10 ms·
What are the odds we are living in a computer simulation? (2016)
- PaulHoule 5y agoIt's hard to square Lorentz invariance with any kind of discrete approximation in either time or space.
- tsegratis 5y agoLorentz invariance is incredible however we square it
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoEither you have causality (even if it's 'only' statistical) or you don't. If the universe doesn't, we have bigger questions to worry about.
- yummypaint 5y agoCould you expand on this? The Planck length and time would seem to be such discretizations.
- PaulHoule 5y agoIt’s not so clear what those mean. Particularly if Lorenz invariance is really true, what is a planck length in your reference frame could be 10 planck lengths or 10^20 planck lengths in your reference frame.
- tsegratis 5y agoI think, just as no system is fully self descriptive (there is always an axiom), and there is no fully self contained perpetual motion machine So it is reasonable to take the universe as not fully self descriptive or defining For instance can the universe create it's own arbitrary laws of physics and run molecules on that basis? No it doesn't And so essentially, a simulation, or God becomes required. And the one running the simulation would need an immense power essentially beyond the realms of our conception It seems if we are to exist, then, for want of a better word, God is essential
- lumost 5y agoThere’s no natural reason to think that the laws of the universe aren’t what they are simply due to a natural process. While no one has credibly made a testable hypothesis on what this process would be as of yet. However I don’t have reason to believe this would be impossible to test.
- tsegratis 5y agoWhatever system made the laws of the universe, it is presumably extremely consistent and uniform (otherwise how give rise to such a uniform universe) So yes, eminently testable, no disagreement with you on that And yet at the same time, the simulation hypothesis is not really disprovable, and infact, is quite reasonable Which presents the problem (if simulation is not disprovable) that there may be many valid explanations that are untestable So in that sense, I would say impossible to test But still I'm surprised you say there are no testable hypotheses!
- lumost 5y agoThere are testable hypothesis, but not about the extremely early universe as of yet. The energy requirements put it outside the realm of terrestrial experiments - and as of yet no one has a good simulacra of the universe prior to the big bang. While there are some theoretical white hole approaches to justify the big bang etc. These are not as of yet testable.
- 5y ago
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoMaybe but if there's no way for information to move in and out, what does it matter? It just ends up being one more turtle on the bottom of the stack.
- rbanffy 5y agoUnless it’s possible to attack the simulation from inside it and escape the sandbox. OTOH, every time an escape is detected and contained, the simulation can be reset to its last valid state and its inhabitants will never suspect the universe was reset.
- cainxinth 5y ago“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.” -Douglas Adams
- jamiek88 5y agoAww you missed the best bit - ‘there’s another theory that says this has already happened’!
- monkeycantype 5y agoThere’s a series of Greg Egan stories (in the book instantiation) about preparing and viewing images designed to exploit the simulator graphics library (when viewed) as a way to transfer between simulations, that considers these problems
- naveen99 5y ago0
- 52-6F-62 5y ago1 And now we have a dyad. Great job. Do you have any idea what just started?
- naveen99 5y agocomputers as we know them are pretty limited in simulating anything in real time. I mean we are limited to double precision most of the time. If we are in a simulation, it isn’t a piece of silicon and metal running on electricity with all the finite math. Maybe if you redefine computer to be reality and have a model for dealing with singularities and infinities.
- Tenoke 5y agoYou can simulate plenty in real-time or faster - most games do. The underlying universe can easily be more complex than the simulated one.
- 52-6F-62 5y agoI'm actually with you. I was trying to make a clever remark. I find it entertaining that ancient occult symbolism of your definition (1/0, singularity/infinity) to be the resulting mathematical foundation of modern computing, though. Personally, I think the discussion of "is it a simulation" is just getting into the mechanics again and is only held to be defining of reality by hardened materialists. I mean, that is just computing catching up with physics catching up with spirituality with regard to facing the question of: what really matters and what really is the point if we're just a small crest of a wave in the infinite ocean of energy, or if we're a bunch of emergent consciousnesses in god's infinite quest to know itself, or I want a cheeseburger because of some cosmic bitflip in some nth dimension of recursive simulations, and so on. The truth of any of it is likely to be found in the abstract, if anywhere, I suppose.
- 5y ago
- jakobdabo 5y agoThere's just too much pain (both physical and emotional) and too many diseases in the world. I refuse to believe that a higher entity (name it God or aliens) would create or simulate all those cruel things.
- ipaddr 5y agoIsn't disease another lifeform trying to survive? Isn't God responsible for all life? Why do you think your life is most important in the eyes of God?
