But what are we a simulation of ?
New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author
Going by the fact that Elon Musk said there was only one in a billion chance that the world was not simulated, we might save ourselves a lot of time and assume that on this occasion, as on so many others, the 52-year-old rocket bro has made a beeline for the wrong end of the stick. Nonetheless, in the developing field of …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 18:01 GMT Alistair
Re: We're just life, imitating art.
The cost of living crisis and inflation are most easily explained by greedy oil industry executives continuously increasing profitability in order to prove their financial worth to Wall Street, thus protecting their continued existence in the simulation.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 16:12 GMT Snake
RE: what are we a simulation of?
Time for a mind-screw: we are a simulation...of life.
Try this for size: all the sectarians believe in their god, and that their god is all powerful and created the universe. And, conveniently, their god is always...aged.
How about the universe was created by a CHILD? That this "god" is nothing more than an advanced being, an adolescent by our methods of thinking, and he/she/it/they simply got BORED and created a universe in a snow globe. It doesn't know how lower life forms live so they created a universe where 'simple' life can live and die. And that's our "universe" because we're living in that globe.
Ask them to prove otherwise. >:D
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 02:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: power
But the question would be still there. Why an advanced civilization would spend enormous amount of energy just play video games that we know is wasting our youth and adults? May be to entertain its dead soul by taking them out of dead den and let them play for lifetime? If such advanced society that harness such vast energy I would think the would use it to bend space time and travel at will. Or even better minutirize their entire civilization into the microscopic world and only come out to our magnitude when they wish to do it.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 05:22 GMT The Man Who Fell To Earth
Re: power
You answered your own question. A huge amount of the energy modern society consumes is used for entertainment. The SimUniverse we live in is probably for the entertainment of some couch potato in his mother's basement. And a zillion SimYears in our SimUniverse is probably 10 minutes in the Couch Potato's universe.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 06:19 GMT Rol
Re: power
Technically advanced, yes, but has it the imagination to fathom the unknown? If all you know is what you can see/feel/smell/hear, you might want to question what more is there beyond my senses. And if you lack the imagination and the drive to experiment in directions common sense suggests is pointless, you will never stumble onto the truth.
Here's where we come in useful. We have imagination in spades, and the stupidity to chase dreams. We are at the cutting edge of someone's attempt to investigate the unknown unknowns.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 17:09 GMT Snake
Re: imagination
It could be more than simple imagination. We, for example, have no real idea of how Homo erectus, never mind the Neanderthals, lived. They might have become post-human, or never were even humanoid at all, and want to see how a society of Homo sapiens would develop and function. It could be a educational simulation.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 17:35 GMT jake
Re: imagination
"We, for example, have no real idea of how Homo erectus, never mind the Neanderthals, lived."
Not at a micro level, no. At a macro level, we have a pretty good idea.
"They might have become post-human"
There is no archeological evidence that even hints that this is a possibility.
"or never were even humanoid at all"
They were humanoid. We have the bones to prove it.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 09:26 GMT Doctor Trousers
Re: power
Maybe because an advanced civilization solves the problem of recreating the universe inside a simulation, long before it solves the potentially impossible problem of travelling thousands of light years across the universe?
Right now, we can kind of imagine how a model of the universe could be recreated inside a simulation, but we only have some very vague ideas about how we could ever travel much further than the limits of our own solar system, and most of those rely on the idea that we could ever travel through wormholes.
A model universe inside a simulation both allows us to observe any point in space-time, any potential point in space-time in any parallel universe, and possibly also demonstrates that it's impossible to ever solve the problem of long distance physical travel in the universe we inhabit?
A simulated universe gives us the answer to any question we could ever have, and essentially makes us gods. I don't think it's hard to imagine why we would expend unbelievably vast amounts of energy on such a project.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 11:15 GMT Plest
Re: power
Each to their own.
We already have this problem right now, people will happily spend 5-6 hours a day on their phones just doom-scrolling, that's a waste of time to some. People will sit and play video games for 5-6 hours every evening online, why? It's often the only social interaction some people can get. There's plenty of reasons people waste time, effort and money on things other people see as pointless. I take photos, I've driven 400 miles in a single day just get one landsscape photo I wanted, some would baulk at such a moronic thing to do but I felt a sense of achievement after doing it as I'd waited 4 years for the right opportunity, others will call me an idiot!
