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UBCO study disproves the simulation hypothesis
- mxkopy 11mo agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22950 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22950 Their argument is that quantum gravity can encode undecidable statements, and therefore cannot be completely computed. Of course take it with a grain of salt, since it relies on an incomplete and possibly inaccurate characterization of quantum gravity, something we don’t know anything about. Still, a cool idea.
- ameliaquining 11mo agoThe paper's core claim is wrong even before you get into any quantum gravity stuff. The other HN thread contains a number of comments explaining why.
- mxkopy 11mo agoIt seems like some of the dismissals are just summaries of basic decidability theory, which don’t attack the underlying argument of the paper: > …the idea that reality can tell us if a statement about a theory is true, given that the theory is an accurate description of reality. So if there’s an accurate Turing complete theory of reality, and we see some process that’s supposed to encode a decision on an undecidable statement being resolved (I guess in a non-probabilistic way as well), then we can conclude that reality is deciding undecidable statements in some nontrivial way. One of the stronger skeptics confidently claims that discrete phenomena doesn’t exist in quantum mechanics. I think there’s a bit of a cult of skepticism around this topic, which is usually fine, except when people haven’t read the paper or don’t have basic prerequisite knowledge before announcing their conclusions.
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- recursivecaveat 11mo agoDo you necessarily need to compute anything in order to perform a simulation? Suppose whenever some weird undecidable statement quantum gravity situation comes up inside the simulation, you pause it, recreate the scenario on a lab bench, and then copy the data into your simulation. You didn't compute what would happen, you don't even necessarily understand how it works, but as long as its the same quantum gravity stuff inside and out, the simulation can proceed faithfully. This makes some assumptions about locality I guess. Of course the whole affair seems a little moot since you obviously only have to be accurate enough that it doesn't disrupt the ancestor simulation or whatever, but that's less fun to think about I suppose.
- mxkopy 11mo agoI think the distinction is a little semantic; the idea is that a simulation is anything that can be computed by Turing machine. So regardless of if we’re in a TM that’s being fed weird undecidable statements, the fact that they exist at all means at some level reality can’t be a TM. Contrast that with having undecidable processes that might go on forever, we could be in a TM and still have those. Basically simulation here means “is a TM”, not “is nested”.
- badenglish 11mo agowith the same success the study refutes the researchers' religious belief in the truth
- E-Reverance 11mo agoJust for reference, the main author's stance on god : https://youtu.be/k_VBzweMIlM?t=125 https://youtu.be/k_VBzweMIlM?t=125
- junon 11mo agoI would imagine the hand-wavey response might not be far away from "God is not algorithmic".
- MangoToupe 11mo agoThe concept of "god" and "simulated universe" seem to be essentially the same
- junon 11mo agoI'm an atheist, but I can tell you that no, they are not - at least not to many believers.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoFrom the perspective of empirical analysis—how?
- junon 11mo agoI'd say the question is flawed (at least, in this context); religion is purposefully the opposite of empiricism for most everyone I know, anecdotally. Hence why it's given the term "faith".
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- beardyw 11mo agoI always felt that most numbers being irrational would make simulation tricky. On the other hand, if it's just me, and everything including you is just simulated for my benefit, it's not too hard.
- mxkopy 11mo agoIndeed, simulating God himself will have to wait a little bit
- anon291 11mo agoThere are no irrational numbers measurable in the universe. Irrational numbers as far as we encounter are computable via straightforward algorithms.
- beardyw 11mo ago> There are no irrational numbers measurable in the universe. Because of course measurement reduces them to rational. That doesn't make them go away.
- anon291 11mo agoUnproveable superstitious rubbish. Irrational numbers exist as ideas, but there is no physical evidence that they are found in nature. We have processes that in their ideal limit will converge to numbers known to be irrational, and the law of large numbers certainly makes them appear to be such, but there is no physical quantity that is measured irrational. In fact we know that at some point we cannot measure much anymore so even the illusion of infinity is null.
