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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.

FWIW I think that simulation theory is fairly obviously bunk, but that's not really an argument. We have no frame of reference for the nature of the simulator, including its constraints and the level of detail it can manage.

I don't personally think the theory that we likely live in an artificial sim is true.

But I also don't think it's 'obviously' untrue. Yes, the level of detail is mind boggling. But quite a lot of that detail follows naturally from the framework itself: The complexity of an object moving through space and time, interacting with heat and light and atmosphere and etc. is huge. However once the framework is in place (physical laws, light models, properties of materials and so on) everything happens 'naturally' provided you have the processing power to render all the variables.

It's not difficult to imagine a point where a detailed enough framework, and the processing power to render it, could exist. Not soon, but eventually.

Add to that the established tendency of our minds to normalize (ignore things that don't seem to fit, rationalize and otherwise edit reality for palatability) and the power of our neurotransmitter systems to override rational thought... The biological interpreter of the theoretical simulation is well designed to be fooled given a deep enough understanding of it's workings. Which is also not difficult to imagine as a future possibility.

Still, not likely, but too compelling a thought experiment to call bunk IMO.

Absolutely, it could be that we are living in a simulation. It's just that there's no reason to believe that as yet. FWIW I think that a 'biological interpreter' is rather unlikely; it's probably just emergence from atomic interactions. (It could be planted there, however.)

The problem with your argument is that it makes too many assumptions. We know nothing about the nature of the simulator, nor do we have any reason to believe that (assuming we are not in a simulator) the universe works the way it does for any particular reason. Furthermore, the isomorphism you point out between the the physical world and computers are much more easily explained if you flip the causality chain: we are humans living in this world, and we modeled computers after ourselves and our surroundings.

I'd like to propose two pro-simulator things that have been bouncing around my head for a while:

* Plank length/time: The granularity the simulation is capable of.

* Quantum entanglement: A deep copy/shallow copy bug (that is, shallow copy was accidentally used where deep copy should have been used, hence why quantum entanglement holds across large distances).

Fair point. But I think that a lot of the support for the "we live in a simulation" idea is because we see ourselves able to produce better and better simulations, and it feels like we might be able to progress to the point where we can do it. Realizing how much detail there is makes it feel much less achievable.

I use the word "feel" for a reason. I think we're dealing with emotional reasonableness, not careful analysis.

Why do you think it’s “obviously bunk”?

It's a horrible abuse of probability, which is not unlike saying that 0*∞ = 100%.

Not to say that we can't possibly be living in a simulation, but rather that the only way that can be shown, or even evidenced, is through concrete evidence. Thought experiment is insufficient evidence.

It's obvious projection. Centuries ago we lived in a dome, in the 18th century we lived in a clock, now we live in a computer, soon enough in a quantum computer. Give it 50 years and we'll live in the new fad, and giggle at the old fools who thought we lived in a simulation. So primitive!

I think this is an argument for the "we live in a simulator" idea - details appear just when they are needed and whenever we think we completely discovered something, another layer of details opens beneath us.

Higgs Bostein (or is it Bostain?)

Classic HN thread on the "we live in a simulation" idea:

Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested: http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-co...

61 points by ph0rque on Dec 11, 2012 | 64 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4902798

I think it's one of the more fundamental meta-learnings, meaning: learn a few different things and then compare the processes (of learning) with each other and you find that they all share the quality that if you pay attention to anything the details expand. This is true of physical things like making stairs but also of mental "things" like programming, or poetry.

The fundamental "direction" is in-out; outward there's this multimodal unbounded fractal, inward there is Self-Awareness, the "infinity shot" of consciousness.

Too much for the kind of simulator you can imagine? But if your imagination is simulated how can you use it as a reference?

Too much detail in relation what? Our current computers in 2020?

What if the humans that made the simulation are from the year 3020 or 10020?

What do you think the level of detail of the simulation is? If it's simulating down to the atomic or subatomic level, then the only way to simulate that is with a universe at least as big, having turned the whole universe into a computer.

Maybe it's a lazy simulation... the atoms and subatomic particles are only simulated once someone is looking at it.

Even if that's true, there's no reason to believe our universe is particularly big for a universe :)

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