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 14:19 GMT Dr Dan Holdsworth
Re: power
The post-human civilisation that is running the sim is probably living in a utopia of some description, which whilst being optimal for living in is also really rather boring. Mind-numbingly tedious, in fact. So, to maintain interest in being alive, sims like the one we are in are run so that these utopians can once again live in a risky, exciting sort of world.
Of course, whilst we die they simply do the utopian equivalent of sticking another 50p into the arcade machine if or when they croak it, to have another go.
The sim is of course going to be heavily and fairly cheaply optimised, which explains a lot of paranormal phenomena quite nicely.
Past-life memories, for instance. This is the sim recycling the code needed to run a human mind and specifically the link to a utopian mind; this is probably quite difficult to do from scratch so the sim will recycle as much as possible and take as many shortcuts as it can, including not filtering information flows. This will lead to info from one simulated human life leaking back down the link to another human life from the utopian in his bedroom remembering one life after it has ended.
UFOs: glitching aircraft object code. Poltergeists: glitching object movement code and probably something that is going to be fixed properly in the next major release. Similarly ghosts of all manner of stuff; simply memory garbage collection not running as well as it should run.
So, try not to look for and poke the holes in reality, because it isn't at all well built and you might just cause the whole kaboodle to dump core and end.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 08:44 GMT MyffyW
I suspect human civilisation is a massive chunk of not-quite-beta-release-quality code on some nerdy teenagers computing platform in a dimension that is unimaginable to us. Somewhere around 2014 - 2016 said teenager decided to make a crazy mod pack (code name: ORANGE-VLAD-SHITGIBBON) to see if it would break the sim. I'm still unconvinced as to whether it will crash and burn.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 12:04 GMT Meeker Morgan
We are in a simulation of a *real* universe ...
... itself a simulation in an *even* *realer* universe, and so on. And why assume we are on the bottom of the sequence? That's akin to geocentrism.
The open question is whether this is truly infinite or merely wraps around.
Alternate hypothesis: The experts are f*cking with us.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 12:57 GMT cookieMonster
Bollox
“— and "resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimize power consumption. And as a result supports the idea that we're living in a simulation—“
Proof we are not, name one computer/OS where this actually happens????
In fact in every instance I can think of over the past 50 years its the exact opposite
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 13:08 GMT ArrZarr
Re: Bollox
I have noted the joke icon, but I would like to disagree.
There are two aspects imo:
The first is that we live in a world where the low cost of compute power means it's not economical to pay people to optimise code to a mirror shine. If a theoretical computer is able to efficiently self-optimise its own code to that mirror shine, then it would absolutely make sense for that to happen.
The second is that a simulation, while its running would have a static featureset, which does enable a position where you can optimise code to that mirror shine.
Over the past 50 years we've encountered feature bloat to a huge degree, enabled by conventions like Moore's law. If Moore's law were not true, then featuresets would have expanded considerably more slowly as compute power would remain expensive relative to developer time so paying for the code to be polished within an inch of its life would be worthwhile in processing-heavy tasks.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 20:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Gotta disagree with that second point
No reason that any particular static conditions should be assumed. There wouldn't be technical constraints at the scale and advancement where it was even a possibility to simulate the universe, and we can infer or assume motive or intent based on our observations.
Hypothetically no reason one couldn't self optimize, and it is reasonable to expect it would in a myriad of ways purely for the sake of efficiency. That has little to do with the chance that we ARE in a simulation, a horse which has been flogged ad nauseam.
For those that choose to believe in the absence of fact or reason, I hope the idea makes you happy. If not consider god as an alternative, the arguments will seem familiar, and is similarly both hard to conclusively disprove and lacking any tangible evidence. Like the author of this supposed "law" it presumes your capacity for self delusion and imagination have primacy over the universe. If you are a brain in a jar you may be right. In an objective world when you look out the window at how the world outside works, it provides ample counter examples.
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Thursday 12th October 2023 23:44 GMT ravenviz
Moore’s Law
It’s only Moore’s Law because Moore said something that happened before it happened without any a priori knowledge, wisdom, or any workings out to show how it could be upheld. Like Fermat’s Last Theorem, Fermat could not have proved his own theorem, he was just the one that said it, and was eventually proved right, not because he knew he was, but just because he said he was.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 17:50 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Bollox
Nit-pick, but no. The second law does not apply to the universe as a whole.
