Hmm … I wonder how Sir Roger’s new notion of a cyclical, forgetful universe:
fits into this idea. Perhaps earlier software versions? Universe-0.99.3, Universe-1.0.5, etc.
And do they use emacs or vi? RCS or GitHub (on a very, very large server of course …)
Okay lets give it another run…
D’oh! heat death again.
While I don’t claim to have any expertise this idea has intrigued me for a while and from the way I see reality and my knowledge of physics, this is one possible way I could see there being an afterlife. Sort of like taking off the VR goggles and seeing the real world. Of course that’s assuming we aren’t in game characters that vanish when the game turns off. The problem I see is how do we test this? If reality is a simulation than wouldn’t all of our tools for detecting that be within the simulation as well?
that question represents a category error. as you have pointed out, popper was a philosopher. yes, he was a philosopher of science although more specifically an epistemologist. his principle of falsifiability was more of a modality of investigation than anything else. falsifiability was not a hypothesis which could be or was even meant to be tested. it was instead a principle which offered a way of knowing whether or not a proposition was even something which could be studied by means of science.
i was about to label this set of questions as a category error as well but perhaps it’s something else. one thing it definitely is not is a reasonable counter to the fragment of @docosc you quote here. the good doctor is not, it seems to me, arguing that we must stop investigating phenomena at or below planck time. he is arguing that at the level of our current technology we are incapable of perceiving relevant information about whatever phenomena exist at that level and that our time and resources might be better spent developing that technology and/or any innovations and advances which derive therefrom.
That’s pretty much every day this year anyway.
Not really seeing a difference.
i thought it might be the founding of the bureau of prohibition under the aegis of the treasury department.
I wasn’t actually arguing against @docosc’s planck time comments, just against this notion that falsifiability is the last word in this or any other subject.
Well, I’ll leave this discussion to those smarter than myself. Carry on!
given our current level of technology and scientific knowledge, not only can we not explore it, we are quite incapable of ever exploring it, barring a revolutionary breakthrough. That is not science, it is speculation. Could it become science one day? Maybe, but my money is on “no.”
And yet, as @GulliverFoyle and I discussed above, quantization within these timescales were testable! From Gulliver’s link:
Using the so-called birefringence method, one may improve the bounds by 14 orders of magnitude! This safely kills any imaginable theory that violates the Lorentz symmetry - or even continuity of the spacetime - at the Planck scale. In some sense, the birefringence method applied to gamma ray bursts allows one to “see” the continuity of spacetime at distances that are 14 orders of magnitude shorter than the Planck length.
Science is amazing, yo.
My perspective is: If I live in a simulation, then somebody went to an awful lot of coding effort to make my particular existence extremely tedious and annoying. I can’t see how anyone would put in that much coding pain, unless they were also simulated.
It’s turtles all the way down.
Well, if that’s what you like…
it might not be a deliberate coding choice, it could easily be an unintended consequence of the programming language they used in the same way an unintialized variable will make it through the compiler but then return a different value every time it gets called. so, too, the tediousness of existence may reflect some default value or hidden defect of the programming or the programming language. similar to hanlon’s razor, don’t attribute to intention what can easily be explained by default settings.
Falsifiability has become somewhat of a dogma. ‘Falsifiability is “just a simple motto that non-philosophically-trained scientists have latched onto,”’ argues Sean Carroll Does Science Need Falsifiability? | NOVA | PBS
A better question is whether the hypothesis can be supported in principle. Can we think of any evidence that, if found, would support the hypothesis in Bayesian terms, There have been attempts to do just that. That would seem to put the question beyond mere metaphysics.
Seems like falsifiability is effectively equivalent to a bit-value in Shannon information. If a system or element (or in this case a statement/hypothesis) is capable of taking on two values it has relevant information carrying capability. Popper’s observation basically tethers a statement to having more than one plausibly realizable condition as the basis of what can be considered factual.
This we do understand. Virtual particle-antiparticle pairs such as electrons and positrons spring existence and annihilate all the time. We only see them when something like a 1 MeV Gamma ray knocks them apart, or someone tries to measure the Casmir force. Quantum physics would be even weirder if this weren’t happening.
The idea that the universe sprang from a point is a similar something-from-nothing deal. I have seen the estimated age of the universe go from ‘somewhere between 2 billion years to infinity’ to 13.77 billion years, with a theory that has some problems with the inflationary period about the one second mark. It is work in progress, but it is coming along nicely, thank you.
There is nothing magic about the Planck limits. This is the level where every particle overlaps with every other particle, and predictions about particular things becomes almost impossible. This does not mean physics suddenly changes to Conway’s Life or anything. Alrght, if you like, this does not mean physics doesn’t suddenly change to Conway’s Life or anything, but right now this assumption does not get us anywhere useful. We do not know whether the Universe came from a point or something fuzzier at the Planck level. It is fun to speculate on sub-Planck-length physics for the very early universe, but no-one really knows anything yet.
Yes, we may get a bit cranky when people talk about ‘arrogant scientists who cannot imagine anything cleverer than themselves’, then say ‘Stand back, little people. This is a problem beyond your means. I am going to try Philosophy on this!’ Knock yourselves out by all means; no-one’s stopping you trying. But evidence has worked for us in the past, and it still seems to have plenty of life in it.
This is the kind of subtle academic distinction that is useless in everyday conversation though. The basic concept of falsifiability is extremely useful in public discourse when half the country believes in a global cabal to rape children in pizza restaurant basements that don’t exist.
So, no, I reject the notion that saying “unfalsifiable!” is some sort of prole crutch used by us poor plebes who don’t have philosophy degrees.
When we can get the majority of people to understand even the most basic aspects of science and rational thought, then I’ll be interested in this apparent epidemic of abuse of falsifiability. 
There is a range of falsifiability. There’s a strong falsifiability: “An observation X would logically make theory Y impossible.” There’s a much weaker falsifiability: “An observation X would make it such that I would agree that theory Y is highly unlikely.” There’s “An observation X would make it such that believers in a thousands of year old tradition of theory Y will reject said theory.” etc.
Also falsifiability is only a useful concept when talking about synthetic/empirical concepts. We don’t reject “2+2=4” as a proposition in a theory simply because there is no way to make it false. This is important because most of the actually useful questions about simulated universes are probably analytic questions like, “Is it possible to simulate a universe with the same degree of extension and (observable?) granularity as the universe it is being simulated in?”
So, the same then?
Thank you, very reassuring.
How about:
Isn’t this a bit salient on account of the fact that in the realm of mathematics, the metric of relevance to the field is the er, proof @prooftheory? And if I recall correctly (maybe this info is out of date by now), there’s no commonly agreed upon formal definition of what constitutes a mathematical proof - just that when enough skilled practitioners in the art recognize it as such it becomes accepted as valid.
