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Yeah I did have this idea at one point that if we’re in a simulation, than there is a cost for simulating things at finer and finer detail, which could manifest

Yeah I did have this idea at one point that if we’re in a simulation, than there is a cost for simulating things at finer and finer detail, which could manifest itself in higher energy requirements that we see in particle accelerators, but that we aren’t actually learning anything new at those levels, maybe we’ll find some new fundamental particles that make up the electron for example, And we’ll find new particles that make up those, none of which even existed until we started poking at them, since they aren’t necessary for the simulation to run.

ineedasername 7y ago
Sort of a "turtles all of the way down", but only if you actually go looking for the turtles. This entire article makes my brain hurt in ways I'm really not used to. (I'm used to brain-hurt, you can't be intellectually curious without experiencing that occasional side-effect. It's just this particular flavor of it is... disconcerting)
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Regarding the cost of simulation, you might find what Dr. Michio Kaku said during his AMA. >I mentioned that a digital computer cannot simulate even a simple reality, since there are too many molecules to keep track of, far greater than the capabilities of any digital computer. We need a quantum computer to simulate quantum reality, and hence, once again, the weather is the smallest object that can simulate the weather. Therefore, I don’t think we live in a simulation, unless the simulation is the universe itself. -Dr.Michio Kaku
- Damorian 7y ago
  This assumes we're simulated from a universe with identical laws and finitude, which I would never even consider.
- andrewon 7y ago
  But a digital computer at present in this world may not be a good reference to the capability of the computer that supposedly simulate this world. We know nothing about the "real" world that computer resided, and nothing about that computer.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    If we have posited a thing with unknown properties and say maybe that is generating our universe, we've pretty much taken the opposite position to Occam's Razor, which is often stated as "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
    - andrewon 7y ago
      Occam's Razor is a good principle for choosing scientific hypotheses. But I think when it comes to studying big questions like fundamental fabric of this physical world, we are at a lost here. Essentially we elect to believe, without justification, that the world got to follow a reductionist paradigm - if the world can be made simpler, it must not be more complex.
  - roywiggins 7y ago
    Right, but that is then a totally unfalsifiable idea. You can't prove the non-existence of something you can't begin to define.
    - andrewon 7y ago
      I guess that's the gist of all these arguments -- they are ideas not something we can prove or disprove.
  - stromgo 7y ago
    We do know that the real world is richer than the simulated world, since it holds a computer that runs the simulated world. Therefore if you exist, then it's more likely that you're the result of evolution in the real world than the result of evolution in the simulated world. Imagine the warehouse-size computer that is needed to simulate a bacterium here on Earth. Computers are dusty, and dust contains bacteria, so if you're a bacterium, then it's more likely that you're one of the billions of bacteria in the dust on the computer, than the bacterium being simulated by the computer. The same reasoning should hold for other worlds.
- trophycase 7y ago
  Thank you for this quote. I've long felt this. Another thing about the simulation hypothesis is that it seemingly offers no explanatory power. That is, I'm not sure how a universe that is "simulated" and one that isn't (thinking about it more I'm not actually sure what the difference is) would actually differ. Maybe would explain the observer effect in QM cause of lazy loading or something?
  - naasking 7y ago
    The simulation hypothesis is not intended to provide explanatory power on the matter you're looking for. It provides explanatory power on other questions though. A simulation is also indistinguishable from the real thing from the inside, or it wouldn't be a faithful simulation.
