Nick BOSTROM :: Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? . [2003, Philosophical Quarterly, 53(211):243-255] - http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulat...
Jan 19, 2011
from
Ken Morley,
Victor Ganata,
Joe,
Big Joe Silenced,
Andrea Mosca,
etesien,
Maitani,
and
Amira
liked this
tabloid version, "The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High" http://www.simulation-argument.com/matrix... -- but ad infinitum, "if our universe were one of many being simulated, the simulation argument could therefore be statistically applied to the creators saying they are in a simulation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... \\ Discuss wormhole: http://www.quora.com/How-wou... -- but the Dream Argument keeps it simple: "the mind's ability to create simulated realities during REM sleep affects the statistical likelihood of our own reality being simulated."
- Adriano
most interesting XKCD http://xkcd.com/505/ got me thinking about a simulator based on a cellular automaton complex enough for combinatorial chemistry: http://ff.im/Xuncn to generate life itself -- but if it was merely Turing computable then human consciousness could have been simulated to imagine such things. On the other hand, you are unpredictable and computational irreducible: https://docs.google.com/viewer... -- really, is that how you think of yourself?
- Adriano
Even if you're unpredictable and computationally irreducible, it doesn't mean you can be simmed.
- Victor Ganata
it was a sleight of hand -- both hands are actually simmed :-) one could argue that the initial conditions are never known with sufficient precision, and that even if the computational process is deterministic (chaotic) the environment could introduce pseudo-random bits to throw us off from believing reducibility.
- Adriano
Whoa, Dude, We are Inside a Computer Right Now... Rich Terrile, director at NASA Center for Evolutionary Computation: "The universe is pixelated—in time, space, volume, and energy. There exists a fundamental unit that you cannot break down into anything smaller, which means the universe is made of a finite number of these units. This also means there are a finite number of things the universe can be; it’s not infinite, so it’s computable. And if it only behaves in a finite way when it’s being observed, then the question is: Is it being computed?" http://www.vice.com/read...
- Adriano
Q: what would be the minimum clock speed of the computer simulating the universe? cf. http://www.quora.com/Physics...
- Adriano
Man, there are way too many people in that thread completely stuck on the fact that clock speeds are in Hertz while the speed of light is in meters per second. They can't seem to make the jump to the fact that the properties of light literally dictate the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted.
- Victor Ganata
Silas Beane discusses evidence of pixelation in terms of lattice spacing via Quantum Chromodynamics, "Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation" (2012) http://goo.gl/Gpo1f -- assuming the classical limit of a quantum computer, the lattice spacing should be non-zero if we are in a simulation, and orders of magnitude finer than Planck scale. (Think of a believable discretization of the Feynman-Kac path integral :-)
- Adriano
good comments on the Beane paper, https://www.quora.com/Physics... "How is the vision of the universe as a computer simulation considered among modern physicists?"
- Adriano