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Exactly. Trying to discern wether we live in a simulation or not with our current knowledge of physics and the universe (we are idiots that only recently discar

• xelxebar 10y ago
  Though a perhaps interesting reworking of the question could be "If the universe were a simluation, what can we say about the computational machine doing the simulation?" I'm guessing that Complexity Theory has some stuff to talk about here.
• jonathanstrange 10y ago
  Bostrom's argument is based on rather implausible and far-fetched assumptions, e.g. speculation about what advanced civilizations would do or not. There are more interesting variants of the simulation argument and many types of simulations could be detectable. To give an example of what makes the question principally interesting, one could claim that storing an infinite amount of information within a finite amount of space violates the laws of thermodynamics and is therefore not physically possible. Hence, real numbers don't exist and the universe is discrete. If it is also finite, then you can simulate it on a computer. What I'm saying is that even though the question whether we are in a simulation is mostly speculation, there are some principally interesting corollaries about it, and some of them are physically meaningful in the sense that they can be confirmed or falsified by experiments at least in principle.