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When you do your experiments and they don't show you are in a simulation, do you conclude that we are living in reality or do you conclude "Wow, this simulation
by staticman2 3y ago
When you do your experiments and they don't show you are in a simulation, do you conclude that we are living in reality or do you conclude "Wow, this simulation has better code than I expected!" or "Wow, I guess the simulation creators invented better computers than we imagined!"
I compare it to religion because, well, I think you are claiming nonfalsifiable ideas are falsiable, and I don't think doing a bunch of math changes this or framing this in a way that sounds scientific changes this.
Anyway someone on substack said it better than me.
"any simulation can only be detected from the inside by performing a measurement and finding a discrepancy between the results and what would have resulted if the measurement had been performed outside the simulation. Without access to the outside of the simulation, there's nothing to compare against and no way to tell simulation from reality".
- _yb2s 3y agoWe can only experimentally test for very specific artifacts from specific types of simulation. If we don’t see them we can conclude that we’re not in that specific type of simulation, but that is all we can conclude, anything more is speculation. I understand the point that you are trying to make, and the quote makes it clearly, but it does not apply in the situations I am talking about, where you can actually make and test a prediction. That’s why these specific testable hypotheses are written up by physicists and appear in arXiv or physics journals, and are not considered theology. Indeed the general idea that we are in some type of simulation is mostly not falsifiable. At best, we could falsify only that we are not in a few specific types of resource constrained simulations that have predictable artifacts.