Quantum Annealing opens a new door to Simulation Hypothesis
vesselproject.io
vesselproject.io
Can someone explain what it means? If it actually does mean anything at all.
> Douglas Hofstadter asserts that human thought entirely depends on analogy. In describing analogy, he says, “we build concepts by putting several concepts together and putting a membrane around them, and kind of miraculously these [interior] concepts disappear." Hofstadter also noticed that analogy could be achieved using the Ising model.
> In one study, a human brain was scanned and compared to the 2D Ising model — it found that at the Ising model’s critical point, the two systems were indistinguishable from each other in all relevant statistical properties.
Why do we blame the scientists here for something they didn’t write? Nobody forced the author of this post to misinterpret science. It is a reasonable assumption that a science communicator knows the science they’re communicating.
If you hike over to the latest work that materials science has been doing you can also see that once you have a "qubit" it's pretty natural to make it sing and dance and do all sorts of related mathematical tricks. It's actually unsurprising there are things that might theoretically be able to simulate qubits in a more complicated universe. Materials science is past the point where it's proving these things exist and is into the process of engineering these states to spec, even if they haven't quite come up with a generalized quantum computer yet.
Or, to put it another way, I'm not updating my Bayesian probability of "the universe is a simulation" simply because it seems like the universe seems to be something that could be simulated on a particular type of computer, on the grounds that I don't have and never had any probability assigned to "the universe is fundamentally not something that could be simulated", again on the grounds that if that statement is true somehow it is likely that for the same reason it is true we could never prove it, or even necessarily gather significant evidence for it. (How would I do that? By finding some event in the universe that fails to match my own computational models? The probabilities that this is evidence for the non-computability of the universe would be smaller than "my model is wrong", "my data fed into the model is wrong", and "the physical process of computing my model failed" almost no matter what I did.) I already had effectively 100% assigned to "any observation I can make with my senses, no matter what machines may be augmenting it, is something that could be simulated with a sufficiently advanced simulator"... in fact, a "sufficiently advanced" simulator could be faking most of the "quantum" nature of reality, even with my machines I only can ever observe a very few qubits directly at a time.
(And I personally am observing basically none! I'm just reading articles about it. It is easy for the Great Simulator to be forging those articles for me, in a reality that is "generally" non-quantum except when it absolutely has to be for me.)
Given the Church-Turing thesis, what would that look like, though? How would we even identify it? We ask "hey, universe, what's 2 + 3" and it says "C'thulu"?
Even the quantumness of the simulation is an efficiency argument, not a possibility argument. A classical computer can simulate our quantum universe, it just has even worse resource requirements that simulating the universe seems to. But there would be no experiment you could run from within that would show you're running on a classical computer or a quantum one. You might be able to create experiments that consume yet vaster amounts of computation time, but you couldn't tell from the inside.
And it's not as if I can just stroll down to my kitchen and perform an experiment that will go one way if the universe is computing to a 10^-20 accuracy, and another if it's using 10^-23 accuracy. Most of your personal experience could be simulated with a classical approach with ad-hoc minor quantum fixups here and there.
Disclaimer: I work at Great Simulation Metaincorporated.
Given that the article repeatedly references D-Wave, a company that is (last I heard -- circa 2020 in the Globe & Mail) in financial distress, I would put money on this being a D-Wave sales pamphlet with the serial numbers scratched off.
At the very least pay for an actual journalist to put their name to a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain#:~:text=In%20t....
TLDR: The Boltzmann brain argument suggests that it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for the universe to have come about as the result of a random fluctuation in a universe in thermal equilibrium.
Disclaimer: I'm an old-universe Christian
transferring ownership of the human universe just one level up doesn't solve the fundamental issue.
Why must we worship Him/Her exactly?
In terms of core beliefs, I think your estimate is rather low. Obviously it depends on how you weight it, but the core beliefs of the Abrahamic relgions and even Hinudism and Buddhism have a lot in common.
> At the very least N-1 of N religions are wrong
I will take it further than this: 100% of all beliefs are at least partially wrong. Ultimately, one has to ascribe weight to something.
The problem is not the things they have in common, the problem is the claims for which you can't figure out the truth value in any way, regardless of whether they're shared or not.
> I will take it further than this: 100% of all beliefs are at least partially wrong.