It applies to a "closed system", which in thermodynamics is one that is open to transfers of energy from an infinite heat bath. The universe as a whole is, by definition, not open in that way and no sizeable fraction of the universe is either because the "rest of the universe" is not infinite by comparison.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 18:57 GMT Omnipresent
Re: Bollox
Actually yes, that's what this "law" states however, entropy states the opposite.
"The basis of the theory is analogous to the second law of thermodynamics, which includes the idea that the disorder within an isolated system will increase unless it is acted on by some external force or condition."
"For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.
A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.
A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message."
If the amount of energy exerted on the universe "is a constant or less", it would not be "expanding at an ever expanding rate".
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 17:55 GMT jake
Re: Bollox
Computers do indeed delete temp files and compress log and other files to save on storage space ... and I suppose one could make a case that reading a large compressed file from storage and then decompressing it in memory to be used, reversing the process when done might save some energy over having to read in the entire decompressed file. Maybe. In some cases. Perhaps. Such as in the case of punch cards or paper tape.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 18:55 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Whatever the law is, rest assured it will be broken in a "specific and limited way" by the government
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 13:12 GMT xyz
IMHO...
Yup, the universe appears to be some computer system (some sort of DB and code munged together) with built in auditing. Defo artificial though. It's not complicated, you just need a shit load of power and had/has 2 main flaws; the first of which was sorted by creating "our" dimensions and the second fix was creating matter to firm up "flabby expansion" issues. BTW, anti-matter is just slightly in the future which is why it's so hard to see it unless you give matter a good yank.
Anyway, you can tell I've got nothing to do of an evening.
I watched The Matrix the other night. There were things called telephone boxes in it and old cars which are cool. Old Nokias not so much.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 13:18 GMT heyrick
If this is a simulation...
...I want my money back. The continuity is pathetic and the plotlines are ridiculous. About the only thing they got right was the rendering quality, though I do note that they're only really capable of doing half the planet at a time. It's night on the opposite side to where it's day as a cheap and lame attempt to reduce the bandwidth requirements.
Plus, there's a distinct lack of power ups, God mode, or the ability to disable clipping. But pain, cancer, and suffering are in plentiful supply.
Plus, we spend a third of the time "dormant", what the hell is with that?
Generally, therefore, this simulation is the lacklustre creation of sadistic bastards and I'm not impressed.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 21:45 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: If this is a simulation...
"About the only thing they got right was the rendering quality,"
As the simulated "intelligences" advance through the program, my experience is that the render quality starts to reduce with added blur effects and the action tends to slow down a lot. Possibly another power saving feature.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 20:37 GMT Andy_bolt
Re: Critical Questions
The point of that aphorism isn’t that Linux isn’t possible on a desktop. It is that it is incredibly rare. A quick google put it under 5%. If you count non desktop, Android probably counts as some form of Linux so the percentage rises but that’s not the metric in question
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 01:35 GMT jake
Re: Critical Questions
Having converted my entire family (except my sister), almost all my friends (except the odd gaming machine[0]), nearly every student I've ever taught (again except the gaming machines[0]), and every single one of my clients (except a couple CAD stations, and a handful of Macs), your incredible rarity is my near ubiquitousness. And has been, for a long time.
Don't you wish you were in my shoes?
"The journey of one thousand miles begins with but a single step." —Laozi, the Dao De Jing, Chap. 64
[0] And even the gamers are using Linux more and more.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 21:47 GMT NickHolland
Re: Critical Questions
Who manages the updates? God, of course, At least, God to the simulation.
Except ... he didn't get around to doing them.
When is EOL? Probably about 1950 years ago, except he lost the documentation to the configuration, and hasn't been able to migrate to the new platform, and since the updates were never done, it's really gonna be difficult.
Any resemblance to any work environments is purely coincidental.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 14:09 GMT Bill Gray
Re: how much it would take to simulate the human brain or, for that matter, 7 billion human brains
https://www.census.gov/popclock/world states that the current world population is a bit over eight billion, with some other sites going to 8.1 billion. So we have about eight billion humans, only 7 billion of whom have (real or simulated) brains... well, that does sometimes seem about right.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 07:56 GMT The Dogs Meevonks
Re: how much it would take to simulate the human brain or, for that matter, 7 billion human brains
I take issue with the reasoning that there are 7 billion simulated brains... I'd put the number a lot lower... a few thousand perhaps... a million at best.
