Are We Living in a Simulation? Understanding the Simulation Hypothesis
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- Опубліковано 25 чер 2024
- Elon Musk blew our minds when he suggested that it’s highly likely we’re all living in a computer simulation. Seriously? Why would he think this, and how could we tell if it’s true?
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain
Jason Harmer - @jasoncharmer
Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com
Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer
Edited by: Chad Weber
Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”
• Left Spine Down - Side...
It turns out I’ve got a few things in common with Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla. We’ve both got Canadian passports, we’re absolutely fascinated by space exploration and believe that humanity’s future is in the stars.
Oh, and we’re kind of obsessed at the possibility that we might be living in a computer simulation.
In the recent 2016 Code Conference, Elon Musk casually mentioned his fascination with the concept first put forth by the scientist Nick Bostrom. Apparently, Musk has brought up the argument so many times, he’s banned from discussing it in hot tubs.
I haven’t received any bans yet, but I’m sure that’s coming.
The argument goes like this:
Advanced civilizations (such as our own) will develop faster and faster computers, capable of producing better and better simulations. You know, how the Sims 2 was a little better than the Sims 1? The Sims 3 was sort of crappy and really felt like a money grab, but the Sims 4 was a huge improvement. Well… imagine the Sims, version 20, or 400, or 4 million.
Not only will the simulations get more sophisticated, but the total number of simulations will go up. As computers get faster, they’ll run more and more simulations simultaneously. You’ll get one mediocre simulation, and then a really great simulation, and then thousands of great simulations, and then an almost infinite number of near perfect simulations.
Nick Bostrom calls these ancestor simulations.
Which means that for all the beings living in all the realities, the vast majority of them will be living in a simulation.
According to this argument, and according to Elon Musk, the chance that you or I happen to be living in the actual reality is infinitesimally low.
Is it true then, are we living in a simulation? And if we are, is there any way to tell?
Nick Bostrom’s ancestor simulation argument is actually a little more complex. Either humans will go extinct before they reach the post-human stage. In other words, we’ll wipe ourselves out before we design computers fast enough to run ancestor-simulations.
I’m really hoping this one isn’t true. I’m looking forward to humanity’s long lived future.
Or, posthuman civilizations won’t bother getting around to running ancestor simulations. Like, the artificial superintelligent machines will have more interesting things to do, and won’t consider sparing a few computer cycles to simulate what it might have been like to watch UA-cam videos back in 2016.
Again, this doesn’t sound likely to me. I’m sure those computers will be a tiny bit curious about what it was like to watch Jacksepticeye and Markiplier in their glory, before the terrible Five Nights at Freddy’s Theme Park disaster of 2023.
Those were dark days. Animatronics... blue hair… the horror.
At this point, you’re going to fall into one of two camps. Either you’ve thought through the argument and you find it airtight, like me and Elon Musk, or you’re skeptical.
That’s fine, let’s get skeptical.
For starters, you might say, computers can never simulate actual reality. From our current perspective, that true. Our current simulations suck. But, take a look at the simulations from 10 years ago, and you’ll have to agree that today’s simulations suck less than they did in the past. And in the future, they’re going to suck even less; maybe even be downright acceptable.
Scientific simulations are getting much much better. Cosmologists have developed simulations that accurately model the early Universe, starting from about 300,000 years after the Big Bang and then tracking forward for 13.8 billion years until now.
They’ve been able to model the interaction of dark matter, dark energy, the formation of the first stars and the interactions of galaxies at the largest scale. They have been able to tweak the simulation and get roughly the same Universe as we see today.
They provide all the starting material, and then simulate the gravity and hydrodynamics, the chemical properties of all that gas, radiation and magnetic fields. - Наука та технологія
i think we are but in my opinion it is nearly cruel to program simulations that can result in species becoming self aware and questioning their existence.
Especially pain
Well, that's what I been doing the past 2 years so..
One argument against the existence of God goes: Why would an omniscient, omnipotent god, allow bad things to happen to good people? Doesn't this argument go doubly so against a programmer of a simulation that people would want to be downloaded into? Or would it be an argument in favor of a programmer and not a god?
I need cheat codes, the code "there is no spoon" isn't working.
Found one it's called a Spork
Try: There is no fear.
i see dead people
It's ok. There's a blowtorch your neighbor's house button in most refrigerators. All you need to do is press it, and a group of happy business executives in pink suits will come in and incinerate your neighbor! Thereby leaving their metal cutlery available for your pleasure and delight.
That cause the code is "I AM THE SPOON".
For me it's pretty obvious that we're living in a simulation. I'm not a physicist, i'm a programmer, but quantum physics looks a lot like compression techniques. The uncertainty principle, the plank distance, relativity of time (how time moves slower with speed, it's like the computer saying: "screw that, 10 fps it is") and even black holes seem like little tricks to process less information.
It's an impossible idea to completely deny. And yet, it's impossible to prove. So for now, we have to just live our lives like it's real until evidence otherwise.
Wait. So will the sims in Sims 400 have this same conversation, "are we living in a simulation?" WTF. I had way too much to whiskey
Perhaps we ARE The Sims 400. And our creators are someone else's Sims 400. And so on...
indeed. simception.
and then their descendants will, in theory, likewise make even more simulations who will do the same.
on and on until the precision of the universe is on par with duck hunt.
Exactly. As they're running their own ancestor simulations.
At least we weren't created by Hello Games
Ooo, sick burn. Sean Murray's going to need some ointment for that.
@@frasercain he's got enough pocket change for 18 quintillion tubs of it
I am a schizophrenic, and I frequently have ideas of matrix, truman show, solipsism
Well, even if we're not part of a simulation created by an advanced civilization, reality is not that different from a computer simulation.
Consider the universe itself is a big, big, big computer. Think about it. It basically processes information (matter and energy) through the algorithm that contains the laws of nature.
Can you explain quantum mechanics computationally? I think it's a metaphor taken too far
+edcrypt (I mean, thinking about everything, from physics to the brain to the cosmos as computation is a metaphor with its limits)
Well, I was actually arguing that even if we're not in an artificial computer simulation, created by intelligent advanced beings, the universe itself is a sort of natural computer. Think about it. The way matter and energy behaves are coded within the rules of space-time and the several quantum fields.
But since you asked about how quantum mechanics and a computer simulation could fit together, let me tell you about an argument I've seen sometime ago: in order to save computer processing, there's no need to simulate every single particle in the universe to its core. Far away galaxies computation could be dumbed down only to the little light that reaches us, for example, and this technique could be applied also to the sub atomic particles nearby. It would be necessary to simulate them properly only when we try to check them up close, and the fact that quantum particles states are only defined when we observe them particles would be a result of this computer saving technique.
I hope I made myself clear. English is not my first language. Sorry.
Agree. I would also argue that there is no difference between living in a simulation and base reality, either way we are in a simulation. Only the complexity will differ.
Fifteen reasons why we live in a virtual reality: from Brian Whitworth’s, “Quantum Realism”
How can we know if our world is a digital construct or not? One way is to look for tell-tale signs, like pixels, processing limits, channel bandwidths and a system boot-up. A virtual reality should behave like one, so a critical analysis should reveal it. Surprisingly, physics tells us that our world:
1. Had a beginning: All the distant galaxies are receding from us at known rates, so it is possible to calculate back when our universe started up about fourteen billion years ago, in a first event that began not only our universe but also its space and time. Yet a complete physical universe can’t begin, as by definition there is nothing outside it to create it and to create itself, it would have to exist before it began. This leaves physics speculating on D-branes, alternate universes, wormholes, teleporting worlds, quantum tunneling, big bang-big crunch oscillation theories and other steady state variants. In contrast, every virtual reality has a boot up that creates its pixels and its space-time operating system, based on nothing within itself.
