Simulation theory is more or less a kind of modern creation myth, and creation myths are based around its societies current level of understanding of the world. In ancient times people explained the worlds actions and existence through gods and imaginative myths. When the scientific revolution happened people explained the universe in terms of immutable laws and cosmic logic. Now we are in the computational revolution, thus some people explain the worlds existence through computers. All untestable and unfalsifiable explanations for the nature of reality are as good as any other, so pick your poison and enjoy!
Simulation theory comes from solipsism, and it’s not that modern. According to Wikipedia it originated in Greece in 483–375 BC.
Every human is solipsist until about 2 years old, when they start to realize that the world is not revolving around them. It is called “crisis of 2 year old”, or “terrible twos”. Some people don’t get to go through this at 2, especially the children of billionaires, who have no reasons to think that they are not the center of the universe.
The danger of this approach is that you start treating other people as NPCs, dehumanizing them. When others are not real people, you don’t have any problem with robbing, raping or murdering them. See the “Westworld” series for more deep analysis.
You cannot disprove this hypothesis and it’s cool. Quite literally nothing can support it - if we live in a simulation, every part of the universe makes sense for us because we have no reference frame for “real” physics.
It’s just something fun to think about but ultimately it doesn’t matter, you have no way to find out.
At this point does it matter? If it turns out tomorrow we have proof we live in a simulation, it doesn’t make my life any less real. I still gotta go to working tomorrow lol.
Yea it really wouldn’t matter other than having religious dogma change or about what happens after death.
It’s more of an interesting thought experiment about the seemingly minuscule chances of life forming and us being/experiencing life.
It gives comfort for people who don’t adhere to any of the major religions but still need to feel like there is a hidden meaning to existence and something bigger than the universe.
- The render distance (observable universe)
- The pixel size (Planck units)
- And the update rate (‘speed of light’ = speed of information being updated)
Calling Planck units “pixels” is extremely reductive. This is just naively applying video game concepts to physics with a poor understanding of both.
I took an entire graduate course in QM and a quantized Universe does, in fact, seem pixelated. That’s exactly how I explain it to people. There’s simply a finite level to how closely you can zoom in. Space, time, and energy are all quantized, and maybe even gravity though we haven’t figured that one out yet.
Why can’t you cut a Planck unit in half?
The why is not really known. But we simply cannot. There is not line where one particle ends and another particle begins. The best you can do is give a probability distribution, but some of the particles will be in places where they’re not really supposed to be. This is actually what drives the fusion processes in stars. The nuclei don’t actually have enough kinetic energy to fuse–but she is the protons in one hydrogen nucleus just magically appear in the nucleus of a neighboring hydrogen atom.
You literally can’t have distances that are smaller than these probability distributions.
Wikipedia’s description quotes Bernard Carr and Steven Giddings as saying that any attempt to investigate the possible existence of shorter distances [via particle accelerator] would result in black holes rather than smaller objects
Why, though?
You have probably heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? It’s the one about how you can’t both know the position and the speed of an electron or photon, because the observation itself changes the outcome of the other.
Something similar exists for length. If we try to observe things at Plancks length, we introduce issues about whether the thing or space even exists there. The observation of infinitely small space requires infinitely large energy in this space causing a black hole or something. I’m not really sure I get it.
There are several good YouTubes on it, but this video sort of made sense to me: https://youtu.be/snp-GvNgUt4
this was one of the better descriptions for why nothing smaller than that can be measured, but I’m aware that my pop-sci joke post is starting to annoy actual students of physics - so who knows if this discussion stays up.
A finite level to how close you can zoom in is very different from pixels. Pixels (or voxels in this case) are indivisible elements of a larger whole that exist along an evenly spaced grid. The universe doesn’t have a Cartesian coordinate system measured in Planck lengths
Pixels (or voxels in this case) are indivisible elements of a larger whole that exist along an evenly spaced grid.
That’s exactly what a Planck unit of spacetime is. And yes, the Universe–like a screen–is divided into an evenly-spaced grid any time you choose a coordinate system.
I took an entire graduate course in QM and a quantized Universe does, in fact, seem pixelated. That’s exactly how I explain it to people. There’s simply a finite level to how closely you can zoom in.
isn’t the most recent explanation on planck’s length saying that we simply can’t observe further down, but it is hypothesised that smaller lengths actually exist?
