We don’t deal in fiddling small change.
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This ^ is the real answer. If–rather, when–we simulate universes using our current technology, we don’t need the computing power of our entire universe because we aren’t simulating the same thing we’re living in. We’re simulating a little game or figuring out the path of a storm or something.
So if this is a simulation, the iteration up from us must contain so much energy and so much matter and so much computing power that simulating our whole friggin thing is doable with whatever technology they have.
Also, who says it’s even a simulation–an attempt at reproducing the same existence they have? For all we know, the galaxies we see are just uninitialized data structures and the thing actually being simulated is limited to what’s on Earth.
Or, if you’re a solipsist, maybe the only thing being simulated is your own sensorium.
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My favourite thing about Minecraft is if you were plunked into it as a simulation, you can come across things which prove it to be procedurally generated for you.
You will often come across a group of trees, on fire because they are next to a lava pit. The weird thing being, how could those trees have been there before you arrived? They should have long burned down because of the lava. Why are they only catching fire now that you’re here?
It’s fun!
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More atoms than exist in this universe, not more than in the universe simulating it.
The best kind of correct!
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My simulated sun is plenty hot to my simulated astronauts when I send them too close to it.
I think even phrasing it as something we would be able to measure in the real world is an error. It’s not hot to us, and never could be. It’s not even similar to the concept of heat, because we can just look at the computer code causing it. But that doesn’t matter in the simulation itself.
Not that I think we live in a simulation, but I personally wouldn’t be satisfied from your argument as I understand it.
Was going to say a bunch more stuff, but it all comes down to “What is consciousness?”, basically. Can a being we would call conscious be created artificially? At the moment, who knows? And all talk about living in a simulation hinges on that.
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Until he eats that bit of fairy cake…
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Weirdly, our universe seems to work that way.
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Ha, that’s brilliant, thanks!
As is this:
Sure. However, the argument for the likelihood that we’re in a simulated universe hinges on whether it’s possible that we ourselves can simulate a universe. If we cannot, than that argument is flawed.
Furthermore, the simulating universe would need to be astronomically larger than ours: for every two hundred electrons simulated, it would need ~10^80 atoms (a rough estimate of the number of atoms in our universe), plus plenty of atoms for all the stuff not devoted to the simulation, and maybe much more for the other simulations being run. We’re talking about a simulating universe with soooo much more mass than our own that the fundamental physics of that universe will be significantly different than our own
Would such a massive universe be capable of not collapsing in on itself long enough to sustain life capable of simulating our universe? Would it even be capable of giving rise to life at all? And even if it could, why would they simulate a universe so significantly different from their own? They could have many reasons why, but I think it would make the most sense to simulate a universe as similar as possible to one’s own so that what is learned from the simulation is applicable to situations within the simulating universe.
Anyway, I don’t see how arguing for our universe being a simulation is any different from arguing for our universe being the creation of a god.
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Outside of the statistical arguments, I think the most compelling reason to theorize we may be in a simulation, is that things start to get nonsensical the more we “drill down” into “reality”. On the higher level, everything seems to work, more or less, via mathematical algorithms. If we were in a computer program, at some point one would discover something that appears as if there is no way to map onto “reality” as we know it. And we have.
To go back to probabilities, though, I would think that the ratio of observed parts of the universe to unobserved parts of the universe would mathematically approach zero. We have to go to great lengths to closely examine subatomic particles. There is no computational need to reproduce quantum phenomena until we look.
Doesn’t that depend on the timescale you’re stimulating? Trying to simulate the next 14 days requires a lot less detail than trying to simulate the next billion years in which atoms form stars, the stars explode and turn into interstellar dust, coalesce, form planets, create and evolve life … that’s a lot of very different roles for a single atom.
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I think you know I meant each event in and of itself before it happened. And after the fact it isn’t a probability, it’s a past event. Probabilities are by definition predictive. Predicting faits accompli is nonsense.
Sometimes I teach probability and one time the following happened: I said “You are in a desert. What is the probability that it will rain tomorrow?” A student responds “50/50! Either it will rain or it won’t.” Do we expect it to rain about half of all days in a desert?
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Again, you’re missing the point. All days is the not the same as that day. The probability of rain on any given day within a sample of days depends on the sample of days. If the sample of days is exactly one, then the probability is 50/50.