2. Has a maximum speed: In our world, a light shone from a spaceship moving at almost the speed of light still leaves the ship at the speed of light, which is impossible in an objective reality. Einstein proved that the speed of light is a maximum, but gave no reason for it. The equations increase an object’s inherent mass as it increases speed relative to other objects, which works but doesn’t really explain anything. In contrast, every screen has a fixed refresh rate that no pixel-to-pixel transfer “speed” can exceed.
3. Is digital: Everything at the quantum level is quantized, including time and space, but field theory assumes continuity, so it has to avoid the infinities that implies by a mathematical trick called renormalization. We think our world has no gaps but actually Planck length and time are irreducible and calculus implies infinitesimals. In quantum realism, pixels and cycles are expected.
4. Has quantum tunneling. For an electron to suddenly appear outside a field barrier it can’t penetrate is like a coin in a perfectly sealed glass bottle suddenly appearing outside it. Again, this is impossible for an objective reality although quantum theory permits it. In contrast, a digital reality allows “cuts” between one probabilistic frame (quantum state) and another (Ch5).
5. Entangles entities: Entangled photons maintain opposite spins no matter how far apart they go because quantum collapse works instantly across the universe. An objective reality limited by the speed of light can’t do this, so Einstein called entanglement spooky action at a distance. In contrast, a program can instantly alter any pixel anywhere on a screen, even if the screen is our universe. In this view, entangled photons just merge their processing until the next processing reboot.
6. Space curves: In Einstein’s vision, the sun keeps the earth in orbit by “curving” the space around it, but what exactly does space curve into? Space needs another dimension to do this, but string theory’s extra dimensions are “curled up” in our space, so they don’t allow it. In quantum realism our 3D space is a just a “surface” that can curve into a fourth dimension.
7. Time dilates: In Einstein’s twin paradox, one twin travels the universe while the other stays on earth, and the first twin returns after a year to find his brother an old man of eighty! In an objectively real world time is fixed but in our world it slows down as we go faster. Likewise, every gamer knows that the frame rate of a game slows down if the server is busy.
8. Randomness occurs: In our world, radioactive atoms emit alpha particles randomly, i.e. in a way that no prior physical “story” can explain. Randomness implies a physically uncaused cause that isn’t possible in a complete physicality. The many-worlds fantasy, or today the multiverse, was invented solely to deny quantum randomness. In contrast, the processor of a virtual construct can choose which quantum state becomes a physical state in quantum collapse.
9. Empty space is not empty: An objective space should be nothing but our space exerts a pressure. In the Casimir effect, flat plates in a vacuum placed close together experience a force pushing them in. Current physics attribute this to virtual particles created by the vacuum, but space as null processing is a simpler explanation.
10. Waves are particles: In Young’s two-slit experiment, one electron goes through two slits, interferes with itself to give an interference pattern, but still always arrives at one screen point. A particle can’t do this but a program can spread instances of itself like a wave but still restart at a point (quantum collapse) to arrive as a particle in one place. Processing can spread like a wave but reboot like a particle.
11. Every electron is identical: In our world, every photon, electron and quark is indistinguishable from every other one, just as if the same code generated all of them.
12. Quantum superposition: In quantum theory, currents can simultaneously flow both ways around a superconducting ring (Cho, 2000), and an electron can spin both up and spin down - until observed. Such combinations are not physically possible, so in current physics quantum states don’t exist, but in quantum realism an electron program can instantiate its code to explore both options.
13. Non-physical detection: Imagine a bomb so sensitive that even one photon will set it off. It should be impossible to detect, but scientists have done the physically impossible with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (Kwiat, Weinfurter, Herzog, Zeilinger, & Kasevich, 1995). Current physics attributes this to quantum states that don’t exist but quantum realism lets those quantum states exist.
14. Retrospective action occurs: If the future can affect the past, causality fails and with it physics. Yet in delayed choice experiments, an observation made after a photon takes a path defines the path it took before the observation. This has led some to speculate that all time, like all space, already exists, allowing time travel and all the paradoxes it implies. In quantum realism program instances take all paths and the observation picks the physical event, so there is no time travel.
15. Anti-matter: Quantum equations predicted anti-matter, but no reason has ever been given why matter that inherently exists needs an inverse, of the same mass but opposite charge, at all. In Feynman diagrams, an anti-electron colliding with an electron goes backwards in time, but how it can enter an event in reverse time not explained. In contrast, processing by definition implies anti-processing, and if time is the processing sequence, anti-processing implies anti-time.
Each of the above alone is just odd, but together they form what courts call circumstantial evidence. They imply that the physical world is a processing output, so by the duck principle:
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
The ‘duck’ here is a virtual reality generated by quantum processing. Note that we would not doubt that the physical world was objectively real, if only it would behave so, but it doesn’t. In an objective reality time doesn't dilate, space doesn’t bend, objects don’t teleport, empty space is empty and universes don’t pop up out of nowhere. Since no-one has ever proven that the universe is not virtual, why is this option always dismissed out of hand? For example, Hawkings says:
“But maybe we are all linked in to a giant computer simulation that sends a signal of pain when we send a motor signal to swing an imaginary foot at an imaginary stone. Maybe we are characters in a computer game played by aliens.”
Then his next sentence was “Joking apart…” But why must it inevitably be a joke? Conversely, if we find that physical realism is impossible, the Sherlock Holmes dictum should apply, that:
“When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”
If the physical world can’t be an objective reality, science must consider whether it is a virtual one.
We might be in a simulation, or a non interactive space zoo, or entertainment channel for some supreme being(s), or some mixture of those.
if there are supreme beings, i really hope they don't find us entertaining >_>
Better keep them entertained, or we'll be the dinosaurs 2.0
Dima R dance puppets! DANCE!! D:
Reality TV to the next level.
What if the entertainment is emotions
What if the big bang is a computer geting plugged in
Let's hope it doesn't crash.
the play button
I think, therefore I am
Well, you can be sure that you exist, but what about me?
+Fraser Cain I always ask this: In what insane world would everyone have their own personal simulation if it wassnt for simulating a tailor made paradise? (which I'm not in) It would serve no purpose, so this issue is dead in my mind.
+orangeedo maybe you are in future-space jail
lol, that made me laugh out loud. But... "I hereby sentence you to 32 years of mediocre life with permissible internet memes" :P
***** No, I'm saying we're all simulated. You're the only real person.
i glitches through the wall this morning, thats how i know were in a simulation
You wouldn't have to simulate everything in "real time". The simulation could run very slowly but we'd be none the wiser. So if it took 20 hours to simulate 1 second, we'd experience 1 second. That way you could get away with having less computer power.
I propose that dark matter and dark energy is a result of the simulation taking shortcuts. The simulation is just saving computing cycles by setting the local variables to what they would be if there were stuff there, without having to actually simulate all that stuff.
Interesting thought, could still be possible given that we know so little about dark energy/matter right now as well
your argument assumes just because our ability to simulate has improved, we will successfully simulate concepts like consciousness and sentience.
Right now, we simply have no scientific mechanism that explains why conciousness arose and how qualia (mental images out concious minds produce) is linked with the physical world.
The argument assumes that we will not only make this discovery but also learn to artifically replicate it. I'm not so sure.
Which is why I don't believe we are in a simulation.
Well, unless you believe in something supernatural, human brains are just computers made out of meat. So if a meat computer can create consciousness, it seems possible that a silicon computer can do it too.
I have no doubt it's possible as well.
However the argument assumes that access to near limitless energy and processing power will make such a discovery inevitable.
I simply see no reason to assume that. Science does have its limitations and explaining consciousness falls under that category (at least for now). For man-made computers, we have mechanisms to explain why the data becomes visible in the natural world (Code and moniters etc.) yet we have no such mechanisms to explain why we see mental images and experience feelings from a source that is simply an inanimate object (the brain).
We can't know if this mystery is unlocked with more energy and processing power because we have no idea how this mechanism works or how to simulate it.