- rubatuga 7y ago
  Even a Commodore 64 could simulate our universe given enough time and memory. Our only clock source is the passage of time itself so even if it was being simulated extremely slowly we would never notice.
  - posterboy 7y ago
    a c64 would need infinitely more memory to address the infinite memory. I'm not sure whether that means uncountably infinite memory
    - Simon_says 7y ago
      Not really. Imagine something like a Huffman encoding. Every node in a tree can have a finite address while the tree has infinitely many nodes.
  - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
    > Even a Commodore 64 could simulate our universe given enough time and memory Given enough energy, we ourself could snap a universe into existence as well by clapping our hands?
- vidarh 7y ago
  This is flawed thinking I've seen show up in a lot of arguments. I even had this argument with Kurzweil at some point. If we want to create a realistic simulation, we only need to simulate things with sufficient fidelity to convince observers. That basically means: - Only things that have been observed needs to gain some form of persistence - Each simulated entity should have error margins that account for their continued existence, or their allowable location and other factors. Once an error margin for an aspect of a simulated entity exceeds the factors of the pseudo-random instantiation of that entity or class of entities, you do not need to explicitly retain or simulate the state of that entity. E.g. you don't need to retain the state of an "NPC human" longer than ~120 years at most; most you can discard much sooner; most details you never need to generate in the first place because it is not known to the entity that observes it. - Over time, perturb the simulation back towards the outcome of a static generator function that takes time as a parameter, to wipe out state and simulation. That is, "undo" all changes the "players" in the simulation do in as plausible way as possible. Do that, and you only need to simulate the "players" you want to simulate and those entities closest in time and space to them most of the time. There'll be a "halo" of other entities that slowly reverts to the baseline simulation. I keep wanting to use this approach as a simulation basis for a game, in fact. E.g. consider Elite: When you leave a starsystem, all the ships in it despawns. If you go straight back, it breaks immersion. The approach above applied to it would instead record a cone from the last known position of each ship that grows over time by likely speeds and directions. As more and more of the larger end of the cone expands outside the starsystem, you increase the chance that they despawn. If you return rapidly, you find ships have moved a believable distance. Or Minecraft: Currently mobs despawn outside of a given area, and simulation only runs within a certain number of chunks from the player. But most things stay exactly as they were. As such all player modifications must be saved. But for many things you can create functions that makes the world more dynamic with less simulation. E.g. if trees slowly grow and age and fall down, and rot, and new trees grow, then that means that the longer since a player has been in a given chunk, the more of the players modifications can be discarded and replaced by a generator function with time as one of the parameter. We've pruned simulations since some of the earliest generative games. To address the quote: We don't need to simulate the weather in its full apparent complexity, as long as the observed aspects of the weather falls within parameters that makes them plausible but sufficiently unpredictable. For most detail of the weather, that just means it needs to conform to the overall parameters. E.g. you don't need to simulate raindrops that "player" sees; just the overall volume of rain in the overall area if it is near a "player". Even less detail if further away.
ffhhj 7y ago
I guess it boils down to whether or not we're willing to accept infinite regress or not. Of course, if not, one must necessarily accept that reality 'comes from' nothing. Although I'm a VR developer, I can't believe it's "all turtles all the way down" :@) Actually I've been working on a theory to define randomness from complete uncertainty, without the "fair coin" metaphor based on constructivism, which is deterministic.
- AgentME 7y ago