- Igelau 5y ago> Isn't disease another lifeform trying to survive? Isn't Nurgle responsible for all life? Why do you think your life is most important in the eyes of Nurgle? Fixed that for you.
- adamjb 5y agoHave you ever watched anyone play RollerCoaster Tycoon?
- ethbr0 5y agoOr any of the 50%+ of our games sales that involve combat and/or death?
- jamiek88 5y agoI’d like to think if we knew those characters were sentient we’d act differently but...<broadly gestures at everything>
- ethbr0 5y agoTo be completely fair to humanity, most people don't get enjoyment out of the arbitrary anguish of sentient creatures. E.g. even animal fights are frowned on in most cultures, and bloodsports are now pretty heavily regulated (especially vs historical norms)
- stoicjumbotron 5y agoThe first 4 paragraphs really made me feel weird. I just can't explain it. Is this what is called existential crisis?
- Black101 5y agoIt's at least a 50% chance. The god-believing-people would probably say that we are for sure.
- johndoe42377 5y agoThis is are a meaningless questions. One cannot calculate any such odds in principle. It is an application of a wrong concept. The real answer is that in cannot be known, again, in principle. The first such answer has been given by Upanishadic seers back then, based on the principle that intellect, conditioned by perceptions, cannot know. Observations of effects is not enough to know the causes and "mechanics". The modern answer is that abstraction barriers are impenetrable (yes, in principle). There is absolutely no way to even guess an actual wiring of a processor from the level of code (separated by a few layers of abstraction barriers).
- lettergram 5y agoIsn’t this basically impossible to prove? see Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ Effectively we can’t prove a higher level of the simulation because we are encoded in it?
- Tenoke 5y agoIs it impossible for software to prove it's likely in a VM just because it is 'encoded in it'? It depends on the implementation but it's definitely not impossible a priori and especially not because of Godel.
- lettergram 5y agoI’m not sure that’s the case, because we don’t know the underlying system (assuming true). More importantly, If math is designed to reflect reality and his proof effectively states you can’t prove the system is correct within the system — then effectively aren’t we saying we can’t prove we are in a simulation? Honest question - I have no idea lol
- qayxc 5y ago> it's definitely not impossible a priori and especially not because of Gödel. You forgot something there: you know the underlying system and about its existence. In the absence of this knowledge it's indeed impossible to know. Here's an example from real-life physics: there's no way of telling by means of measurement, whether you're accelerating or at rest but subjected to a gravitational field. A software example would be this: how would a program written and running in Factorio (like Pong [0]) be able to tell that it's implemented by means of video game mechanics running in an emulator executed within a VM on server hardware? If the programming environment itself features no way of interrogating its runtime environment, then there's just no way. [0] https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=76155 https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=76155
- Tenoke 5y agoIf we assume that this is running in a truly huge Factorio instance then monitoring the world intently would reveal so many subtle bugs and inconsistencies in a world with otherwise extremely straightforward laws that being in a simulation should be a prime hypothesis.
- Igelau 5y agoNo dev up against a deadline is going to implement a Higgs Field. Those masses would be hard-coded.
- ethbr0 5y agoPresumably you could delay implementing microscopic phenomena, as long as they're consistent with macroscopic phenomena, until such time as they're actually measured. Lazy physics development. :)
- jeremyjh 5y agoYou can always go back and add it later. You put in a cheap heuristic to begin with and only implement the faithful model when particle colliders start coming online. If it took too long to develop just pause the simulation for a bit.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MaggiD 5y agoNot complete without linking to Georg Hotz (geohot) talk at SXSW: "Jailbreaking the Simulation" He's taking the hacker's perspective and exploring if the simulation would be hackable from inside. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ
- tomcooks 5y ago2016
- dang 5y agoAdded above. Thanks!
- werber 5y agoI’ve had a reoccurring dream since childhood about our universe being a B+ assignment in an extraterrestrial middle school classroom and that in effect I’m a npc in that effort. Whenever this subject comes up I’m always a bit interested but it seems like an impossible thing to know.
- scotty79 5y agoUnknowable. And no, you'll have no way to break out of simulation and access api of the simulator, because if it's in place it works similarly to this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
- fabiospampinato 5y agoNot necessarily, there might be bugs in it.
- krustyburger 5y agoWell, we know there are bugs in this reality. I believe the relevant field of study is called entomology.
- scotty79 5y agoSure, because gods that made math are known to be crappy developers. ;-)
- fabiospampinato 5y agoYou don't need to be crappy to make something that isn't perfect, maybe it's not even possible to prove that something extremely complicated like the universe is bug-free. Obviously though it might be a matter of perspective, we might as well be gods compared to ants, our code might be buggy but I don't think ants are smart enough to figure that out.