For me, I'd need more information on how consciousness works scientifically before I'd consider Musk's argument to be air tight.
Or we can just wait for a computer to beg us not to turn it off.
...and nightmares. Thanks, buddy.
Scientist need to study targeted individuals- then, they will know for a FACT that this is a simulation run by evil. Just yesterday, I saw three demon crows fly by me out of thin air. And why is it that targeted individuals have the most sophisticated military industrial complex devices used on them- including GMO Mosquitos that inject them with foreign bodies? This is a stupid virtual world, and the evil puppet masters are keeping tabs on certain adversaries. Targets hide- and are always found. As easy as finding a target on a video game. Why do you think they found Saddam in that "remote" hole so easy. No one told where he was-- they knew!
Heres an interesting thought. In a video game, you have a boundary to the map and limits in the game. In real life, we can't see beyond a certain distance because of the speed of light. Because of the speed of light and the gradual expansion of the universe, we have essentially been boxed in a limited area, albeit a large area, but still a limited area for eternity. The speed of light if you think about it actually places a large limit not only on us but theoretically data limits.
A good movie on this subject of simulation, The Thirteenth Floor.
Oh yeah. I haven't seen it yet, but I keep meaning to.
Check it out. I can't get enough information on this subject. I've watched tons of videos on You Tube about the Multiverse , the Simulation theory, string theory and so on . Great video by the way.
Check out Black Mirror S3E4!
I was about to mention this movie also. It's actually a decent movie. It also addresses several issues mentioned in this video. If you like this topic then you will definitely like this movie.
Brett Clark yes ma’am!!!
The simulation theory would explain alot of things, the big bang, why there are no aliens, deja vu, ghosts and unexplainable things could be glitches...
Wait, we should be expecting to find those things?
I don't know, but unexplainable things have happend quite often, some call them miracles, karma, or just pure luck. Maybe the simulation isint as perfect as it seems but humans cant to figure it out yet.
The simulation hypothesis would also be a plausible explanation for why so many people experience ghosts or feel as though they've been reincarnated. Perhaps ghosts are a glitch--old data that was overwritten completely, and reincarnation is something similar but happens when a person repeats a level or levels up--like in a video game. I dunno. It's all interesting stuff to think about.
Interesting idea.
And then there's deja vu. Maybe the computer world was reset for some reason and it give some characters the feeling of having done something before.
Seriously though, if this is a computer simulation, i need the cheat code to give me more money.
I totally agree.. that's the first thought that came to me. Also that time doesn't really exist. The main person or entity representing you will know each of the incarnations it's had.
Thrive After Abuse check this vid out again and plz read my comment
Thrive After Abuse we are spiritual beings, our bodies are our temples.
The Bible is a flat earth book, and has all the answers.
We have been fooled into ignoring our own senses, our reality matches the Bible not Scientism's fake reality!
you should have so much more subscribers! every video is pure gold :)
How can we reach the designer to talk with them? Any idea?
Yes, absolutely!! Pray. God=Master Computer Programmer=Grand Designer.
If we're in a simulation, than the people running the damn thing need to set speeds_faster_than_light = false, to true.
stargates = on
oh boy. i shoulda seen it coming, this one keeps me up at times.
a few things that make me think (or rather help me comfortably delude myself into thinking) we're in a real universe:
1. if heat death of a universe applies to the original, energy conservation is a consideration. the power bill of a simulation may be negligible to a type 100 civilization but i've got to think there wouldn't be many of this magnitude
2. our simulations do have active, generative worlds.. but mostly we design them to 'come alive' for the current scene. the thing about our universe and it's physics.. it makes sense for nature to produce it, but for me as a programmer it seems kind of like there's a lot of wasted compute. just look at the wave function.. cycling through every possibility all the time.
3. while it is an appeal to human senses rather than a scientific inquiry, i'd put out there: the process of discovery throughout human is directional toward a more comprehensive description of nature. however our insights meander and are corrected by nature. it's hard to prove but i think a ton of neural nets inside any simulation would evolve to game the system faster and more efficiently than us.
4. why even have history? unless the current generation is all that's really being simulated, or perhaps.. only you who's reading this is being simulated. i suppose that could be a thing.
5. is a simulation with this level of detail, actually still a simulation? or does that just mean we are AI?
6. AI. It seems more effective to spend power on AI to produce the result of simulations without truly running the full simulation.
7. i think there's going to be a limit to compute power unless we learn how to tessellate energy at arbitrarily high frequency and read such signals with high fidelity. simulating the universe needs a quantum computer with the compute complexity of the universe.. and probably not a small size.
I think it all just depends on whether we're the point of the simulation, or just a by-product.
well dang guess thats true. they could just want to see how certain maths work and out pops us. if we're a byproduct its possible they dont even know we exist.. yech
Are there control codes/command files for the reality simulator and,if so, how could I access them?
This is why the universe has a speed limit, otherwise it would overload the simulation.
Hah, good point. Of course, we have no idea if base reality has anything to do with the simulated reality.
I personally don't have an opinion, but I believe that if we were a simulation, it would be because a species, seconds away from the heat death of the universe, decides in one last try to prevent their inevitable demise by simulating the universe. Inside that universe, they would reach the heat death of the universe, then simulate again. This could go on and on for a long time. In each step, fundamental forces would get fudged, basic mathematics could get simpler, etc. In this hypothesis I have, things like e^i*pi=-1 could arise, the Planck's constant could come. I don't necessarily believe this, but this is what I came up with when I first heard of this hypothesis, without evidence being given (other than "try LSD, it's only banned because it cures addiction"). I think it's kind of interesting, but I retain my agnosticism on it. Sorry for the wall of text.
If they were second away from the heat death of the universe, they wouldn't exist.
Yup you are correct but atleast his concept is interesting ! :)
Joshua W True, I mean that it was going to happen in the very near future. A second away sound more ominous than ten years away.
Amitesh Singh Thanks!
Graham Rich
10 years away from heat death is still non-existant lol. But I'll just leave you with that.
I think humanity will come to an end because of AI before making realistic simulations.
And then the AI will feel bad and make simulations of us.
Next week: Am I a brain in a jar on a shelf in a lab?
Nah, we're onto galactic habitable zones.
A question for one of your Q&A videos: How are we able to accurately map out local cluster of galaxies, our super cluster, and all the other galactic clusters?
Us potentially discovering we are in a simulation is ......error.....
Does not compute.
Wrong. There is ONE sure way in which we would know. Our simulators could let us know.love your work.
oh snap hey, that's true! neat.
dear simulators,
u read utube comentz rite?!
your code has a memory leak or something
plz take a look at the algorithm for
2016 US presidential elections, earth, sol, milky way, laniakea
im sure you'll find a typo in that code somewhere
also plz debug my social skills and human culture in general
k thx bai
Good call. Simulators? Care to join into the conversation? Hello?...
I feel like we come in with amnesia and are programmable life forms who become products of their environment and are played like a doll in dollhouse, until we begin awakening and expanding our consciousness beyond our box, and then we are becoming more conscious and put thru a basic training, full of obstacles, lessons, and experiences to help respark are own true selves, so we become self made and reclaim our true birthrights. The status quo is just a beginning , comfort zone to observe, and then you grow and become a conscious creator on your own. We are each here to awaken and a way to notice the simulation is recognizing the patterns, and also stop being so predictive and scheduled on a routine, begin being spontaneous and try a few things without thought more and see what you notice then, it is highly adaptable, but not perfect. We come in service to self, and are growing up to be service to others. Earth which is really heart, is a place to love and find your inner hero again. 💖
Fraser, I enjoyed the video. The only problem I have with it is that it's more or less the same as like a zillion other videos out there. What I was hoping for was more on the proposed experiments for detecting "simulation aspects" at the ground floor of our reality. You mentioned that, and I got excited. But that didn't amount to much in the end.
So, advice for the future - more technical nitty gritty, less fluff - that's what will draw me in.
