Every time I need to cross a seemingly empty street, suddenly cars appear. I can't help but imagine it's a render distance issue.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Try to cross the street without turning your head. When you turn your head, they render the cars in the opposite directions.
/jk always look both ways before crossing the street.
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According to some, assuming it's even possible to fully simulate a universe to the degree that life in it can't tell, then there should be multiple simulations running, so there would be more sim-universes than real ones, and odds would be high that any given universe you find yourself in would be a sim.
Personally I don't buy it, I think if we were in a sim the laws of physics would have to be easily computable (they aren't, see gluons) and I think it would take the computing power of an entire universe to simulate one of similar complexity at anywhere close to reasonable speed. (Note how emulators and virtual machines can only emulate a weaker system then the host system, at least at speeds comparable to native hardware)
Thanks for typing out what i was gonna say.
I am agnostic about simulation theory. If an advanced enough “something” can create a simulation undistinguishable from the lives we experience now then i would bet that we do live in one. But thats a big if and goes a bit further than one where life cant tell. (A simulated single cell organism is miles of from simulated mammals and society)
How much would speed matter to a simulated lifeform. Ive often wondered if time would suddenly stop and then continue we would probably just experience it like it didn’t stop.
there would be more sim-universes than real ones
This ties back to the mediocrity principle. If there are 10 billion people living on Earth, but 10 quadrillion living in simulations, the chances for you to live in the latter is much higher.
Along goes the simulation argument by Nick Bostrom. If simulation is possible, and practiced, we likely are simulated ourselves.
Isaac Arthur) noted that housing a population in a simulation is much more efficient than doing so physically. It seems like a convergent choice for powerful civilizations which want to maximize the life supported by fading stars (or energy potentials in general).
I think it would take the computing power of an entire universe to simulate one of similar complexity
Two objections:
- It might be sufficient to simulate the experience, without fully simulating the underlying physics. That's how we do 3D games anyways. No one cares if we actually simulate individual air molecules. If the cloth moves indistinguishable as if, that's as good as the original, for a much lower cost. You can also cull unobserved parts of the universe.
- Host and simulation can have completely unrelated laws of nature. Specifically, inhabitants of the simulation cannot study their host environment. As such, I think making assumptions about the host makes no sense.
Those are some really interesting points, thanks for your input.
but time is relative. we might very well live in a simulation that takes a minute of “external time” to compute a single tick of our time. we just can’t experience it.
I'm not really a believer of the whole simulated universe theory, but I find your arguments against it weak.
You're basing what is and isn't easily calculatable off of our experiences. Same with "complexities of the universes". However, if our world is indeed simulated, there's no telling what the host universe is like. It might have crazy different math and be far far more complex than ours. Us trying to understand it would essentially be an excercise in futility.
- The render distance (observable universe)
- The pixel size (Planck units)
- And the update rate ('speed of light' = speed of information being updated)
- Status not being updated if no one is looking at it (Schrödinger's cat, quantum entanglement)
Calling Planck units "pixels" is extremely reductive. This is just naively applying video game concepts to physics with a poor understanding of both.
I took an entire graduate course in QM and a quantized Universe does, in fact, seem pixelated. That's exactly how I explain it to people. There's simply a finite level to how closely you can zoom in. Space, time, and energy are all quantized, and maybe even gravity though we haven't figured that one out yet.
Why can’t you cut a Planck unit in half?
Wikipedia's description quotes Bernard Carr and Steven Giddings as saying that any attempt to investigate the possible existence of shorter distances [via particle accelerator] would result in black holes rather than smaller objects
Why, though?
You have probably heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? It's the one about how you can't both know the position and the speed of an electron or photon, because the observation itself changes the outcome of the other.
Something similar exists for length. If we try to observe things at Plancks length, we introduce issues about whether the thing or space even exists there. The observation of infinitely small space requires infinitely large energy in this space causing a black hole or something. I'm not really sure I get it.
There are several good YouTubes on it, but this video sort of made sense to me: https://youtu.be/snp-GvNgUt4
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I took an entire graduate course in QM and a quantized Universe does, in fact, seem pixelated. That's exactly how I explain it to people. There's simply a finite level to how closely you can zoom in.
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The idea that it's theoretically possible that we would be able to simulate a universe of our own leads to the hypothesis that we could be living in a simulation ourselves.
If we do, I would like a server change. Please 🥺
That very much reminds me about the reasoning of Descartes why a god must exist: basically because he can think about it.
But really, just because you can think of it doesn’t make anything theoretically possible. For the simulation of a universe we have no idea how to do it.
I think that's a poor analogy.
It's true that we're not capable of stimulating a universe in appropriate detail presently, but it's inevitable that at some time we will have that capacity.
Looking at progress in the last 20 years, and extrapolate another thousand years, it's entirely plausible that one could spin up a "universe" on a personal device to play with.
