Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t - but it is a highly debatable metaphysical assumption. I’m not sure how seriously we should take some people’s claims that they “know” that such an assumption is actually true
I’m not arguing that a dualism (of this sort) is actually true, merely that we don’t (and can’t) know for a fact that it is false. But if we can’t know for a fact that it is false, then even if we (somehow) knew our reality was simulated, that wouldn’t give us grounds to make confident inferences about the nature of other simulations, or the nature of simulations in themselves
Panpsychists claim everything is conscious, even rocks, even atoms. Again, I don’t claim this is true (I’d be rather shocked if I somehow found out it was), but we can’t know for a fact that it is false. Yet if panpsychism (or at least certain versions thereof) is true, every simulation (even a simulation of the weather, or of crop growth) is conscious, simply because absolutely everything is. But I don’t think most standard definitions of “simulation” are excluding that possibility - on the contrary, they are agnostic with respect to it, treating its truth or falsehood as outside of their scope
It also doesn’t necessarily imply determinism because some computer simulations use RNGs. Most commonly people use pseudorandom RNGs for this, but there is nothing in principle stopping someone from replacing the pseudorandom RNG with a hardware RNG based on some quantum mechanical process, such that it is indeterministic for all practical purposes, and the question of whether it is ultimately deterministic or indeterministic depends on controversial questions about QM to which nobody knows the answers
Roger, that's even better. I tried to clarify the log book idea in another reply.[1] The question is whether you can have reality (from the observer's perspective) just based on whether coherent information exists in any setting.
Basically the question is whether we can go from "I think, therefore I am" to "something is constructing information." The latter is obviously a simpler, lower-level proof than other concepts of existence.
That brings us back to the "something extra." Is it required for our observations to be possible, i.e. can we rule out the log book conjecture? I don't think we can, but I might be wrong.
In that case, the non-conscious people in the log book would spend a lot of time pontificating on their experiences of consciousness and how mysterious it is and whether it's possible for there to be other universes that contain entities like themselves except not conscious. They'd be having these discussions for reasons that have nothing to do with actually being conscious, but coincidentally their statements would perfectly correspond with our actual perceptions of consciousness. Maybe not logically impossible, but it seems extremely improbable.
(This is pretty much the argument at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zo... which I find persuasive).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
Reality is a multi-disciplinary domain, but it gives off the appearance of being physics only, because of its metaphysical nature.
If they ever solve the randomness, then if the map is down to every particle, then yes, the map and reality could be the same. But think at that point you need a computer the size of reality to keep track of every particle.
Or, maybe the entire universe is one giant wave equation. But again, I think you need a computer the size of the universe to solve it.
And for many worlds. Doesn't it punt randomness into other universes, but doesn't help us solve for results in our own individual universe. Since we can't measure what happens in the other universe we don't really know. If there were two results, and one is in one universe, and one in our universe, sure we determinedly know both results. But we don't know which universe we are in, so instead of a random result, now we have 2 answers and 2 universes, but now randomly don't know where we are?
We are in both. Both universes are equally real. Each 'copy' of you knows it's in the universe where the result matches the observation.
If in my universe I could always predict the correct results, then we would just have determinism, and I could predict exactly when an atom would decay. There would be no need for statistics.
Some high level background that might help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-syaCoqkZA
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was for experimental verification of Bell's theorem. The experiment did not rule out superdeterministic local hidden variables; superdeterministic local hidden variables does not violate Bell's theorem, since Bell's theorem assumes "free will" (that there is no correlation between arbitrary choices made by an experimenter and the state of the system being measured), but superdeterminism is the denial of that assumption.
If you know the position and speed, everything, about every particle, then you should be able to extrapolate the future by calculating it. The problem is you need a computer the size of the universe to do that calculation.
So even thought the map is the territory, equal scale, and you have the map. It is little worthless because the map ends up being reality.
Edit: Little different than the idea that if this is simulation, you can do clipping and only render what we see. I'm saying the entire universe is 'real'.
I’m not sure were you get that idea from. The amount of calculations we can do, per say, 1 000 000 molecules dedicated to the calculation has absolutely skyrocketed, and will continue to skyrocket.
Lets say it takes 100 molecules in a circuit to calculate 1 particles state. Then you already would need a universe 100X the size to calculate our 1X size universe.
