And here I was waiting to get unplugged, or maybe finding a Nokia phone that received a call.
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.
You don’t even need to reject the applicability of Gödel, because there’s no proof that our universe doesn’t include a bunch of undecidable things tucked away in the margins. Jupiter could be filled with complete nonsense for all we know.
I mean, simulation theory is kind of a joke itself. It’s a fun thought experiment, but ultimately it’s just solipsism repackaged.
In reality there’s no more evidence for it than there is for you being a butterfly dreaming it’s a man. And it seems to me that the only reason people take it at all seriously in the modern age is because Elon Musk said he believed it back when he had a good enough PR team that people thought he was worth listening to.
The DMT I took yesterday says otherwise
Simulation theory is actually an inevitability. Look up ancestor simulators for a brief on why.
Eventually when civilization reaches a certain computationally threshold it will be possible to simulate an entire planet. The inputs and outputs within the computational space will be known with some minor infinite unknowns that are trivial to compensate for given a higher infinite.
Either we are already in one or we will inevitably create one in the future.
There’s a few wild leaps in logic, here.
Firstly, we know of life evolving once. Just one planet. In the entire universe. We can postulate that with such a vast universe (and possibly multiverse) that it’s probable that other life exists elsewhere, but we don’t know that. It could be a unique event or an incredibly rare event. We can’t say, because 1 is way too small a sample size to extrapolate from.
But you’re not even extrapolating from 1 datapoint. You’re extrapolating from something that you think might be true at some point in the future.
I am skipping steps because this topic demands thought, research, and exploration, but ultimately the conclusion is, in my view, inevitable.
We are already building advanced simulators. Video games grow in realism and complexity. With realtime generative AI, these games will become increasingly indistinguishable to a mind. There are already countless humans simultaneously building the thing.
And actually, the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial life is support of the idea. Once a civilization grows large enough, they may simply build Dyson sphere scale computation devices, Matrioshka brains. Made efficient, they would emit little to no EM radiation and appear as dark gravitational anomalies. With that device, what reason would beings have to endanger themselves in the universe?
But I agree, the hard evidence isn’t there. So I propose human society band together and build interstellar ships to search for the evidence.
None of what you’ve said ameliorates the faulty logic I highlighted. You have instead just added more assumptions.
The logic is not faulty, it is predicated upon conditional statements. It is actually a synthesis of Bostrom’s trilemma, Zuse/Fredkin digital ontology, Dyson/Fermi cosmological reasoning, and extrapolation from current computational capabilities.
The “holes” are epistemic, not logical.
Okay, if you prefer to frame the flaws in your reasoning like that, then I’m happy to do so. That doesn’t make the conclusion less flawed. The conversation isn’t about the hows and whyfores of formal logic, it’s about whether the conclusion is likely to be true.
Have you bothered looking for evidence?
What makes you so sure that there’s no evidence for it?
For example, a common trope we see in the simulated worlds we create are Easter eggs. Are you sure nothing like that exists in our own universe?
If we’re in a simulation then we’d have no idea what’s outside that simulation, so we’d have no idea what an easter egg would look like.
But it’s not my job to find evidence to prove other people’s claims. It’s their job to provide evidence for those claims. That’s true regardless of whether the claim is that we live in a simulation, that we’re ruled over by a benevolent omnipotent god, or whether there’s a teapot orbiting between Mars and the sun.
“Robot, parse this statement, ‘this sentence is false’.” The robot explodes because it cannot understand a logical contradiction.
I swear, that’s what this argument sounds like to me. Also, I’m genuinely confused why people don’t think that, if we can simulate randomness with computers in our world with pseudo random number generators, why a higher reality wouldn’t be able to simulate what we view as true randomness with a pseudo random number generator or some other device we cannot even begin to comprehend.
Either this paper is bullshit or they’re talking about some sort of very specific thing that all these articles are blowing out of proportion.
I don’t believe we are in a simulation but I don’t believe this paper disproves it. Just like I don’t believe in god but I don’t believe the question “can god make a rock so big he can’t pick it up?” disproves god.
When we dream we often believe it to be reality, despite that in retrospect we can identify clear contradictions with logic in those dreams.
A Matrix-like simulation doesn’t have to be perfect. We are a bunch of dumb-dumbs who will suspend disbelief quite easily and dismiss those who claim to see a different truth as crazy.
Exactly what the simulation would say
Definitely was patched in the newest update
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.
I think the “what if we’re all in a video game” take is a thought terminating cliche based solely on our own culture and experience.
I’m less certain that we’re not a brane stretched across the cosmological horizon projected backwards in time by the collapse of a universe-sized supermassive black hole, and that the answer of who runs the simulation or who’s making the hologram is no one. But mostly I think that because I cleave hard to the idea that any natural process that we hypothesize about should have a basis in an existing model. Black holes are something that we largely exist outside and can study and have a number of comparable features that make them ideal to test these thought experiments. There’s obvious uncertainties, like whether our universe is spinning, whether it even needs to be spinning, and the inconclusiveness of whether galaxies have inherited spin from that or not, but I also don’t buy for a second that the big bang doesn’t have an origin or natural cause or that it could possibly be “just is.”
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.
I’m a proponent and I definitely don’t think it’s impossible to make a probable case beyond a reasonable doubt.
And there are implications around it being the case which do change up how we might approach truth seeking.
Also, if you exist in a dream but don’t exist outside of it, there’s pretty significant philosophical stakes in the nature and scope of the dream. We’ve been too brainwashed by Plato’s influence and the idea that “original = good” and “copy = bad.”