Fortunately most beliefs held by people are not considered dogmas. Even Newtonian gravity was replaced when time arose for that. You didn't get a schism in form of a Newtonian Church splitting off.
I can't speak for anyone else, but the Abrahamic[0] (and most other, but you appear to be referencing monotheistic ones) religions are based on "evidence" that is demonstrably false.
The simulation hypothesis, just like your "Old-time religion" isn't falsifiable and, as such, can't be addressed in empirical terms.
That said, given advanced/sensitive enough measurements[1] (which are unlikely to ever be viable), there are at least a few potential experiments that could falsify the simulation hypothesis.
Abrahamic religions, OTOH, make claims that are, based on already collected data, demonstrably false.
That's why I don't reject the simulation hypothesis out of hand (although I don't take it all that seriously either), while I do reject the claims of Abrahamic (and most other) religions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259212 (an, admittedly poorly formed, hypothesis, but something potentially measurable)
Edit: Added link to "poorly formed hypothesis."
Similarly, there is no evidence that can demonstrably disprove the existence of "God." In fact at the fundemental level these two beliefs are basically identical; the difference is in language and emotional baggage.
>Similarly, there is no evidence that can demonstrably disprove the existence of "God." In fact at the fundemental level these two beliefs are basically identical; the difference is in language and emotional baggage.
The former is a claim that I made explicitly. The latter is also true to a certain extent, but a whole raft of the claims made by those who hypothesize the existence of a "god" have been shown to be empirically false.
The simulation hypothesis isn't falsifiable either, but it doesn't make demonstrably false claims.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
All that said, both are metaphysics[0] at best, and to paraphrase Sir Peter Medawar[1], a "bounteous harvest of gobbledygook" at worst.
I think you recognized the contradiction in your own point and corrected it so I will leave it be. It is unimportant to the broader idea of the simulation hypothesis that any individual hypothesis can be disproven. In fact there is an infinite number of trivial variants that can easily be disproven. This is still an infinitessimal fraction of the uncountable space of hypotheses.
Similary it doesn't matter if the claims of any individual religion can be falsified, there is simply another one without those claims. Just because I read something false in one book, or many books, doesn't mean all books are false. Or just because one scientfic paper turns out to not be replicable doesn't mean empiricism is fundementally useless.
I didn't "correct" anything. And there's no contradiction, AFAICT.
You either chose to misinterpret my points or I was unclear in expressing them. Either way, you drew an incorrect conclusion from my statements.
If the reason for that was the former, shame on you! If it was the latter, shame on me!
The contradiction was in saying the simulation hypothesis was fundementally unfalsifiable, and then pointing to its falsifiablity as a reason to prefer it to other belief systems. Your edit made it more clear, but there is still a contradiction there.
Given that a sibling comment is expressing very similar criticisms, I think my interpretation of your argument reflects something present in your text. If I am mistaken, please help me understand your point of view better. This is what good faith discussion is about. No shame necessary.
I didn't say that the hypothesis of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent creator was falsifiable, I said that some of the claims made by those who believe that hypothesis (Abrahamic religions) are demonstrably false.
I then contrasted that with the simulation hypothesis, that doesn't make such claims.
>If I am mistaken, please help me understand your point of view better. This is what good faith discussion is about. No shame necessary.
I hope I've been able to do that. As to "shame," that was a rhetorical flourish. Please feel free to ignore it.
What claims? There are so many denominations of protestant Christianity alone that I don't think you could even go so far as to say that "Abrahamic religions make claims." Maybe one specific sect makes a claim.
Creationism is pretty much de rigueur for all Abrahamic religions.
There are others, but that one gives the lie to all of them.
The platonic ideal fundamentalist only exists in atheist cultural myths. ;) It would be awfully convenient for atheism if believers in religions weren't also trying to square away contradictions, but they are, and they have brains too - about the same brains because we're all the same species - and they're not entirely unsuccessful unless you count the activity of squaring away contradictions itself as evidence that the divine author lacked foresight into what people would think when they read Genesis millennia after it was put to text.
The essential question about apologetics is, how reasonable is to to put a lot of effort into coming up with interpretations, when the text was supposed to be written to teach you? If the only way to correctly interpret the text is to get the information elsewhere, that doesn't speak highly of the text as a vehicle for knowledge.
