I'm surprised that the simulation hypothesis is even falsifiable. I mean, the guys above are supposed to be in a totally different level of existence from ours, how can we even start to think we can debug the simulation? Wouldn't that be already covered by beings way smarter than us?
It is hard to even disprove that we aren't a Boltzmann brain that hallucinated entire reality. Assuming the simulation is perfect(or at lest consistent) the only way to falsify it is to get some impossible estimates for required CPU/memory/storage. I think the whole "if simulations are possible, multiple ones will be created" falls apart when 1 second of running simulation requires several years of compute.
But some people seemingly like to pretend with enough "can do attitude" they can prove or disprove anything in a paper, no matter how unconvincing the line of reasoning.
I’ll play devil’s advocate. The beings that made our VMs are clearly superior. But the Halting theorem applies to them too. They too represent floating point numbers with finite precision. Does that mean we can catch them violating conservation laws? Maybe.
In any case, here’s some food for thought: ray tracing is undecidable [1]. If something is undecidable, it is for any form of computation, classical, quantum, or anything. Does this mean we can find some “glitches in the matrix”. It simply means such glitches are there (if we are in a similation). But they might be too infinitesimal for us to identify.
for the article: "the fundamental nature of reality operates in a way that no computer could ever simulate"
Yes, no computer in our universe, with our physical laws. In "a totally different level of existence", all bets are off regarding the fundamental nature of reality there. It could be utterly different. So, speculation is nonsensical, it's unfalifiable.
The article suggests this paper is based on quantum gravity. Which we don't have an accepted theory of. Based on this, I'm not going to read the rest of this clickbait.
Their argument is that quantum gravity can encode undecidable statements, and therefore cannot be completely computed. Of course take it with a grain of salt, since it relies on an incomplete and possibly inaccurate characterization of quantum gravity, something we don’t know anything about. Still, a cool idea.
Do you necessarily need to compute anything in order to perform a simulation? Suppose whenever some weird undecidable statement quantum gravity situation comes up inside the simulation, you pause it, recreate the scenario on a lab bench, and then copy the data into your simulation. You didn't compute what would happen, you don't even necessarily understand how it works, but as long as its the same quantum gravity stuff inside and out, the simulation can proceed faithfully. This makes some assumptions about locality I guess.
Of course the whole affair seems a little moot since you obviously only have to be accurate enough that it doesn't disrupt the ancestor simulation or whatever, but that's less fun to think about I suppose.
I think the distinction is a little semantic; the idea is that a simulation is anything that can be computed by Turing machine. So regardless of if we’re in a TM that’s being fed weird undecidable statements, the fact that they exist at all means at some level reality can’t be a TM. Contrast that with having undecidable processes that might go on forever, we could be in a TM and still have those.
Basically simulation here means “is a TM”, not “is nested”.
It seems like some of the dismissals are just summaries of basic decidability theory, which don’t attack the underlying argument of the paper:
> …the idea that reality can tell us if a statement about a theory is true, given that the theory is an accurate description of reality. So if there’s an accurate Turing complete theory of reality, and we see some process that’s supposed to encode a decision on an undecidable statement being resolved (I guess in a non-probabilistic way as well), then we can conclude that reality is deciding undecidable statements in some nontrivial way.
One of the stronger skeptics confidently claims that discrete phenomena doesn’t exist in quantum mechanics. I think there’s a bit of a cult of skepticism around this topic, which is usually fine, except when people haven’t read the paper or don’t have basic prerequisite knowledge before announcing their conclusions.
Yes, this is exactly my problem with claims about the 'real' universe if we are, in fact, in a simulation. It might be literally, programmatically, impossible for us to infer anything about it. The analogy I like to use is Pac-Man believing that the entire universe exists within the confines of a blue-walled maze.
From the ghosts perspective it is of prime importance to understand the behaviour of pacman. But it is influenced by the player's psychology which is in turn influenced by the surrounding world. Then: a sufficiently advanced model of pacman must include (at least implicitly) a description of the outside world.
“ Here’s a basic example using the statement, “This true statement is not provable.” If it were provable, it would be false, making logic inconsistent. If it’s not provable, then it’s true, but that makes any system trying to prove it incomplete”
Only if you assume the law of the excluded middle, right?
Statements aren’t just true or false, they can also be malformed or undefined.
That example is particularly fishy. The truthiness of a statement is not part of the statement itself, so any explicitly stated truth value is not inconsistent with truthiness, rather it is meaningless.
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But some people seemingly like to pretend with enough "can do attitude" they can prove or disprove anything in a paper, no matter how unconvincing the line of reasoning.
In any case, here’s some food for thought: ray tracing is undecidable [1]. If something is undecidable, it is for any form of computation, classical, quantum, or anything. Does this mean we can find some “glitches in the matrix”. It simply means such glitches are there (if we are in a similation). But they might be too infinitesimal for us to identify.
[1]https://users.cs.duke.edu/~reif/paper/tygar/raytracing.pdf
for the article: "the fundamental nature of reality operates in a way that no computer could ever simulate"
Yes, no computer in our universe, with our physical laws. In "a totally different level of existence", all bets are off regarding the fundamental nature of reality there. It could be utterly different. So, speculation is nonsensical, it's unfalifiable.
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And again, almost every statement in this paper is wrong, including the main claim
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Their argument is that quantum gravity can encode undecidable statements, and therefore cannot be completely computed. Of course take it with a grain of salt, since it relies on an incomplete and possibly inaccurate characterization of quantum gravity, something we don’t know anything about. Still, a cool idea.
Of course the whole affair seems a little moot since you obviously only have to be accurate enough that it doesn't disrupt the ancestor simulation or whatever, but that's less fun to think about I suppose.
Basically simulation here means “is a TM”, not “is nested”.
> …the idea that reality can tell us if a statement about a theory is true, given that the theory is an accurate description of reality. So if there’s an accurate Turing complete theory of reality, and we see some process that’s supposed to encode a decision on an undecidable statement being resolved (I guess in a non-probabilistic way as well), then we can conclude that reality is deciding undecidable statements in some nontrivial way.
One of the stronger skeptics confidently claims that discrete phenomena doesn’t exist in quantum mechanics. I think there’s a bit of a cult of skepticism around this topic, which is usually fine, except when people haven’t read the paper or don’t have basic prerequisite knowledge before announcing their conclusions.
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On the other hand, if it's just me, and everything including you is just simulated for my benefit, it's not too hard.
Because of course measurement reduces them to rational. That doesn't make them go away.
Only if you assume the law of the excluded middle, right?
Statements aren’t just true or false, they can also be malformed or undefined.
It’s like saying