There’s a lot of things that can only exist by way of copies that can’t exist for the original (i.e. closure recursion), so it’s a weird remnant philosophical obsession.
All that said, I do get that it’s a fairly uncomfortable notion for a lot of people.
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
“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.
Oh those mathers. At least scientists are humble enough to recognize that theorums about the physical world can’t be proven.
Inside a turtle’s dream theory still not disproven
I thought the rebuttal to this was covered in ‘The Thirteenth Floor’. They don’t have to simulate the entire universe, and it doesn’t have to be consistent. Just the parts that the PCs are looking at.
I’m not even going to mention what tricks they can do with the rewind button.
Anyways this paper was likely written by an NPC.
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 :)
Broadly speaking, I’d say simulation theory is pretty much more akin to religion than science, since it’s not really testable. We can draw analogies based on what we see in our own works, but ultimately it’s not really evidence based, just ‘hey, it’s funny that things look like simulation artifacts…’
There’s a couple of ways one may consider it distinct from a typical theology:
- Generally theology fixates on a “divine” being or beings as superior entities that we may appeal to or somehow guess what they want of us and be rewarded for guessing correctly. Simulation theory would have the higher order beings likely being less elevated in status.
- One could consider the possibility as shaping our behavior to the extent we come anywhere close to making a lower order universe. Theology doesn’t generally present the possibility that we could serve that role relative to another.
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?
That’s just what they fucking want you to think.
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
Yes, just like Minecraft worlds are so antiquated given how they contain diamonds in deep layers that must have taken a billion years to form.
What a simulated world contains as its local timescale doesn’t mean the actual non-local run time is the same.
It’s quite possible to create a world that appears to be billions of years old but only booted up seconds ago.
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
This is such a boring take, I wonder how anyone gets funding or publication making a statement as useless as “see godels incompleteness theorem that proves that there’s more truth than what mathematics can prove, therefore reality is not a simulation”. Yes, we know, you don’t need a PhD to know the major theorem that took down the entire school of logical positivism. The fundamental philosophical error here is assuming that all forms of simulation are computational or mathematical. Counterexample: your dreams are a form of simulation (probably). So I can literally disprove this take in my sleep
The fundamental philosophical error here is assuming that all forms of simulation are computational or mathematical.
Uh… that’s literally what a simulation is.
Counterexample: your dreams are a form of simulation (probably). So I can literally disprove this take in my sleep
But dreams aren’t simulating reality as we observe it; they just kinda do their own thing. Your brain isn’t consistently simulating quantum mechanics (or, hell, even simple things like clocks) while you’re dreaming so this is a moot point.
People who are lucid dreaming simulate a full reality that’s nearly indistinguishable from the one they find themselves in during waking time. If your brain can’t tell the difference during this time, how can you be sure you’re not dreaming right now reading this?
The scope of what a simulation is has always been limited by the technology we know. It is only a failing of imagination and knowledge to assume that algorithmic computation is the only valid form of simulation in the future, these have existed for barely 100 years, but even Plato’s cave was talking about the larger philosophical problem
People who are lucid dreaming simulate a full reality that’s nearly indistinguishable from the one they find themselves in during waking time.
You’re not describing a simulation, you’re describing a perception. A person perceives that they’re seeing an indistinguishable reality, but we know that people’s brains do not have the computational power to simulate molecular motion in even a cubic centimeter of air.
Or, if they look at the stars, are they then simulating an infinite space with infinite mass and all of the associated interactions inside of their finite brain? Of course not, that would be impossible.
Dreams are perceptions, not simulations.
The mind while lucid dreaming is creating a whole environment, which for some people has incredible level of detail. Your “consciousness” is experiencing a whole video game or whatever, which must be simulated to be percieved. Imagine you had some kind of really advanced VR setup and body suit that could touch your senses very richly - something must be feeding that perception, a simulation
Our brains build a model of the world inside of our head, that’s what we experience.
Those same processes can generate output that isn’t there, we can hallucinate. This is what we’re doing when we’re dreaming. We’re not simulating a world it is computationally impossible.
To perfectly simulate a volume the size of your bedroom for even a few minutes would take millions of years of compute time. That is not happening inside your brain.
A lucid dream does not fully simulate anything, it is an altered state that includes the subjective apprehension of verisimilitude. Perceptions and apprehensions, even outside of altered states, do not constitute proof of anything.
While I’m far from an expert on it… at best the dream simulations are still, extremely rudimentary. To the point that’s usually how you can tell it isn’t real by doing something like reading a book. IE it’s largely believable, but only because you are put in a gullible state. Like watching 2 year old AI videos, while stoned.
Counterexample: your dreams are a form of simulation (probably). So I can literally disprove this take in my sleep
Dreams are an approximation of reality at best. It’s not a perfect simulation.
Damn
I was under the impression that something along these lines was already accepted from the perspective of information theory. I.e. a machine that could simulate the universe must at least be composed of as much information as the universe itself. Given the vastness and complexity of the universe, this would make it rather unlikely that the universe is simulated. Unless you want to view the universe itself as a machine that calculates it’s own progression. But that is a bit of a semantic point.
Disclaimer: this is not my area of expertise and I probably got some terms or concepts wrong. I am basing this off of ‘The information’ by James Gleick
I mean, maybe the machine is five-dimensional and has no problem containing all the information of a three-dimensional universe? I don’t know, yadda yadda talking out of my ass.
we are a speck of excrement on the buttplug of reality during a gay porno film.