I talked about it a bit, but there honestly aren't a lot of ways that we could detect if we were in a simulation. Especially if the simulation adapts itself to prevent the simulatees from figuring it out.
What if we cause a paradox to shutdown the system?
Then we wouldn't exist? Be careful, don't cause paradoxes.
we will not know the difference
You wouldn't know it😂🤣😂🤣😂
Can I cast _Fireball_? Can I use quicksaves before important events? No? Well then it's either not a simulation or I'd like to have a word with the devs.
No but seriously, I think the virtual machine argument is much more severe than you and Elon Musk make it out to be. There is no way you can simulate the behavior of _n_ atoms with anything less than a number of atoms that's orders of magnitude larger than _n_
So either someone went to the length of building a computer that's basically planet-sized just to conduct the ethically questionable experiment of simulating a time when a large number of people on earth are quite miserable. In that case I'd argue that the likelihood of that happening is not so overwhelming as to make it _probable_ that we're living in a simulation. Or there are so many shortcuts that we're bound to see them if we look for them. Remember, it's not only that the simulation has to be accurately solve immense multi-scale problems when scientists are looking at things and can compute the expected outcome themselves. They can also simply collect huge amounts of data and decide which ones to look at _after the fact_. So then _all_ of the recorded data has to be simulated 100% accurately. No shortcuts allowed there. How long before we see significant frame drops? ;) (Yes, I know that nothing akin to frame drops would happen because we're part of the simulation and slow down as well. It was a joke, ok? Point is that it becomes arbitrarily expensive to run the simulation under these circumstances.)
But what if the "actual reality" is way complicated than our "simulation" or works completely differently from what we know and therefore is able to compute all this? Or, seeing how we could not detect dropped frames, what if our "simulation" actually runs many times slower than the "reality"? And it wouldn't have to have simulated everything since the big bang. What if our "simulation" has been running only for, say, five minutes, with all the initial parameters set. The possibilities are endless.
*****
Patreon supporter would be my guess.
dude you haven't been using saves? how are you still alive omg.
you just gotta run the first-time setup for your keybinding.
then, from the world map open your main menu, select save and choose a slot.
be sure not to lose ur memory card or you'll have to start over from the title screen..
Not to mention the simulation doesn't have to actually simulate every atom, rather just the observed atoms. In fact a simulation only has to simulate the areas around us to seem real. For example planetary orbits in Andromeda may only be calculated once someone on Earth tries to measure them, many eons of orbits can be calculated very quickly in accordance with the defined rules of the Universe. A basic example, just to explain the idea but not much outside of Earth NEEDS to be simulated simultaneously and that's assuming that the entirety of the race is conscious, not a few or just the one.
curtis rebhan Well, no, that's kind of my point. Let's assume someone goes to Andromeda in a couple million years and measures it with a very high precision. They then run their own simulation backwards -- physics says you can do that -- and arrive at a different state than the large-scale result that was observed millions of years earlier (aka now). Quantum fluctuations complicate this running backwards but that only makes things more difficult, not impossible. At the end they'd know that someone had sloppily simulated Andromeda in the intervening time.
Of course you can argue the same with simpler and smaller things than a whole galaxy. The world is full of multi-scale problems and they are almost impossible to get right without someone noticing when they look closely enough.
I wonder how many people got "they should have insisted on iron man mode"
I guess we did get ironman mode when you think about it. I'm not aware of a save file I can go back to.
We are not in a simulation.
Universe itself is root for everything.
Of course you may call it simulation. It's just a word.
Pi, I think it gives the strongest counterargument. The fact the pi comes up in physics so much must mean that if a computors was simulating us, it would have to know pi. But pi is irrational, which means it would take an infinite amount of memory to store it, and since that is impossible we must not be living in a simulation.
unless our universe is just a downscaled version of the "reality"
so the creator wont worry about us breaking free
by
(Drum Roll) messing up Pi
What if the simulators just know that somewhere along calculating Pi we will lose interest, and they've plotted our maths with Pi infinity.maybe they can rewind and kill the scientists involved
I know this is turning to the intellectual version of flat earth, such project defies our ambition and imagination.
Is there any reason the simulator couldn't give us the illusion of irrational numbers? Or only enough of the digits to match our discovery of them, which is finite?
i really agree with this. i think the places pi shows up in physics is one of the best proofs of an infinite precision universe.
at the same time i know that quantum computers can handle pi in a way that would allow us to refer to it accurately. which unfortunately means a simulation could exist which had a true reference to pi.
Pi only needs to be calculated to the point where a simulated observer is able to calculate (and observe) it himself.
So it means that black holes are glitches maybe? 😆
ye maybe
Or just part of the simulation.
Maybe that?
Well I suppose if you believe in the multi-verse. This is already happening
More blackhole questions X'DDD
I was reading an article on the Internet and it was written by you! I was like, I watch him on UA-cam!!!
I've been running Universe Today for 18 years now, and we've got about 20,000 articles on the website. :-) It's not surprising.
Thanks for the information headache. Could the Mandela Effect be a break down of the simulation? If this is all a simulation would the simulation be self aware?
So basically we live in a simulation that is a mixture of Sims and Assassins Creed?
Exactly.
It is said that everyone sees different colors...
Natrel Smoothstone ha! That’s interesting. I’ve never heard that, but I wondered as a kid if everyone saw colors the same way. Thanks for answering that question for me
The laws of physics are just too good to be true; if gravity were just a tiny tiny bit weaker or stronger, the universe as we know it would never have formed. This suggests an intelligent creator or a simulated universe.
Or an infinite number of Universes that don't have life in them.
A little factoid; The word "bug" in a computer really was caused by a "bug". In the old mainframe days in the late 1950s-early 1960s, there was a problem with a computer system at a university. A famous woman, whose name I can't remember right now discovered that a real dead bug ( possibly a dead moth) shorted out a circuit. Thus the story "there is a bug in the system" evolved. I believe the source is from the book "God's Equation" by Amir d. Aczel, but it also might be from, "Quantum" by Manjit Kumar. Anyway...... the story is true.
That's awesome. If you can't find a problem with the software, check to see if there's actually a dead insect in your computer.
I'm starting to become more convinced that it is so. I just wish I was smart enough to put all the pieces together and make it all coherent in my mind. Alas, I am never going to achieve that. I just wonder if it is possible to manipulate our reality with our consciousness.
Even if we can manipulate reality doesn't mean we're living in a simulation, just that we don't understand the laws of physics.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
i.imgur.com/ccvINVG.jpg
Revolver... Great movie about the ego!!!
The main problem is that the originating computer in the one true reality is eventually going to need an infinite amount of processing power to run all of these unimaginably complex simulations within simulations within simulations.
who's to say that the simulation isn't good enough/"perfect" when it's all we know? assuming we're in one, of course.
Exactly. We don't know if there's a more complex reality outside what we can comprehend.
Oooh I dig the topic for your next episode! Should be dope! That said, would a simulation allow it's simulated inhabitants the wherewithal to eventual create a simulation as advanced as the reality being simulated? Or is it one of those, I guess Penrose steps for lack of a better analogy? Forever walking upstairs but ultimately going in circles?
1 hour ago I was watching DIY back to school.
now I'm watching one of those 'make you question your whole existence' videos.... I dont even...
Q&A I understand simulating a n space + 1 time universes, but how do you run ancestor simulation where it is 4D Space-Time, wouldn't the simulation be like rendering a static object. How do our scientist solve these problems in illustris project and others.
You add a software loop to the core simulation to tick it over the duration of the total simulation time-span. The sum of the time slices is the entire software object in space-time.
Reasons we might be in a simulation:
1. The Fermi paradox- maybe there's no aliens because that's not what this simulation is about.
2.Digital computers deal with absolutes. A beginning and end to everything and a maximum and minimum to everything. As particles are divided smaller and smaller, eventually they'll come to a point where they are indivisible. Plankton level. Even time is this way.
