And here I was waiting to get unplugged, or maybe finding a Nokia phone that received a call.
I will prove that we’re not in a simulation:
If we’re in a simulation then whoever is operating it would not want us to know if we’re in a simulation or not.
Anyone trying to check if we’re in a simulation or not would be stopped by the operator.
I wasn’t stopped by an operator hence there is no operator and we’re not in a simulation.
Q.E.D.
This paper is shit.
https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488_8e072972f66d1fb748b47244c4813c86.pdf
They proved absolutely nothing.
For instance, they treat physics as a formal axiomatic system, which is fine for a human model of the physical world, but not for the physical world itself.
You can’t say something is “unprovable” and make a logical leap to saying it is “physically undecidable.” Gödel-incompleteness produces unprovable sentences inside a formal system, it doesn’t imply that physical observables correspond to those sentences.
I could go on but the paper is 12 short pages of non-sequiturs and logical leaps, with references to invoke formality, it’s a joke that an article like this is being passed around and taken as reality.
About that title…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(mathematics)
Matrix theory is the branch of mathematics that focuses on the study of matrices.
In mathematics, a matrix is a rectangular array of numbers or other mathematical objects with elements or entries arranged in rows and columns
Inside a turtle’s dream theory still not disproven
we are a speck of excrement on the buttplug of reality during a gay porno film.
Oh those mathers. At least scientists are humble enough to recognize that theorums about the physical world can’t be proven.
That’s just what they fucking want you to think.
“If we assume X theorem is true, Y theorem is true, and lemma Z is true, then …”
This is actually about our models and seeing their incompleteness in a new light, right? I don’t think starting from arbitrary axioms and then trying to build reality was about proving qualities about reality. Or am I wrong? Just seems like they’re using “simulated reality” as a way to talk about our models for reality. By constructing a “silly” argument about how we can’t possibly be in a matrix, they’re revealing just how much we’re still missing.
I highly suggest to listen to this podcast with Damien P. Williams and Paris Marx:
“No, we don’t live in a f—ing simulation”
https://ouropinionsarecorrect.libsyn.com/no-were-not-living-in-a-f-ing-simulation
It’s possible that the universe could be simulated by an advanced people with vastly superior technology.
Hard solipsism has no answer and no bearing on our lives, so it’s best to not give it another thought.
It’s possible yes, but the nice thing is that we know we are not merely talking about “advanced people with vastly superior technology” here. The proof implies that technology within our own universe would never be able to simulate our own universe, no matter how advanced or superior.
So if our universe is a “simulation” at least it wouldn’t be an algorithmic one that fits our understanding. Indeed we still cannot rule out that our universe exists within another, but such a universe would need a higher order reality with truths that are fundamentally beyond our understanding. Sure, you could call it a “simulation” still, but if it doesn’t fit our understanding of a simulation it might as well be called “God” or “spirituality”, because the truth is, we wouldn’t understand a thing of it, and we might as well acknowledge that.
But that sounds like disproving a scenario no one claimed to be the case: that everything we perceive is as substantial as we think it is and can be simulated at full scale in real time by our own universe.
Part of the whole reason people think of simulation theory as worth bothering to contemplate is because they find quantum physics and relativity to be unsatisyingly “weird”. They like to think of how things break down at relativistic velocities and quantum scale as the sorts of ways a simulation would be limited if we tried, so they like to imagine a higher order universe that doesn’t have those pesky “weird” behaviors and we are only stuck with those due to simulation limits within this hypothetical higher order universe.
Nothing about it is practical, but a lot of these science themed “why” exercises aren’t themselves practical or sciency.
I’m not sure I agree with the “no one claimed” part, because I think the proof is specifically targeting the claim that it is more likely than not that we are living in a simulation due to the “ease of scaling” if simulated realities are a thing. Which I think is one of the core premises of simulation theory.
In any case, I don’t think the reasoning only applied to “full scale” simulations. After all, let’s follow the thought experiment indeed and presume that quantum mechanics is indeed the result of some kind of “lazy evaluation” optimisation within a simulation. Unless you want to argue solipsism in addition to simulation theory, the simulation is still generating perceptions for every single conscious actor within the simulation, and the simulation therefore still needs to implement some kind of “theory of everything” to ensure all perceptions across actors are being generated consistently.
