Run at the same speed as reality? Hell no. When you are doing very detailed simulation, it runs a lot slower. That’s why we have thousands of processors running microprocessor simulations.
Now, if you model at a very high level, you can go faster, but you lose a lot of precision, and our universe seems to be modeled so the time step is one quantum of time. Unless physics is way different in the simulator’s universe, it would take 150 billion years to do our universe, and that with a stupendous number of parallel processors with amazing bus speeds between them.
It is definitely also an argument against Intelligent Design. But beings doing simulation are not going to waste that amount of time and resources.
Exactly.
True. Different levels of modeling take different simulators. Cell library elements get modeled in SPICE at the transistor level, much gets modeled at the gate level, and architectural studies use modeling at the instruction set level. But you can’t run an entire processor in SPICE, nor would you want to. And mixing simulation levels often doesn’t work very well, since you lose information at the higher level. For instance a circuit design which is iffy in SPICE won’t show up as a problem at gate level.
If time runs thousands of times faster there, then maybe. If their scientists can live 150 billion of our years, then maybe. Especially if they can wait a really long time to get tenure. But you are really shoving the problem under the carpet.
Sure someone may want to do it. And in fact the diversity of planets and stars does your life experiment in parallel. But you are way underestimating the size of the problem. And the need for all of this stuff.
I see us speculating about doing it - but not really doing it.
It is not hard to build a simulator, or to put in single stepping or breakpoints, Quite easy, actually. But expecting someone to make effective use of them on a universe simulator is quite another matter.
Depends on who you ask…and who’s asking… Or so I keep telling myself…
The only answer I can give, alas, is an argument from ignorance: we have no way of knowing what the purpose of the sim is. Ultimately, we can never totally rule out such irrational possibilities as diabolical spirits, mad Lovecraftian gods, some form of personal insanity, or simply a higher universe with very different laws of physics, such that our universe, complex as it is, is just a cheap and easy “Wa-Tor” style sim to them. We’re some junior-high-school kid’s summer-school project.
We can never disprove any of this.
Any level? It is literally impossible for you to imagine situations in which this can work? Again, as above, how do you rule out a higher plane of existence, with totally different laws of physics – possibly even different rules of arithmetic – where your experiences have no meaningful application?
Yes, definitely, such hypotheses are “nonsense” in the scientific jargon. There’s no possible falsification. But that’s the problem: you cannot dismiss these ideas, either. You can’t falsify them a priori. The most you can do is say “If the higher universe has laws similar to our universe, then the idea of a sim is not workable.” But that’s an assumption we don’t know enough to make.
For those of us inside that universe, the time-scale is not discernible. Maybe it has taken 150 billion years to do the 15 billion years of our perceived universe. How would we know?
So, even if the laws are physics are largely the same…your argument doesn’t work. And since you note the possibility that the laws of physics might be different – and how different? What are the limits? – you don’t succeed in wholly discrediting the notion.
I don’t have to simulate any atoms any more than Call of Duty does. You don’t see every single atom when you look at a tree. You just see “tree”. The level of detail might only increase as you get closer to it, just like a videogame.
If you are “simulating” every single atom in the universe, that’s not a simulation. That’s an actual universe you created.
But my experience has nothing to do with the laws of physics. I can write a simulator where I change Planck’s constant or Newton’s laws or c. But I’d make the range of the simulation just big enough to test what I want it to test. As I said, unless the simulator writers have infinite time and resources at no cost, they would follow the same logical path as I would. And our universe is not like that.
Sure it is not quite falsifiable. So it is not even wrong. And sure it might take 150 billion years (though I wish I had a simulator that ran at only 10% of real time.) Who is going to waste that time.
Bostrom’s trilemma depends on universe simulations being relatively easy for a civilization to do, such that many will do so, and they will do a lot of them, so many as to outnumber naturally developing universes. That is pretty clearly not true. One culture doing this (doubtful as it is) is not going to make the trilemma work, and so there is no good reason to believe we live in a simulation. Especially, to repeat again, since our universe does not look like one a simulator developer would create. And this has nothing to do with physical laws at all.
