this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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The argument goes that: a sufficiently technologically advanced society would run ancestor simulations. Those simulations may also run simulations. There's no ceiling on the number of nesting simulations. It's the height of conceit to think we're the top level when there are squillions of simulated universe.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2535
"there are squillions of simulated universe."
Huge assumption there lol, but I guess I see your point. If you assume simulations of this scope and quality are possible (again HUGE assumption), then your odds of being in one go up a lot, obviously.
Again though, at some point you have to hit actual, non simulated reality, and when everything seems to point towards that being the case for us, and absolutely nothing hints at a simulation, I don't see why we couldn't just be in that actual reality. I can't help but see that thought experiment as just an attempt to answer "the big question" in some way, even though in actuality it just moves it out of view.
It's Russell's teapot, impossible to disprove and theorically possible, but there's nothing backing it up besides fantastical assumptions. In that regard yeah, I think the comparison with God is warranted. The creators of our simulation, and especially the ones up above that are actually real would need such absurd levels of technology so far beyond our comprehension that it would be magic to us, and they would absolutely be our Gods.
I don't see much of a difference, it's kind of just a tech themed spin on it, with the same fallacies plaguing the whole concept, IMO. It's cool to think and write scifi about, but that's about it.
Yeah I don't like simulation theory because it assumes that technologically advanced societes would run simulations. It's not guaranteed at all, it's a weird assumption to make in the first place given that the best thing we have, which is VR, is not a simulation of any universe, it just tricks us (not the simulation itself) into thinking there is one.
I've always thought that reality is something that just is, because if this were a simulation then there must be a true reality outside this one, which begs the question why ours wouldn't be the one true reality.
We, or at least I, don't know why there is a reality in the first place and why we get to experience it. I think that reality is either 1. something that just is and life is just a random coincidence, which will later end and will never recover, 2. an almighty god just exists and created us for some purpose, or 3. there is a circle of life, people living out lives and being reborn, the universe living a life and being reborn, for reasons nobody can explain.
In conclusion, reality is weird because we are conditioned to always expect there to be something (how can there be literally nothing?), but also that something to be somewhere. We are on Earth, Earth is in our galaxy, our galaxy in a cluster and so on. Therefore we expect the universe to also be somewhere, created by something, and that brings out interesting theories.
It's not an assumption, it's a conclusion based on the premises laid out in the previous sentences.
Maximum speed, minimum length, light is only a particle when we're looking at it....
Like there are other things that definitely point away from it being a simulation (eg gravity waves). But there's not nothing pointing towards simulation.
Lmao why would gravity waves point away from the universe being a simulation? Also you put a comic strip as your source, you have less than zero credibility in anything.
Sorry what I meant is miniscule gravitational forces across billions of light years.
Because of the ridiculous cost of calculating the force of gravity between every water molecule on neptune and carbon atom on exoplanet xjwhatever. Gravity waves suggest this is actually happening.
What community are we in? I don't actually believe simulation theory... it's a concise explanation.
There is a cieling though. A computer made of matter of one universe cannot simulate an entire universe at the same speed. It's like installing a VM on a computer: the VM is always slower. Each layer would then become exponentially slower with a limit of 0 speed.
Having said that, combined with the fact that our Universe is 13B years old, it would make the age of our root universe exponentially larger than 13B years.
It could maybe feasible if we live in the first layers, but beyond that our root universe would have died from Heat death long ago.
The simulations could be imperfect simulations. So, each nested simulation would lose fidelity, simulate a smaller universe, or simulate a universe with less life. I think one hypothesis I've heard is that wave functions are an approximation, and the simulation only fully simulates particles when they are observed. Kinda like how games do level-of-detail optimizations when you are further away from objects.
Edit: Another possibility is that nothing says the simulation we're in started at the beginning of the universe, it could've just been given initial conditions and started yesterday for all we know.
I don't know if we are in a simulation, but I think it's plausible. I think a God (at least of the religions I know of) is implausible, but possible. I kinda like the many-worlds hypothesis better than simulation theory, but I guess they're not exclusive.
There are indeed ways you could make it work, but then you add more hypothesis and thus the cost of the simulation hypothesis increases.
Optimizations are indeed necessary, but just like the player is something special in a game, the observer would need to have a special status in the universe. I don't like this idea because the history of science always moved in the direction of making us the observers less and less special.
Moreover if life spreads in the universe, the simulation would encounter a scaling issue with an exponential growth of the numbers of observers.
I agree with you that in the end we just don't know, it's fun to push ideas to their limits!
Right but we don't know what the real universe's limitations are, and I'm geostationary to speak too authoritatively of the capabilities of an arbitrarily advanced civilization.
I don't think simulation theory is true. Eg calculating gravitational forces between everything in the universe would presumably be extraordinarily cost intensive, but essentially irrelevant (I mean like gravitational waves, not the moon).
Even though our knowledge of physics is incomplete, a VM running a faster simulation of its container would be a paradox. You could stack successive layers of reality that would go faster and faster reaching eventually Infinite processing speed, allowing the computer from the root layer to perform an Infinite amount of computation in a finite time.
You may say that this could be possible as our understanding of physics is lacking. And that's fine! But I think this paradox shows that the VM can only run slower than reality
Yes for anyone interested
https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
Nah fourth possibility, we get to space and have alien skin-suits with silicon chips in our brains to make complex calculations for vectors, directions, etc while we're moving around in space