Could you support the premise you can make an undetectable simulation?
That's a key proposition and you don't support it at all. I find the idea highly questionable.
That's a key proposition and you don't support it at all. I find the idea highly questionable.
Or what if, while you are asleep, someone essentially detaches your brain from your body and uses the signals your brain sends to control a simulation of your body in a virtual environment and feeds back the simulation output into your brain as what you see, hear, feel, and smell? How would you detect that you are no longer really in the real world when you wake up?
For example, in Minecraft you can build a redstone interferometer to detect things about the computer you're executing on and over time the statistical behavior will detect the physics of the real system.
A character in Minecraft could build a cosmic ray detector, for instance.
So yes, absolutely -- my expectation is that any intelligent structure in a computational "bubble" will be able to detect that it's in a bubble managed by some outside system.
Is your argument entirely from lack of imagination in how it could be done?
Only because minecraft does a lot of things to save from doing extra work, like unloading chunks or skipping frames if it's under load. If you remove those optimizations (and add some error-correcting ram or a redundant process to double-check calculations to protect from cosmic-ray-induced errors), then it's easy to make a minecraft-like game that's deterministic across platforms and doesn't reveal details about whatever platform it's on.
Take something like Ethereum's blockchain: it's not possible for an executable turing-complete contract to know what type of computer it's executing on, because the VM is strictly specified, and if there were any flaws that accidentally revealed information from the environment, then every nearly every node in the Ethereum p2p swarm would get different results and the blockchain would fork ridiculously and practically halt as all nodes desynchronized from each other until people updated the software to fix that bug.
I'm probably using slightly different terminology than other people -- I haven't played much in a while.
The basic idea is to use two quasi-connected redstone wires hooked up to a piston -- one providing an update signal but no power and one providing power but no update signal.
The circuit is such that the two wires are actually branches off of a single redstone wire, using only redstone -- so you can detect if the left or right branch off of a redstone line updates first (within a single update cycle) based on if the piston extends: it only extends if the line carrying the update signal is updated after the line carrying the power signal. (If they come in the other order, it stays retracted because it updates before there's power available.)
> how would you decide between them being part of the game mechanics and them being shadows of the outer world given that you have no ground truth knowledge of what the game is supposed to be like?
You only have an operational model, just like us -- but it's eventually going to look like an extremely localized computation running their world that occasionally gets bumped by outside sources. That sounds like them discovering that their reality is a subregion hosted in another, richer reality.
The question of "game mechanics" only has meaning to the people outside in their language for discussing their actions -- at the end of the day, there is no "game", there's only what the simulation does as a facet of reality. The people inside will accurately suss out a model that includes a structure that looks like them being run as a simulation.
How they interpret that is likely to be different, but no more or less correct, than how we do.
The point is that reality is little more than what you experience. All that simulating a reality requires is that an individual's experiences are able to be constrained to within the controlled ream. Take a child, 'disable' all senses except sight - and install permanent VR goggles. That child, lacking outside interference, will believe in a reality that is not really real. Should it develop the cognition to wonder it will likely do as we do. Why do large bodies attract one another? We can explain the operation of this through perhaps the curvature of spacetime, but that then again one can ask then why is there spacetime? At some level the answer simply ends up being that because that is the way it is - a inherent facet of our universe.
I dispute the very notion that it's possible to cut someone off from the basic nature of reality, because you must fundamentally have constructed the cage from that reality and thus their interaction with their cage will reveal its mechanics (and hence the mechanics of reality) to them.
You can only make it take more time by suppressing noise, but eventually the "errors" will carry accurate information inside. (And someone inside can accelerate this process by causing noise in certain manners.)
> lacking outside interference
Depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is either impossible (Bohmian; maybe all of them) or insufficient (Copenhagen, MWI) -- in either case, small "errors" will reveal information about the actual nature of reality.
The Cave itself is only given definition in terms of what we might call the Ultimate (in a Platonic setting); though it's essence is to obscure the Sun (a symbol of the too bright to observe Ultimate), the very ability to do so is fundamentally related to the fact it's also a manifestation of the Ultimate.
Similarly, the Fire and anything used to cast Shadows. By careful observation of the nature of Shadows and Light from the Fire upon the Cave, we observe a manifestation of the Ultimate interacting with itself, because the Light from the Fire is merely a transposition of Truth from the Sun, while the essence of the Cave is revealed in it, and we can see the Ultimate through the lens of the Cave.
It's fundamentally impossible to separate the manifestation of an Essence from an expression of the Ultimate interacting with itself; ergo, any structure capable of self interacting and capturing its "Errors" will find in them the ability to distill a view of the Ultimate.
-- the argument is pretty endemic to any structure capable of expressing existing: what exists cannot be cut off from the nature of existence, because fundamentally it's doing that.
(Also, first time I think those philosophy classes came in handy.)