It’s not only about levels of detail. We have no theory about how to compute a universe.
Moores law already does not hold up any more. There’s nothing to extrapolate.
I think the analogy is perfect. Thinkers think, but they’re bound in the context of their time and place. Our time and place is full of technology, of course thinkers will spin up an origin myth that is based on technology.
But that’s really all it is.
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If you believe it’s possible we could create that simulation (and why would we only do it once), then it follows it would possible for that simulation to create it’s own simulations. And so on and so on.
So if it’s possible, then it’s all but impossible that any of this is real.
The first ~~mover~~ stimulator theory - we are God.
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I think it's a contemporary way of viewing the creation problem that religion has also been trying to address. Who created the universe, and who created the one who created the universe. What caused the Big bang. Etc.
The whole thing is irrelevant in my opinion. It doesn't matter, because whatever initialised existence is outside of our existence. That would be separated in dimensions, or even if we could interact with it, it would at least be in a completely different frame of time. The entire existence of our universe could be a blink of an eye in whatever is outside of it.
It seems like megalomania to me for humans to believe that they can ever figure this one out. Just like the microbes in our bodies can't interact with us, I don't have any hope for humans to ever understand how the entire universe interacts with it's creator, whether it's a simulation, a devine creation or the result of physics.
If it's a simulation and we are just variables in a sub-routine, then its futile to claim that we can ever figure out what is outside our loop. We can catch global variables from the main loop, like natural constants, but we'll never see the code that calls our sub.
The only reason to believe it is that we can also not prove that it isn't so. Someone claims that it's statistically unlikely that it's not a simulation but I'm not so sure about that argument. It's based on an extremely deterministic view, that everything can be simulated with enough computer power, which itself is a questionable view.
Because thinking that we are here for no specific reason is scary
It's not an "either/or" situation. I don't think we're in a simulation, but that doesn't mean we're here for hi specific reason. We're obviously here to live, and to help each other out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of understanding while they live. That's literally our purpose, and so much of what we do is geared toward that. I guess people are looking for something deeper, but that seems plenty deep to me! If you're not actively trying to help the people around you, you're going to feel empty, like your life has no meaning. Unless you're a sociopath, which is definitely a thing. But most of us are not. Most of us just want to feel like we're doing our part, so we should keep that in mind.
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The limits of physics could be a rendering limit on the simulation hardware.
I'm a weak solipsist - I firmly believe that "I think therefore I am" is the only truth we can know. Everything else, we take on faith.
That said, it doesn't really matter. We live in the reality we perceive. There's no practical difference between living in reality and living in a simulation.
At this point does it matter? If it turns out tomorrow we have proof we live in a simulation, it doesn’t make my life any less real. I still gotta go to working tomorrow lol.
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Simulation theory is more or less a kind of modern creation myth, and creation myths are based around its societies current level of understanding of the world. In ancient times people explained the worlds actions and existence through gods and imaginative myths. When the scientific revolution happened people explained the universe in terms of immutable laws and cosmic logic. Now we are in the computational revolution, thus some people explain the worlds existence through computers. All untestable and unfalsifiable explanations for the nature of reality are as good as any other, so pick your poison and enjoy!
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What's the difference?
What does it mean to "live in a simulation"? If I created a sentient computer program that has no contact with the outside world then you would say it's living in a simulation, but if you took that same exact program and connected it to a robot you'd say it's living in reality. But what's the line? If you add a tiny glimpse of reality but 99.9% of its experiences are stimulated is it living in a simulation or reality? It's not necessarily a black or white thing but more like a spectrum. In that sense you could say that our brains are creating a simulation of the outside world based on real inputs, but our perception of reality is not necessarily accurate. I would say our brains are on the spectrum of being a simulation of reality because not everything we experience is necessarily real.
It's based on the idea that if we were, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
My life is “Murphy’s Law: the Movie”. Every time I try to reassure myself by saying “well, at least it can’t possibly get any worse than this”, it gets worse. There’s no way that there isn’t some asshole running a simulation where they just fuck with me.
It gives comfort for people who don't adhere to any of the major religions but still need to feel like there is a hidden meaning to existence and something bigger than the universe.
Because everything can be expressed mathematically.
You cannot disprove this hypothesis and it's cool. Quite literally nothing can support it - if we live in a simulation, every part of the universe makes sense for us because we have no reference frame for "real" physics.
It's just something fun to think about but ultimately it doesn't matter, you have no way to find out.
Ever wonder about reasons to think we are not living in a simulation?
Because Elon Musk believes in it, I know it’s probably wrong.
I'm still waiting for Pi to start repeating so that we have proof.
I never see my neighbors bringing groceries into their house.
Doesn’t sound any more ridiculous than any of the other ideas.
I don’t see any reason to think I’m not in a simulation, except that it’s just a silly ancient fable, created by the simulation. but none of that affects the “realities” of life and love all the rest of it.
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