Elon Is Wrong About Simulations | Hacker News Reader

Elon Is Wrong About Simulations

braineight.com

I feel that the question that "if we are in a simulation" is quite equivalent to "if there is a god that reasons beyond human logic", or "is there is a husky dog that has super ability and always be hidden from any kind of human observation".

You can never say that these arguments are wrong, but they are rather pointless since they are always not wrong.

The difference is that "we're in a simulation" is still a natural, as opposed to a supernatural, explanation.

We can come up with ways to test whether or not we're in a simulation. If the tests return positive we can come up with ways to study the rules outside of the simulation. If it's natural then we can work with it.

"We can come up with ways to test whether or not we're in a simulation"

How?

Well, if you can look past the simplification, The Matrix had some examples. Like how deja vu is a glitch caused by the controllers manually changing something. And an example from The 13th Floor is to travel so far you reach the limit of what the environment the engine rendered.

An example of a test that's phenomenally complicated is, roughly speaking, to zoom in on physical reality until the resolution starts to drop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis#Testing_...

An example that's like magic is to communicate with someone outside of the simulation. Either someone in an adjacent simulation, or someone outside of the simulating system itself.

Basically, a simulation has to have rules and constraints. If we can get a fingernail into a crack we can expand it. Just keep pushing the limits until they break. We could even start the simulation version of SETI. That's a project that's testing the hypothesis that there are ETs out there we can communicate with. We could start a project like that based on the hypothesis there are Simulators outside of our simulation we can communicate with.

In the wikipedia page you mentioned it stated: "Under the assumption of finite computational resources, the simulation of the universe would be performed by dividing the continuum space-time into a discrete set of points." How will we know if this assumption is correct? If the beings that run the experiment have higher intelligence, they may successfully hide all the evidence of simulation and we may never find the constraints.

Unless we reduce the simulation hypothesis to "Beings of similar intelligence level as us running similar computer simulations that we do in the late 20th and early 21st century", then it is testable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com