  >if not, one must necessarily accept that reality 'comes from' nothing. UDASSA (http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/udassa/ http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/udassa/) is the closest thing I've seen to a believable idea about how reality could come from nothing. It's basically a more specific version of the mathematical universe hypothesis. >Actually I've been working on a theory to define randomness from complete uncertainty If you're trying to make a deterministic theory of physics and eschew randomness from the world, then you're going to run into big problems from quantum mechanics. The idea that results from random quantum interactions comes from hard-to-measure factors in the world that we just happen to be uncertain about is called a hidden variable theory, and Bell's Theorem shows that those theories are incompatible with the principle of locality. Though there is one popular local and deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics that avoids this issue: the Many-Worlds Interpretation. I wrote a post in another thread recently that's relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22845499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22845499.
joe_the_user 7y ago
But wouldn't a simulation be simulating the laws of an "actual" world? Why would the actual world have such a cost? Oppositely, if the actual world had such a cost, that's equal evidence that we are in said actual world.
- empath75 7y ago
  Why would they? People make simulations of worlds that aren’t like the real world all the time.
mirimir 7y ago
In Fall, Stephenson argues that the speed of light reflects resource limitations in the machine(s) running our reality.
- wildermuthn 7y ago
  When looking for explanations to a mystery, the best debugging method is to look at edge-cases. You eliminate all unimportant noisy data and begin to focus on the data that at least has the potential to cause the mystery. Ideally that data doesn’t change. Ideally it is a constant signal within the noise. Some underlying and unchanging constant. The speed of light has always struck me as one of the more constant, arbitrary, and yet vital pieces of data we know about our universe. Suitable for debugging whatever kind of reality is is that we find ourselves inhabiting.
chadcmulligan 7y ago
The question I always end up with - how many simulations deep are we? Universe A builds a simulator to see how it works, it then builds a simulator and so on. We can never communicate with the original universe, so we build our own simulation. As always if simulating universes is possible then the probability we're in level 0 tends to 0.
- fpoling 7y ago
  The could be no original universe. Just consider infinite sequence of simulations. Or universe A can be simulating universe B which is in turn simulates A. This is not possible with finite systems, but the moment one considers infinite ones, all bets are off.
  - Intermernet 7y ago
    From Excession by Iain M Banks: "Eventually in the progress of a technologically advanced society, occasionally after some sort of limited access to hyperspace, more usually after theoretical work, it was realized that the soap bubble was not alone. The expanding universe lay inside a larger one, which in turn was entirely enclosed by a bubble of space-time with a still greater diameter. The same applied within the universe you happened to find yourself on/in; there were smaller, younger universes inside it, nested within like layers of paper round a much-wrapped spherical present." "In the very centre of all the concentric, inflating universes lay the place they had each originated from, where every now and again a cosmic fireball blinked into existence, detonating once more to produce another universe, its successive outpourings of creation like the explosions of some vast combustion engine, and the universes its pulsing exhaust." "There was more; complications in seven dimensions and beyond that involved a giant torus on which the 3-D universe could be described as a circle, contained and containing other nested tori, with further implications of whole populations of such meta-Realities… but the implications of multiple, concentric, sequential universes was generally considered enough to be going on with for the moment."
reedwolf 7y ago
Relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-11-09 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-11-09

