Is the universe a simulation?

[Warren Stupidity]

Many mathematicians, when pressed, admit to being Platonists. The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” But if this is true, how do humans manage to access this hidden reality?

We don’t know. But one fanciful possibility is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics — not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used.

This may strike you as very unlikely. But the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not. If such simulations are possible in theory, he reasons, then eventually humans will create them — presumably many of them. If this is so, in time there will be many more simulated worlds than nonsimulated ones. Statistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than the real one.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/is-the-universe-a-simulation.html?_r=0&referrer=

[LuvNewcastle]

1. If so, I'd like to get a hold of this programmer and wring his fucking neck.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. Well you could just wait for the next release.

[VWolf]

2. Knock knock, Neo

The Matrix has you.

[hrmjustin]

3. Interesting theory.

[Warren Stupidity]

5. It is more of an amusement.

If we are in a simulation it really (pun intended) changes nothing for us sims.

[Kablooie]

6. Yes.

We all live in a simulation created by our minds.
We don't experience anything directly, it's all interpreted into sense signals that our brain reacts to.
Essentially in reality there is no light, sound or solidity.
They are all illusions we generate for ourselves.

[Warren Stupidity]

7. Well yes our minds do create a model.

But the sensory inputs that inform that model are reacting to an existent external reality. Despite manufacturing irregularities, for the most part our individual models appear to cross correlate very well.

[gtar100]

8. Hard to call it a simulation when pain is part of the experience.

Intellectually we can separate ourselves from our experiences but physical pain will remind us in a most unpleasant way that we are not separate, no matter how much we can compartmentalize it. The concept of a "simulation" isn't really a good way to describe this. If a programmer really coded this, then whatever it is that was created is really happening. It's running now as the real thing.

Simulation implies to me not real but a copy with no consequences. Sounds more like a psychopath's excuse that it all doesn't really matter. Does it matter? If not, why not just treat all other people and animals as tools and do whatever it takes to climb to the top of the food chain because you'll enjoy the benefits better, avoid a lot of suffering and in the end just disappear because it all doesn't matter... no real consequences.

On the other hand, you could take it that your actions do matter and you want to make this universe a better place by giving to it things like compassion and justice and fairness... love. But that may mean, and usually does mean, you're going to sacrifice something of this life to make it happen. It means saying it does really matter and this is no joke, no game, no simulation. If it were *just* a mathematical construct in some grand experiment, would it be worth all the effort and sacrifice?

[Warren Stupidity]

9. The simulation is assumed to be indistinguishable

from reality to the sims. You are assuming qualities to the simulation that they aren't. The interesting part of the article is the discussion of how a determined sim could test the simulation in order to discover if it was in fact a simulation.

[goldent]

10. This runs a little too close to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for me

But it could explain why physicists can't figure out what matter or gravity are - the author of the simulator is messing with them!

Is proof that we are in a simulation also proof of the existence of God?

[Warren Stupidity]

12. Really no, it is just an amusing philosophical

puzzle. If one accepts the assumptions, all of which appear reasonable, the conclusion that we are most likely in a sim is a logically sound deduction. However the assumptions are mostly not backed by evidence. We don't have evidence that the universe is populated by other intelligent life forms, even though that seems likely to be true. We don't have evidence of the existence of computational technology sufficient to create such a simulation, although again it is not a ridiculous assumption that such tech could exist. A bigger leap is the assumption that a sim could have conscious experiences, but I suspect that assumption, unlike the others, will be validated in the near future.

[goldent]

20. Did you check out the paper?

Those people can do hard sums!

[Warren Stupidity]

21. im familiar with the argument. it remains an amusement.

[demwing]

24. So says the SIM! /nt

[Warren Stupidity]

25. I could be a bot

[demwing]

27. Thats just

What a SIM would say; )

[Downwinder]

11. If so, then there is a God and the creationists are right.

Are we all computerized artificial life forms performing to some programmer's script?

[goldent]

13. Yep, it would explain everything.

But I don't think the fundamentalists would be happy with it.

[Warren Stupidity]

14. unfortunately "god" is likely an adolescent in his bedroom

and could get bored of the whole thing momentarily.

On edit: no, a simulation is not necessarily "scripted". In fact that level of determinism generally is exactly what a simulation attempts to avoid.

[Downwinder]

16. Responses to stimuli are scripted, even random responses.

Unless you have "players" directing responses.

[Warren Stupidity]

17. Not required.

Scripted responses are not a requirement, and calling a random response generator "scripted" is a misuse of the word "scripted". I'll program conscious free will into my sims, by your use of the word that would also be "scripted". The sims are autonomous agents responding using their internal mechanisms to input stimuli from the simulation.