I'm assuming all particles, not that this is somehow clipping and only rendering what we see. I'm not talking about the brain in box simulation, I'm talking about idea that entire universe is out there. What would it take to calculate every position of every particle.
That’s not how it works though. You’d have a lot of fixed costs to build a computer that simulates exactly the behavior of one particle. But then simulating a secondary particle will have a much, much, much smaller marginal cost.
Since you brought up clipping, games are actually a perfect example. You can see games as very crude simulations of our own reality, or slices of it. Take for example Red Dead Redemption 2. Run it on a PS5. Now compare the size of your PS5 to the mass of what was the old Wild West territory :)
Plus there’s the whole quantum computing thing, where in a way you’re reaching into “alternate” realities for extra compute.
That is what I'm saying is not happening. I'm saying that in a particle collider, we measure particles, and those exist all the time, not just when we are looking at them. Like, I have DNA and bones, they exist all the time, not just a simulation showing a 'skin' so it doesn't have to render everything.
Unless you are making a bigger point. That a computer that could be simulating every single particle, must exist outside this universe, and maybe mass and energy in this outside universe is so radically different we can't even grasp the scales of it.
Just like someone inside a minecraft world with blocks, couldn't grasp the amount of energy in our world.
The simplest way I can put it is that at some point of compute, there is a crossover where you need less mass to simulate something than the mass of the actual thing is. This will hold true for particle simulations as well. So no, you would not need more particles than the universe has to simulate the universe perfectly.
So lets say you have Minecraft running.
You can completely build a CPU / Memory, etc... Inside Minecraft with Redstone.
Lets say you do this, build a PC inside Minecraft to the point that it is functional enough to run Minecraft. Minecraft running in Minecraft.
There is huge overhead.
You need an astronomically large real PC that could handle running Minecraft such that the Minecraft version running inside Minecraft is usable. That is the scale problem.
I'd have to dig up the citation. But pretty sure this compute power needed to compute the universe has been worked out.
So.. we are basically just a few meters over the start line in terms of doing perfect particle simulations :)
Look at protein folding. For decades, we could do it incrementally faster as our globally available compute increased. Then Alphafold came along and proved that it could be done much more efficiently. Now there's multiple models / companies that are planning to jostle for supremacy in that space.
Our ways of simulating particles will get more sophisticated and efficient as time goes on. Our hardware will push more calculations per watt and per density (aka per unit of mass).
I guess ultimately you take the pessimistic view and I take the optimistic view, so we'll have to agree to disagree. Good talk though!
What I find interesting is looking at whether some observable things look like they might be performance optimizations, or even "magic seeds" (as in RNG seeds.)
No proof of a simulation obviously, but maybe hints.
But isn't that the exact thing that quantum mechanics refutes? You cannot know the future just from the past; you can only know the probabilities of different futures.
Guess I'm in the camp that eventually we'll find some model or discover something new, to discover what is behind the randomness, so it is no longer just random. But, yes, that is big IF.
Until then, with current theories, we couldn't do these calculations. They'd just be approximations accounting for some randomness.
I guess for whatever reason you don’t consider that to be the correct discovery?
Or another way of saying it. We have 2 answers, they are determined. That is great, we know the 2 answers, one in each universe. Now the problem is we don't know what universe we are in. Now which universe we are in is random.
We didn't move the ball towards doing something useful in our own universe.
That said, isn't the obvious answer 'all of them'?
*May be subject to entropy over time.
How about an exact copy of the log book, but with one bit flipped. Voila, mostly universal physics.
Let me restate the metaphysics a bit differently. Let's say there's no us, no butterflypeople, nothing at all. Entropy reigns supreme, no information is organized.
Now add the butterflypeople. They write the humanpeople's log book. Information exists in organized form. The humanpeople's bits have been divined out of the great entropic nothing. Maybe that's all it takes?
How do you know every event to every particle?
The answer to that will literally change what gets written in the log book.
If the sequence of the log states is entirely deterministic based on the initial state, then you don't even need to actually write down the entire log for it to "exist". This is Greg Egan's Permutation City.
In the middle are the permutations selected through the filter of other realities, when they chose which universes to simulate. We lucked out but not as much, because uninteresting universes never made it out of the entropic soup.
