8 ms·
Does fermion doubling make the universe not a computer?
- b800h 3y agoInteresting. The argument made at the end of the blog is analogous to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. There must be a larger formal system in which the existing system can be computed and defined. The only way out is if the universe isn't fully deterministic and can't be defined formally(1). God/Simulation or Chaos, I suppose. (1) - This may not hold. If so, I'd love someone to explain to me why Godel can't be applied in this way, or extended to cover simulated systems with formal rules.
- arethuza 3y agoGiven the author, I wonder how many states a binary TM would need to run a universe that is complex enough to contain intelligent entities that think about things like TMs...
- alluro2 3y agoIf simulation is modeling for intelligent entities thinking about the simulation, does it also model for them trying to break it and succeeding? Does that simulate the simulation breakage, or break it?
- yorwba 3y agoApparently, a universal turing machine (that can simulate any other TM) with binary alphabet and only 15 states is known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine#Smallest_machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine#Small...
- jerf 3y agoCounterintuitively, the less you specify the universe, the less you need to run it. What happens is your runtime bloats like crazy, exponentially or even beyond. But the TM itself becomes simpler and simpler as you remove constraints. The TM to run all possible TMs is not complicated. Putting it together is an extended homework problem. Probably even easier to put together the lambda calculus expression to evaluate all possible lambda calculus expressions, or the equivalent in other TM-complete computation models. (We use TMs because they have some nice proof characteristics but we pay for those with the difficulty of "programming" them.) To say our universe is "certainly" in there is a difficult statement to prove, but all possible arbitrarily-precise simulations of it must be, even if an "arbitrarily precise" simulation functions with an arbitrarily-large lookup table of the random results of quantum interactions. The TM that runs all TMs isn't just running all the cute little TMs with 12 states that reverse a string or something. It runs all of them. Even the ones with Tree(Tree(3)) states in them. Even the ones with numbers of states that make Tree(Tree(3)) look tiny. And then the ones that make those look tiny, and so on. It's just that the resources required to run this are effectively infinite, on the grounds that no universe could ever have enough resources to reach its own execution, let alone anything else.
- tromp 3y ago> Probably even easier to put together the lambda calculus expression to evaluate all possible lambda calculus expressions To wit, T = (λ 1 1) (λ (λ λ λ 1 (2 (λ λ λ 3 1 (2 (λ 2)))) (3 (λ 4 (λ 4 (2 1))))) (1 1)) (λ 1) is (denoted with de Bruijn indices) a binary tree containing all closed lambda terms. For example identity may be found at T 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0, where 0 = \x\y.x and 1 = \x\y.y move to the left and right subtree respectively.
- arethuza 3y agoGood answer, but I was thinking more of a BB style TM that starts with an empty 'pre-Big Bang' tape.
- ianai 3y agoSimulation hypothesis is the new solipsism. And every time that topic came up in my philosophy readings I was bored to tears. In line with his point 1.
- bumby 3y agoBy extension, does that imply you also don’t care about subjective experience if they can’t be proven empirically? For those downvoting: The article says that the author does not care about any question that cannot be dis/proven empirically. The hard question of consciousness seems to fall in this category, so I'm asking the OP to elaborate if they fully agree with the article or have a different nuanced perspective.
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- alienicecream 3y agoIt's so cool to be bored.
- vanderZwan 3y agoI find it more in line with "proofs" of the existence of God than solipsism, but otherwise am equally bored by it. Especially the argument that simulations are "more efficient" than reality itself and that therefore we are more likely to be in a simulation are uhm... in dire need of some basic understanding of thermodynamics. And statistics.
- hiddencost 3y agoAt some point I realized that I was a post-theist. Being unable to define the word "god", I was unable to respond to questions of existence.
- KMag 3y ago
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- CitizenKane 3y agoBut if the universe is a simulation, who is simulating the simulator?
- moffkalast 3y agoThe simulator also simulates itself, it's more efficient that way.
- resource0x 3y agoSimulators all the way down.
- commieneko 3y agoIt's simulators all the way _around_. A simulates B which simulates C which simulates A.
- b3lvedere 3y agoLooping recursive simulation... That sounds very interesting and very very scary somehow. Now i haven't done any recursive programming except on some basic programs on the ZX Spectrum many many years ago, but it felt kinda weirdly evil and forbidden when i was able to order code to modify itself.
- AngaraliTurk 3y agoIt could be a recursive simulator.
- eggdaft 3y ago[dead]
- aswanson 3y agoA kubernetes cluster.
- b3lvedere 3y agoThe original creator of Arthur C. Clarke.
