Comment by onetimeuse92304 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onetimeuse92304 | Hacker News Reader

onetimeuse92304

I think the discussion about simulation tends to fail to grasp couple important facts:

* The physics of the world that is running the simulation can be completely different from ours. Just like we can put together a bit of software that runs a computer simulation with pretty much any rules we want.

* Even if the world that is running the simulation has a similar concept of time as ours, it is not guaranteed that the rate of simulation is constant. So if our world gets more complicated the simulation rate might be slowing down and we would be none the wiser. Just like a computer physics simulation does not have to progress at a constant rate (in can render things faster when there is less entities and then slow down later when there are more entities -- to produce a movie that runs at a constant speed).

* We have no idea yet what are underlying rules that govern our world, let alone be able to infer anything about the simulation based on it. Claiming that quantum physics is because of limitations or bugs in the simulation is at the very least super premature.

I am careful not to say that we are or are not simulated and that's because I simply believe there is insufficient data. I think there are some convincing arguments for the simulation in the way how the rules seem constructed to prevent us from understanding what is really happening. But there might just be a good explanation for this just like there is a good explanation for general relativity that comes directly from understanding some mathematical facts.

It's as meaningless as the question whether there is "a god." If our universe is indeed somehow embedded in an outer universe, at what point does that make it a "simulation" vs. just being the underlying mechanism from which the known universe emerges? It requires imagining some "beings" that are running the simulation to which you can ascribe human qualities like intent to create or intent to deceive. Without them, it's not a "simulation," it just is.

The simulations that we create are subject to the physics of this universe, so they inherit fundamental limitations like finiteness and boundedness of everything. If we then find that some aspects of physics seem to obey the same principles, that's evidence for exactly nothing. Furthermore, the host universe could be literally anything and may be subject to completely different limitations.

It's an unfalsifiable and thus meaningless idea.

> inherit fundamental limitations like finiteness and boundedness of everything

This, in my opinion, while true in principle, does not have to become visible to the simulation (from inside the simulation). For example, we cannot build a true Turing machine because we can't supply it with an infinitely long tape, but we can always get a new roll of paper and paste it back-to-back to the one being used, thereby creating an arbitrarily long tape. This process can't go on forever, but if you are sure you can erase and re-use some old tapes (e.g. because they're sufficiently far from 'now' and your machine will only backtrack so much and ultimately advance to the same 'future' direction) it's conceivable to have unbounded non-periodic processes on finite hardware.

Some say there is a speed limit to allow distributing the computation required for the simulation, since it guarantees that distant nodes do not need to communicate.

Yes, but that speed limit is imposed on our reality. If a higher-order reality didn't have those limits they could do computation that didn't have those limits.

Our computing architecture reflects our reality, that's all that really says.

The problem with any limitations on time/speed is that there's no need for there to be any correspondence between simulation time and host world time. It's like rendering CGI movie frames, it doesn't matter that it doesn't happen in realtime. As far as the simulants are concerned, it happens when the simulation time 'ticks'.

Right, it doesn't matter for the simulants.

But imagine you are a teenager playing "Universe Simulator", then you definitely want all your computer billion cores to be used to get a decent frame rate.

When we're talking about their physics being different than ours, I also wouldn't expect any of our predispositions to be analogous or even timescales (if they have time) of what's fast or slow.

"The universe is a simulation" is a very strong claim, and most of the justifications for it also support the weaker claim "the universe is computable".

No read the wikipedia on it. They use probability to prove it's basically true. That is the argument that is hard to argue against and the one Elon goes on about. It sounds wrong but it's logically hard to show why.

The argument relies on a couple of assumptions which are not obviously true (they're not obviously false either). That's where most of the criticism of it is aimed.

"The universe is a simulation" is exactly as strong of a claim as "There is a god."

The foundation of simulation theory relies on a quantitative probability argument. It says by extremely high probability we live in a simulation. This is the logic that is hard to dispute. Your arguments here are not addressing that.

Weirdly it sort of relies on moores law. Just look it up. If you want to refute the theory you need to attack the main argument. The main argument sounds wrong but at the same time is hard to logically unjustify.

> This is the logic that is hard to dispute. Your arguments here are not addressing that

> If you want to refute the theory you need to attack the main argument

I did not mean to address any arguments for or against simulation. And definitely did not want to refute the theory.

Where did you get that idea?

I am just saying to be careful about assuming too much about the world that is running the simulation in case we live in one.

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