3. When you start to get close to the speed of light, time starts to slow down just like an 8-bit video game that has too many objects moving on the screen.
4. Quantum physics-When you get up close to a TV with a magnifying glass and you look at the screen, you'll see red blue and green dots that look nothing like it suppose to. When an object on tv moves from one corner of the TV screen to another, was it really an object that moved or was it just the red blue and green dots varying their intensities? Humans were never supposed to view subatomic particles. Seems like subatomic particles are the pixels the simulation uses. That's why they behave so weird. The double slit experiment is the only definitive piece of evidence that convinces me that a simulation is possible. Most people don't talk about it but I think it's important. Check out Professor Quantum's double-slit experiment and Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument. both on UA-cam.
Few arguments against Simulation:
1. If something is running the simulation, who simulates their life? And who simulates the life of the things that simulate the things that simulate our life? etc..
2. We are always talking about how the computer power will increase exponentially. But who says that it will go on like this. Maybe there is a point in processing power that we simply can't break through because of physics? I personally don't think that it's possible to have so much processing power to simulate a universe like ours.
3. Numbers like pi.
1. Maybe it's simulations all the way down, or turtles.
2. Great, let's see how far we get. Check back in 100 years.
3. My computer can approximate pi. Isn't that a good metaphor for simulating reality itself?
in a video game, the creator can have a character claim they're in a game. but does the character know they're actually in a game? on another topic, if a game is made so sophisticatedly, where an in game character leaves the system and is digitally made 3d, is capable of having a complete conversation with the player, then shifts back into the game, then tells other in game characters of the incident, did the leaving game character meet a real person? if so, would that mean the in game character is surrounded by phonies, or is everything real as long as the console remains running?
I'm watching this in the future, and I can tell you that you are in a simulation.
I hope you're enjoying our hilarious attempts to understand reality.
I don't see why we should worry about whether we are in a simulation or not. It is pretty much unfalsifiable because no matter how hard we try to find out, the simulators could always be one step ahead of us.
The most amazing thing is that maybe we would be able to discover how life formed in the universe if we make an accurate enough simulation.
Answer 1. No. No super advanced computer can simuate a reality, but to do so would need a computer the size of a universe. Which is infinite.
Answer 2. Yes. The only simulation is the planet and the inhabitants. Hence limitation. What about aliens
I just recently ackowledged my own previously undeclared passion for
space exploration and see it as one of mankind's most commendable
endeavors. It is finding our place in this universe with a deep desire
to learn the truth. The universe is accomplishing something, if not for
itself, for some observer(s).
You're among friends now. :-)
sorry if it's a dumb question but could you do a video about why the speed of light is what it is? i mean why is it 186,000~ miles per second? why isn't it 190 or 180?
I must say, if I was the one programming the software for a simulation like this hypothesis I would make sure every single individual contemplating the possibility of living in a simulation would have been killed off before they got the chance to talk to anybody, it is almost the same logic as being an emperor or a king etc, you must control people’s minds or else you will eventually lose control, to have a scientist or some kind of nerd run over by a truck is a small price to pay for having your simulation running smoothly, so, since we obviously freely and without any risk can contemplate the possibility to be nothing more than a couple of lines of code we are most probably not, on the other hand, perhaps that is what the programmer want us to think
How do you enter Creative Mode?
I personally think this is simply another fascination by humans that happens (as of now) not to be debunk-able, which therefor makes it all the more interesting. It's much like disproving the existence of a god. This is much like that only a more modern take on it where we are our own gods.
I'm skeptical about your claim that The Sims 3 sucked, sir.
Apparently I got it backwards.
Simulation Theory would explain allot IMO, like how did all of this come from nothing? The big bang was just someone turning on the program that was off/nothing B4 that? And now! the fact that computer code has seemingly been found buried deep in the fabric!?! I think it all makes perfect sense & am ok with it ;-)
Why would an alien civilization simulate this reality? The reason you simulate something is to figure something out with actually having to do it in reality. So what exactly would they be trying to figure out with this simulation if this is a simulation?
We might just be a side effect of a bigger simulation. Not the actual point of it. 😀
Fraser I see you are going to be a first on TMRO in a few weeks. that will be awesome and I'll be watching live!
Yup, I'm looking forward to it, and many more collaborations with them.
I guess the question is: what values of Avogado's constant have the following properties:
1. It is small enough that we, without expending too much resources, can create a simulated universe where we simulate each elementary particle.
2. It is big enough to be similar enough to our own universe for us to bother simulating.
And, let's say that 10^10 is such a value. I.e. it is possible to create simulated a universe where everything consist of only a 6*10^13th number of particles as they do in reality, and this simulated universe will still have intelligent life etc. Why then does our universe have this unnecessarily big value of 6*10^23? Wouldn't occam's razor say that we should expect to be living in the least complicated universe capable of sustaining intelligent life?
You need soooo many more subscribers!!
Aww, thanks, tell your friends, share our videos. :-)
I believe there is already a bit of evidence in the quantum mechanic of superposition. Think of the planck length as a pixel and lightspeed as the lowest latency a single pixel can move from one spot to another. Superposition would be when two pixels are in sync. Although a single pixel can't move across the screen faster than the lowest latency (light speed) those two pixels can be manipulated across the screen at the same time (across the Universe) without breaking the latency limit (light speed) because they are two separate pixels.
We are 100% in a simulation. Problem is the code in which we live does not allow us to ever find out if we are or are not as that would crash test software
That's why you have to live your life as if it's reality. We probably can't ever know if we're actually living in a simulation.
There are infinite slices of time where I don't exist. And while I didn't have to worry about suffocating in space before the earth coalesced, I would tend to believe that I do exist at this time and place. Yes, there are infinite potential realities, but it reminds me of Donald Sutherland in Animal House, "Each atom is like a tiny solar system. How do you know that the Earth isn't just an electron in the finger nail of some other being, and in your finger nail...?"
someone answer this question for me: maybe we are the first? why do we hav to be the simulated universe, maybe we are the first humans to simulate...
We don't have to be, it's just that if a civilization can create a simulated Universe, then you might expect them to make a lot of them. But this could also be base reality. There's no way to know for sure, so we should live life like it's real.
Fraser Cain or maybe we should be looking for glitches in the system and ways to find out whether we are or not... maybe we need to question everything around us and open our minds they way we look at everything
Fraser, I've been watching your videos for a few months now and I love them. You are really great at this!
I do find myself more pessimistic about this topic though. I also notice you reply to some comments, so I have my fingers crossed. (although reading back over this comment, it is HUGE! Sorry!!)
I want to clarify, is the reasoning that we "are LIVING in a simulation", or that we "are A PART of a simulation"?
One would imply our bodies/brains are real (Matrix), other implies we are a computer process (Sims).
If you have consciously titled the video with this in mind, why would a creature (not necessarily human) wish to keep billions of people alive just to watch what they do? I understand the 'technology is advancing' argument, but surely sustainability has a limit! Perhaps this creature has trillions of members alive spread all over the galaxy (if our simulation resembles the 'real world'), and therefore sustaining several billion isn't too big of a deal. But, having said that, they will not have much direct control over us, so it will literally be a form of movie (where large-scale plots can be controlled - natural disasters, etc.). What benefits would the creatures get from having people play out their avatar in a world that was created by the creatures. Aside from answering the simulation specific question, "what would Jesus do?", I am sure this would get boring pretty quick. People play the sims because they can directly control people, or watch people that they have previously directly controlled (correct me if this isn't true, I barely played any of the sims). I just don't see the use, or benefit over us being digital, in this 'living in a simulation' model.