Just searched a bit, looking into how the length came to be and found this from wikipedia. https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length “The Planck length does not have any precise physical significance, and it is a common misconception that it is the inherent pixel size of the universe.” What I found elsewhere was that it’s the only length one can get out of the universal constans of G, c and h. So as far as I know with my limited know how is that the planck length is useful or more convenient than other lengths in quantum physics.
isn’t the most recent explanation on planck’s length saying that we simply can’t observe further down
No. The math has the indivisibility built right into it, and our countless observations agree. There’s no smaller length, because then the probability distributions between different particles start overlapping. There’s a limit to how closely you can zoom in, and we can describe that limit mathematically. We don’t know why it’s there, but it’s certainly there.
can you post a source for this?
I can’t post a source for all of QM, no. I can share my class notes with you, but you might as well look into it. There are lots of quality online classes about it. You can go digging for info about Planck’s constant, that’s where it’s “built into” the math.
Here’s a good explanation from PBS Spacetime https://youtu.be/tQSbms5MDvY
but he’s not saying that the Planck’s length is the pixel size of our universe.
There is a misconception that the universe is fundamentally divided into Planck-sized pixels, that nothing can be smaller than the Planck length, that things move through space by progressing one Planck length every Planck time. Judging by the ultimate source, a cursory search of reddit questions, the misconception is fairly common. There is nothing in established physics that says this is the case, nothing in general relativity or quantum mechanics pointing to it. I have an idea as to where the misconception might arise, that I can’t really back up but I will state anyway. I think that when people learn that the energy states of electrons in an atom are quantized, and that Planck’s constant is involved, a leap is made towards the pixel fallacy. I remember in my early teens reading about the Planck time in National Geographic, and hearing about Planck’s constant in highschool physics or chemistry, and thinking they were the same. As I mentioned earlier, just because units are “natural” it doesn’t mean they are “fundamental,” due to the choice of constants used to define the units. The simplest reason that Planck-pixels don’t make up the universe is special relativity and the idea that all inertial reference frames are equally valid. If there is a rest frame in which the matrix of these Planck-pixels is isotropic, in other frames they would be length contracted in one direction, and moving diagonally with respect to his matrix might impart angle-dependence on how you experience the universe. If an electromagnetic wave with the wavelength of one Planck length were propagating through space, its wavelength could be made even smaller by transforming to a reference frame in which the wavelength is even smaller, so the idea of rest-frame equivalence and a minimal length are inconsistent with one-another.
Reference: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/hand-wavy-discussion-planck-length/
- Status not being updated if no one is looking at it (Schrödinger’s cat, quantum entanglement)
What does it mean to “live in a simulation”? If I created a sentient computer program that has no contact with the outside world then you would say it’s living in a simulation, but if you took that same exact program and connected it to a robot you’d say it’s living in reality. But what’s the line? If you add a tiny glimpse of reality but 99.9% of its experiences are stimulated is it living in a simulation or reality? It’s not necessarily a black or white thing but more like a spectrum. In that sense you could say that our brains are creating a simulation of the outside world based on real inputs, but our perception of reality is not necessarily accurate. I would say our brains are on the spectrum of being a simulation of reality because not everything we experience is necessarily real.
Aliens could land on my lawn and take a 10hour long shit and I’d still have to go to work the next day.
For a slightly different take, a simulation and reality are not that fundamentally different given how both are perceived by senses in a similar way. Like how a VR headset uses the same sense that you use to see real objects.
They start to diverge in a way when you start encountering edge phenomenon that are beyond the scope of the simulation, like how a game would glitch. So far, however much we zoom in or zoom out, reality works consistently. So it is less likely that we’re in a simulation.
Every time I need to cross a seemingly empty street, suddenly cars appear. I can’t help but imagine it’s a render distance issue.
Try to cross the street without turning your head. When you turn your head, they render the cars in the opposite directions.
/jk always look both ways before crossing the street.
I’ve got a spinbot for crossing the street to exploit the universe’s shoddy hitboxes
Because Elon Musk believes in it, I know it’s probably wrong.
I’m a weak solipsist - I firmly believe that “I think therefore I am” is the only truth we can know. Everything else, we take on faith.
That said, it doesn’t really matter. We live in the reality we perceive. There’s no practical difference between living in reality and living in a simulation.
Once I learned about quantum field theory, the distinction between reality and simulation kind of went away for me. It says that all of reality is essentially number values for different fundamental fields. A particle exists when the value for this field is d and the value for that field is y. But the only fundamentally real things are the fields. Everything else are just a configuration of number values within them that together conform to mathematical logic.
This sounds a lot like software to me. Whether it’s running on quantum fields or a fucking Pentium 3 doesn’t seem super important.
So sweeping aside the technology as irrelevant, we have turn to the issue of whether the universe is contrived by programmers. The question becomes: did people create the universe? And my opinion of us just isn’t that high.
