![we live in a simulation we live in a simulation](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/d96/ce8/548748447c0aa1c20ae4437885e7e4afe9-01-simulation-oscars.rsquare.w700.jpg)
So how does he or she know what are the consistent data to feed the artificial brain with when it decides to probe a specific hypothesis? Where does the data come from? The programmer could presumably get consistent data from their own environment, but then the brain wouldn’t live in a simulation. Instead there’s some fog about how the programmer could prevent simulated brains from ever noticing contradictions, for example contradictions between discretization and special relativity.īut how does the programmer notice a simulated mind is about to notice contradictions and how does he or she manage to quickly fix the problem? If the programmer could predict in advance what the brain will investigate next, it would be pointless to run the simulation to begin with. What’s more important is that these difficulties of getting the physics right are rarely even mentioned when it comes to the simulation hypothesis. The effects of violating the symmetries of special relativity aren’t necessarily small and have been looked for – and nothing’s been found.įor the purpose of this present post, the details don’t actually matter all that much. The idea that our universe is discretized clashes with observations because it runs into conflict with special relativity. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe it’s not possible. The best attempt to date is that by Xiao-Gang Wen and collaborators, but they are still far away from getting back general relativity. Įven from qubits, however, nobody’s been able to recover the presently accepted fundamental theories – general relativity and the standard model of particle physics. You either have to overthrow quantum mechanics (good luck), or you have to use qubits. This might be somebody’s universe, maybe, but not ours. If you try to build the universe from classical bits, you won’t get quantum effects, so forget about this – it doesn’t work.
![we live in a simulation we live in a simulation](https://images.medicaldaily.com/sites/medicaldaily.com/files/2015/12/30/cheese.jpg)
Good - but already we’re deep in the realm of physics. It’s also a meaningless statement.Ī stricter way to speak of the computational universe is to make more precise what is meant by ‘computing.’ You could say, for example, that the universe is made of bits and an algorithm encodes an ordered time-series which is executed on these bits.
![we live in a simulation we live in a simulation](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/v3uXy1hGVAo/maxresdefault.jpg)
Then it’s tautologically true that we live in a computer simulation. It’s a bold claim about the laws of nature that however doesn’t pay any attention to what we know about the laws of nature.įirst, to get it out of the way, there’s a trivial way in which the simulation hypothesis is correct: You could just interpret the presently accepted theories to mean that our universe computes the laws of nature. The simulation hypothesis annoys me because it intrudes on the terrain of physicists. Proclaiming that “the programmer did it” doesn’t only not explain anything - it teleports us back to the age of mythology. After all, finding consistent explanations is what we get paid to do. Unfortunately it primarily speaks for their lacking knowledge of physics.Īmong physicists, the simulation hypothesis is not popular and that’s for a good reason – we know that it is difficult to find consistent explanations for our observations. The simulation hypothesis, as it’s called, enjoys a certain popularity among people who like to think of themselves as intellectual, believing it speaks for their mental flexibility. And one of our biggest existential risks is that the superintelligence running our simulation shuts it down. According to Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute, it is likely that we live in a computer simulation.