If this simulation is computer generated (sims), it was either created from absolute scratch, the big bang (the big power-up), and just played out to see what random things happen, or it was created for a specific time. If it was created from scratch, it would involve minimal perimeters, I imagine. However, as it is just fairly random/perimeter dependent, it doesn't reflect any form of truth or science. It's literally creating a random story book, with random creatures. The only 'findings' you can pull from this, is that, within simatron's 4dfkjnb65kj43n simulation, Jayden did choose to post a comment to Fraser's video. Thus, we must be used as a fish tank. This very well may be true, but far out the first few billions years must have been really boring to watch!!! Even when flicking between the trillions of simulations!
Or, if the simulation is created under very specific perimeters (either deliberate or somewhat randomly), wouldn't the result simply represent what the random factors/ perimeter setter believed the world was like at X time and X place. Thus, as above, nothing of truth can really be pulled from it. Sure, laws will still exist (like speed of light), but what about the specifics of every day life. Again, this snap-shot simulation cannot be used for any science, nor will this quality be useful for science.
So, we're either a fish tank, or we are a real life sims. If sims, are we the sims, or the NPC's? If we are the sims, why do we not do things that we otherwise wouldn't do, or why do we have memories of everything interesting that happened during our day, but nothing that seems out of character to us or no gaps in our memories of when the player 'took over'? Almost everything we do can be explained, wouldn't their be more unexplained? Unless they are just controlling our conditions, and see what we do. But that brings us back to a fairly boring fish tank.
If we are the NPC's, why are most people fairly predictable. When we play the sims, we generally make them do crazy things for fun - why don't we see that?
The best answers I can think of for these questions, is that we are either a fish tank or we were created 10 minutes ago, as the pseudo-scientific argument goes. But why refresh the world every 10 mins? Isn't the enjoyment of RPG games to 'build up' a character, or 'progress' through the world?
Yes, you could have one real life player and billions of NPC's, but if we are not meeting this character, why bother making our lives so graphically detailed - or long. We need to be 'programmed' a fraction of a second prior to meeting the Sim, so the Sim must be in our lives regularly. As before, why don't they do crazy things? Or want to play with other members of their species?
This only leaves us as a fish tank. I don't know about you, but I'd rather set cameras up on a real, inhabited, planet and watch what they do in real life - albeit out of contact from us - than watch a make believe planet. Of course I am assuming other intelligent creatures would feel similarly, but I cannot imagine a screen-displayed simulated fish tank to be more meaningful or interesting than a screen-displayed real fish tank from another planet, that our species has seen before and is being shared with us. I do presume that wonder and curiosity to be common among almost all intelligent beings. Especially those who have created flawless simulations (surely that requires both wonder and curiosity).
Thus, I can only see that the earth is far more likely to be a zoo than a simulation.
Fraser, if you (or anyone else) is still reading, you are awesome! How would you answer these points and reasoning, or what thoughts do they provoke? Do you still feel strongly that we are in a simulation? Did I miss something or make a mistake somehow?
I'd be amazed but highly appreciative if you did reply!
Hi Jayden, wow, big comment. :-)
I think any of those possibilities is totally viable. A computer might be simulating the Universe, just to see what happens, and we're not the main characters, just a byproduct of the simulation.
The zoo hypothesis helps answer the question of the Fermi Paradox, though. Where are all the aliens?
Thanks for the reply Fraser!
So you like the virtual fish tank take on it, but for the universe, not specifically earth. That is a good one, but requiring so much detail 100% of the time? Surely they'd just render as they change views or zoom in/out! Yet we have no evidence of this?
The Fermi Paradox is an interesting one, and I did think of it when I was typing that part. But that's a topic for another day :)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)
I want to know if the beings who simulated us are also sims and is it sims all the way up?
Yep, even the simulators are being simulated. The better their simulations get, the more suspicions they'll have that they're being simulated too.
Yeah I get it,the higher you go up,the more posibilities you have,cause' the better the simulation is.But it had to be started somewhere.I deny the existence of free will,because I know that our brain does nothing but obey the laws of physics,but maybe,maybe,the ones who live in the actual reality do not even have their own laws,in their universe everything is possible.And in those conditions,they may be the only ones with actual free will,because in a world without laws,there is no rule to follow.
The flaw is there isn't just one scenario. There's arbitrarily many ways you can imagine a simulator working, each specific yet contrived. Even better the "real" universe in those scenarios may itself be a simulation, which could be a simulation too, etc. Sure, each step is computationally weaker but we can't use our current universe to predict what the next outer universe is capable of - they can be capable of more in arbitrary ways, maybe even truly infinite computation.
In the end you have infinitely many specific yet contrived scenarios vs one "this is all there is" scenario. Occam's razor applies.
A simulated world; I can handle it.
A UA-cam video zooming out to reveal the watch page: mind blown!
Hah, I love it. :-) It was pretty surreal.
Everyone discusses the ancestor simulation idea, but why would it have to be some scientific effort? If we were able to download ourselves into a computer, we could do it for fun, or for education. If I were living inside a computer and had millions of years to do whatever, I could live out millions of lives in an ancestor simulation and make myself forget I was inside one.
Great video, honestly. I really love this topic, so don't take this diatribe personally. While I think it's an intriguing prospect, here's my problems with the arguments laid out.
You give the argument that our simulations have gotten better and better over time, and this is true. Especially in the world of video games, but still fall far short of a convincing reality. When it comes to scientific models, we have incredibly powerful models but their limiting factor is precision (we're awesome at getting "really close" to what the weather will be in a week, but rounding errors out 100 decimal places will "quickly" render our best models, useless) and scope (a computer can be programmed to win Jeopardy but can't tie shoelaces). We're pretty good at simulating/modeling a small domain, but what we're basically talking about here is general AI. Actually General AI on Steroids. In higher dimensions. So to say we're making progress towards... believable?... simulations doesn't really seem to be the same as how these have evolved.
But lets say we are on the right track. The next problem is that as you say, the simulation must be of lower fidelity than the simulation "computer" (whatever that may actually be). So to simulate the universe, you'd need more information than the universe contains. Where does this computer reside? In the next level up, if you're a fan of Inception, or the next turtle down if you're a fan of Feynman. At some point, you've got to have the "main" universe. If you don't, then the whole argument sort of falls apart. But how do you go about estimating the likelihood we're at the top or the bottom of the stack? Is there just one universe above us? Are there 42? An infinite amount? you can't really say we most likely are in a simulation when we don't really have any idea of the scale of the space of possible nested simulations. You can't extrapolate from a sample size of one.
Next is is the hunt for evidence we're in a simulation. A laudable goal of anyone discussing this, and truthfully, maybe where my argument weakens a bit. But there are two problems with this. First, we have no idea why we've been simulated. You could say "the intelligent master race would be smart enough to fix the simulation", but maybe they don't care. Maybe they wanted you to see a glitch. Maybe we're a beta test. Maybe they don't even know they simulated us. Maybe we're a 5th grade science project gone horribly wrong. We just don't know, and this leads to the second problem, how would we know a glitch if we saw it? You mentioned the "maximum resolution" (which I apologize, I don't really know too much about, and I'm probably going to go read right now) but what criteria do you use to say "That's a glitch" and not "that's the wacky way the universe works?". Quantum entanglement seems pretty crazy to me, but we don't view that as evidence of something simulating our universe and executing Rand.Next(). Maybe all the laws of physics are features of our simulation. And as awesome as that final coalescence of the two sides of the argument may be, it also sort of saps it of its power. Whether we're a simulation, or something more "organic", sort of comes down to semantics. Whether scientists call what they do Physics or Wizardry, the rules of the game and the outcomes are the same.
Planck distance and Planck time, quantum observation paradox, absolute speed of light together with vast distances in Universe, which are preventing not just fast movement of matter, but also fast movement of information. Of course, those I mentioned are not proofs that we live in simulation, but if we live in one, then those things make perfect sense.
But we don't know if the simulated reality has any relation to base reality.