I read a series, can’t recall the name anymore, but computer simulations were so powerful that the entities within the simulations would think they are alive. In the novel this was done to try and simulated conditions to predict real life outcomes. It was also considered particularly vile and cruel to do this and illegal in some cases. Particularly if the simulated entities realized their situation and knew they would be turned off or understand their past was all made up.
It definately makes you wonder.
Just like we think we actually have free will, and are pretty upset to find we don’t, and are going to die.
Here’s Elon Musk’s argument (not saying I agree with it but here’s what he said about it):
Eventually we will be able to create entirely convincing simulations. Just look at video games. The graphics are getting pretty good.
So given that we will inevitably create such simulations, we have to ask whether it has perhaps already happened and this is one of them.
And since we will no doubt create many different simulations, millions of them, the odds are against this one being the prime reality. It’s just millions-to-one odds by the numbers.
Therefore this is almost certainly a simulation.
(Personally I think there are factual and logical problems at many steps in this)
I just want to point out that while Musk likes to parrot this rhetoric, it is Nick Bostrom who should be credited with the hypothesis in its current, modern incarnation. That’s not to say it is entirely his idea either, as similar hypotheses have been pontificated over for centuries , notably by René Descartes.
Mm thanks. Worthy footnote.
seems consistent…
I just want to point out that while Musk likes to parrot this rhetoric, it is Nick Bostrom who should be credited with the hypothesis in its current, modern incarnation. That’s not to say it is entirely his idea either, as similar hypotheses have been pontificated over for centuries , notably by René Descartes.
If you have the fundamental belief that if we know every single possible detail down to the atom, that we can predict what will happen every time, then you believe that free will does not exist. If you think of it that way, and think everything is calculated, then it could be theoretically be possible for some kind of super computer to generate everything since it knows all the information and can calculate what will happen next.
I also think that free will may not exist, but I’m not sure why. Either everything can be calculated in advance as you say, or everything is fundamentally random because quantum mechanics. But maybe there’s something at the edge where neither of these explanations are correct? What happens there?
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Yes, but you’ll regret it later, in about 20 years.
According to some, assuming it’s even possible to fully simulate a universe to the degree that life in it can’t tell, then there should be multiple simulations running, so there would be more sim-universes than real ones, and odds would be high that any given universe you find yourself in would be a sim.
Personally I don’t buy it, I think if we were in a sim the laws of physics would have to be easily computable (they aren’t, see gluons) and I think it would take the computing power of an entire universe to simulate one of similar complexity at anywhere close to reasonable speed. (Note how emulators and virtual machines can only emulate a weaker system then the host system, at least at speeds comparable to native hardware)
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Exactly. Liu Cixin’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past has some great writing on different technological levels between alien species and how one could influence a lower tiered civilization by using physics.
but time is relative. we might very well live in a simulation that takes a minute of “external time” to compute a single tick of our time. we just can’t experience it.
I’m not really a believer of the whole simulated universe theory, but I find your arguments against it weak.
You’re basing what is and isn’t easily calculatable off of our experiences. Same with “complexities of the universes”. However, if our world is indeed simulated, there’s no telling what the host universe is like. It might have crazy different math and be far far more complex than ours. Us trying to understand it would essentially be an excercise in futility.
there would be more sim-universes than real ones
This ties back to the mediocrity principle. If there are 10 billion people living on Earth, but 10 quadrillion living in simulations, the chances for you to live in the latter is much higher.
Along goes the simulation argument by Nick Bostrom. If simulation is possible, and practiced, we likely are simulated ourselves.
Isaac Arthur) noted that housing a population in a simulation is much more efficient than doing so physically. It seems like a convergent choice for powerful civilizations which want to maximize the life supported by fading stars (or energy potentials in general).
I think it would take the computing power of an entire universe to simulate one of similar complexity
Two objections:
- It might be sufficient to simulate the experience, without fully simulating the underlying physics. That’s how we do 3D games anyways. No one cares if we actually simulate individual air molecules. If the cloth moves indistinguishable as if, that’s as good as the original, for a much lower cost. You can also cull unobserved parts of the universe.
- Host and simulation can have completely unrelated laws of nature. Specifically, inhabitants of the simulation cannot study their host environment. As such, I think making assumptions about the host makes no sense.
Those are some really interesting points, thanks for your input.
Thanks for typing out what i was gonna say.
I am agnostic about simulation theory. If an advanced enough “something” can create a simulation undistinguishable from the lives we experience now then i would bet that we do live in one. But thats a big if and goes a bit further than one where life cant tell. (A simulated single cell organism is miles of from simulated mammals and society)
How much would speed matter to a simulated lifeform. Ive often wondered if time would suddenly stop and then continue we would probably just experience it like it didn’t stop.
