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Comment by deltaonefour | Hacker News Reader

I'm going by your definition and example of simulation.

The answer to your question is that it takes a super computer to simulate 5 atoms interacting with each other. And the simulation won't be real time either.

So reality is not "simple" enough to be simulated accurately.

The simulations that do exist are gross simplifications called models and in no way accurate to what's really going on. Those models are usually application specific and are only relatively accurate within that scope.

You can make an argument that human intelligence can be simulated by a application specific model, however your statement of the universe being axiomatically premised in simple rules is categorically wrong.

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Simple is ambiguous as I said, people can and do claim anything is simple. So it can’t be categorically wrong. If it’s possible to simulate five atoms, why not more? I’m not placing time or memory bounds on the process.

I linked to a simulation of an artificial cell [1] in a different comment, I’ll toss the link here too. As I said there, this is not the way the universe works, but I think this approach to simulation may support real thought (ignoring time and memory requirements). It supports cell division.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a...

You are going off topic. I am simply addressing your claim that the universe is made up of simple rules and saying it's NOT TRUE. I am ignoring the rest of your claims.

I am saying THAT specific claim is incorrect.

Whether it's possible to simulate human intelligence on a computer, it is certainly a viable possibility. I never made a statement agreeing or disagreeing with this. I basically agree so I didn't address THAT part of your claim.

There's actually more compelling evidence for your statement. The IBM blue brain project already did this with part of the rat brain. All this stuff is nothing new though, so it was uninteresting to me. I only addressed the part of your statement that is CATEGORICALLY WRONG.

We are using different definitions of simple. Any equation can be written down and calculated by a Turing machine. By simple I mean computable.

That's a large deviation. But I can see that as a realistic possibility.

Your first stated belief was "the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world"

If a simulation takes resources that are exponential in the number of particles then it fails that test. All the stars will die before you manage to calculate anything meaningful in your non-microscopic simulated world.

There's a line between things that take massive resources and things that take nearly-infinite resources. Let's say the line is somewhere around the 'Dyson sphere' range.

The former can be computed on hardware. The latter cannot be computed on hardware.

For the record, I am consistent because I absolutely think it is not possible we live in a simulation, because the immense resources it would take to simulate the large, detailed, world we live in. I don’t think even the most advanced civilizations could build a computer that we live in.

But this is different from if we can simulate some amount reality at all, which I think is possible, and I use that to demonstrate why I think computers can contain human like intelligence in theory. Of course you will see instructions and be unable to tell why it feels alive if you just look at op codes.

Then I do ask, without answering, how much can you omit and still get sentience. You can likely simulate bio chemistry alone and get consciousness. And you may be able to simulate even less than that. Though each reduction would make it easier for a simulated scientist to discover they are simulated.

> But this is different from if we can simulate some amount reality at all, which I think is possible, and I use that to demonstrate why I think computers can contain human like intelligence in theory.

In what kind of theory, though?

In mathematical theory you can use a googol watts. In "things you can do in this universe" theory you can't use a googol watts.

I understand the argument of taking a small accurate simulation as a basis point and extrapolating to a larger simulation. But if you're stuck with exponential complexity, then that extrapolation doesn't work. The demonstration of simulating 5 particles becomes useless. Even if you can massively simplify it, if you can't eliminate the exponential cost you're screwed.

I agree with most of what you are saying; it absolutely applies to physical questions. Whether or not quantum computing can be practical depends on our ability to fight off decoherence in more and more qubits.

But I'm more of a software guy, so it feels fair to ask if Turing completeness enough to simulate reality, and therefore human-like intelligence?

If so, what shortcuts can we take to avoid simulating "everything"?

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