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How would forking occur? Forking requires copying data. Does the universe get cloned infinitely many copies all the time? That's quite an extraordinary claim.
by hasenj 9y ago
How would forking occur? Forking requires copying data. Does the universe get cloned infinitely many copies all the time? That's quite an extraordinary claim.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- quickben 9y agoYou have to consider his concept as an analogy. Infinity is a thing inside this universe, it may not be outside.
- hasenj 9y agoThe problem is not with infinity per se. If the universe gets cloned one time every second that would still be a huge claim. A million times every nanosecond is even a bigger claim. Now imagine how many states the universe can be in, and how many times a second can be meaningfully divided. If you can solve the "one clone every second" then I would be satisfied.
- virgil_disgr4ce 9y agoWhat is the problem, though? Who says the uni/multiverse has a finite memory capacity? For more in this vein: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/30/why-the-many-worlds-formulation-of-quantum-mechanics-is-probably-correct/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/30/why-the-...
- hasenj 9y agoIt's not about the memory capacity ..
- virgil_disgr4ce 9y agoWhat is it about?
- Retra 9y agoI'm not reading any problem description in your comment other than an inadequate imagination.
- jamesrcole 9y agoNote that you're assuming that a nanosecond is a tiny amount of time. It's tiny relative to what we're used to, but as far as what "implements the universe" goes, a nanosecond could be enough time for a huge amount of occurrences to happen within. We don't know.
- hasenj 9y agoI did not assume nor imply it's tiny in any "absolute" sense.
- jamesrcole 9y agoThen why is "every second" a "huge claim" and "every nanosecond" "even a bigger claim"?
- hasenj 9y agoIt's only linearly bigger I suppose.
- hossbeast 9y agoCopy-on-Write
- hasenj 9y agoThat's worse (more complicated).
- deepnotderp 9y agoNo, it would have to be a true semantic fork I believe.
- AgentME 9y agoThis answer seems to be assuming the universe must be implemented on a classical computer and computed in a reasonable amount of time (that's not slowing down exponentially over time). That's not necessarily true. I feel that assuming that the nature of how the universe is computed matches up with our first intuition feels a bit like the assumption in geocentrism that the universe matches up with our intuition of Earth being the center and the most significant body. Even if you accept the basic premise of the universe being a simulation, there are still many ways it could work with MWI. The simulator's universe needn't have classical physics; the simulation could be running on quantum computers or something more advanced. Or the simulator's universe could be classical with a classical computer doing the simulation at exponentially-decreasing speeds as it has to simulate the increasing number of branches. It wouldn't make any difference to us how long the simulation takes to compute us, as long as the simulating machine doesn't break down and succumb to entropy. The simulator's universe could be something like Conway's game of life, and the simulation is running on a turing machine pattern which will never decay or break down. (I might be borrowing more than a few ideas from Permutation City here.)
- wruza 9y agoAlso https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ (A bunch of rocks).
- SkyMarshal 9y agoGoogle "multiverse". OP isn't making up this idea.
- shrimpx 9y agoCopy on write. :D