eager vs lazy. When I open a tree view, it doesn't have to eagerly evaluate all of the contents of each node. It gives you the nodes that you are looking at and you have a decision as to what you want to open. This is precisely analogous to what you "pay attention to". So the "tricks" that you mention could be thought of in terms of lazy evaluations.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- charles-salvia 10y agoNo, what you're saying is that the simulation would mess with our observations - but our basic logical axioms are not dependent on observations to be valid - that's why they're axioms! They are used as valid starting points in reasoning, and nothing the simulation does could change that.
- stanfordkid 10y agoYes you're right about what I meant. Though I think you're incorrect about the idea that any axiom could exist within a simulated universe. We have to get back to the relationship between consciousness ... does an axiom even exist if it is not fathomed by some conscious being? If you believe that it does not exist absent an observer then it is certainly possible that particular axioms simply cannot exist within the universe -- they cannot be fathomed because time itself might slow down to infinity when such things are fathomed.