Not really. If we're in a simulation that just begs the question - what is the "real" universe that the simulation is running in. It pushes the question of the nature of our universe up a level where we have zero visibility. No more satisfying that "where was god before he created the universe?"
The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is sufficient for it to exist. A simulation might also be considered a mathematical model, and it would exist in the same way even if nothing ever runs the simulation. So I guess maybe it could be a simulation, but we mustn't ask what it runs on, but what is the program?
> The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is sufficient for it to exist.
This then leads to how does math exist instead of nothing? Math is a concept, and if concepts exist then that is not "nothing".
Many people confuse "nothing" with the vacuum of space and particles appearing out of nowhere. In this case, we have something (space, vacuums, and particles), not nothing.
Because nothing is precisely what does exist.
But nothing implies something, so my working theory is that nothing's implied opposite something is itself the first thing, then some cellular automata like progression results from similar logical self-reference and down the line our physics (and the entirety of every logical permutation of information n-dimensionally) results from that.
A similar conception I've heard is that its like something and nothing, at the beginning of time, made a bet whether there'd be something or nothing, but the act of making the bet was already something, rigging it in something's favor. Nothing thought that was bullshit and tried to call it so, and they've been battling it out ever since.
Put another way, nothing has absolutely no properties - including the property of being nothing, or empty. If an empty nothing lacks the property of being empty, or nothing, then something must arise.
I'm working on writing a paper along those lines. I do believe that the answer to "why there is something rather than nothing?" may be: actually nothing is the only thing that exist, but its instability creates our apparent reality trough a self-referential observer-observed reality loop. I would love to chat, use my research email.
Does science fiction exists? Or Pokemon? In case your view is that they don't, you may argue similarly that math is a human made construct (which happen to work well to describe our universe, but it may be just survivorship bias as we use in physics only the math that works. For instance we discard imaginary solutions to classical motion equations).
I do believe it is the right view, math is a man made "language" inspired by physics which is more fundamental.
If the universe will never leak any information about its origins, then those origins cannot affect us in any way, ever. This doesn't make any such hypothesis less likely, but it makes them irrelevant to us.
If we are in a simulation and this simulation obeys similar constraints to our computational models, we can test hypotheses on the basis of information theory. Or possibly find error-correction codes encoded in string theory as some quantum physicists have suggested.
A lot of physics seems unnecessarily expensive to compute. Quantum mechanics suggest we either have nonlocality or exponential blowup, both of which cause simulation challenges. With just classical physics you don’t need to deal with that.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that make physics tractable to compute, such as the +++- metric tensor and other factors forbidding causality violations. A universe with closed timelike curves becomes very expensive to compute because you usually have to use implicit solvers that are slow and might not even converge, corresponding to various time travel paradoxes.
Everyone saying it would be computationally expensive to simulate our universe is failing to put their mind outside of the box of our universe. Imagine for a moment that there's a universe which compares to our universe similarly to how our world compares to one inside of Conway's Game of life.
Granted, this scenario doesn't provide us with anything we can take action on, but the idea that we're in a simulation at all doesn't, either.
Some self-replicating "creature" in Conway's Game of Life could rowhammer the machine it runs in such that the creature (or a copy of it) now exists outside the Game and is able to replicate across the machine and maybe even across the network. If it takes control of a robot, you could argue it's "escaped" its simulation and now exists in our physical world.
The odds of all that happening without it being prevented are all but zero.
We have a better chance that one of the simulators grows attached and—against protocol—decides to uplift us from the simulation into a form where we can directly communicate with them.
So you only have to assume physics totally different from ours, and we can’t observe it. Isn’t that a bit of a weak point? And what would be the point of this simulation that has been running for billions of years?
>you only have to assume physics totally different from ours
You don't have to assume anything is true if you don't want to, but if you want to consider whether we're living in a simulation, it's probably worth considering.
>And what would be the point of this simulation that has been running for billions of years?
First, it's billions of years in our time. Second, what's the point of Conway's Game of Life?
> You don't have to assume anything is true if you don't want to, but if you want to consider whether we're living in a simulation, it's probably worth considering.
Which, for me, is a dead end. It's the same as assuming there's a God, except the moral implications are worse.
> First, it's billions of years in our time.
So, if billions of years of our time fly by like your average simulation run in "their" universe, the simulation can't be very meaningful to them. And it makes the distance between our and "their" physics even larger.
> what's the point of Conway's Game of Life?
None, and that's why nobody runs one with 10^120 cells for billions of years. And if somebody did, the result would be incomprehensible. The gap between us and our creators must then be incomprehensible for us. All this is so outlandish, that the word "likely" shouldn't be anywhere near this discussion.
> And what would be the point of this simulation that has been running for billions of years?
There is zero evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis, so why would some random person on HN be able to have the answer to this question even if we are in a simulation or even if we simply assume that we are?
Even if it's easy, simple simulations would still dominate the space of all possible simulations if the resources of the simulators are finite. So simpler simulations are more likely. (https://osf.io/ca8se , disclaimer I'm the author)
> A lot of physics seems unnecessarily expensive to compute.
When you make a simple simulation of rigid bodies with classical physics you often get numerically unstable results - bodies jerking against each other, slowly passing through, etc. One common way to solve this is to introduce a "frozen" state. When objects are close enough to be at rest with balanced forces - you mark them as frozen and don't compute them every frame to save computing power. You only unfreeze them when some other unfrozen object interacts with them.