- scotty79 5y agoComplexity of the universe comes from super simple (relatively for gods) rules of math. You don't have bugs in math.
- fabiospampinato 5y agoThere's actually a math theorem that says basically that, unless I'm misunderstanding, if your math has no bugs you can't prove it has no bugs with it.
- hirundo 5y agoIf it is a simulation, what are the odds that it's a game? The great majority of simulations that we know about are games. If it is a game, what are the odds that you are a non player character? In games, the vast majority of characters aren't the player. So if we are living in a computer simulation, odds are that we're non player characters.
- numlock86 5y agoMaybe you are not an NPC but an actual playable character to someone and the whole concept of you thinking that you are in control is part of the system. But yeah, odds are much higher you are just an NPC for decorative purposes ...
- taf2 5y agoI think probably as likely as the earth is at the center of the universe. The simulation theory as fun as it is to imagine I think is more like the earth being flat or center of the universe type thinking … it more comes from our imagination then from our observation
- andyana 5y agoOur observations are driving the comparison, no? People are trying to make sense of existence but only have their personal experiences and knowledge to use as evidence.
- s_dev 5y agocries in solipsism
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agocrisis in solipsism is signalling suboptimal self-control ...some serving of shrooms seems suggestive to spiritual salvation...
- celticninja 5y agoIn that case NPCs are the real people of the simulation. It is the playable character that knows it is not real. The NPCs are simulated to act and behave like independent entities with their own drivers and motivations. Therefore the NPCs are actually the most free characters in the simulation. The playable character just does what it is told by the player.
- alexshendi 5y agoThe world certainly feels as if it was hacked together in C++ as a side project by an incompetent demiurge.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoTo me this is simply rephrasing the age old question about the existence of God using a modern technology analogy.
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago"So, if your brain is fast, and aliens have the Playstation Fourteen, that means reality is a Nintendo" Sit down, Doug, that doesn't make any sense
- sobriquet9 5y agoPlanck constant in uncertainty principle does look like pixel pitch on the screen or mesh of finite element method.
- cik 5y agoI find questions like this fascinating. As a religious person, I guess I don't really see the question. There's no way for me to (currently) prove or disprove the existence of a deity. Ultimately I make a faith-based decision based on things that resonate with me, helping to reinforce my religious beliefs. Others do the reverse and don't believe. But it would be hubris on my part to try and prove the existence of deity. It's fundamentally unproveable - at least with what we currently know. I view these simulation exercises as the same.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago> It's fundamentally unproveable While we can't know the future, this might not have been the case in the past. Most religious books describe a time where special people like prophets have very direct, physical contact with the main deity of the religion (one of them even had a fight with God).
- stevev 5y agoMy opinion, the enigma of what we call the paranormal, or sightings of people who has passed, could shed some light about the reality we live in.
- rendall 5y agoSimulation is such a lack of imagination. I see it situated right in the tradition of always comparing the universe to the latest technology. The Universe is... a clock! A hologram! Electricity! A computer! What if the Universe were a blemish on a semi-sentient 8th dimensional creature, itself by-product of an 23rd dimensional industrial process, which is itself a symbolic representation for even more incomprehensible entities? Could you call that a simulation? The comparison is meaningless.
- Igelau 5y ago> What if the Universe is a blemish on a semi-sentient 8th dimensional creature, itself by-product of an 23rd dimensional industrial process, which is itself a symbolic representation for even more incomprehensible entities? That's supposed to be a trade secret, who leaked this to you?
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y agoI completely agree, but it would be very difficult for the readers of such article to relate to. It's simply easier to call it something that we're familiar with so that people can think of it and discuss it. The reality might be so strange that we might be lacking any terms to describe it.
- pestatije 5y agoDepends on your definition of "Computer Simulation". If it is "making physics match what maths say", then 100%.
- Folcon 5y agoI find the notion of a sim a little more interesting that other kinds of closed systems, because unlike say "what if the world is a dream" there are constants in a sim, rules are fixed. Those rules may be exploitable. So I'm just curious where the bugs may be found? After all anything this complicated probably has bugs =)... Is it in quantum mechanics? Faster than light travel? Something super mundane that we've not thought about because it's that simple way someone decided to trigger debug mode? Find those and fun things may be possible, which would also give us evidence for the sim theory. I'm not holding my breath, but it's fun to think about.
