4 ms·

To your first point, if it's a simulated universe, the simulators can just choose to make it finite, and come up with their preferred particle behavior rules.

To your first point, if it's a simulated universe, the simulators can just choose to make it finite, and come up with their preferred particle behavior rules. As observers, we perceive time as passing, but is there anything special in this perception? Looked at another way, everything could be frozen in a 4D log book and we couldn't tell the difference, or could we? In this interpretation, Napoleon is as alive (in 1820) as we are (in 2024.) A film reel is a similar concept, except it's just a 3D projection rather than a complete detailed 4D account.

nonameiguess 2y ago
I get the questions of eternalism, the reality of the past and future, why privilege the present (or at least my present), and all that. I just don't understand why the fact that you can record events in a medium that doesn't experience the time that it records has any implications for how we should think about this. Whether or not you want to say "Napoleon exists" or "Napoleon existed" seems to be a matter of linguistic convention and the more common latter would reflect speakers privileging their own time. If you want to look at it another way, Napoleon exists, but entirely in my past light cone, and I exist entirely in his future light cone. I can't send him any kind of information, but he can send information to me. Is there anything special in this perception? To who? To observers at the absolute end of all time, my future is just as written in stone as Napoleon's. To observers I can receive information from, my future is unknown. To any particular observer, there are regions of spacetime in which you have no past. There are regions in which you have no future. There is a region in which you have both a past and a future. Is there anything "special" in perceiving the sequence of events within the third region as passing rather than existing forever as a log? Not really. You're just describing a different variety of the Copernican principle or relativity as far as I can tell. But so what? None of us are the center of the univers. None of us exist in a special inertial frame describing absolute spacetime. These facts, however, have consequences in terms of how to measure and compute stuff. They change the kind of testable predictions you make given certain conditions. What computational or predictive consequences arise from observing that the entire world curve of the universe exists at once from a perspective outside of the universe? Going back to the I can't send information to Napoleon thing, if observers outside of our universe are keeping a log, none of us nor anything else in our universe can receive information from them, so what difference does it make? It's an interesting shower thought but kind of also a big so what?
- worstspotgain 2y ago
  One way the simulation argument starts is: Is this the ultimate nature of reality? A universe out of thin void? One possibility is that all possible universes exist, we just have survivorship bias. But we're blessed with poetry and rainbows and Goldilocks constants, which seems like a very lucky draw. So we proceed to wonder if it's a simulation. That would mean the universe is interesting because it was designed or selected as such. This answers some local questions, and punts the existentialism into the simulating world. My argument is that a simulation need not look like the Matrix, where there's a machine running in real time so that the simulating and simulated universes share a timeline. The simulants might just be doing the relevant computations in whatever graph-traversing order, and printing them out or whatever. The computed information would make up our universe, it would be the essence of it. The universe would have come into "being" just by being selected out of the big entropic soup of all possible 4D log books to write. As for "so what," it's just amateur philosophy, no guarantee you'll find it interesting.

nonameiguess 2y ago

I get the questions of eternalism, the reality of the past and future, why privilege the present (or at least my present), and all that. I just don't understand why the fact that you can record events in a medium that doesn't experience the time that it records has any implications for how we should think about this. Whether or not you want to say "Napoleon exists" or "Napoleon existed" seems to be a matter of linguistic convention and the more common latter would reflect speakers privileging their own time. If you want to look at it another way, Napoleon exists, but entirely in my past light cone, and I exist entirely in his future light cone. I can't send him any kind of information, but he can send information to me. Is there anything special in this perception? To who? To observers at the absolute end of all time, my future is just as written in stone as Napoleon's. To observers I can receive information from, my future is unknown. To any particular observer, there are regions of spacetime in which you have no past. There are regions in which you have no future. There is a region in which you have both a past and a future. Is there anything "special" in perceiving the sequence of events within the third region as passing rather than existing forever as a log? Not really. You're just describing a different variety of the Copernican principle or relativity as far as I can tell. But so what? None of us are the center of the univers. None of us exist in a special inertial frame describing absolute spacetime. These facts, however, have consequences in terms of how to measure and compute stuff. They change the kind of testable predictions you make given certain conditions. What computational or predictive consequences arise from observing that the entire world curve of the universe exists at once from a perspective outside of the universe? Going back to the I can't send information to Napoleon thing, if observers outside of our universe are keeping a log, none of us nor anything else in our universe can receive information from them, so what difference does it make? It's an interesting shower thought but kind of also a big so what?

worstspotgain 2y ago
One way the simulation argument starts is: Is this the ultimate nature of reality? A universe out of thin void? One possibility is that all possible universes exist, we just have survivorship bias. But we're blessed with poetry and rainbows and Goldilocks constants, which seems like a very lucky draw. So we proceed to wonder if it's a simulation. That would mean the universe is interesting because it was designed or selected as such. This answers some local questions, and punts the existentialism into the simulating world. My argument is that a simulation need not look like the Matrix, where there's a machine running in real time so that the simulating and simulated universes share a timeline. The simulants might just be doing the relevant computations in whatever graph-traversing order, and printing them out or whatever. The computed information would make up our universe, it would be the essence of it. The universe would have come into "being" just by being selected out of the big entropic soup of all possible 4D log books to write. As for "so what," it's just amateur philosophy, no guarantee you'll find it interesting.