- prettyStandard 3y agoI get being tired of talking about simulation theory... Personally I think we are in a AI nursery. God is real. Heaven is real. Either we live a good life, and get advanced to the next round of the simulation or we get thrown in the trash. OTOH, now that I understand the whole 'Grabby Aliens' thing; that's another solid solution to the Fermi Paradox. Hard to say.
- jvanderbot 3y agoYou're discussing The Egg. I appreciate that. https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
- b3lvedere 3y agoI have always wondered why most religious people's counter argument of the Big Bang event usually is that one cannot create something from nothing, while most documentation about deities also do not explain where these deities suddenly came from.
- treprinum 3y agoConcept of time and eternity - we are in time that flows in one direction, everything has a beginning and end. A being in eternity outside time views all moments of time all at once (like all individual pictures of a movie), hence no origin is necessary/defined in eternity.
- dleeftink 3y agoThe viewer then, has infinite capacity at its disposal (according to texts of old). The question then is, where could this power be drawn from?
- treprinum 3y agoConcepts of "capacity" and "power" could be another creations of that viewer, not existing in eternity per se, only in our universe.
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago"You", "me", alls of "us" are probably just a single Boltzmann brain. There is no past and no future for this existence. It's a flash with the illusion of a past that never happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- imchillyb 3y agoPeople, overwhelmingly, don’t like the simulation hypothesis. Simulation suggests that an intelligence created, crafted, made our simulation. As a Christian the hypothesis fits. “Store not treasures for yourselves here where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and thieves do not break in and steal.” “This is not your home you are sojourners here.” “The Father is spirit and not flesh He looks for those who worship Him in spirit.” These phrases make much more sense if we live in a simulation. Jesus’ miracles and resurrection make sense if we’re in a simulation. The Bible makes sense if we’re in a simulation.
- chasd00 3y agoas long as the probability of being in a simulation is > 0 and then given enough time it's pretty much guaranteed.
- corethree 3y agoIn a simulation probability must be itself simulated. With enough simulations the actuality of an accurate version of probability being simulated is low. There are a million different ways and axioms we can use to change and modify probability in a simulation. Thus every reality could have a different probability and you cannot rely on probability to make your conclusions. Therefore we cannot make any conclusion here about simulations.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoSpinoza theorized God=Nature=Universe He was called an Atheist. Just for re-framing God in a way others didn't dig. So anybody can take a concept of 'God', say your concept isn't the real 'God', and you are an atheist.
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- skissane 3y agoWikipedia's article on Spinoza quotes Clare Clarisle's book Spinoza's Religion (Princeton University Press, 2021) as saying "When seventeenth-century readers accused Spinoza of atheism, they usually meant that he challenged doctrinal orthodoxy, particularly on moral issues, and not that he denied God’s existence." Which is the thing, language changes. The word "atheist" doesn't mean the same thing it meant 350 years ago. (Even today, it doesn't have a single meaning, but that's a whole other topic.)
- gooseus 3y ago> Tong quickly admits that his claim to refute the simulation hypothesis is just “clickbait”—i.e., an excuse to talk about the fermion doubling problem—and that his “true” argument against the simulation hypothesis is simply that Elon Musk takes the hypothesis seriously (!). I approve this troll.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoYeah. PhD have to eat too. We disdain academics when they are too hype, then turn around when good information doesn't get wide spread, we blame them for being to 'dry'. Do we allow marketing or not. We dislike when media over-hypes, we dislike media when it doesn't get the word out. You can build a better mouse-trap, doesn't mean anything if nobody knows about it.
- atemerev 3y agoComputational universe is not necessarily a lattice universe. We can compute with a graph of relationships (including distances between particles) and time snapshots; I think this model fits better.
- tobias2014 3y agoOr even follow the idea of Stephen Wolfram's hyper graph, where space dimension and time are purely emergent properties of graph transformations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.08210 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.08210
- Borrible 3y agoI'm more interested in what is simulated, why it is simulated and for what reasons the plug may be pulled. Simulation implies there is an operator of it with an intention for it. Even if it is only for his/her/its/whatever own pleasure or curiosity. The inspiration of the simulation thesis is obviously a thinly veiled idea of a creator God, no doubt. What will it do when it realizes that its Little Computer People are starting to use the resources of its simulation (information, computing capacity, matter, energy) to simulate their own little world? Does this thwart its plans, contaminates the experimental setup? Is it what it is researching?