- bloak 5y agoThe first step is to realise that it makes no difference to the people living inside a universe whether that universe is "real" or simulated. The second step is to realise that it makes no difference to the people living inside a simulated universe whether you actually run the simulator, or even bother building it. For example, the set of prime numbers less than 10^12 exists whether or not you build and program a computer to print them out. If you write a program that simulates a universe, then the mathematical object defined by that program exists whether or not you build a computer and run the program, and to any conscious beings that happen to exist inside that hypothetical universe it can't possibly make any difference. That's my opinion, anyway.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago> then the mathematical object defined by that program exists whether or not you build a computer and run the program This is how physics poses to "see behind the veil", so to speak. The implications seem a lot more interesting than a computer simulation, at least to a [this] human's perspective.
- andyjohnson0 5y agoWhat if mathematics is only valid within the simulation? If seems natural to us that a simulation must be grounded in mathematics, and that maths must therefore be a thing within the reality/universe that is running the simulation, but I don't think this is a given. The infrastructure might utilise something else that we can't conceive of.
- tsegratis 5y agoMathematics can describe concepts abstractly, like a type checker checking a program, even if we can't decide whether the program halts or not In that sense, we might be able to use mathematics to describe systems that are beyond the reality of the universe For 'us' to be meaningful to 'them', hopefully we can conclude that in some sense, 'they' are meaningful to 'us', tho agreed, as you said, it is no given I like the aleph sequence, because it shows that allowing paradoxes and impossibilities doesn't mean all bets are off -- that the universe can make perfect sense, even containing paradoxes that are beyond our conception
- arketyp 5y agoMaybe the universe exists precisely because it's indistinguishable from its own simulation. Maybe that's existence per se. Maybe self-reference is more fundamental than void. Likelihood arguments assume some kind of bottom level, but perhaps there is none.
- Simplicitas 5y agoDoes the resulting simulation (this universe) show any hints that it is nearly impossible for the theoretical hosting universe to exist?
- polynomial 5y agoWell yes, since you said hints and not absolute proof. Using QMC (Quantum Monte Carlo) we can show that quantized gravitational responses underpinning certain bosonic systems make the computational demands for simulating them exponentially intractable, to the point it's not clear how they could be simulated not just in practice but in theory.
- Simplicitas 5y agoOk, then that's enough for me to say: So far as we can reasonably tell right now, no, we do not live in a simulation.
- dazhengca 5y agoA fine example of why you don’t just get to make up the probability of something when you don’t know the actual probability.
- recursivedoubts 5y ago"Therefore some simulation exists of its own necessity, and does not receive its existence from another simulation, but rather causes it. This all men call God."
- only_as_i_fall 5y agoAll physical evidence points to the universe containing some fixed amount of entropy which puts an upper bound on the complexity of any simulation you could embed inside it. Given this, the claim that we're at the bottom of some large or infinite stack of simulated universes would have to also assert that the containing universe is fundamentally different than our own, which moves the claim from the realm of merely unfalsifiable to convoluted. When I see people like musk make the argument for the universe being simulated I can't help but see those arguments as a sophomoric reach for whatever model of reality feels "coolest" at the time; evidence be damned.
- returnInfinity 5y agoThe universe could be infinite. Current evidence may be incorrect.
- pontiacbandit8 5y agoThis might explain parallel universes…
- rektide 5y agoisn't it a bit weird to hypothesize that the virtuality would run on something as Reality 1.0/Earth-Normal as a computer? are we assuming there are smarter cooler humans running around on their own planet with 7 continents, 5 oceans, in a 8 planet solar system (sorry pluto), orbiting a G2V class star? that are running big data-centers where they faithfully simulate physics, the planet, the heavens for us in essentially-exact detail? that'd take a lot of computation. maybe our simulated reality only moves 10^-6 as fast, so they have time to do all the computation, and they're just really really old over there. in sci fi typically the uploaded people speed around at a much much faster time factor, but if we're trying to make sure that every physics experiment reproduces, biology & virology &c experiment & observations reproduce, that's a lot more complexity than what i imagine for your run-of-the-mill hyper-advanced society that has uploaded into the cloud: i imagine the uploaded society running a much more synthetic, simpler reality, selectively interesting. to me, it's much easier to imagine a Great Fake situation, that humanity has been actively steered by unknown higher technology forces sometimes in the past couple thousands of years (and perhaps longer). i still tend to think we are a not entirely-uncommon random chance amid the congealed energy that exploded & hopefully pretty please contracts to explode again. i tend to think our past is our own. and so too our future.
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/ENDoc https://archive.is/ENDoc