4 ms·

To me, one of the more interesting arguments against the universe as a simulation came from Sean Carroll. I'm paraphrasing, but he noted that any simulation wou

To me, one of the more interesting arguments against the universe as a simulation came from Sean Carroll. I'm paraphrasing, but he noted that any simulation would be limited and it's possible detail, because it has to use the resources of the real world, and therefore is likely to be less detailed than the real world. And the logic of simulated universes is that they, too, have simulated universes, and you keep on going, and you end up with much greater probability that you're in one of the simulations then that you're in reality. But, it would also follow, that the version of reality that you experience is not very rich in detail relative to whatever is "real." The author, John, says that blindness to detail can make you "intellectually stuck." So I would wonder if an implication of Sean Carroll's argument, an implication of the universe as a simulation, is that we would experience less detail and therefore be more prone to getting "stuck".

OneTimePetes 5y ago
That is nonsense. We can do "unlimited" detail, by just-in-time generating details on observation and extrapolating from some mathematical deterministic constants tail. Not everything that can be seen, needs space- lots of it can be reproduced with formulas just in time on observation. The only observable thing would be a "detail snap" and the same "high-res" details were the same hash is produced. Which could be avoided by hashing in the observer, at some level of detail.
- glenstein 5y ago
  Carrol calls it the "Resolution Conundrum" [0]. If you believe in the underlying logic that there is a kind of runaway effect, of simulations within simulations, etc, it's inevitably going to be the case that the most probable simulated universe is the one with the least available computing power. So whatever trickery you use to get around the problem of low resolution just substitutes one problem for another, and then the new thing runs up against limits of computing power. We would be most likely to experience the simulation that's most likely to generate noticeable artifacts as the simulation runs up against limits. 0: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-we-do-not-live-in-a-simulation-the-resolution-conundrum/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-w...
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    It could also be that the most probable simulated universe is one in which it is very hard to simulate other universes. We do 2D simulations, games of life, etc. If our universe is simulated, why wouldn't the "parent" one be vastly more complex (more dimensions) and a much better place to run simulations? It could be highly hyperdimensional and contain unimaginable levels of detail, even "time" in our universe could be a construct (or multidimensional) in the parent universe.
  - coremoff 5y ago
    the thing that I don't understand is why people think that there would be a simulation of a universe; surely it would be more likely that this is a simulation of "you" (well me as obviously you lot aren't real) - vastly simpler and more plausible
    - OneTimePetes 5y ago
      In a simulation, would make the idea of a simulation inconceivable not be the best recursion prevention?
- Retric 5y ago
  No we can go deep but no where near unlimited zoom. Watch a video that shows a fractal zoom to say 10^20,000 and that feels like forever but it’s nothing next to 10^(10^20,000) let alone anything actually large. Even seemingly simple problems run into surprising issues when you want arbitrary precision. What’s the one’s place digit of π^(π^(π^π)? I mean sure you could fake unlimited zoom by just picking arbitrary numbers like say 4, but that’s no longer zoom.
- jcims 5y ago
  Heisenberg discovered the simulation.
ericmay 5y ago
Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know we aren’t stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe? Stuck in our minds? It’s an interesting theory though but I’m not quite sure I buy the detail resolution argument as the one that defeats it, rather similar to Descartes in that you can’t trust your senses it’s hard to care about, especially with no proposed test (which wouldn’t the test be part of the simulation too?). So you kind of run into the “well who created that kind of marathon and I don’t know of any philosophical conjectures that have those characteristics that have been solved. Could be wrong though.
- glenstein 5y ago
  >Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know we aren’t stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe? Stuck in our minds? I largely agree with where you're at on this. What we experience as normal might be extremely low detail relative to some more detailed underlying reality. However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. So it seems like there's room to go "further down". I also don't necessarily think it's a decisive argument, but what's interesting to me is that argument in particular stresses detail, and what it has in common with this article leads to an implication that we're more likely to get "stuck" in a cognitive sense, so that there are shapes to our thinking that correspond to the level of detail we're able to experience.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    > However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. Do we? I'm not trying to do the Socratic Method here with endless questioning but how can I know or experience what less detail means? Don't I only have access to all of the detail I could have access to by definition?
    - glenstein 5y ago
      I take the notion of "resolution" to relate to things such as the range of visible color, complexity of shapes and sounds. If you agree with that assumption (and you don't have do) that details are of that nature, you can always conceive of less, but not necessarily more.
magneticspark 5y ago
And to add to the sibling reply by OneTimePetes, even if the simulation had to generate a nearly infinite amount of details, the simulation itself could have its internal time slowed down, and the beings inside the simulation would not be able to perceive it as such.
- glenstein 5y ago
  The problem is with finding an argument as to why, as a matter of principle, we would expect simulations to be accompanied by such fixes. If you buy into the bootstrapping premises (which I don't!) that simulations beget more simulations, and that this runs into limits of computing power, there are clear and consistent principles driving that runaway process. However, so far as I can tell, it's not clear that there would be any principle leading us to conclude that there would be a standardization of simulations relating to image hashing or fiddling with the experience of time. Those types of fixes would fall into the category of idiosyncratic details that either would or wouldn't hold in particular one-off scenarios, and don't generalize into any transcendant probabilistic implication that such experiences are most likely. That kind of generalization is what would be necessary for it to be responsive to the argument about simulations.
rocqua 5y ago
This always makes me think of the 'uncertainty principle' and quantized values in physics. As a layman, it seems to me like both of these combine to limit the amount of information needed to describe the state of the universe. I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to check if this makes sense. My wild imagination suggests that 'waveform collapse' could be modeled as the result of a simulation being forced to resolve a state of a specific particle for further calculations. I imagine it is hard to come up with a plausible 'simulation model' for this that includes features like probability wave interference and entanglement of particles. Such a model would be amazing for insight into quantum mechanics, and also have far-reaching consequence for metaphysics. It would strengthen the argument for us living in a simulation, if the peculiarities of quantum mechanics can be modeled as artifacts of a particularly efficient emulation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
