But if the outer universe is complex enough to fully simulate our universe, every physical interaction over 40 billion light years of the observable universe since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, then our universe isn’t a simulation of a “full” universe. It’s some sort of Flatland, much simpler than the outer universe. And nothing in our universe could ever simulate our universe, we’d have to simulate a simpler universe. And does that simpler universe have enough complexity to evolve life forms that are able to simulate simpler universes?
My point is, if there is a larger more complex universe that sustains our universe, it’s silly to call our universe “simulated”. Created, sure. The point would be, the Alien Space Bats from the outer universe aren’t simulating our universe, they created our universe.
It’s impossible to represent 10^80 particles with only 10^80 particles to work with, and still have room for ourselves.
Any universe that we simulated would have to be smaller than ours. Maybe just a single solar system, a single planet, or a single human with a faked universe. And/or, we would build with larger parts than a quark. We might simply represent atoms as the smallest unit. Or, like Minecraft, invent a simpler structure (a cube) that is easier to represent and do math on, while having sufficient physical properties to build complex systems.
A species which has curiosity about how things works, and uses logical steps to arrive at answers to that question, allowing them to make better use of the materials around them.
You need a control group in order to prove anything. If you want to know what would happen to Earth if we do X instead of doing Y, there’s no way to know except by having two different Earths to test against. It’s far faster and easier to do such tests by building a virtual Earth than by creating a few more physical Earths.
We have people who are interested in abiogenesis. I could see them doing the sort of simulation which would result in such a simulation being developed. And if their universe is so much more particle dense than ours, the amount of resources spent on our universe might not seem particularly vast.
If they can hit pause, stop the application at any arbitrary point, dump the data into a log for analysis, and watch statistics about it running across their screen, I see no particular reason to not call it a simulation.
They might not consider it to be a particularly useful simulation of their universe, or even think of it as a “universe”, but the point would remain that it’s a simulation, and to us, it’s the universe.
If the world is a simulation, then all these and all other “facts” are suspect. AFAYK, “civilization” might have just started this morning when someone turned it on. Everything you think you know or remember about anything might just be implanted information.
The “who” or “why” of it doesn’t really matter. And attempting to rationalize anything based on how you think the universe works is suspect because your universe only works according to the parameters of the simulation and may not, in fact, be how the actual universe works outside the simulation.
You don’t need to represent every particle in the universe if the subjects of your simulation can’t travel very far from the 4000 mile ball you stuck them on.
That’s kind of the point; the idea of there being so many layers of simulation with the original world running a simulation that creates intelligence that runs its own simulation that creates intelligence that runs its own simulation and so on runs into the the problem that each level gets massively simpler and smaller. With a starting point that is remotely like the universe we observe, you can’t get the practically infinite number of levels of simulation needed for the logic of the 3rd piece of Bostrom’s trilemma to make sense.
A minecraft box is not going to simulate the world with enough detail to develop superhuman level intelligence that then runs simulations itself. If you simplify the world, you don’t continue to have emerging trans human intelligences creating their own levels of simulations.
I don’t think that creating a virtual earth in such detail and for such time that it spontaneously creates human-level or higher intelligence that create their own simulations of earth is nearly as trivial a task as you’re presenting it here. If the sim-earth people create their own simulation of sim-earth inside of sim-earth, how does that work exactly? Generally simulating something is much slower than doing it in the real world, so instead of Bostrom’s practically infinite layers you end up never actually going deep because the universe ends before you get down the tree of sim-sim-sim-etc-earth.
But that’s not in the original conditions for Bostrom’s Trilemma! You’ve added yet another ‘if’ to the already shaky string of suppositions.
Advanced flight simulators have sensors to tell where the student pilot’s eyes are focused, in order to increase the depth of detail of the projected background, specifically in that direction. (Scientific American, some decades ago.)
So, yeah, the Ring Nebula is simulated in remarkable detail…but only when you’re looking at it. All other times, they turn it off to save computation resources.