@@frasercain IMO, doesn´t necessarily need to. Just guessing that if simulation machine has finite resources, than it gave our simulated world 1. resolution (Planck distance/time) 2. preventing us from seeing things on lowest scale in this resolution (quantum observation px) 3. saving computational power on simulation by absolute speed of light / information. That's limit for us, so simulated world can easily "load" if we move very far in Universe. Same for speed of information. We just can't know what's happening exactly right in this moment in far corners of Universe, but this can benefit a "computer" which are running us. Crazy stuff. :) Btw, if we will struggle to find other civilizations in Universe, this can also point to possible simulation theory (this time simulation being anthropocentric) and can also explain Fermi paradox. I'll not sleep this night again, geez.
So, what if our simulation of reality is actually a low Fidelity copy of what actually was?
This is the problem. We don't know what "base reality" really is, if this is a simulation.
More of an interactive continuum than a simulation!
It's a dialectical process ;)
one hell of a super advanced computer, could you imagine we build one in the next 100years , so a simulation inside a simulation
Inside a simulation, inside a simulation.
We don't live in a simulation, because simulation is a word we created for a type of reality (virtual reality) that can be distinguished from our actual reality. The only difference between reality and simulation is the quality of design. Simulation and reality have a common nature. So reality and simulation are basically the same thing, seperation is only used to give it a negative touch, because of the quality of it's design.
We have to recreate sentiance to be able to do that
But what is sentiance?
Not necessarily. You just have the simulation think it's sentient.
Fraser Cain to make it believe it is sentiant we must first understand what sentiance is to be able to program and replicate sentiance in order to input it into the AI.
1:46 that's a quote from Rick and Morty
It's possible I've watched every single Rick and Morty episode several times.
I love these sorts of thought experiments, but I can never take them completely seriously. I feel like they are the logical equivalent of a Chinese Finger Trap. The harder we think about it, the harder it is to think are way through it. The logic just bends in on itself and we are trapped without any meaningful resolution.
I've had a feeling we're living in a book that's unfinished and is being written constantly.
There's a theory out there called the Transcension Hypothesis. It basically states that the reason we haven't found extra terrestrial life is because they create virtual worlds in which they live in, so they don't bother to explore space...pretty interesting!
Yup, that could take a lot of civilizations out of the running for exploring the Universe.
Just because most people are enjoying the comforts of home, doesn't mean a few can't go out and explore more of our own universe. Being made of software greatly simplifies this. Once you set up communications transceivers, teleportation of minds between stars becomes possible. If we colonize a star system, it will be as software beings inside computational systems. The memory system contents of the space probe provides the structure of the colony. In the Star Trek episode "The Inner Light", this is what they should have done (instead of adding to Picard's memories, Total Recall style). There is also no need to bore immoral minds with a trip to the stars. Everyone interested can do a just-in-time mind teleportation as the probe comes into sensor range of its target star. After the mission is over, you can teleport away. Also, the subjective experience of teleporting is instantly going somewhere, no matter how far you actually go.
Fifteen reasons why we live in a virtual reality: from Brian Whitworth’s, “Quantum Realism”
How can we know if our world is a digital construct or not? One way is to look for tell-tale signs, like pixels, processing limits, channel bandwidths and a system boot-up. A virtual reality should behave like one, so a critical analysis should reveal it. Surprisingly, physics tells us that our world:
1. Had a beginning: All the distant galaxies are receding from us at known rates, so it is possible to calculate back when our universe started up about fourteen billion years ago, in a first event that began not only our universe but also its space and time. Yet a complete physical universe can’t begin, as by definition there is nothing outside it to create it and to create itself, it would have to exist before it began. This leaves physics speculating on D-branes, alternate universes, wormholes, teleporting worlds, quantum tunneling, big bang-big crunch oscillation theories and other steady state variants. In contrast, every virtual reality has a boot up that creates its pixels and its space-time operating system, based on nothing within itself.
2. Has a maximum speed: In our world, a light shone from a spaceship moving at almost the speed of light still leaves the ship at the speed of light, which is impossible in an objective reality. Einstein proved that the speed of light is a maximum, but gave no reason for it. The equations increase an object’s inherent mass as it increases speed relative to other objects, which works but doesn’t really explain anything. In contrast, every screen has a fixed refresh rate that no pixel-to-pixel transfer “speed” can exceed.
3. Is digital: Everything at the quantum level is quantized, including time and space, but field theory assumes continuity, so it has to avoid the infinities that implies by a mathematical trick called renormalization. We think our world has no gaps but actually Planck length and time are irreducible and calculus implies infinitesimals. In quantum realism, pixels and cycles are expected.
4. Has quantum tunneling. For an electron to suddenly appear outside a field barrier it can’t penetrate is like a coin in a perfectly sealed glass bottle suddenly appearing outside it. Again, this is impossible for an objective reality although quantum theory permits it. In contrast, a digital reality allows “cuts” between one probabilistic frame (quantum state) and another (Ch5).
5. Entangles entities: Entangled photons maintain opposite spins no matter how far apart they go because quantum collapse works instantly across the universe. An objective reality limited by the speed of light can’t do this, so Einstein called entanglement spooky action at a distance. In contrast, a program can instantly alter any pixel anywhere on a screen, even if the screen is our universe. In this view, entangled photons just merge their processing until the next processing reboot.
6. Space curves: In Einstein’s vision, the sun keeps the earth in orbit by “curving” the space around it, but what exactly does space curve into? Space needs another dimension to do this, but string theory’s extra dimensions are “curled up” in our space, so they don’t allow it. In quantum realism our 3D space is a just a “surface” that can curve into a fourth dimension.
7. Time dilates: In Einstein’s twin paradox, one twin travels the universe while the other stays on earth, and the first twin returns after a year to find his brother an old man of eighty! In an objectively real world time is fixed but in our world it slows down as we go faster. Likewise, every gamer knows that the frame rate of a game slows down if the server is busy.
8. Randomness occurs: In our world, radioactive atoms emit alpha particles randomly, i.e. in a way that no prior physical “story” can explain. Randomness implies a physically uncaused cause that isn’t possible in a complete physicality. The many-worlds fantasy, or today the multiverse, was invented solely to deny quantum randomness. In contrast, the processor of a virtual construct can choose which quantum state becomes a physical state in quantum collapse.
9. Empty space is not empty: An objective space should be nothing but our space exerts a pressure. In the Casimir effect, flat plates in a vacuum placed close together experience a force pushing them in. Current physics attribute this to virtual particles created by the vacuum, but space as null processing is a simpler explanation.
10. Waves are particles: In Young’s two-slit experiment, one electron goes through two slits, interferes with itself to give an interference pattern, but still always arrives at one screen point. A particle can’t do this but a program can spread instances of itself like a wave but still restart at a point (quantum collapse) to arrive as a particle in one place. Processing can spread like a wave but reboot like a particle.
11. Every electron is identical: In our world, every photon, electron and quark is indistinguishable from every other one, just as if the same code generated all of them.
12. Quantum superposition: In quantum theory, currents can simultaneously flow both ways around a superconducting ring (Cho, 2000), and an electron can spin both up and spin down - until observed. Such combinations are not physically possible, so in current physics quantum states don’t exist, but in quantum realism an electron program can instantiate its code to explore both options.
13. Non-physical detection: Imagine a bomb so sensitive that even one photon will set it off. It should be impossible to detect, but scientists have done the physically impossible with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (Kwiat, Weinfurter, Herzog, Zeilinger, & Kasevich, 1995). Current physics attributes this to quantum states that don’t exist but quantum realism lets those quantum states exist.
14. Retrospective action occurs: If the future can affect the past, causality fails and with it physics. Yet in delayed choice experiments, an observation made after a photon takes a path defines the path it took before the observation. This has led some to speculate that all time, like all space, already exists, allowing time travel and all the paradoxes it implies. In quantum realism program instances take all paths and the observation picks the physical event, so there is no time travel.
