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The Random Number Generator Hypothesis
- chriswarbo 4y agoThere's no need to invoke aliens, or indeed an 'outside universe', in these thought experiments: computations can occur without any 'intelligent designer' purposefully putting together hardware and software (whether to simulate their ancestors, or to generate random numbers, or anything else). After all, our universe is a Turing-complete computer; we don't need to invoke an 'outside universe' for it to run on, any more than we need to invoke an 'outside slide-rule' when billiard balls collide. Every physical system is "software" running on that computer. The simulation hypothesis invokes an outside universe, with intelligent designers, to explain why a simulation would be like our universe: because it's an ancestor simulation, so it must be the sort of universe that permits the evolution of intelligence. This RNG hypothesis doesn't have such requirements: any suitably-unpredictable computation can be used. That makes it less likely for our universe to be a RNG: sure, there are likely many more RNGs than ancestor simulations; but the vast majority of those RNGs will be nothing like our universe.