3 ms·
This is really cool, leaves me wondering about the fabric of the universe itself Could we be living in a infinitely recursive simulation?
by nico 3y ago
This is really cool, leaves me wondering about the fabric of the universe itself
Could we be living in a infinitely recursive simulation?
- a-r-t 3y agoIf anyone is interested in reading about this idea, I recommend Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" [0] and Max Tegmarks's "Our Mathematical Universe" [1]. [0] https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ [1] https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html
- hackinthebochs 3y agoOh no what have you done
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- anthk 3y agoThe Computational Beauty of Nature, too among: https://github.com/gwf/CBofN https://github.com/gwf/CBofN
- kossTKR 3y agoSeems most likely, but why is there anything at all to begin with? .. a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach. Does anyone else sometimes get these "intuitive flashes of insight" - like your brain configures itself in a pattern that "lifts the veil". I've been thinking of starting meditating to stabilise or cultivate this state if possible because i've feel like i've been losing this slightly psychedelic ability since i was a kid. Most often i get it in the hypno/hypopompic phases, sudden flashes of eureka that disappears just as fast, like a loud echo of "wow this is existance", "time is unbelievably deep", "demensions and perspective are bizarre in essence", "is this just a fraction of a shared dream" etc.
- mentos 3y agoMy thought is that ‘things just exist’ and the problem is the dimension we experience things in. Does that make any sense?
- a13o 3y agoIf you wanna get really lost, consider how the 'aha' feeling could itself be illusory and indicative of nothing at all. Similar to how everything in a dream is convincingly real. Or how ideas sound better when you're high. 'Aha' is not a reliable narrator. My challenge to people chasing 'aha', is to see how long you can stay in the present moment.
- a_cardboard_box 3y agoWhy shouldn't stuff be allowed to spontaneously come into existence? Why should there be any rules at all to begin with? If there is truly nothing, then there isn't any rule to force the nothing to stay nothing. So the question becomes "how was the universe chosen to be this way, rather than some other way?". The choice must be made, but there is no objective reason to prefer any option over any other. "Nothing exists" is a simple answer, but simplicity is not objectively preferred. I think the presence of this subjective choice forces a subjective experience into existence with the free will to decide it. Though I haven't a clue how the characteristics of the experience are chosen - that's also a subjective choice. It's subjective choices all the way down.
- TomSwirly 3y agoRequiring infinite amounts of information to explain a finite universe? Occam's Razor comes down pretty hard on the side of "no". People have tried to explain the universe with cellular automata and so far none of these systems has even been consistent with our current observations of the universe, let alone predicting some new behavior that would allow us to prove or disprove that the theory was true. (If your theory doesn't predict anything new, it's not a new theory at all!) Requiring infinite recursion of cellular automata would seem to make the whole problem much harder...
- mseepgood 3y agoSince when is the universe finite?
- krapp 3y agoThe Big Bang involved a finite amount of energy and created a finite amount of matter. New energy cannot be created. Therefore the universe is finite.
- Kranar 3y agoYou're kind of just making stuff up here. In particular the assertion that the big bang involved a finite amount of energy is entirely unfounded. It's not that your statement is false, but that there is absolutely no consensus on the matter. Some physicists make strong arguments that at the big bang the total energy of the universe was 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 3y agoMost current models of the universe suggest that it occupies a volume and has a finite number of particles. But these are just models based on observations and constraints.
- politician 3y agoPBS SpaceTime just did a piece on the theory of a holographic universe yesterday. https://youtu.be/DoCYY9sa2kU https://youtu.be/DoCYY9sa2kU
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SigmundA 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
- breuleux 3y agoI agree that this is really cool, but this is a very contrived situation where the entire universe is arranged in such a way as to form a sort of fixed point. The vast majority of configurations of the Game of Life or of the real world are not fixed points and would break the clever tricks that are used to make this. Also, because the simulation is infinite and speeds up and simplifies itself as you zoom out, you don't properly appreciate the fact that every layer is a thousand times slower than the layer that simulates it and contains a thousand times less cells (I don't know if it's a thousand). If you transposed this to the real world, it would take one kilogram of computing substrate an hour to simulate one gram of matter for 3.6 seconds and that's kind of useless.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoWell, we don't have the tech to build such a simulator ourselves, so we'd have to be a leaf node of the simulation tree, that has yet to run long enough to discover how to spawn the next levels. But I guess not all leaves are successful at spawning - some just self-destruct.
- monktastic1 3y agoObligatory: https://qntm.org/responsibility https://qntm.org/responsibility