Additionally hierarchical space indexing algorithms are often used to avoid n^2 comparisons calculating what interacts and what doesn't. And these algorithms often use heuristics and hashing functions with collisions to subdivide the problem, which might result in objects becoming unfrozen without actually touching each other.
The result from inside this simulation would be weird, nonlinear, nonlocal and look a little like wave function collapse (if particle A whose coordinates hashed through this weird function are the same as those of particle B happens to unfreeze - the particle B unfreezes as well despite not interacting in any way). And this would be probably considered "hard to compute" compared to the simple equations the system developer wanted to simulate.
Example that might be more relatable for scientists - it's much easier and cheaper computationally to make a numerical simulation for 3-body problem than to make an analytic simulation of it. But describing this numerical simulation behavior in terms of physical equations requires much more complex model than the equations that you wanted to compute in the first place. You have to include implementation details like floating point accuracy, overflows, etc. And if you go far enough you have to add the possibility of space ray hitting a memory cell in the computer that runs your simulation.
I'm not saying this is the reason QM is weird - I don't understand QM well enough to form valid hypotheses ;), but I'm saying we might be mistaking the intention of The Developer with the compromises (s)he made to get there. If you take any imperfect implementation of a simple model and treat it as perfect - the model becomes much more complex.
The physics of the simulator would have to be totally different to support a simulation with exponential computational costs. You probably couldn’t have anything like conservation of energy. Polynomial overhead would feel much more plausible.
Consider the physics of the simulator is literally the physics of our current universe. It need not be running on a binary substrate, the computation platform could just be the mass of the universe over time.
Nope, long distance entanglement collapse breaks this. You either need exponential blowup to simulate all possible eigenvalues or you need superluminal coordination.
There isn’t actually an observed/unobserved distinction in physics. Unless you mean the simulation is specifically targeting humans, which is a vastly more complicated proposal.
> Unless you mean the simulation is specifically targeting humans, which is a vastly more complicated proposal.
It's also the most likely proposal (with current understanding of universe).
Axis of Evil (Cosmology) calls into question the Copernicus views of the universe. Essentially saying our solar system is somehow back at the center of the universe.
If WE are the subject of the simulation, it's likely everything our instruments observe are like the sky on the Truman show - not there, just phantoms of what we would expect to be there with what the simulation wants us to know about physics.
There's a max speed the speed of light, what if this is the max processing ability of the computer we're running on. What if we're not on a computer at all but some sort of wetware computer system that grows as it needs to, and never runs out of resources?
What if the speed of light in the parent sim is 500x bigger for them, or ours is like a centimeter in comparison.
A dream is a simulation, we could all be dream creatures to some huge extra-dimensional being. Not everything pre-supposes human technology.
I've seen literal "glitches" in reality, so it's pretty easy for me to believe that reality isn't something completely set in stone. For others it challenges everything they believe in, for that I say open your mind.
Donald Hoffman believes that what we see is like what someone in a VR headset sees, outside the VR headset who knows what that world is like, but in this one -- everything except math (which he believes is universal and extra-universal), is made to fit this universe. Physics, science, all of it is unique only inside the headset. There could be many headsets with different settings running parallel (parallel worlds/universes), maybe the speed of light is faster in one than the other, maybe gravity works different, etc... So many things in our understanding are really like "settings" like size of a planck's constant, pie, speed of light, etc. Almost reads like a config file.
I mean if you buy into a "God" being, if computing is a thing which we have it so why wouldn't God? Wouldn't it even make more sense for him to just code up a simulation? I mean it's gotta be a lot less demanding than building a whole universe from nothing.
Yes, any evidence of complexity (assuming that simpler universes are more likely) is evidence against the simulation hypothesis: The Simplicity Assumption and Some Implications of the Simulation Argument for our Civilization
https://osf.io/ca8se
(I'm the author :) )
complexity and simplicity seems pretty biased to human understanding?
Just as a thought experiment, I'd propose that our universe and the human experience is incredibly simple. Humans were only given a limited number of senses so that the simulation can be run in this "low fidelity". Compared to the thousands of senses a level or two up. We also are simulated in a simple linear time model, only able to experience a single time at once, greatly reducing the complexity and fidelity needed. Same for the number of dimensions we are able to sense.
Yes, you need to remain inside the reference class of human simulations, so in a sense there is a bias in where do you want to draw the line of what's a human simulation. But once you do it, the result in not ambiguous.
Running an ai simulation on an 8 bit nintendo is going to be a lot more complicated, and difficult than running one on a 512^e38 bit (pulled out of ass) 100kth gen Radeon GPU that won't be developed for 1000 years from now...
In a universe where time itself could be fluid, where it could be easy to reverse events, rewrite events, etc - making quantum computers work even way better than we ever could because we're limited by causality.
I mean the people beyond this universe could have 50 senses, like a sense of how far up or down they are, or how much water they can breathe in before they need oxygen if o2 is even a thing, or a sense of time so they can go back/forward through time. If they have 50 senses, our 5 sounds like "nothing" to simulate.
It's all a matter of perspective, I'm sure an ant feels like they keep pretty busy and nothing could possibly simulate their colonies, but I'm sure that would be pretty easy.
It is actually possible :) (with some assumption on the distribution of the simulations)
Complex sims are less likely, so the likelihood of increasing optional complexity of our sim should be slim, for instance interstellar travel. It's still unsolved how much unlikely, but if you have a large enough increase in complexity (say interstellar travel over billions of light years) you will hit sims which are unlikely enough.