- BigParm 11mo agoThe only thing to simulate is my personal experience.
- aeve890 11mo agoI'm surprised that the simulation hypothesis is even falsifiable. I mean, the guys above are supposed to be in a totally different level of existence from ours, how can we even start to think we can debug the simulation? Wouldn't that be already covered by beings way smarter than us?
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- f4uCL9dNSnQm 11mo agoIt is hard to even disprove that we aren't a Boltzmann brain that hallucinated entire reality. Assuming the simulation is perfect(or at lest consistent) the only way to falsify it is to get some impossible estimates for required CPU/memory/storage. I think the whole "if simulations are possible, multiple ones will be created" falls apart when 1 second of running simulation requires several years of compute.
- SideburnsOfDoom 11mo agoIMHO, it likely isn't even falifiable. for the article: "the fundamental nature of reality operates in a way that no computer could ever simulate" Yes, no computer in our universe, with our physical laws. In "a totally different level of existence", all bets are off regarding the fundamental nature of reality there. It could be utterly different. So, speculation is nonsensical, it's unfalifiable.
- yehosef 11mo agoThis. The main issue with how people approach the simulation hypothesis is by thinking that the beings that made our VMs are just like us.
- credit_guy 11mo agoI’ll play devil’s advocate. The beings that made our VMs are clearly superior. But the Halting theorem applies to them too. They too represent floating point numbers with finite precision. Does that mean we can catch them violating conservation laws? Maybe. In any case, here’s some food for thought: ray tracing is undecidable [1]. If something is undecidable, it is for any form of computation, classical, quantum, or anything. Does this mean we can find some “glitches in the matrix”. It simply means such glitches are there (if we are in a similation). But they might be too infinitesimal for us to identify. [1]https://users.cs.duke.edu/~reif/paper/tygar/raytracing.pdf https://users.cs.duke.edu/~reif/paper/tygar/raytracing.pdf
- ozb 11mo ago(dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45762892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45762892 ) And again, almost every statement in this paper is wrong, including the main claim
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- UltraSane 11mo agoIf the minds are being simulated they could be manipulated to ignore any evidence they are in a simulation.
- southwindcg 11mo agoYes, this is exactly my problem with claims about the 'real' universe if we are, in fact, in a simulation. It might be literally, programmatically, impossible for us to infer anything about it. The analogy I like to use is Pac-Man believing that the entire universe exists within the confines of a blue-walled maze.
- hyghjiyhu 11mo agoFrom the ghosts perspective it is of prime importance to understand the behaviour of pacman. But it is influenced by the player's psychology which is in turn influenced by the surrounding world. Then: a sufficiently advanced model of pacman must include (at least implicitly) a description of the outside world.
- johnnienaked 11mo agoThe simulation hypothesis rests on shaky assumptions
- burnt-resistor 11mo agoIt rests on magical conspiracy theories with an imaginary "them" hobgoblins. Changelings with more dimensions.
- moi2388 11mo ago“ Here’s a basic example using the statement, “This true statement is not provable.” If it were provable, it would be false, making logic inconsistent. If it’s not provable, then it’s true, but that makes any system trying to prove it incomplete” Only if you assume the law of the excluded middle, right? Statements aren’t just true or false, they can also be malformed or undefined.
- cluckindan 11mo agoThat example is particularly fishy. The truthiness of a statement is not part of the statement itself, so any explicitly stated truth value is not inconsistent with truthiness, rather it is meaningless. It’s like saying bool isTrue = true; bool isProvable = false; bool isTrueAndProvable = isTrue && isProvable; // false
- Jean-Papoulos 11mo agoThe article suggests this paper is based on quantum gravity. Which we don't have an accepted theory of. Based on this, I'm not going to read the rest of this clickbait.
- burnt-resistor 11mo agoSimilar to a cosmological argument, something that cannot be proven or disproven from within the system that cannot be escaped. How convenient.