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I 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

I 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 ago
At 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
I'm not a simulationist, but both quantum and relativistic phenomena do look a lot like simulation optimizations to patch over increased granularity of a simulation and improve parallelism in a simulation. For instance, my understanding is that nuclear reactor simulations mesh the volume into volumes much much larger than atoms (cm-scale, in most cases, I guess) and then use bulk statistics for each element of the mesh. A finer mesh is much more expensive to compute, and gives diminishing returns in terms of accuracy. My fist job was discrete event network simulation. Some competitors used per-link bulk statistics instead of per-packet discrete events to run simulations much faster, but with lower accuracy. We had a reduced-accuracy hybrid simulation mode to use per-link bulk statistics to affect the per-packet event simulations for an epoch, and then use those results to update the link bulk statistics for the next epoch. I'm sure these sorts of optimizations are common across all kinds of simulation domains. Limiting information travel to the speed of light, and using true randomness instead of hidden state determinism would improve simulation parallelization. Someone might reasonably believe the "real" universe isn't quantitized and/or it's quanta are smaller than our universe's, and our observations of quantum phenomena are artifacts of the use of bulk statistics in simulating the mesh of our universe.

hiddencost 3y ago

At 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

I'm not a simulationist, but both quantum and relativistic phenomena do look a lot like simulation optimizations to patch over increased granularity of a simulation and improve parallelism in a simulation. For instance, my understanding is that nuclear reactor simulations mesh the volume into volumes much much larger than atoms (cm-scale, in most cases, I guess) and then use bulk statistics for each element of the mesh. A finer mesh is much more expensive to compute, and gives diminishing returns in terms of accuracy. My fist job was discrete event network simulation. Some competitors used per-link bulk statistics instead of per-packet discrete events to run simulations much faster, but with lower accuracy. We had a reduced-accuracy hybrid simulation mode to use per-link bulk statistics to affect the per-packet event simulations for an epoch, and then use those results to update the link bulk statistics for the next epoch. I'm sure these sorts of optimizations are common across all kinds of simulation domains. Limiting information travel to the speed of light, and using true randomness instead of hidden state determinism would improve simulation parallelization. Someone might reasonably believe the "real" universe isn't quantitized and/or it's quanta are smaller than our universe's, and our observations of quantum phenomena are artifacts of the use of bulk statistics in simulating the mesh of our universe.