4 ms·
This has been bugging me quite a bit recently. The model I keep coming back to is some giant cellular automata embedded in a some sort of higher dimensional com
by jakear 6y ago
This has been bugging me quite a bit recently. The model I keep coming back to is some giant cellular automata embedded in a some sort of higher dimensional compute structure —- perhaps what we call the “big bang” was the randomly initialized start state, and everything since has been its update algorithm ticking along with an encoding of what we call “physics”. This plays interestingly with things like quantum mechanics - perhaps they’re the underlying implementation of “Math.random()” and things like entanglement are implementation details leaking through. Similarly, perhaps wave/particle duality is the result of some sort of legacy code built to deal with light as particles that got shoehorned into the current implementation’s wave-based approach (easer to simulate at-scale), and it only gets activated when the results are under observation!
It, like every proposed answer to the existential question, is both unverifiable and unrefutable, making pondering it somewhat pointless. Though it is good to know even our proposed higher-dimensional overlords haven’t solved the problem of leaky abstractions!
- Darkphibre 6y agoI had a pet theory that Plank Time is the clock-step (or mantissa precission) of our simulation. :)
- amelius 6y agoA global clock can't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
- fierarul 6y agoPlank Time would be the smallest size of a grid in that Wikipedia animation.
- jakear 6y agoWho said anything about global? Each “cell” (elementary particle? string?) in the automata could be responsible for its own update function, based on its own clock ticking along at its own plank time.
- lovehashbrowns 6y agoThere's an idea I really like that if we ever reach "the end" of pi then that's strong evidence that we're in a programmed world.
- sempron64 6y agoYou cannot reach the end of pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrational https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrationa...
- lovehashbrowns 6y agoYes, that's the whole idea. Pi is infinite, so if we ever get to the end of pi or it starts repeating, it means whatever is simulating our universe has finite resources. There are a lot of issues with this idea, but I like it. I doubt we'll ever find the end of pi, though.