My point is that it’s nonsense to talk about the probability of a specific person existing early in the universe. The people alive now haven’t beaten the odds. You can’t beat the odds. You are among odds. But you are not yourself the odds, because the odds is the mathematical relationship of you to other elements in a given sample set. I’ll reiterate what I said in my first comment in this thread, probability is a mathematical relationship among events or, more abstractly, the elements of the given sample set.
People have this really unfortunate tendency to treat probability as a force that effects individual events, rather that a prediction about mathematical relationships. I’ve even had students who referred to probabilistic models as forces or pseudo-forces. Mind you I don’t blame their probability or stats profs, I blame pop science.
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Another way to look at it:
There are computations that, when done on a classical computer, would require a computer larger than the entire universe. Or you can run the same computation with a handful of electrons.
There’s no reason to think that a classical computer is the only device available to our programmers.
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While I agree that the statistical argument for the Simulation Hypothesis might be dubious and that trying to imagine the motives and capabilities of much more advanced civilizations seems of little value, that is not the whole of the basis for the Simulation Hypothesis and the physical limitations in simulating particles is an entirely different problem that has little bearings on the hypothesis as it is generally interpreted.
To demonstrate that, we need only to look at the recent forays into fast and secure encryption, which uses algorithms such as the product of large primes. Those algorithms are easy to compute given an input, but it would take decades or more to obtain the input given the result. Simulation Hypothesis is in large part based on cellular automatons, which work much the same way. In fact, in the early cellular automatons such as Conway’s Game of Life, created in the 70’s, the discovery of new entities (the “spaceships”, “guns” and so on) was done by hand on graphing paper!
The Simulation Hypothesis really took off following Wolfram’s foray into cellular automatons in the 80’s. Later researchers posited in the 90’s and early 2000’s that, if a universe was a cellular automaton, an observer without knowledge of the rules used to generate it would come up with particle-based physics to describe the interactions. Cellular automaton based physics is slowly gaining ground and has led to some great intuition in describing quantum phenomena.
Mind you, it’s entirely different to say “Some of our universe’s phenomena make sense when seen as a simulation (cellular automata)” rather than “Our universe is a simulation created by an advanced civilization from another dimension”. While I think the first statement is very interesting both as to what it implies and what we can be discover from it, the second is, as you say, an unfalsifiable position much like saying “God created our universe”.
For those interested in cellular automata and cellular-automaton-based physics, the Wikipedia page is quite interesting, as well as Stephen Wolfram’s work (yes, THAT Wolfram), James P. Crutchfield’s The calculi of Emergence and, more recently, The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by Gerard 't Hooft.
Neither a frequentist nor a Bayesian would agree with you on that.
As to your last paragraph, air pressure is commonly regarded as a force and also is fundamentally probabilistic in nature like the rest of statistical mechanics.
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I always find it quite entertaining that we insist on assuming we understand the universe based on “proofs” or “formulas” developed by using an artificial language we constructed (mathematics) to describe it… "But let’s put those quibbles aside and dig into some physics, shall we? Theoretical physicists from Oxford just published Quantized gravitational responses, the sign problem, and quantum complexity in Science Advances, in which they document the geometric complexity of computing the location of particles that make up the universe. It turns out that figuring out these particles’ locations scales at n^2, meaning the amount of computing power needed doubles with each additional particle, which means that “storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe.” That our math and science are constantly updating themselves should make it obvious that they are both works in progress and cannot accurately represent finite, immutable truths like the one quoted above. The assumption that we actually know the number of atoms in the universe comes close to hubris. We did not even know what an atom was until Democritus “theorized” it in 400BC - at which time it was defined as a solid and the smallest particle in the universe. That truth did not stand the test of time or the onslaught of human’s insatiable curiosity. We are foolish to assume that what we know at any given time is “correct”. Math and science may allow us to understand many things, but the actual nature of reality may not be one of them… until we understand our consciousness which experiences it. And that - according to any physicist or neurologist you ask - we do not even come close to understanding.
Thermodynamics is what I was thinking about when I typed that. Kinetic energy is a force. Air pressure, the average kinetic energy of a mass of gaseous particles, is arguably a pseudo-force. The latter is calculated using statistics. But individual particles aren’t gases. They possess the former, kinetic force.
Sorry I’m in a foul mood. Shitty week, not you.
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