ineedasername 7y ago

Sort of a "turtles all of the way down", but only if you actually go looking for the turtles. This entire article makes my brain hurt in ways I'm really not used to. (I'm used to brain-hurt, you can't be intellectually curious without experiencing that occasional side-effect. It's just this particular flavor of it is... disconcerting)

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

Regarding the cost of simulation, you might find what Dr. Michio Kaku said during his AMA. >I mentioned that a digital computer cannot simulate even a simple reality, since there are too many molecules to keep track of, far greater than the capabilities of any digital computer. We need a quantum computer to simulate quantum reality, and hence, once again, the weather is the smallest object that can simulate the weather. Therefore, I don’t think we live in a simulation, unless the simulation is the universe itself. -Dr.Michio Kaku

Damorian 7y ago
This assumes we're simulated from a universe with identical laws and finitude, which I would never even consider.
andrewon 7y ago
But a digital computer at present in this world may not be a good reference to the capability of the computer that supposedly simulate this world. We know nothing about the "real" world that computer resided, and nothing about that computer.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  If we have posited a thing with unknown properties and say maybe that is generating our universe, we've pretty much taken the opposite position to Occam's Razor, which is often stated as "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
  - andrewon 7y ago
    Occam's Razor is a good principle for choosing scientific hypotheses. But I think when it comes to studying big questions like fundamental fabric of this physical world, we are at a lost here. Essentially we elect to believe, without justification, that the world got to follow a reductionist paradigm - if the world can be made simpler, it must not be more complex.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  Right, but that is then a totally unfalsifiable idea. You can't prove the non-existence of something you can't begin to define.
  - andrewon 7y ago
    I guess that's the gist of all these arguments -- they are ideas not something we can prove or disprove.
- stromgo 7y ago
  We do know that the real world is richer than the simulated world, since it holds a computer that runs the simulated world. Therefore if you exist, then it's more likely that you're the result of evolution in the real world than the result of evolution in the simulated world. Imagine the warehouse-size computer that is needed to simulate a bacterium here on Earth. Computers are dusty, and dust contains bacteria, so if you're a bacterium, then it's more likely that you're one of the billions of bacteria in the dust on the computer, than the bacterium being simulated by the computer. The same reasoning should hold for other worlds.
trophycase 7y ago
Thank you for this quote. I've long felt this. Another thing about the simulation hypothesis is that it seemingly offers no explanatory power. That is, I'm not sure how a universe that is "simulated" and one that isn't (thinking about it more I'm not actually sure what the difference is) would actually differ. Maybe would explain the observer effect in QM cause of lazy loading or something?
- naasking 7y ago
  The simulation hypothesis is not intended to provide explanatory power on the matter you're looking for. It provides explanatory power on other questions though. A simulation is also indistinguishable from the real thing from the inside, or it wouldn't be a faithful simulation.
rubatuga 7y ago
Even a Commodore 64 could simulate our universe given enough time and memory. Our only clock source is the passage of time itself so even if it was being simulated extremely slowly we would never notice.
- posterboy 7y ago
  a c64 would need infinitely more memory to address the infinite memory. I'm not sure whether that means uncountably infinite memory
  - Simon_says 7y ago
    Not really. Imagine something like a Huffman encoding. Every node in a tree can have a finite address while the tree has infinitely many nodes.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
  > Even a Commodore 64 could simulate our universe given enough time and memory Given enough energy, we ourself could snap a universe into existence as well by clapping our hands?
vidarh 7y ago
This is flawed thinking I've seen show up in a lot of arguments. I even had this argument with Kurzweil at some point. If we want to create a realistic simulation, we only need to simulate things with sufficient fidelity to convince observers. That basically means: - Only things that have been observed needs to gain some form of persistence - Each simulated entity should have error margins that account for their continued existence, or their allowable location and other factors. Once an error margin for an aspect of a simulated entity exceeds the factors of the pseudo-random instantiation of that entity or class of entities, you do not need to explicitly retain or simulate the state of that entity. E.g. you don't need to retain the state of an "NPC human" longer than ~120 years at most; most you can discard much sooner; most details you never need to generate in the first place because it is not known to the entity that observes it. - Over time, perturb the simulation back towards the outcome of a static generator function that takes time as a parameter, to wipe out state and simulation. That is, "undo" all changes the "players" in the simulation do in as plausible way as possible. Do that, and you only need to simulate the "players" you want to simulate and those entities closest in time and space to them most of the time. There'll be a "halo" of other entities that slowly reverts to the baseline simulation. I keep wanting to use this approach as a simulation basis for a game, in fact. E.g. consider Elite: When you leave a starsystem, all the ships in it despawns. If you go straight back, it breaks immersion. The approach above applied to it would instead record a cone from the last known position of each ship that grows over time by likely speeds and directions. As more and more of the larger end of the cone expands outside the starsystem, you increase the chance that they despawn. If you return rapidly, you find ships have moved a believable distance. Or Minecraft: Currently mobs despawn outside of a given area, and simulation only runs within a certain number of chunks from the player. But most things stay exactly as they were. As such all player modifications must be saved. But for many things you can create functions that makes the world more dynamic with less simulation. E.g. if trees slowly grow and age and fall down, and rot, and new trees grow, then that means that the longer since a player has been in a given chunk, the more of the players modifications can be discarded and replaced by a generator function with time as one of the parameter. We've pruned simulations since some of the earliest generative games. To address the quote: We don't need to simulate the weather in its full apparent complexity, as long as the observed aspects of the weather falls within parameters that makes them plausible but sufficiently unpredictable. For most detail of the weather, that just means it needs to conform to the overall parameters. E.g. you don't need to simulate raindrops that "player" sees; just the overall volume of rain in the overall area if it is near a "player". Even less detail if further away.