And ultimately, we still end up with the requirement that there is some kind of “higher order” universe whose existence is fundamentally unknowable and beyond our understanding. Presuming that such a universe exists and manages our universe seems to me to be a masked belief in creationism and therefore God, while trying very hard to avoid such words.
The irony is that the thought experiment started with “pesky weird behaviours” that we can’t explain. Making the assumption that our “parent universe” is somehow easier to explain is really just wishful thinking that’s as rational as wishing a God to be responsible for it all.
I’ll be straight here: I’m a deist, I do think that given sufficient thought on these matters, we must ultimately admit there is a deity, a higher power that we cannot understand. We may as well call it God, because even though it’s not a religious idea of God, it is fundamentally beyond our capacity to understand. I just think simulation theory is a bit of a roundabout way to get there as there are easier ways to reach the same conclusion :)
Just blaming god again for all the unexplainable stuff. Only instead if god it’s a simulation.
Does it feel very solipsistic around here or am I the only one?
The uptime is too good to be a simulation. It has an uptime of like 14 billions years! AWS has a lot of catching up to do. /s
From our perspective, sure. But we wouldn’t know if it was stopped and started running again, or if it was reverted to a previous state.
Or, if malware was inserted in, say, 1933 or 2016.
I just had déjà vu
🐈😱
Lol, because these guys imagine the outer universe in which ours is built has the same rules and limitations. Also because they can’t wrap their minds around our universe’s rules doesn’t mean they make no sense to higher beings. Life in conway’s game would equally produce the same wrong statement
Exactly what the simulation would say
I can’t explain how much I hate simulation theory. As a thought experiment? Fine. It’s interesting to think of the universe in the context of code and logic. But as a driving philosophy of reality? Pointless.
Most proponents of simulation theory will say it’s impossible to prove the universe is a simulation, because we exist inside it. Then who cares? There obviously must exist a non-simulated universe for the mega computer we’re all running on to inhabit, so it’s a pointless step along finding the true nature if reality. It’s stoner solipsism for guys that buy nfts. It’s the “it was all a dream” ending of philosophy.
Yes but, also, no.
You already seem familiar but, ror the uninitiated playing along at home, Wikipedia’s entry for Simulation Theory is a pretty easy read. Quoting their synopsis of Bostrom’s conjecture:
- either such simulations are not created because of technological limitations or self-destruction;
- advanced civilizations choose not to create them;
- if advanced civilizations do create them, the number of simulations would far exceed base reality and we would therefore almost certainly be living in one.
it’s certainly an interesting thought. I agree it shouldn’t inform our ethics or disposition toward our lived experiences. That doesn’t mean there’s zero value in trying to find out though. Even if the only positive yield is that we develop better testing methods which still come up empty: that’s still progress worth having. If it nets some additional benefit then so much the better.
I’d argue that satisfying curiosity is, in itself, and worthy pursuit so long as no harm is done.
That all still sets aside the more interesting question though. If such simulations are possible then are they something we’re comfortable creating? If not, and we find one has been built, what should we do? Turn it off? Leave it alone? “Save” those created inside of it?
These aren’t vapid questions. They strike at the heart of many important unresolved quandries. Are the simulated minds somehow less real than unsimulated ones? Does that question’s answer necessarily impact those mind’s right to agency, dignity, or self-determination?
The closer we get to being able to play god on a whim the more pressing I find such questions. That’s not because I wring my hands and labor anxiously at truth or certainty for lack of better idols. It’s because, whatever this is, we’re all in it together and our choices today have an outsized impact on the choices others will have tomorrow. Developing a clearer view of what this is, and what we’re capable of doing in it, affords future minds better opportunity to arrive at reasonable conclusions and decide how to live well.
Simulation theory is the long way around to creationism for atheists.
Creationism usually implies the creator put a lot of thought, care, and love into the creation. Knowing what I do of software development, fucking lol.
The universe can’t be a simulation, the framerate is way too good.
In a simulation, you could take a thousand years to render a single frame, and the occupants of the simulation wouldn’t know any better.