It seems almost touchingly naive to assume that a superuniverse would have similar limitations as this one. We don't know anything about how different universes might be structured. That's not just because we can't access them, but because a superuniverse system assumes a coherent set of metalogic that makes certain universe features possible and other features impossible/unlikely Not only can we not access that, there's absolutely no justification for generalising from this universe to any metasystem in any way. Especially if you accept the premise that this simulation has less detail than the original. Because then of course you don't know what detail is missing, or what detail is possible. So that argument nicely destroys itself.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  Hmm maybe, but also what about the argument that the most likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a universe like ours? A good reason to simulate a universe would be to ask “what if?” questions, which would seem of greatest utility to those living in similar universes…
  - htrp 5y ago
    Or our universe may literally be a game of dwarf fortress running on commodity hardware. These are all similar to the epistemological arguments of unknowable truths. Interesting but ultimately fruitless.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      >dwarf fortress Ridiculous! It's much more probable that our universe is a game of Factorio being played by an idiot.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    > what about the argument that the most likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a universe like ours? So your argument is Genesis 1:27? "So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them" Big, if true.
dsego 5y ago
There is a fun little esoteric/new age youtube video* about reality glitches that explain how reality is (in loose terms) more "mathematical" in nature than "material" (as we mostly perceive it). These are the reasons mentioned: 1) speed of light is an absolute cosmic speed limit 2) wave/particle duality 3) conservation of energy - everything is eternal, nothing can be truly created or destroyed 4) quantum entanglement shows that reality is non-local 5) singularities at center of black holes where seemingly all physical laws break down [*] https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg
- wruza 5y ago
  Ugh nope. This video is not only too naive at the intro (could be just a watchbait), it further doesn’t explain what it claims, neither is it consistent nor starting from any preexisting model. It starts from limited factoids and uses them as fundamentals to go to some crazy not-even-a-hypothesis. E.g. in GR the conservation of energy is an “it really depends” thing, not a universal law. And c is not a galactic speed you or your flashlight may “hit”. To save a stranger some time on c-part to make their own idea of this video, it’s right in the intro and then at 11:30+.
- coremoff 5y ago
  I've only watched the the first five minutes of that video; I think he has some fundamental misconceptions that make it difficult to take much from what he's saying. e.g. for #2 wave/partical duality (which isn't necessarilly even a thing, depending on what foundation of QM you subscribe to) he says that everything is energy and that energy is light; this is not correct (the 2nd part) for #3 energy is not necessarily conserved over long time frames in our universe #4 depends on which foundation of QM you subscribe to, but doesn't necessarily require non-locality (AIUI, if your foundation results in this problem, then you must chose between locality or reality to explain things - reality in this context not really meaning what it might mean in common parlance) #5 singularities appear in black holes because the maths breaks down because we don't have a unified theory of QM+gravity; they aren't magical. Also the big bang wasn't a singularity in the way he seems to be implying, again AIUI I'm no expert, but I would suggest you review some more technical videos before reading too much into the link you posted (I suggest PBS Space Time / FermiLab / Sabine Hossenfelder)
ineedasername 5y ago
I don't know, humans exist, comparative to the most granular levels of reality, at a macroscopic level. That leaves plenty of room for lost detail in a simulated universe within ours that being at our scale would never really notice. Separately, how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? We all do sometimes-- how would we ever know if it's more or less than "normal" in an non-simulated universe? Carrol is a physicist so he may have more technical reasoning grounded in physics-- I don't know-- but it sounds like a rhetorical rather than scientific justification.
- glenstein 5y ago
  >how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? I never said we aren't prone to getting stuck, in fact I was trying to suggest the opposite although maybe I wasn't very clear. A possible implication of being in a simulation, if we are in one, is that maybe we're more likely to get "stuck." That possibility was the very connection between this article and Sean Carroll's argument that led me to make my comment.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Certainly we get stuck sometimes. How do you know that it's less often than in a simulation? Perhaps on a non-simulated universe there is *no* getting stuck. Or it happens so little as to be a virtually unknown concept. Relative to a universe higher up we might be getting stuck constantly. The entire idea is a counterfactual with absolutely no way of evaluating it as evidence for the opinion that we're not simulated. It may even be true that successive layers if embedded universes would have more problems of that sort, but we still lack any way to establish that our own rate is the baseline. Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation.
    - glenstein 5y ago
      >I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Well I only just posed the idea, and a lot would depend on working out what the terms mean. Of course it's difficult to reason in cases with vague terms. Where I part with you is in the conclusion you draw from the vagueness. You rattle off a string of questions, to each of which my response would be along the lines of "good question! How we answer that depends on XYZ, I think this is more likely, this is less likely. In this case you do this, in that case you do this other thing, etc." For me, those kinds of questions are prompts that allow you continue a constructive conversation in a spirit of good faith and intellectual curiosity. It's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it, and all that. But you don't seem to want to have the questions engaged with or answered so much as you want to use them in a performative expression of helplessness to show that the whole exercise is doomed. To me that's skipping about 3, 4, or 5 steps in the middle. >Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation. Again, you're chasing ghosts. Before you said "how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck?" when I had never suggested we are not prone to getting stuck. Now you're saying can't "be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation." I agree! It is speculative. Where is this disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're responding to coming from?