On the other hand perhaps we can start a new religion of God, Programmer. An all-powerful God doesn’t create the universe with a wave of his hand, he codes it. Makes a lot more sense than Genesis.
Then you have to monitor every conscious entity in the universe in order to switch simulation levels when it looks at something more deeply than your fast simulation. That makes the problem even worse. I’ve seen people try to do this kind of thing, and it never works very well, though it is possible.
Um…what makes you think there are any other “conscious entities” in my simulated universe besides you?
I don’t think people are getting the concept of “simulated universe”. Other than your own consciousness (and maybe not even that), you can’t take anything else for granted as how the “real” universe actually works. Our “sim” universe may be as different from the actual universe as SimCity is to an actual city.
A couple of points:
If the universe is infinite, wouldn’t we still need an infinite bucket?
How do we know it isn’t already inside a bucket?
What does “fit” mean anyway when you are talking about putting the entire universe into something?
I think we’re just working from different assumptions about what simulated universe means. I’ve been taking it to mean that the universe is what’s being simulated.
If you’re thinking of the simulator as following only a single individual or a city, then that’s a different scope of simulation entirely and I don’t think it would be appropriate to call it a simulated “universe” anymore.
In terms of the sim being different from the universe… our scientific investigations have at least determined the rules of our current situation, be that real universe or simulation of universe. Our current knowledge says that it would be all but impossible to simulate the entire universe the way we know it to work.
Last I checked, no entities within COD have developed human level intelligence and started running their own simulations of the universe. If COD was a model of simulations supporting Bostrum’s Trilemma, then it would spawn intelligent entities who create and run their own simulations within it.
Those Earth simulators aren’t very accurate. Can they predict a tornado? No. They are crude models. And yes it would be very hard to create a machine with that much RAM.
Now we’re throwing in solipism also? A big universe is even sillier in this case. Plus, while I’ve had an interesting life if the universe revolved around me I’d expect it to be slightly more interesting.
In any case we don’t simulate an entire processor to look at one gate.
I though of another reason that even one simulation is unlikely and many are next to impossible. Computation takes energy - that is a basic law of thermodynamics and I’'m not sure a universe without such a law would be stable enough to lead to any intelligent life, or maybe even matter. I got rid of my information theory book decades ago but I’d suspect using immense amounts of RAM and updating every atom in the universe would require an amount of energy that several supernovas a second would not satisfy. Plus you’d have to figure out how to get rid of the waste heat. Nope, not buying that our simulators can make anything 100% efficient.
This is kind of like four-sided triangles of tri-omni gods - easy to describe and talk about, but basically logically of physically impossible.
Right, but my point is our knowledge can only tell us how our “simulated” universe works based on the information provided.
And again, you haven’t actually conduced these tests yourself, have you? So much of what you “know” about how the universe works may be what the simulation told you.
I mean why even assume that it’s a passive simulation someone created and let run?
In all fairness, I expected you to do a lot more in the sim.
I think you’re missing something…or probably I am.
You don’t need to simulate an entire universe. I don’t know there’s proof of an entire universe. I just have you guys telling me there is. If I’m the only one in a simulation,…well you see where I’m going.
“I’d expect my life to be more interesting.”-Noted.
The OP is about whether we live in a simulated universe. All of us, not just me. If I’m in a holodeck with my environment projected, it isn’t really a simulated universe, but more of a Potemkin universe.
And to paraphrase Dylan, there’s no use simulating me, you might as well be simulating you.
Now if we can convince Trump that he is the most important person in the universe (which wouldn’t be hard) maybe we can get him to walk off a pier or something.
Yep, and delayed-choice experiments/uncertainty collapse look a bit like reverse raytracing and rendering-on-demand, and the whole wave-particle thing looks a bit like the code is happy to convert between integer and floating point math on the fly, depending on the output required.
BTW, this is nothing new. Ed Fredkin dropped into one of my MIT classes in 1973 and mentioned his universe as a simulation idea. He said that miracles in the past were bugs in the code, and the lack of miracles today come from it being fixed. And Planck time is the simulation time step. That is the one place where the universe does match what you expect to see in a simulation.