The rejoinder is that the Bible, or the Torah, or whatever, was not written to be a science textbook, and its value to us as a textbook did not matter at all to the author. Given that religion is focused more on saving souls that it is on natural history, it doesn't seem like such an unreasonable picture of the motives involved to say that the divine coordinator would gladly confuse generations of internet forum posters in exchange for a little more symbolic significance in the text.
The rejoinder to that is: why would God be dealing with tradeoffs? Well, at this point we've completely submerged ourselves into arguing about the personality of the creator.
His noodly goodness[0][1] will reward you for your faith!
Arrrh!
I then contrasted that with the simulation hypothesis, that doesn't make such claims.
That doesn't make the core hypothesis of either one falsifiable. Rather, it (at least to me) makes me less likely to entertain the (non-falsifiable) hypotheses that surround themselves with demonstrably false claims than those that don't.
If you're saying that creationism is wrong because many creationists are wrong, that sounds like some kind of fallacy.
That's doesn't even bear a resemblance to what I said.
Apparently, my communication skills are quite poor, so I will cease to attempt to use them in this context[0].
[0] Or you're being deliberately obtuse. But I don't claim that as I try to assume good faith.
What would be an example of one of those claims? We tried Creationism but it turns out one can't really demonstrate that it's false.
As for the omnipotent omniscient All-Seeing creator, not so much beyond the arguably anthropic nature of the universe.
Not big on either of these being true but happy to admit and embrace the mystery
I find the simulation hypothesis one of the strongest arguments for the existence of a god/gods. I also believe it is has an infinitesimally small chance to be the Christian god though (or any other religion for that matter). Then again, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Though, I'm not fully sure how that works (and giving me potent DMT is cheating ;-) ).
We have a good understanding of the origins of religion via archaeological, historical, and anthropological accounts. Insofar as supernatural claims about God from religious texts can be made sense of, they are inconsistent with physics (or if you prefer, false). This leaves room for a more abstract "God", or a God-falsified history, but even if we ultimately know the genealogy of the idea, we should consider the possibility.
We could say similar things about the simulation hypothesis. It arrives in the information age, at at time when the high-performance computing, The Matrix, and virtual reality are culturally salient. Out of context, the simulation hypothesis looks like just another metaphor/myth about the creation of the universe. Proponents of the simulation hypothesis suggest that the proof of the simulation can be found by examining inconsistencies in the universe's structure, as if that will eliminate all other improvable explanations. Hint: it doesn't, and even if you think it does, you can't infer anything about the "real world" without assuming it tracks with the simulation. Again, there is no reason to believe this.
Some would say the simulation hypothesis is testable and that this marks an important distinction. But are any conceivable tests specific to simulation, and not generalizable to alternative metaphysical theories or to misunderstood features of the universe? Either way, I predict the simulation hypothesis will live on after the "tests" have failed time, and time again. Sound familiar?
It's called "Wave-particle duality". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality Basically a light wave can behave like a bunch of particles flying in one direction or like a wave. And it has been tested in the famous "double slit" experiment, where the interference image was disappearing on the other side of the barrier with two slits when the light wave was observed up close.
That switching back and forth is caused by something known as "Quantum observer effect". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(quantum_physics)
All this feels like an optimization, it would be rather expensive for the Universe to calculate locations of all particles at all times, so it just simplifies it with a wave function. Sort of what we do in video games.
Specifically, if you wanted random outcomes calculated at interaction, waves allow you to describe the potential positions continuously instead of needing to calculate a trillion+ potential positions for single particles.
Why someone would need to calculate outcomes at interaction is a different question entirely, but I would avoid making too specific assumptions about our overlords at this point.
The fact that the bottom seems to be quantum fields instead of either particles or waves doesn't in any way exclude the possibility that this was a deliberate design choice to compute random outcomes from continuous possibilities at interactions.
In fact, the simulation idea is exactly transcendent religion coated in scientistic terms. The simulation is like Hindu Maya, where the real world is Brahman, the ultimate truth. Or Buddhist nirvana. Or even Abrahamic notions of the earthly world vs the Kingdom of God.
Some people have different ideas.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-c...
Similarly, if we assume that God must have certain properties, than we can make falsifiable predicitons. For example, if God is as strong as a human, we can prove that God couldn't have created the Earth. Does that tell you anything interesting about religion?