OneTimePetes 5y ago

That is nonsense. We can do "unlimited" detail, by just-in-time generating details on observation and extrapolating from some mathematical deterministic constants tail. Not everything that can be seen, needs space- lots of it can be reproduced with formulas just in time on observation. The only observable thing would be a "detail snap" and the same "high-res" details were the same hash is produced. Which could be avoided by hashing in the observer, at some level of detail.

glenstein 5y ago
Carrol calls it the "Resolution Conundrum" [0]. If you believe in the underlying logic that there is a kind of runaway effect, of simulations within simulations, etc, it's inevitably going to be the case that the most probable simulated universe is the one with the least available computing power. So whatever trickery you use to get around the problem of low resolution just substitutes one problem for another, and then the new thing runs up against limits of computing power. We would be most likely to experience the simulation that's most likely to generate noticeable artifacts as the simulation runs up against limits. 0: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-we-do-not-live-in-a-simulation-the-resolution-conundrum/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-w...
- MayeulC 5y ago
  It could also be that the most probable simulated universe is one in which it is very hard to simulate other universes. We do 2D simulations, games of life, etc. If our universe is simulated, why wouldn't the "parent" one be vastly more complex (more dimensions) and a much better place to run simulations? It could be highly hyperdimensional and contain unimaginable levels of detail, even "time" in our universe could be a construct (or multidimensional) in the parent universe.
- coremoff 5y ago
  the thing that I don't understand is why people think that there would be a simulation of a universe; surely it would be more likely that this is a simulation of "you" (well me as obviously you lot aren't real) - vastly simpler and more plausible
  - OneTimePetes 5y ago
    In a simulation, would make the idea of a simulation inconceivable not be the best recursion prevention?
Retric 5y ago
No we can go deep but no where near unlimited zoom. Watch a video that shows a fractal zoom to say 10^20,000 and that feels like forever but it’s nothing next to 10^(10^20,000) let alone anything actually large. Even seemingly simple problems run into surprising issues when you want arbitrary precision. What’s the one’s place digit of π^(π^(π^π)? I mean sure you could fake unlimited zoom by just picking arbitrary numbers like say 4, but that’s no longer zoom.
jcims 5y ago
Heisenberg discovered the simulation.