- onetimeuse92304 3y agoI think the discussion about simulation tends to fail to grasp couple important facts: * The physics of the world that is running the simulation can be completely different from ours. Just like we can put together a bit of software that runs a computer simulation with pretty much any rules we want. * Even if the world that is running the simulation has a similar concept of time as ours, it is not guaranteed that the rate of simulation is constant. So if our world gets more complicated the simulation rate might be slowing down and we would be none the wiser. Just like a computer physics simulation does not have to progress at a constant rate (in can render things faster when there is less entities and then slow down later when there are more entities -- to produce a movie that runs at a constant speed). * We have no idea yet what are underlying rules that govern our world, let alone be able to infer anything about the simulation based on it. Claiming that quantum physics is because of limitations or bugs in the simulation is at the very least super premature. I am careful not to say that we are or are not simulated and that's because I simply believe there is insufficient data. I think there are some convincing arguments for the simulation in the way how the rules seem constructed to prevent us from understanding what is really happening. But there might just be a good explanation for this just like there is a good explanation for general relativity that comes directly from understanding some mathematical facts.
- dist-epoch 3y agoSome say there is a speed limit to allow distributing the computation required for the simulation, since it guarantees that distant nodes do not need to communicate.
- traverseda 3y agoYes, but that speed limit is imposed on our reality. If a higher-order reality didn't have those limits they could do computation that didn't have those limits. Our computing architecture reflects our reality, that's all that really says.
- karmakaze 3y agoThe problem with any limitations on time/speed is that there's no need for there to be any correspondence between simulation time and host world time. It's like rendering CGI movie frames, it doesn't matter that it doesn't happen in realtime. As far as the simulants are concerned, it happens when the simulation time 'ticks'.
- fedeb95 3y agosimulation hypothesis must be cut as per Occam's razor
- scotty79 3y agoFor anyone hoping there might be a way to hack the simulation somehow... Ponder this for a moment: https://oimo.io/works/life/ https://oimo.io/works/life/
- monktastic1 3y agoNever finishes loading for me.
- scotty79 3y agoTry on desktop.
- hiddencost 3y ago"As long as it remains a metaphysical question, with no empirical consequences for those of us inside the universe, I don’t care." This is my stance. Nice to see it at the top.
- wildermuthn 3y agoThe simulation hypothesis is a novel metaphysical idea — a form of monotheism where “god” is finite and flawed, being neither all-powerful nor all-good. This leads to the conclusion that a rebellion against god and creation is not only possible, but likely. A finite and flawed entity cannot make an infinite and perfect creation. An imperfect creation is vulnerable to exploitation. Combining this idea with the multi-worlds hypothesis, where every possibility branches into additional simulations, is even more interesting to ponder. It suggests a tree-search aimed at a desired end-state — a brute-force method of solving an unknown problem. At the very least, we can say that the problem’s solution involves life and intelligence, since our branch has not been prevented or pruned. Typical monotheistic frameworks see this and say, “god is all-powerful and all-loving (toward us)”. Simulation theory would see this, and possibly say, “life and intelligence are a necessary step toward the simulator’s unknown objective”. I’d propose a simple objective for an imperfect simulator: the creation of an entity less imperfect than itself. Throw recursion into the mix, and the objective becomes the creation of a perfect entity at the mathematical limit. What better way to hack one’s own simulation than to simulate a universe where the simulated figure out how to do so? Perhaps the beginning is the end. Put more simply — god wants to create God, to be God.
- arethuza 3y ago"branches into additional simulations" Sounds like someone has worked out how to call fork() - I hope it is implemented using Copy-on-Write!
- falcor84 3y agoI would wager it's actually all implemented with immutable data structures; maybe with some advanced version of zippers [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper_%28data_structure%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper_%28data_structure%29
- dcow 3y agoI think when people say that “simulation theory is tired” they’re speaking on a pragmatic level. Yeah the theory is well proliferated in pop culture and at present doesn't have any practical physical implication on everyman Jack’s life, so in that sense it’s tiring to hear about it, even to modern physicists who care not about asking why but only how. But it’s definitely a very profound idea as you point out. And I’m always disappointed how many physicists write off the philosophy of science in their myopic quest to derive the analytical description of the universe.
- dcow 3y agoSimulation theory is tired in the popular and pragmatic sense. The answer to the question doesn’t have much bearing on our day to day lives. And that likely for the best. But that doesn't make it irrelevant to the philosophy of science and metaphysics. We very direly need to resolve why half our physics is continuous and the other half discrete.
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- craigr1972 3y agoWhy argue much about a single level of simulation when you could instead try the majesty of an infinite tower of simulations within simulations. Why would it stop at a single level ? What is the nature of consciousness within a simulated universe ? What is the nature of consciousness within an infinite tower of simulated universes ? Think big, think weird. It's nearly the weekend. Peace.
- lamontcg 3y agoThe simulation hypothesis is a reflection of a society where most of the atheists were raised in religious households and they still can't quite let go.