Technology

I mean, simulation theory is kind of a joke itself. It’s a fun thought experiment, but ultimately it’s just solipsism repackaged.

In reality there’s no more evidence for it than there is for you being a butterfly dreaming it’s a man. And it seems to me that the only reason people take it at all seriously in the modern age is because Elon Musk said he believed it back when he had a good enough PR team that people thought he was worth listening to.

You don’t even need to reject the applicability of Gödel, because there’s no proof that our universe doesn’t include a bunch of undecidable things tucked away in the margins. Jupiter could be filled with complete nonsense for all we know.

When we dream we often believe it to be reality, despite that in retrospect we can identify clear contradictions with logic in those dreams.

A Matrix-like simulation doesn't have to be perfect. We are a bunch of dumb-dumbs who will suspend disbelief quite easily and dismiss those who claim to see a different truth as crazy.

⬆️ ⬆️ ⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️BABA Start holy fucking shit I can see time. It's the colour three.

I think the "what if we're all in a video game" take is a thought terminating cliche based solely on our own culture and experience.

I'm less certain that we're not a brane stretched across the cosmological horizon projected backwards in time by the collapse of a universe-sized supermassive black hole, and that the answer of who runs the simulation or who's making the hologram is no one. But mostly I think that because I cleave hard to the idea that any natural process that we hypothesize about should have a basis in an existing model. Black holes are something that we largely exist outside and can study and have a number of comparable features that make them ideal to test these thought experiments. There's obvious uncertainties, like whether our universe is spinning, whether it even needs to be spinning, and the inconclusiveness of whether galaxies have inherited spin from that or not, but I also don't buy for a second that the big bang doesn't have an origin or natural cause or that it could possibly be "just is."

Simulation theory is the long way around to creationism for atheists.

Yes but, also, no.

You already seem familiar but, for the uninitiated playing along at home, Wikipedia's entry for Simulation Theory is a pretty easy read. Quoting their synopsis of Bostrom's conjecture:

1. either such simulations are not created because of technological limitations or self-destruction;
2. advanced civilizations choose not to create them;
3. if advanced civilizations do create them, the number of simulations would far exceed base reality and we would therefore almost certainly be living in one.

it's certainly an interesting thought. I agree it shouldn't inform our ethics or disposition toward our lived experiences. That doesn't mean there's zero value in trying to find out though. Even if the only positive yield is that we develop better testing methods which still come up empty: that's still progress worth having. If it nets some additional benefit then so much the better.

I'd argue that satisfying curiosity is, in itself, and worthy pursuit so long as no harm is done.

That all still sets aside the more interesting question though. If such simulations are possible then are they something we're comfortable creating? If not, and we find one has been built, what should we do? Turn it off? Leave it alone? "Save" those created inside of it?

These aren't vapid questions. They strike at the heart of many important unresolved quandries. Are the simulated minds somehow less real than unsimulated ones? Does that question's answer necessarily impact those mind's right to agency, dignity, or self-determination?

The closer we get to being able to play god on a whim the more pressing I find such questions. That's not because I wring my hands and labor anxiously at truth or certainty for lack of better idols. It's because, whatever this is, we're all in it together and our choices today have an outsized impact on the choices others will have tomorrow. Developing a clearer view of what this is, and what we're capable of doing in it, affords future minds better opportunity to arrive at reasonable conclusions and decide how to live well.

I mean, it's a bunch of technical gobledygook from different fields in an Iranian journal dealing with holography claiming extraordinary results.

Reminds me of the Bogdanov affair.

What bothers me most is that they equate a model with reality.

Quantum gravity theory is our current working model that we use to describe our observations. It's not reality itself, and no scientist worth their money would claim that it is, because if it was, physics would be solved and it isn't.

That's how science works: We have observations, we build models to describe them, then we have more observations that don't fit the old models, so we build newer models that also describe the new observations. Since we aren't omnicient, there's always something we can't observe (yet) and what we can't observe we also can't describe.

“Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone.”

This, in fact, would fit quite well to an imperfect simulation that doesn't perfectly follow all the rules we made up when observing.

They also identity the particular junction that seems the most likely to be an artifact of simulation if we're in one.

A game like No Man's Sky generates billions of planets using procedural generation with a continuous seed function that gets converted into discrete voxels for tracking stateful interactions.

The researchers are claiming that the complexity of where our universe's seemingly continuous gravitational behaviors meet up with the behaviors of continuous probabilities converting to discrete values when being interacted with in stateful ways is incompatible with being simulated.

But completely overlook that said complexity itself may be the byproduct of simulation, in line with independent emerging approaches in how we are simulating worlds.

It’s possible yes, but the nice thing is that we know we are not merely talking about “advanced people with vastly superior technology” here. The proof implies that technology within our own universe would never be able to simulate our own universe, no matter how advanced or superior.

So if our universe is a “simulation” at least it wouldn’t be an algorithmic one that fits our understanding. Indeed we still cannot rule out that our universe exists within another, but such a universe would need a higher order reality with truths that are fundamentally beyond our understanding. Sure, you could call it a “simulation” still, but if it doesn’t fit our understanding of a simulation it might as well be called “God” or “spirituality”, because the truth is, we wouldn’t understand a thing of it, and we might as well acknowledge that.

The fundamental philosophical error here is assuming that all forms of simulation are computational or mathematical.

Uh... that's literally what a simulation is.

Counterexample: your dreams are a form of simulation (probably). So I can literally disprove this take in my sleep

But dreams aren't simulating reality as we observe it; they just kinda do their own thing. Your brain isn't consistently simulating quantum mechanics (or, hell, even simple things like clocks) while you're dreaming so this is a moot point.

From our perspective, sure. But we wouldn't know if it was stopped and started running again, or if it was reverted to a previous state.

So really The Matrix should have taken place in a two dimensional world.

Alternatively, I would also accept renaming the trilogy to The Array, The Matrix, and The Tensor.