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Comment by mihaifm | Hacker News Reader

I wish physics would explore the theory of a simulated universe a bit more. What if these incomplete laws of physics are flaws with the simulation, maybe dark matter is just a hardcoded variable or a hotfix to an existing problem. Is this something physics can tackle or does it lie more in the philosophy realm?

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I don't think the simulation theory is falsifiable therefore there's no practical reason to dig into that. You can explain almost anything with it, it's very close to religion and creationism in that sense.

And although we still haven't found the dark matter directly, we notice its effect in the stars motion, galaxies' gravitational lenses, large-scale structure of the Universe and even notice the coinciding data in the cosmic background radiation. Sounds like too much for a "hotfix".

It doesn't matter if "dark matter is just a hardcoded variable or a hotfix to an existing problem" -- all physics cares about is building a theory of dark matter that can make effective predictions. If a "theory of a simulated universe" can make concrete, testable predictions, then it's a physical theory. If not, it's more of a philosophical theory.

What makes you think a simulation complex enough to be a universe would have familiar programming concepts? Would you expect that of alien tech a million years more advanced?

Also, if our universe is a simulation, then we have no idea how faithful that simulation is to the world it runs inside of. Could be a lot different. Maybe our simulated physics is fanciful. Maybe the hardware it runs on is nothing like anything we're familiar with. And maybe the software is completely alien.

To me it seems like the simulation argument is self-defeating, because you can't draw any conclusions about the real world from it in order to tell that it's actually a simulation.

What does it give you though? Just because some behavior could be viewed as equivalent to a "hotfix" for something doesn't mean that the universe is a simulation. And just because the universe is a simulation doesn't mean that it needs hotfixes. I don't even see how it could be considered philosophy, much less physics.

There are people working on physics as computation.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-black-hole-interiors-grow...

The theory of a simulated universe isn't really physics though, is it?

The closest physical theory would be the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.

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