[The_Commonist]

15. No.

The universe is a single cell in a larger organism.
And every cell is a universe.

[pokerfan]

18. That means...

That means that our whole solar system could be, like one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being. This is too much! That means one tiny atom in my fingernail could be—

—One little tiny universe!



Could l buy some pot from you?

[rug]

19. This makes Scientology look mainstream.

[Warren Stupidity]

22. nothing in the hypothesis violates physics or biology.

unlike for example virgin birth, resurrection, and transubstantiation.

Nothing in the hypothesis, except perhaps the deduced conclusion itself, is improbable.

[rug]

23. Platonic monads have, by definition, no basis in reality.

[Shivering Jemmy]

26. Counter argument

A simulation of the universe would have the same complexity as the actual universe. Therefore it would require a process time on the order of the age of the universe to run on a processor capable of managing the number of variables contained in the universe. If there is a one to one mapping of simulation time step to universal time step and simulation objects to universal objects then a completely faithful simulation would require an entire universe to run it only once. Therefore there can be only one such simulation, the universe itself. Therefore the probability of many universal simulations is exactly zero.

[Warren Stupidity]

28. Your assumptions are wrong.

But here have a look: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.1847v2

The assumption that simulation complexity equals universe complexity is not true. algorithms replace some of the complexity of both computation time and "bits". Further instead of 1-1 mapping, the "universe" is essentially "sampled", and it is this pixelated nature of the simulation that can be exploited by clever and determined sims to learn just what our reality is.

[Shivering Jemmy]

35. Unconvinced

I will read the article but I do not believe my assumptions are wrong but rather that my definition of what constitutes a simulated universe is different than the authors of the paper. Namely I require that the universe be simulated with perfect fidelity for it to be admitted to the class of a universal simulation.
Why?
Because I'm not sure how one escapes the fact that if the simulated universe is only an approximation of an actual realized universe, then the possibility that the idea of a "simulation" is itself an imperfect realization of a realized super concept that subjects in the simulation cannot conceive of. But if they don't have a mapping from the simulation level definition of "simulation" to the universal level than they will have no idea how to assign prior probabilities necessary to make the inferences that posit the universe to be a simulation.

But I will read the paper.

[mike_c]

29. and yet, every living thing runs a constant, real time simulation of the world...

...in their heads and calls it "reality." Unless they don't have heads, of course. But still. Everything we think we know about the world is constructed by an organ system with little or no direct experience of that world, using input data streams that are abstracted from the actual stimuli that they respond to. That is, our eyes send a coded bitstream of abstract information down the optic nerve to the visual cortex, not a movie or any other sort of visual representation. Likewise, our ears don't convey sound to the brain-- they send a similarly abstracted bitstream of data. Our whole experience of the world-- look around you, listen to your surroundings, feel the apparent solidity of your furniture-- all of it is constructed from input data and updated constantly in real time. We even continue to do it while we sleep.

Would you like the red pill, or the blue?

[Shivering Jemmy]

34. They run a short term simulation with imperfect fidelity and limited dynamic range

[mike_c]

36. oh, I understand your original point....

A system capable of modeling every bit of information in the universe would have to be at least as complex as every bit of information in the universe. So what system is that one running on? But that still leaves room for some fascinating conjecture. What if the universe is real (is that even a meaningful question, LOL?), but with information storage and processing, and complex organization as fundamental properties of matter, i.e. with the essential properties of a simulation, but under self organization. The universe as both software and hardware, simultaneously. Not much of a what-if, actually, since matter is demonstrably information dense.

[struggle4progress]

30. Frenkel seems to be a good mathematician, but this stuff is silly gibberish

What is the Beane, Davoudi and Savage paper really about, for example?

Well, those guys all do lattice simulations to find numerical solutions of QCD problems. That (in principle) enables experimentalists to get some idea what QCD predicts and to compare the predictions to results to actual measurements. But numerical simulations have numerical errors, like round-off and other effects of discretization. So if the experimentalist comes back and says, Well, my results differ from your simulations, a natural question will be: Is this a problem in QCD or a problem with the numerics? Therefore, a real expert in QCD simulation should also be able to say something about how the simulation might differ from the exact results we would obtain from QCD, if we could obtain exact results from QCD

Beane, Davoudi and Savage amuse themselves by imagining the universe itself consists of a lattice QCD simulations and conclude "The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice"

They're really just saying: for the foreseeable future, lattice GCD simulations will exhibit as artifacts some rotational symmetry breaking for high energy cosmic rays. In other words, even if GCD is correct, there can some rotational symmetry differences between lattice GCD predictions and experimental observations of high energy cosmic rays

[Warren Stupidity]

32. Is everything you don't understand "silly gibberish"?

I have a different reaction: "I wish I understood more of that".