ffhhj 7y ago

I guess it boils down to whether or not we're willing to accept infinite regress or not. Of course, if not, one must necessarily accept that reality 'comes from' nothing. Although I'm a VR developer, I can't believe it's "all turtles all the way down" :@) Actually I've been working on a theory to define randomness from complete uncertainty, without the "fair coin" metaphor based on constructivism, which is deterministic.

AgentME 7y ago
>if not, one must necessarily accept that reality 'comes from' nothing. UDASSA (http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/udassa/ http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/udassa/) is the closest thing I've seen to a believable idea about how reality could come from nothing. It's basically a more specific version of the mathematical universe hypothesis. >Actually I've been working on a theory to define randomness from complete uncertainty If you're trying to make a deterministic theory of physics and eschew randomness from the world, then you're going to run into big problems from quantum mechanics. The idea that results from random quantum interactions comes from hard-to-measure factors in the world that we just happen to be uncertain about is called a hidden variable theory, and Bell's Theorem shows that those theories are incompatible with the principle of locality. Though there is one popular local and deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics that avoids this issue: the Many-Worlds Interpretation. I wrote a post in another thread recently that's relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22845499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22845499.

joe_the_user 7y ago

But wouldn't a simulation be simulating the laws of an "actual" world? Why would the actual world have such a cost? Oppositely, if the actual world had such a cost, that's equal evidence that we are in said actual world.

empath75 7y ago
Why would they? People make simulations of worlds that aren’t like the real world all the time.

mirimir 7y ago

In Fall, Stephenson argues that the speed of light reflects resource limitations in the machine(s) running our reality.

wildermuthn 7y ago
When looking for explanations to a mystery, the best debugging method is to look at edge-cases. You eliminate all unimportant noisy data and begin to focus on the data that at least has the potential to cause the mystery. Ideally that data doesn’t change. Ideally it is a constant signal within the noise. Some underlying and unchanging constant. The speed of light has always struck me as one of the more constant, arbitrary, and yet vital pieces of data we know about our universe. Suitable for debugging whatever kind of reality is is that we find ourselves inhabiting.

chadcmulligan 7y ago

The question I always end up with - how many simulations deep are we? Universe A builds a simulator to see how it works, it then builds a simulator and so on. We can never communicate with the original universe, so we build our own simulation. As always if simulating universes is possible then the probability we're in level 0 tends to 0.

fpoling 7y ago
The could be no original universe. Just consider infinite sequence of simulations. Or universe A can be simulating universe B which is in turn simulates A. This is not possible with finite systems, but the moment one considers infinite ones, all bets are off.
- Intermernet 7y ago
  From Excession by Iain M Banks: "Eventually in the progress of a technologically advanced society, occasionally after some sort of limited access to hyperspace, more usually after theoretical work, it was realized that the soap bubble was not alone. The expanding universe lay inside a larger one, which in turn was entirely enclosed by a bubble of space-time with a still greater diameter. The same applied within the universe you happened to find yourself on/in; there were smaller, younger universes inside it, nested within like layers of paper round a much-wrapped spherical present." "In the very centre of all the concentric, inflating universes lay the place they had each originated from, where every now and again a cosmic fireball blinked into existence, detonating once more to produce another universe, its successive outpourings of creation like the explosions of some vast combustion engine, and the universes its pulsing exhaust." "There was more; complications in seven dimensions and beyond that involved a giant torus on which the 3-D universe could be described as a circle, contained and containing other nested tori, with further implications of whole populations of such meta-Realities… but the implications of multiple, concentric, sequential universes was generally considered enough to be going on with for the moment."

reedwolf 7y ago

Relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-11-09 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-11-09