Grin! The Planck length is, to my mind, actually an argument against the world being a sim, because it goes so very far beyond the necessary measures.
A perfectly good Aristotelian sim could have been devised, with no measurements available below, say, 1/1000th of an inch. Microns and angstroms and the like? Unnecessary!
As for whether it’s a sim that deceives one person or deceives us all…what’s the difference? In either case, the system is capable of editing our individual perceptions. Whether or not it does so is something we can never test.
You may say, “Yes, I’ve been in New York,” but how do I know that? Ultimately, how do you know that?
The theological “problem of pain” is a big part of what stops me from ever believing in the sim model of reality. What kind of monsters would have coded the Holocaust into the run? And if “free will” is the answer, the same objection pertains: what kind of monsters would have permitted it to take place if they could have stopped it? The Thirty Years War had already established that human evil is vast; did they really have to play “Can you top this?” and run the full Nazi scenario out?
If this is a sim, then we will never be able to comprehend the alien minds that are modeling us.
Yep, I buy the argument that it’s more likely we’re living in a simulated universe than a real one, since the number of simulated universes should exceed real ones by a large factor.
The cool thing about this, is that if we are in a simulation, it can potentially be hacked. Speed of light a hard limit? Not if you can somehow exploit a loop hole or glitch in the simulation. Also the idea that the we’re in a simulation gives an extra layer of meaning to the phrase “black holes are where the universe divided by zero”.
Are you kidding? How many “people” are killed every day in Sim games? COD3 alone has “killed” something like the entire population of the Earth 200,000 times over.
Not if we are alone in the Universe which was meant to model intelligent life, if not humans specifically. Perhaps miracles were the way the universe used to work, until we found out all the scientific rules, then they had to stop the sim and change the rules of physics to something stranger to keep us guessing and finding out the inner workings. Quantum physics and Inflation are the latest and greatest representations of this effort. Once we were able to look at the inner workings of the atom they needed to extend the granularity to the Planck length or else we would discover we were in a sim.
The speed of a simulation depends strongly on the speed of the innermost simulation loop, that updates the state of the simulation. If dealing with the Planck length (and I think about time, because my simulations are synchronous and proceed by updating the clock in the loop) means you only have to deal with n cases instead of m >> n cases it would be far more efficient.
We can indirectly observe quantum level effects - the rules might be written so that we can’t if the granularity was coarser.
Back in the 70s I once took LSD every day for a week … and ended up in what appeared to be the real world. We are apes who are able to mechanise our behaviour… The sense that the world we perceive may not be real has something to do with this fact.
I wouldn’t say that I believe or disbelieve, as there’s no evidence either way. But there’s no getting around the fact that reality is whatever reality is, whether we believe it or not.
Functionally, it’s irrelevant whether the universe is simulated (unless we find a bug we can exploit).
One of my fears is that we are a simulation and once we achieve the level of technology to create our own universal simulation, the program shuts off because it has run its course. It’s not a big fear, but I’ve thought about it.
None of these are complex simulations that give rise to intelligent entities. I find all of the video game comments in this thread just weird, no video game today has any processes within it remotely near human intelligence.
Exactly. Now, yes, definitely, I have gone the absurd route in old Civ of maximizing pollution and accumulating polar melt-downs. (In “Space 1889,” I blew up the British Museum.)
Once individual characters get simmed to the degree that they can talk to us, the morality changes entirely.
Then you are misunderstanding the point. From the perspective of the “Sim masters”, our “human intelligence” may be no more significant that the stupid AI of the “Sims” that inhabit SimCity. Or they might simply not care for reasons unknown to us.
It’s only necessary to simulate the world to the level of detail that it’s being observed. If I’m looking at a mountain 30 miles away with unaided eyes, it’s not necessary to render individual leaves on the trees. Or even individual trees for the most part. If I then break out the telescope and point it in that direction it’s only necessary to update every object I observe with the events that have modified it since it was last observed. Once it is no longer being observed by an intelligence above a certain level it goes back to semi-static storage only recording events that it will need to be updated with the next time it is observed.
If we are indeed existing in a simulation, that would lend a whole new perspective on the theories of parallel universes. They would just be other simulations running in the same framework with slightly or greatly different parameters. Or even the same parameters with variance provided by the randomness of the AI inhabitants.
For that matter, all of you are simply words on a screen from my viewpoint and level of observation. You’ll be happy to know that most of you pass the Turing test though.
