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Comment by detourdog | Hacker News Reader

I believe the universe we live right now is no different than a simulation. Subtle difference in belief but I think it might have a big implication.

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There is one key difference between reality and simulation. In reality you have to spend energy to remove noise. In simulation you have to spend energy to add noise. Or perhaps more accurately, all objects interact in reality and energy needs to be spent to prevent interaction, while simulation requires energy to make objects interact.

But it’s even worse than it sounds at first, because you need to spend energy not just on calculating the interactions which is super linear with the number of objects, you must also spend the energy to make it possible for the objects to interact in the first place.

This is an incredibly deep observation that essentially points to the problem with the representations we use to understand the Universe. It feels like the universe is essentially showing us that there is a non-supra-linear representation it uses (based on the kinds or fields of interactions?), and that calculating within this representation (between fields?) is somehow equivalent to calculating all of the interactions for the objects across all of the fields simultaneously.

Almost feels like it's related to P=NP or logic and meta-logic. Is it fundamentally impossible to use the same 'Universe'-al representation inside the Universe, a Gödel-like result limiting us only to the real? Or can we represent and run subsets of smaller universes within without a computational explosion? If so, does it eventually revert back to becoming fundamentally impossible at some limit, and if so, are we there yet? Can we measure how far from the limit we are, somehow?

Fun questions. Thanks for the provocative clarification.

Perhaps a foolish question but does “simulation” necessarily imply calculation or is that just an extension of our current evolution of computing technology as an analogy for what a simulation would be? I’m not convinced the one necessitates the other.

Oh, I don’t know. I mean conceptually a simulation is just a model that changes over some axis, time being a prime candidate. I’ve seen some goofy models that use an axis other than time to create some interesting visuals. There are definitely game makers playing with some of this stuff.

Calculation may be the wrong word for what’s necessary for a simulation, but I don’t think you can have a simulation without something analogous to computing. But the computation may look foreign, think analog vs digital computers. I mean, what would it mean to simulate something if you weren’t interested in finding some measurable thing? How do you seperate the ability to observe the simulation and not be able to measure anything? I may be too steeped in engineering to be able to answer this, since the last thing I simulated was an analog circuit. But I also studied artificial life, and even there the goal was to learn something about life.

What I wonder about from your explanation is how does a simulation know where the noise is coming from. I feeling is that inside the simulation one is unable to differentiate the source of the noise.

You're not wrong. But I suspect you'd find inconsistencies if you looked hard enough. Situations where 2 things don't interact in some obvious expected way. And that's just the simple case. If you've played enough video games, you'd know that devs can easily create scenarios where there is no way to get the correct behavior between 2 objects without doing some pretty drastic changes to their game engine. (I play a lot of simulation centric games). Basically the number of ways you can poorly implement objects interacting with one another explodes pretty quickly. So that means, that the bar is pretty high, for something living in a simulation to never notice irregularities quick enough for the simulator runner to fix them, assuming the simulator runner is able to fix them at all.

I think about this a lot, and sometimes wonder if the edges of science can't be solved until some meta being comes along and implements that edge case. And then the edge cases get weirder and weirder. But really, I'm relying on my intuition of superlinearity when I think about this stuff, and I can see certain problems with simulations going to infinity faster than, say, the infinity of the infinite time argument that we must be in a simulation.

For the record I'm in the reflection of reality camp. I think the simulation camp is silly.

I think the reality as simulation camp gets one thing right - reality is virtual. Space and time don't exist, there is only information and relation.

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