It would have to be a conditional estimate of course, because our sentience biases our contemplation.
But why bother with this kind of detail? What's the difference between what you're imagining here and a normal reel of film? It can be played back, but even if it isn't, it records the state of events that happened, including observers that once existed and no longer do, experiencing events that once happened but no longer do. It's possible for a record to describe a canonical sequence even if the record itself doesn't change. Somebody outside of the record can view it out of order, speed it up, slow it down, pause it, reverse it. A film reel doesn't share the time dimension of its own universe in that way.
I'm struggling to come up with what this implies and why.
As observers, we perceive time as passing, but is there anything special in this perception? Looked at another way, everything could be frozen in a 4D log book and we couldn't tell the difference, or could we? In this interpretation, Napoleon is as alive (in 1820) as we are (in 2024.) A film reel is a similar concept, except it's just a 3D projection rather than a complete detailed 4D account.
Whether or not you want to say "Napoleon exists" or "Napoleon existed" seems to be a matter of linguistic convention and the more common latter would reflect speakers privileging their own time. If you want to look at it another way, Napoleon exists, but entirely in my past light cone, and I exist entirely in his future light cone. I can't send him any kind of information, but he can send information to me. Is there anything special in this perception? To who? To observers at the absolute end of all time, my future is just as written in stone as Napoleon's. To observers I can receive information from, my future is unknown.
To any particular observer, there are regions of spacetime in which you have no past. There are regions in which you have no future. There is a region in which you have both a past and a future. Is there anything "special" in perceiving the sequence of events within the third region as passing rather than existing forever as a log? Not really. You're just describing a different variety of the Copernican principle or relativity as far as I can tell. But so what? None of us are the center of the univers. None of us exist in a special inertial frame describing absolute spacetime. These facts, however, have consequences in terms of how to measure and compute stuff. They change the kind of testable predictions you make given certain conditions. What computational or predictive consequences arise from observing that the entire world curve of the universe exists at once from a perspective outside of the universe? Going back to the I can't send information to Napoleon thing, if observers outside of our universe are keeping a log, none of us nor anything else in our universe can receive information from them, so what difference does it make?
It's an interesting shower thought but kind of also a big so what?
So we proceed to wonder if it's a simulation. That would mean the universe is interesting because it was designed or selected as such. This answers some local questions, and punts the existentialism into the simulating world.
My argument is that a simulation need not look like the Matrix, where there's a machine running in real time so that the simulating and simulated universes share a timeline. The simulants might just be doing the relevant computations in whatever graph-traversing order, and printing them out or whatever.
The computed information would make up our universe, it would be the essence of it. The universe would have come into "being" just by being selected out of the big entropic soup of all possible 4D log books to write.
As for "so what," it's just amateur philosophy, no guarantee you'll find it interesting.
Similarly a simulation run at some "tick rate" can also be run at 2x the rate while taking 1/2 the step per tick. Within the universe nobody would notice, as long as the steps were fine enough to begin with.
I think it was in Diaspora (or Permutation City?) that Greg Egan proposed that any tick rate would be unnoticable to that simulated beings, including "none".
In other words, the movie Top Gun will continue to exist as-is, no matter how many copies are made of it, including none. Encoded as a digital file it is just a number, a pure timeless concept, it doesn't have to be written down to exist. It always existed on the number line, even before Tom Cruise was born. In fact, every encoding of Top Gun exists on the number line, in every compression format, in every resolution, even a future 16K resolution that was never filmed and has no display devices made for it yet. Its encoding as a 400GB long number is there, already, and will always be there.
In other words, and simulation, an log of events, any experience already exists in mathematics, in every encoding... somewhere on the number line. This includes the entire physical universe. This isn't hypothetical, it's necessarily true! Anything that can be represented by a finite amount of information must be on the number line.
Even if you assume the Universe lasts forever, you can break its history up into a sequence of states, each of which is finite. Then the series will exists on the number line as a set of points heading off to infinity.
- In a much larger universe, write down in a log book every event to every particle at every instant, from the Big Bang to the restaurant.
- Put it on the fireplace mantle and leave it there.
This is basically a log of a simulation. It exists in much the same way as an ongoing simulation would, except that its time dimension isn't shared with the simulating universe. But every observer within has had the same observations as if it did.