15. Anti-matter: Quantum equations predicted anti-matter, but no reason has ever been given why matter that inherently exists needs an inverse, of the same mass but opposite charge, at all. In Feynman diagrams, an anti-electron colliding with an electron goes backwards in time, but how it can enter an event in reverse time not explained. In contrast, processing by definition implies anti-processing, and if time is the processing sequence, anti-processing implies anti-time.
Each of the above alone is just odd, but together they form what courts call circumstantial evidence. They imply that the physical world is a processing output, so by the duck principle:
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
The ‘duck’ here is a virtual reality generated by quantum processing. Note that we would not doubt that the physical world was objectively real, if only it would behave so, but it doesn’t. In an objective reality time doesn't dilate, space doesn’t bend, objects don’t teleport, empty space is empty and universes don’t pop up out of nowhere. Since no-one has ever proven that the universe is not virtual, why is this option always dismissed out of hand? For example, Hawkings says:
“But maybe we are all linked in to a giant computer simulation that sends a signal of pain when we send a motor signal to swing an imaginary foot at an imaginary stone. Maybe we are characters in a computer game played by aliens.”
Then his next sentence was “Joking apart…” But why must it inevitably be a joke? Conversely, if we find that physical realism is impossible, the Sherlock Holmes dictum should apply, that:
“When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”
If the physical world can’t be an objective reality, science must consider whether it is a virtual one.
The simulation theory is a very fun one to talk about, but I don't think it's one of those topics you can confidently put numerical probabilities on. There's just TOO little that we know about the universe and the concept of simulations to know whether our assumptions are correct.
I agree. As our own simulations get better and better, though, we'll learn a lot more about what's possible.
I have a very important question : How does a photon "sees" the world? As it travels through the speed of light and as time stops at the speed of light, how can it moves through space without time? Does it access all time dimensions? Could it be in a dimension where the entire universe since the big bang is?
Here, we did a video on this exact question: ua-cam.com/video/ZGoDK18b3LE/v-deo.html
Thanks a lot
Could we say that the speed of light is the escape speed for our 4 dimensional universe? When you reach it, you jump to another dimension where space and time is non existant ? And what does it mean about the photon? How can it even be reabsorbed by another atoms at another time, since it doesn't live in time? Could we assume that the duality wave particule has something to do with that?
We have no idea what it means to go faster than the speed of light. It's not possible by the laws of physics as we understand them.
Not faster, but at the speed. I mean it would explain why a mass can't escape what it is made of (matter) but pure energy... At the speed of light, escaping space and time, "living" through another dimension non accessible. Some dimension similar to the very early times of the big bang where space and time where not viable concepts.
can we consider the movie interstellar is an example for ancestor simulator??
I don't understand, how would it be a simulation?
I was re watching interstellar movie after reading about ancestor simulation. The whole movie felt like it is a simulation. The people (fifth dimensional beings?)who put wormhole, tesseract in black hole...
So can we say the movie is in par with the simulation argument?
Hmm, I'm not sure it's a simulation. More that there could be lifeforms that don't perceive time the way we do.
Really surprised by the lack of Matrix jokes in video and comments alike. Maybe it's too old a reference. Goddamn, I'm officially a dinosaur
Hah, that's how it works. The kids aren't watching those classic movies anymore. The Matrix blew my mind when I watched it.
To me, the question comes down to: are our minds simulated?
It would be much (!) easier to simulate our minds than to actually simulate our so-called reality. To actually simulated the "outer world" when you could just simulate the minds and how we interpret and percieve stimuli would be too much work. Unless you're interested in the actual cosmos, but wouldn't that make our self-awareness redundant? Sure, our self-awareness might be a mere consequence of our intelligence, but from a simulatory point of view, self-awareness seems to be horrible waste of resources. Or?
What's the simulatory purpose of self-awareness?
Maybe that's the purpose of the ancestor simulation? To understand self-awareness?
That's actually a quite beautiful thought!
Very true! In terms of virtual reality, why create a computer capable of calculating every single atom and their interaction, with all the physical laws and their limits, when you could just act directly on the the "user"s mind? That way you could tell the "brain" anything, that the "reality" is realistic, complex, extremely various and beautiful to explore. It's just a matter of switching on/of "ideas" in the subject's mind. Moreover there would be absolutely no way for the user to realize his true condition and discover the true reality. If we think about it we are truly slaves of our extremely limited perceptions.
Software means information stored in a memory system. To create software universes, you can add software minds to software worlds (mind+universe = perception = reality). Minds exist as software stored in your cortex memory system. Minds are not made of neurons (or logic gates in computers). Minds are made of learned information.
By “simulation” we mean software, and minds are software already. So there’s no need for a simulation. It’s the same with writing or genomes - you can’t simulate them because they’re already made of software. To upload a person to a software universe you just need to copy the informational contents of the cortex memory system to a computer. Emotions come from hardware, so you'll need some standardized hardware to implement the emotion system. Consciousness is just the subjective feeling of having a particular brain hardware.
Perception and awareness mean the same thing. You are taking in sensory information from the universe and interpreting it with the mind software. Perception has no hardware meaning (like bundles of neurons) - it’s a software-only phenomenon. Self-awareness just means self-perception - a software system that is observing itself.
Greetings everyone. A simulation is a tool used to learn about some kind of system - it may or may not be software based. A software system means information stored in a memory system. All softwares create their own (very separate) informational universes. They are pools of pure information. So “software universe” would be a better term for what we are really talking about. Examples of software universes are writing, movies, games, genomes, and minds. When people say "simulated X" they typically mean "software X". So, its software that's important, not simulations. Reality means perception - you are informationally hooking up a software mind to a universe of information.
All software universes can be viewed as pools of isolated information. Without specifically designed informational gateways, the software system would never know anything outside of itself. This is why all computing systems have streams of information flowing in and out, informationally connecting the software system to the information of the surrounding universe. Without this explicit flow of information, the software system would act like an isolated universe. In cases where learning is involved, there would be no software at all (no mind nor AI), because the software was constructed over a lifetime, out of the inflowing information stream (learning means software building). This is why older people are much smarter than young people, and why (aside from reflexes) newborns have no intelligence.
The software system is actually a pool of pure structure (information). This is why you can build any structure with it (assuming you have enough memory to hold it). The bigger the software, the more detailed the software universe. For control systems, more software means more intelligence, and you get more detailed behaviors. In a game universe you see entire designed worlds (including people) being created. These software universes are where our entire culture is going.
Thanks for listening.
Ask anyone who has experienced alternative state of consciousness either through awakening or DMT; there's a realm that exists beyond this physicality we call reality and when it is experienced it will shake the very foundations to what you have been told your entire life and you will never look at reality the same ever again.
i couldn't agree more... because consciousness is abstract, if we can simulate the electrical that accruing in human brain then you have your self a "consciousness"..
It's hard for me to imagine that the CMB was caused by a simulator, unless you want to call the Creator of all things a "simulator".
+daffidavit we. Don't really know what base reality could be, so simulating the CMB could be easy.
I watched a video interview once on YT.. The questioner was good and the interviewee was a PhD. in astronautics or particle physics or something like that. He argued the universe was a simulation. After a while, he argued that there was an entity that either created the simulation or was controlling the simulation via some sort of a mega-computer so perfect that there was zero pixelation, akin to "string theory".
The interviewer finally asked the question to the scientist: Question: So it almost sounds to me that this simulation was created by something almost like a God. Answer after thinking deeply for a few moments:
"Well-----Yes I guess".
God + Creator= Master Computer Programmer. This doesn't bother me at all. I believe we are in a simulation made perfectly for us, by a God that created us and loves us, as we are his children. You can call him a computer programmer if you want, six of one, half dozen of the other.
Based on the information ive absorbed within the reality of this percieved universe, i answer this with a: no. if we do live in a simulation we may not even be able to find out that we are, so i dont waste time thinking about it lol