ericmay 5y ago

Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know we aren’t stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe? Stuck in our minds? It’s an interesting theory though but I’m not quite sure I buy the detail resolution argument as the one that defeats it, rather similar to Descartes in that you can’t trust your senses it’s hard to care about, especially with no proposed test (which wouldn’t the test be part of the simulation too?). So you kind of run into the “well who created that kind of marathon and I don’t know of any philosophical conjectures that have those characteristics that have been solved. Could be wrong though.

glenstein 5y ago
>Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know we aren’t stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe? Stuck in our minds? I largely agree with where you're at on this. What we experience as normal might be extremely low detail relative to some more detailed underlying reality. However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. So it seems like there's room to go "further down". I also don't necessarily think it's a decisive argument, but what's interesting to me is that argument in particular stresses detail, and what it has in common with this article leads to an implication that we're more likely to get "stuck" in a cognitive sense, so that there are shapes to our thinking that correspond to the level of detail we're able to experience.
- ericmay 5y ago
  > However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. Do we? I'm not trying to do the Socratic Method here with endless questioning but how can I know or experience what less detail means? Don't I only have access to all of the detail I could have access to by definition?
  - glenstein 5y ago
    I take the notion of "resolution" to relate to things such as the range of visible color, complexity of shapes and sounds. If you agree with that assumption (and you don't have do) that details are of that nature, you can always conceive of less, but not necessarily more.

magneticspark 5y ago

And to add to the sibling reply by OneTimePetes, even if the simulation had to generate a nearly infinite amount of details, the simulation itself could have its internal time slowed down, and the beings inside the simulation would not be able to perceive it as such.

glenstein 5y ago
The problem is with finding an argument as to why, as a matter of principle, we would expect simulations to be accompanied by such fixes. If you buy into the bootstrapping premises (which I don't!) that simulations beget more simulations, and that this runs into limits of computing power, there are clear and consistent principles driving that runaway process. However, so far as I can tell, it's not clear that there would be any principle leading us to conclude that there would be a standardization of simulations relating to image hashing or fiddling with the experience of time. Those types of fixes would fall into the category of idiosyncratic details that either would or wouldn't hold in particular one-off scenarios, and don't generalize into any transcendant probabilistic implication that such experiences are most likely. That kind of generalization is what would be necessary for it to be responsive to the argument about simulations.

rocqua 5y ago

This always makes me think of the 'uncertainty principle' and quantized values in physics. As a layman, it seems to me like both of these combine to limit the amount of information needed to describe the state of the universe. I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to check if this makes sense. My wild imagination suggests that 'waveform collapse' could be modeled as the result of a simulation being forced to resolve a state of a specific particle for further calculations. I imagine it is hard to come up with a plausible 'simulation model' for this that includes features like probability wave interference and entanglement of particles. Such a model would be amazing for insight into quantum mechanics, and also have far-reaching consequence for metaphysics. It would strengthen the argument for us living in a simulation, if the peculiarities of quantum mechanics can be modeled as artifacts of a particularly efficient emulation.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

It seems almost touchingly naive to assume that a superuniverse would have similar limitations as this one. We don't know anything about how different universes might be structured. That's not just because we can't access them, but because a superuniverse system assumes a coherent set of metalogic that makes certain universe features possible and other features impossible/unlikely Not only can we not access that, there's absolutely no justification for generalising from this universe to any metasystem in any way. Especially if you accept the premise that this simulation has less detail than the original. Because then of course you don't know what detail is missing, or what detail is possible. So that argument nicely destroys itself.

randomsearch 5y ago
Hmm maybe, but also what about the argument that the most likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a universe like ours? A good reason to simulate a universe would be to ask “what if?” questions, which would seem of greatest utility to those living in similar universes…
- htrp 5y ago
  Or our universe may literally be a game of dwarf fortress running on commodity hardware. These are all similar to the epistemological arguments of unknowable truths. Interesting but ultimately fruitless.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    >dwarf fortress Ridiculous! It's much more probable that our universe is a game of Factorio being played by an idiot.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > what about the argument that the most likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a universe like ours? So your argument is Genesis 1:27? "So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them" Big, if true.

