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Comment by vimacs2 | Hacker News Reader

In orders of questions asked, probably not and probably not. There isn't really a particularly strong case to be made for the simulation hypothesis because it's unfalsifiable and the entire premise of it's alleged liklihood rests on some major assumptions with no evidence.

The fact that it's been given more consideration than as an idle philosophical thought experiment has more to with our current's culture's fixation on computers than a particularly strong argument.

The original thought experiment from Nick Bostrom has also at this point been paraphrased incorrectly by both Neil Degrass Tyson and Elon Musk so the public discourse surrounding it has lost much coherence.

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I like your take on it. Unless the entities running the simulator directly enter the simulation and tell / show everyone that it is a simulation, we'll never know - and it won't actually matter.

That said, it does make sense; do characters in The Sims as it is now, or as it may be in a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years, know that they're living in a simulation? We're adding more and more computing power, and more and more details to our own simulations; at the current pace it seems to be a matter of time before we can simulate physics to the smallest quantum details, at an universal scale, at a fraction of the energy cost of our own universe. And maybe not real-time, but if we live in a simulation, who is to say that time as we experience it ourselves passes as fast on the "outside"? It could be that every second of our existence takes the equivalent of a hundred years outside of the simulation. But we're going down a philosophical rabbithole now.

There is no good reason to think that we will in fact scale to the point where we can "simulate physics to the smallest quantum details, at a universal scale, at a fraction of the energy cost of our own universe". Computing cannot scale infinitely - we already have various limits based on our incomplete models of physics and there may be even more limits that emerge with further research. Even with a quantum computer, it's unlikely that we can really simulate chaotic systems with any real semblance of accuracy. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't approximate such behavior by implementing optimizations and abstractions on top of elementory particles but if our universe is indeed a simulation, it seems to not be employing any of these.

Indeed, the only two aspects of your universe that make the idea that it's a simulation even remotely possible is the fact that there at least appears to be an ultimate smallest division of physical attributes - the plank units and the fact that there is also a specific limit on the speed of causality - c. Neither of these are a slam dunk.

But the ‘real’ universe need not have the same physics and energy constraints that this simulated one does. The limits we observe need not apply.

My guess is that the hypothesis is false but unfalsifiable.

> If our universe is indeed a simulation, it seems to not be employing any of these

If our universe is indeed a simulation there is absolutely nothing preventing the creators from using a hack that modifies our minds on the fly to correct the inconsistencies.

There’s only a few billion people, and so very many particles.

Except then you would also have to explain exactly what those billions of minds are running on and have the ability to predict with 100% accuracy their future state at any point - something which is impossible under our current mathematics and physics.

This is why it's pseudoscientific though - you could still argue that it's a hack or whatever since the ultimate universe might have different laws of physics and computation. At that point, what makes this theory particularly more empirically appealing than a supernatural deity though? An unfalsifiable theory is an unfalsifiable theory.

It's one option to resolve fine tuning. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that the there is only one universe and that universe just happened by random chance to have "interesting" laws of physics that are capable of chemistry.

Either the universe is one of a large number of potential universes (anthropic principle + multiverse), or the laws of physics were designed or selected to be "interesting".

It's not a falsifiable question at our current level of understanding of the universe, but it is clearly a question that has an answer even if we can't know it.

To be fair, if I was Elon I'd definitely think that I'm living in a simulation since my life would seem like that of a player character.

My life is that of a player character, it’s just that the story starts when I’m 60.

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