The max tick rate for our simulation seems to be tied to the speed of light, that’s our upper bound.
Of course, the lower bound is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or Planck length.
In other words, it is a confined system. That means it is computationally finite in principle if you exist outside the bounds of it.
I keep seeing supersampling artifacts when I squirt my eyes
Eyes don’t normally do that. I think you should
squirtsee a doctor.I think typing charlie squirt so many times fucked up my autocorrect
An surprise, I’m sure, but a welcome one.
Dr. Faizal says the same limitation applies to physics. “We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity,” he explains.
“Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone.”
Your argument is bad and you should feel bad.
Impossible to describe does not mean that it’s not possible to simulate, and impossible is an incredibly strong criterion that sounds quite inaccurate to me. We simulate weather systems all the time, even though the systems are fundamentally chaotic and it’s impossible to forecast accurately. We don’t even know that gravity is quantum, so that’s quite a weird starting point but we’ll ignore that for a second. What is this argument?
This seems like a huge leap to conclude that just because some aspects of our understanding seem like we wouldn’t be able to fully describe them somehow means that the universe can’t be simulated.
“Drawing on mathematical theorems related to incompleteness and indefinability, we demonstrate that a fully consistent and complete description of reality cannot be achieved through computation alone,” says Dr. Faizal.
Who’s to say that reality is completely defined? Perhaps there are aspects to what we consider the real universe that are uncertain. Isn’t that foundational to quantum mechanics?
What bothers me most is that they equate a model with reality.
Quantum gravity theory is our current working model that we use to describe our observations. It’s not reality itself, and no scientist worth their money would claim that it is, because if it was, physics would be solved and it isn’t.
That’s how science works: We have observations, we build models to describe them, then we have more observations that don’t fit the old models, so we build newer models that also describe the new observations. Since we aren’t omnicient, there’s always something we can’t observe (yet) and what we can’t observe we also can’t describe.
“Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone.”
This, in fact, would fit quite well to an imperfect simulation that doesn’t perfectly follow all the rules we made up when observing.
We simulate weather systems all the time, even though the systems are fundamentally chaotic and it’s impossible to forecast accurately.
The amount of computer power used to run those simulations is immense, and even then, the predictive capacity of those models starts degrading rapidly around 7 to 10 days ahead. There’s some amazing science that goes into those models, but the results are hard-won. And what we know about more energetic systems (say, the magnetohydrodynamics of the sun) is far less comprehensive.
And be careful with that “fundamentally chaotic” assertion: there are degrees of how chaotic a system is, and some aspects of a system can be more deterministic than others.
We simulate weather systems all the time, even though the systems are fundamentally chaotic and it’s impossible to forecast accurately.
Weather simulations are approximations. It’s not an exact replication of the universe.
Can the universe not also approximate? Why must it be an exact result whenever a rule is applied?
Then it’s not an approximation - it’s the reality. The question is whether all things the universe does can also a computer do in theory. If one thing about the universe is uncomputable, then the entire universe is uncomputable.
The paper suggests this thing is quantum gravity. I have my doubts about it, but I’m in no position to refute the paper.
But who sait it must be a perfect match?
I mean they can argue that we can’t simulate correctly the universe (just check kaos theory) but that doesn’t mean we cant simulate a universe. Even a universe that looks feels like ours.
The paper makes the argument that the universe we live in is mathematically uncomputable. No algorithm can describe it. There’s no mathematical formula we can use to compute the universe as it is.
If this is the case, then we don’t live inside a computer. Something more than pure computation is required.
Now their argument is that quantum gravity is the thing that makes the universe uncomputable. I’m not sure how valid this part of their argument is.
If this is the case, then we don’t live inside a computer. Something more than pure computation is required.
SO many assumptions in that statement
Well, ”computer” in the mathematical sense is well defined of what it can and cannot do. The limit is the halting problem or equivalent problems.
The question is: is there some equivalent to the halting problem in the real universe? If that’s the case, then there’s no algorithm you can use to describe the entire universe.
”computer” in the mathematical sense is well defined of what it can and cannot do.
It is in this universe. Who’s to say the same holds remotely true in a different universe that may have entirely different laws of physics?
In that case it must also have different laws of mathematics for it to work.