The rest are just poorly programmed AI NPC's with a very limited capacity for reasoning and response. Which does explain a lot of the world right now... They're the chatgpt of the simulation, tell it a lie often enough and they will spout it to everyone else as fact.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 21:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: how much it would take to simulate the human brain or, for that matter, 7 billion human brains
I can't prove it for you, but you might be able to. It could take a while though. Follow the trail of bread crumbs through the Chinese Room and then figure out if you are talking to yourself. Probably still not enough to tell if you are a brain in a jar sadly.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 14:10 GMT tiggity
Odd argument
Organised complexity (& thus supposedly defying entropy rules) is a natural consequence of a living organism (otherwise it would never get to become a complex organism).
Organisms don't live in an isolated system, there are various energy inputs (e.g. looks at shining sun which is good for producers.. and producers and/or other consumers, make an energy input for consumers)
.. and. of course, over the long term an organism dies and its complexity decreases and its entropy changes considerably!
Plenty of cases where increased organisation comes naturally e.g have a jar with oil and water (obv the 2 separate out into layers). add molecules with a hydrophillic "head" and a hydrophobic "tail", you will, after a while for the molecules to diffuse, get the molecules "organised" with their hydrophillic "head" in the water layer, and the hydrophobic "tails" in the oil layer .. and, if we just had a jar of water we would get molecules clumping such that heads "outside" (in the water) and tails inside (away from the water, potentially excluding it) *
If he takes his flawed arguments to ridiculous extremes then life would never have happened so the simulator creators would never exist.
* Yes, this ultra simple example is deliberately chosen because its these type of basic molecular properties that help things like cell membranes exist (and are useful in organism complexity )
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 21:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Swing and a miss
It's an attempt at a turn of phrase, but it's really important not to take the piss with entropy and thermodynamics. Like time and relativity, trying to shoot from the hip for a rhetorical one liner about entropy and closed systems is a great way to stub your toe.
The thermodynamics definitions of these things are super specific for a reason. The "universe" isn't closed or isolated in that frame of reference, though if cosmic inflation and time run their course those open bounds won't matter at some point and you still get a grim slow heat death of the universe. Any ordered structures or reactions exist attached to an entropic system "outside" and over time will reach thermodynamic equilibrium between those systems.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 06:01 GMT claimed
Re: simulating consciousness is not the same as being conscious
Also it’s a philosophical argument up for debate.. if we simulate every damn neuron and chemical signal.,.. why is it not “real”? I would strongly question the ethical boundary of scanning a brain, simulating a work day, then rebooting the brain, but I’m pretty sure that is what Musk is up to with Neuralink etc.. Only way we’ll get to AI too, IMO
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 12:56 GMT Primus Secundus Tertius
Re: It must be bugged.
"we are already living in a simulation created by a post-human society"
Our invisible galactic overlords will not allow us to become too self-aware. 65 million years ago they bombed the dinosaurs into extinction because some of them were getting smarter than could be allowed. But the bombing was disguised as a meteor impact.
Our overlords may be thinking that another 'zoological weeding' is due.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 21:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Meh
I'll meh your meh.
The quantum layer will probably just reveal itself as another layer of physical laws who's impact will be a lot clearer in hindsight when the equations and mechanics are in hand. We first started to spot patterns and answers using some scary math that got us working answers without knowledge of all the hidden variables. It's likely we can tease whatever lies beneath the standard model apart, but it's likely to follow some combination of wave mechanics and a deeper layer of the nested doll of quarks, baryons, atoms, elements, molecules, etc etc that you climb over to get to the visible and familiar world of Newtonian physics.
In reality, it's all and always just a ton of interactions happening down at the lowest level, and what we see is and ordered subset of whatever chaotic system roils beneath the standard model. Most of the spooky parts of the behavior of quantum systems show up at larger scales too, we just usually reach for other tools to understand them. Solitons in macro scale wave systems being one of many examples.
Feel free to meh my meh of your meh.
Forget the turtles, it Mehs all the way down.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 16:46 GMT Jimmy2Cows
Re: Problem of evil?
Why would the ethics of a post-human society match our current ethics? Hell, even our current ethics vary from person to person, never mind country to country. There's certainly no singular global set of ethics everyone follows. Even if many try to come close.
