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In my personal simulation hypothesis, quantum mechanics is a workaround for when pesky scientists started looking closely at the edge cases in the simulation’s

In my personal simulation hypothesis, quantum mechanics is a workaround for when pesky scientists started looking closely at the edge cases in the simulation’s behavior. It’s expensive to simulate every particle, so it’s easier to simulate the macroscopic observables of a system in bulk. But if you try to look at individual particle interactions, you end up seeing that things aren’t deterministic any more (because the individual particles aren’t typically simulated), and the results of experiments are heavily dependent on when/what exactly you decide to measure. Wave function collapse is what happens when the simulation had to fully evaluate a particle interaction that would have normally been optimized away.

contravariant 5y ago
I mean sure that sounds nice, but entanglement makes no sense as an optimization. There's no computational argument that can be made why you'd want something that classical computers are frankly incapable of calculating. You could argue that the simulation must be running on a quantum computer then, but that's just moving the goal posts.
- ninkendo 5y ago
  > entanglement makes no sense as an optimization. Of course, which is why the universe doesn’t typically calculate full entanglement; hence entanglement doesn’t really show up on the macro scale. Only when you do experiments on a handful of particles, and come up with an observable that depends on their behavior (interferometry, etc), the simulation has to scramble to come up with a coherent history that agrees with your measurement, in a lazily evaluated way. The larger scale the experiments are on entangled particles, the harder the simulation has to work to make it all happen and make sense. :-) One could say that decoherence is the universe’s way of preventing us from stealing its compute power too much.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    If this holds then things should start to break down once we get some serious entanglement on the way (VLHC anyone?). And let's ignore that most of the supposed optimizations that quantum mechanics was allegedly bringing happen because of entanglement and not in spite of it.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Like the cars and pedestrians in GTA. I was trying to create the biggest pile up of wrecked cars that I could, and they kept disappearing whenever I turned my back in them!

contravariant 5y ago

I mean sure that sounds nice, but entanglement makes no sense as an optimization. There's no computational argument that can be made why you'd want something that classical computers are frankly incapable of calculating. You could argue that the simulation must be running on a quantum computer then, but that's just moving the goal posts.

ninkendo 5y ago
> entanglement makes no sense as an optimization. Of course, which is why the universe doesn’t typically calculate full entanglement; hence entanglement doesn’t really show up on the macro scale. Only when you do experiments on a handful of particles, and come up with an observable that depends on their behavior (interferometry, etc), the simulation has to scramble to come up with a coherent history that agrees with your measurement, in a lazily evaluated way. The larger scale the experiments are on entangled particles, the harder the simulation has to work to make it all happen and make sense. :-) One could say that decoherence is the universe’s way of preventing us from stealing its compute power too much.
- contravariant 5y ago
  If this holds then things should start to break down once we get some serious entanglement on the way (VLHC anyone?). And let's ignore that most of the supposed optimizations that quantum mechanics was allegedly bringing happen because of entanglement and not in spite of it.

DonHopkins 5y ago

Like the cars and pedestrians in GTA. I was trying to create the biggest pile up of wrecked cars that I could, and they kept disappearing whenever I turned my back in them!