The math and physics behind the simulation conjecture has been very well vetted. This is not new stuff. The paper is discussing extrapolation from existing simulations of a much smaller scale that are in use now in experimental physics and cosmology.

[struggle4progress]

33. I'd be interested in Frenkel's work on representation theory and algebraic geometry, but

the NYT piece you linked is garbage

The Beane, Davoudi and Savage paper might indeed be interesting, but as I discussed in #30, I think they were merely having a bit of fun with the way they expressed their research and results

As far as the value of Bostrum's "simulation" work, I'll let you and other readers decide for yourselves the value of his idea here, but it seems vacuously childish to me:

... at least one of the following three propositions must be true: (1) Almost all civilisations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature. (2) The fraction of technologically mature civilisations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero. (3) You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. Suppose first that the first proposition is false. Then a significant fraction of civilisations at our level of development eventually become technologically mature. Suppose, too, that the second proposition is false. Then a significant fraction of these civilisations run ancestor simulations. Therefore, if both one and two are false, there will be simulated minds like ours. If we work out the numbers, we find that there would be vastly many more simulated minds than non-simulated minds. We assume that technologically mature civilisations would have access to enormous amounts of computing power. So enormous, in fact, that by devoting even a tiny fraction to ancestor simulations, they would be able to implement billions of simulations, each containing as many people as have ever existed. In other words, almost all minds like yours would be simulated. Therefore, by a very weak principle of indifference, you would have to assume that you are probably one of these simulated minds rather than one of the ones that are not simulated. Hence, if you think that propositions one and two are both false, you should accept the third ...
Do we live in a computer simulation?

[Jim__]

37. Frenkel may just be playing with an approach toward understanding the nature of mathematical objects

What kinds of things are mathematical entities and theorems, that they are knowable in this way? Do they exist somewhere, a set of immaterial objects in the enchanted gardens of the Platonic world, waiting to be discovered? Or are they mere creations of the human mind?

Note that in the simulated universe, mathematical entities are not just creations of the simulated human mind, but are fundamental to the universe. Is mathematics more fundamental to our universe than physics? Or, is it merely a descriptive and exploratory tool? At the very least, consideration of the simulation could prove to be a fruitful mental stimulation.

[struggle4progress]

38. Well, there are difficult and productive questions in the philosophy of mathematics IMO

Platonism is indeed the stance that many classical mathematicians appear to take, though it's not clear to me how many are really "Platonists"

One problem is that it can be very difficult in many discussions, of all sorts of things beyond mathematics, to eradicate all Platonist appearances, without appearing also to annihilate the entire discussion

The problem shows up clearly in mathematics because mathematics, in some sense, involves lots of abstraction

What are the obvious alternatives to Platonism? There are a variety of them, but they all have their faults

One can become a logicist, and assume what is of interest is the logical structure. Then perhaps one also becomes a formalist, pushing little symbolic tokens according to certain rules

Or one can become a constructivist: nothing makes sense unless it reduces in principle to concrete constructions. And then perhaps one applies this view to the underlying logic and becomes an intuitionist or a strict finitist, at which point large areas of mathematics simply evaporate

One can become a recursive function theorist: nothing matters except what can be done by calculation. Taken seriously, this may lead back into strict finitism and an abandonment of much that seems to be true

Or one sees what one of these approaches tells us about another approach. A Platonist, for example, can ask what he might expect to see or not see if he were to adopt intuitionist views

I don't know what the universe is. I know I try to "understand" it through my mind, and that in the course of doing so I often have ideas that don't work. The philosophy may help me understand how to think better about the questions, but it can't answer the questions

But I'm not seeing anything helpful or even interesting in Frenkel's essay

[John1956PA]

31. The "Wolf 359" Episode of the "Outer Limits." Broadcast Date: 11-07-1964

Plot synopsis: A scientist recreates the conditions of a planet (Wolf 359) on a microscopic scale in his laboratory. The evolutionary process proceeds at an accelerated pace, and the threshold of nuclear weapons is at hand.

Ending narration:

There is a theory that Earth and sun and galaxy and all the known universes are only a dust mote on some policeman's uniform in some gigantic super-world. Couldn't we be under some super-microscope, right now?