I vote that it is possible that we are (or just I am) living in a sim, either of technological or theological nature. (Scientific arguments don’t work against the notion that a demon is deluding you.)
I also vote that this isn’t actually the case, and the universe really is pretty much the way we observe it to be.
Great, so you only need to simulate the 10^50 atoms in the world? That still a reasonable prospect with a computer you can build with resources you gather from the world? If you think you don’t need to use that many particles, how many do you need for intelligent life to evolve and run its own simulation?
Not sure what you mean. A theoretical physicist doesn’t need to see a shrink because they can’t accept the “real” world, whatever that ends up being. It’s not like they’re wasting a perfectly good life that would be better spent knitting sweaters.
Right, but if you only turn on the Crab Nebula when someone is looking at it, why bother simulating it in the first place? Why not make the stars little dots of light moving on a solid dome? This is assuming the point is to simulate the Earth.
The universe is really really big. Much bigger than it needs to be, if all you want is to watch the monkeys dance. As I said, in that case you just need the Earth and the Sun in your simulation. And not even that, what’s the point of having a giant simulated Sun?
Yes, it’s easy to imagine simulating the world Minecraft style. You get rid of a lot of worthless detail, and concentrate on the humans and the zombie pigmen. But our universe is a lot more complicated than it needs to be to model human behavior. Like, astronomically more complex. And each lonely star and planet out there in every galactic supercluster is modeled down to the quark level.
If you don’t need quark level detail for each star and dust cloud, why have quarks? Why have stars and dust clouds? Yes, you can simulate Earth’s weather without simulating each atom of nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen. But our planet really does have atoms of nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen. If it’s all simulated why would you do that? And why would it go back 14 billion years?
If there’s a much more complex universe out there and our universe of quarks and photons is their equivalent of Minecraft, well, what can we say about that universe, other than whatever created this universe might as well be God?
It certainly seems extremely unlikely that whatever created our universe was particularly interested in planet Earth, or the behavior of a particular species of primates that evolved 200,000 years ago. The scale is all wrong.
Asked and answered: [POST=17124061]“Any sufficiently complex simulation is indistinguishable from reality.”[/POST]
The “reality of this physical world” is anything but. Everything you think of as being solid matter is actually nothing more than quantum fields interacting in a stochastic fashion which produce highly predictable results in the aggregate but have well defined limits of uncertainty at the fundamental level.
“Shrinks” (psychologists) are dealing with even less reality than the rest of us, at least on a professional level. They assume everyone falls into neat diagnostic categories and treat patients accordingly, often with shockingly low success.
If there is an intelligent creator my guess would be his time frame is nothing like ours. We may be 200 billion years away from where evolution will eventually take this universe and this may only be a year or less to who ever created it.
If I’m going to entertain the idea of fringe theories, I’d be more inclined to believe that we “Earthlings” are a science experiment. That is to say that some advanced beings implanted Earth with organic material on this goldilocks planet, just so they could sit back and watch to see what would happen.
I would also contend, that the above is more plausible than an abrahamic god.
This. I’m fairly confident that those who have come up with the simulation hypothesis have never written a simulator in their lives. I’ve written several, and know quite a bit about many more.
Simulators are done for a reason, and are as simple as they can be to fulfill their goals. No race, no matter how advanced, is going to add complexity for the fun of it. The universe could be one billion ly across, or less, and work just as well. If the simulators were interested in the development of intelligent life, they could easily find someone a lot sooner than 14 billion years after the Big Bang. And then they’d stop. If they wanted to simulate the heat death of the universe, they’d start way into our future.
And this statement by Sage Rat
is to laugh. That’s the very definition of hard, not to mention impossible and unneeded.
The problem with the simulation hypothesis is not technological, it is just common sense. It really only makes sense if the simulators value of time is 0 (and so can wait 15 billion years) cost of energy is 0, and ability collect matter is near infinite. In other words, given our universe, the only logical identify of a simulator is God. And you get all the problems God has except benevolence and omniscience.