dsego 5y ago

There is a fun little esoteric/new age youtube video* about reality glitches that explain how reality is (in loose terms) more "mathematical" in nature than "material" (as we mostly perceive it). These are the reasons mentioned: 1) speed of light is an absolute cosmic speed limit 2) wave/particle duality 3) conservation of energy - everything is eternal, nothing can be truly created or destroyed 4) quantum entanglement shows that reality is non-local 5) singularities at center of black holes where seemingly all physical laws break down [*] https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg

wruza 5y ago
Ugh nope. This video is not only too naive at the intro (could be just a watchbait), it further doesn’t explain what it claims, neither is it consistent nor starting from any preexisting model. It starts from limited factoids and uses them as fundamentals to go to some crazy not-even-a-hypothesis. E.g. in GR the conservation of energy is an “it really depends” thing, not a universal law. And c is not a galactic speed you or your flashlight may “hit”. To save a stranger some time on c-part to make their own idea of this video, it’s right in the intro and then at 11:30+.
coremoff 5y ago
I've only watched the the first five minutes of that video; I think he has some fundamental misconceptions that make it difficult to take much from what he's saying. e.g. for #2 wave/partical duality (which isn't necessarilly even a thing, depending on what foundation of QM you subscribe to) he says that everything is energy and that energy is light; this is not correct (the 2nd part) for #3 energy is not necessarily conserved over long time frames in our universe #4 depends on which foundation of QM you subscribe to, but doesn't necessarily require non-locality (AIUI, if your foundation results in this problem, then you must chose between locality or reality to explain things - reality in this context not really meaning what it might mean in common parlance) #5 singularities appear in black holes because the maths breaks down because we don't have a unified theory of QM+gravity; they aren't magical. Also the big bang wasn't a singularity in the way he seems to be implying, again AIUI I'm no expert, but I would suggest you review some more technical videos before reading too much into the link you posted (I suggest PBS Space Time / FermiLab / Sabine Hossenfelder)

ineedasername 5y ago

I don't know, humans exist, comparative to the most granular levels of reality, at a macroscopic level. That leaves plenty of room for lost detail in a simulated universe within ours that being at our scale would never really notice. Separately, how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? We all do sometimes-- how would we ever know if it's more or less than "normal" in an non-simulated universe? Carrol is a physicist so he may have more technical reasoning grounded in physics-- I don't know-- but it sounds like a rhetorical rather than scientific justification.

glenstein 5y ago
>how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? I never said we aren't prone to getting stuck, in fact I was trying to suggest the opposite although maybe I wasn't very clear. A possible implication of being in a simulation, if we are in one, is that maybe we're more likely to get "stuck." That possibility was the very connection between this article and Sean Carroll's argument that led me to make my comment.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Certainly we get stuck sometimes. How do you know that it's less often than in a simulation? Perhaps on a non-simulated universe there is *no* getting stuck. Or it happens so little as to be a virtually unknown concept. Relative to a universe higher up we might be getting stuck constantly. The entire idea is a counterfactual with absolutely no way of evaluating it as evidence for the opinion that we're not simulated. It may even be true that successive layers if embedded universes would have more problems of that sort, but we still lack any way to establish that our own rate is the baseline. Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    >I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Well I only just posed the idea, and a lot would depend on working out what the terms mean. Of course it's difficult to reason in cases with vague terms. Where I part with you is in the conclusion you draw from the vagueness. You rattle off a string of questions, to each of which my response would be along the lines of "good question! How we answer that depends on XYZ, I think this is more likely, this is less likely. In this case you do this, in that case you do this other thing, etc." For me, those kinds of questions are prompts that allow you continue a constructive conversation in a spirit of good faith and intellectual curiosity. It's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it, and all that. But you don't seem to want to have the questions engaged with or answered so much as you want to use them in a performative expression of helplessness to show that the whole exercise is doomed. To me that's skipping about 3, 4, or 5 steps in the middle. >Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation. Again, you're chasing ghosts. Before you said "how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck?" when I had never suggested we are not prone to getting stuck. Now you're saying can't "be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation." I agree! It is speculative. Where is this disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're responding to coming from?