Trust me, setting breakpoints and dumping data during a simulation is not as easy as you think. Unless you are infinitely clever you often have to run it again (or at least since the last checkpoint - whoops, more memory required) or back it up (which the rules of our universe don’t really allow.) So I’m not buying it on any level.
The Universe that we know is just one of many simultaneous and parallel universes, all of them being simulations being run by God with various simulation parameters, to see which of them will work out best before He goes and creates an actual universe. As we well know, our particular universe simulation went off the rails early on (Genesis 3:5-6). Perhaps some other simulation is working out better.
Unless you know something about simulators that I don’t know, there’s no requirement that they run at the same speed as the amount of time they’re meant to simulate. When NASA runs a simulation of the atmosphere over the next 50 years, they do not actually run it for 50 years.
I do grant that, from what we can observe of our Universe, the amount of time inside the Universe seems excessive, as does the size and complexity. But that’s an argument against things like Intelligent Design, not an argument against simulation.
If I wanted to test AI, I would create a virtual world with just enough physics in it that my AI could develop sufficiently to operate in a world similar to ours - which doesn’t require quark-level precision by any stretch. The ground might just be large polygons. A creature might be a full creature object with a pre-dictated model which never changes. Why create something with small building blocks if that’s not necessary for what you want?
But if I want to see what happens if I dump a bunch of quarks into a single point of space, all of a sudden, then I would just model a quark, decide a constant number of them I want to dump, and tell the app to run. If 10^80 quarks is easy for my hardware to run and the app can run in a couple of days, why wouldn’t I use that many? NASA’s next climate simulator will have more polygons than the current one. The generation after that will have even more, and the generation after that will have even more. If one can have greater resolution, they may as well do so, regardless of the level of need.
For what we know of our universe, its seeming complexity may just be an issue that we view ourselves as complex. From an outsider’s vantage, we might not be so far away from the AI example I gave. To us, it seems overdone. To them, it might seem very straightforward. Fundamentally, we have no capacity to decide what the functional and reasonable limits are in a universe outside of our own. Believing that we are hard to compute has no bearing on whether we actually are hard to compute.
Nor do we have any ability to know what the purpose would be for our creation. It’s unlikely that we’re a simple test of AI, as it’s more hassle than necessary to build up life from quarks. But, as said, we have no idea what the capabilities are in a universe outside our own. Emergent life from a chaotic system may be a simple and straightforward way to create intelligent creatures, once you have sufficiently amazing hardware. Just as we might try creating life on top of Conway’s Game of Life if we had enough CPU and RAM to do it. The system is so simple, at its core, that you may as well start the application and see if you can devise any way to spot the life among all the billions of cells. They might run through a hundred iterations, all the way from the Big Bang to the Heat Death simply because they’re testing their tools for scanning for larger and larger structures to see if any of them seem to be life-like. If you can do it, why not?
But certainly, if we can envision ourselves doing it, at any level, we have to open to the possibility that others might and have.
I’m a programmer. And I’m not clear what this has to do with anything? “It’s hard to make simulators, ergo, no one would ever build a simulator.” Strange hypothesis for someone who has in fact made simulators.
The principal error being made gratuitously in this thread is that we are the preferred “outcome” of the simulation. This is, oddly, very much like the theistic argument that “the universe is perfectly designed for us to exist thus it had a designer.”
To the creator of a simulation, we are no different than a planet or star; just an infinitesimal possibity given enough time and space.
In that regard, maybe our existence is the purpose of the simulation. But not such that a “Simcity” approach would have sufficed. Why not craft a universe defined by rigid natural law and see what pops up?
This is my thinking, in such a vast universe why would anyone see out planet or for that matter our particular stage of development as somehow an end all goal.
Well, if our universe is a simulation, it was made by a someone, and a someone who made a universe with life in it probably didn’t create it to study black holes and supernovae. They may not have created it specifically to create Earth, but they probably made it knowing life would form.