If we are living in a simulation, maybe it's some teenager's science project looking at how their species developed. Or maybe a simulation of their universe, and we're just some random emergent property that wasn't anticipated, but we're interesting enough that the admin keeps us running.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 22:03 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Problem of evil?
"Would a post-human society capable of creating a simulated universe be as unethical as to allow all this suffering?"
You never played Sim City? Introducing "natural disaster" or conjuring up Godzilla to help clear some old buildings for redevelopment was a useful and "fun" part of it.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 08:00 GMT The Dogs Meevonks
Re: Problem of evil?
You've never played 'the sims' it's all about the suffering... I would create a lothario who sleep with every single woman in the neighbourhood, get them all to come and live in my giant house and watch the fallout as they constantly catch me cheating on them with each other.
Then if one of them looks like they're going to leave... get them to go for a swim and remove the ladder... or wait for a cooking fire and remove the doors.
I think I might be a satan bot.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 11:25 GMT Plest
Re: Problem of evil?
They tried to explain that away in "The Matrix" by saying that human beings are basically dirty little animals and we hate anything approaching perfection as we'll get bored and reject the simulation. We like to suffer and wallow in our own filth as it's the challenge of surviving such an existence is what gives life its meaning.
Nothing like a bit of suffering and punishment! --->
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 14:39 GMT Filippo
Re: Problem of evil?
Calling such a society "post-human" is very reductive, though. The parent universe where they live would need to be intrinsically much bigger and more complex than ours - and they would have the innate ability to live in it and interact with it. They'd be as far beyond us as we are beyond bacteria. More than that, even. They could be as far beyond us as we are beyond inanimate matter.
You don't think that an atom moves away when pushed because it got offended. It goes away because of electrostatic repulsion. To a sufficiently advanced intelligence, we'd be like that. It's not real suffering, it's just math describing how a fast-moving bit of metal turns into a pressure wave in air. There's no sentience involved. To us, it's somebody screaming in pain after getting shot, but that's just because we lack perspective.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 15:49 GMT probgoblin
I found the issue!
Humans are pattern matching animals. It's a useful tool but one of the costs it imposes is that we tend to reach for the tools we're comfortable with. If you are a mechanic, everything starts looking like a small block V8 or coil over suspension. If you are a plumber, the world and everything in it are really just a series of tubes and valves. If you're a habitual computer toucher, like the good doctor this article is about, everything starts to look like a program. Do Planck time and Planck length look like clock cycles and pixels to me? Do highly ordered biological systems look like optimizations and iterations on previous releases? Yes, but I have spent too much time on the computer and it has ruined my brain.
Computers: Not even once.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 16:48 GMT Jimmy2Cows
Re: "show a tendency towards declining disorder"
Perhaps view "information" as a quantum phenomenon, and thermodynamics as a macroscopic one? Then it's like trying to marry quantum dynamics with relativity. Both seem to be correct, but at wildly different scales, suggesting we're missing the bits in between that merge it all together. Maybe information theory and thermodynamics are also two sides of the same coin.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 16:21 GMT steelpillow
"According to thermodynamics, if we treat entropy as a measure of information in a system, then information tends always to increase."
"But according to quantum information theory, information is neither created nor destroyed in any quantum interaction, though it may be transformed."
"Or, er... right then. Ahem! In thermodynamics entropy represents a capacity to hold information. Thus, entropy can increase even though the information contained doesn't."
"But according to astrophysics, the area of a black hole's event horizon is directly proportional to both its entropy and the information it has swallowed."
"Oh, bollocks! Excuse me while I cook up a theory of information entropy and see if I can change the subject..."
My crystal balls now suggest that soon, we will be told that the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (IIT) should really be a theory of information entropy. Hey! maybe the decreasing entropy with age is why we get slower and stupider in old age? I claim my Nobel Prize!
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 17:36 GMT jake
How many simulate consciousnesses ...
can dance on the head of a pin?
More to the point, what kind of intelligence would waste the necessary energy to make such a simulation? What would be the point?
Methinks this is nothing more than an attempt at re-filling the grant money coffers. Philosophers gotta eat, too.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 22:06 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: How many simulate consciousnesses ...
"Methinks this is nothing more than an attempt at re-filling the grant money coffers. Philosophers gotta eat, too."
We need a bigger computer to identify what the actual question to "Life, The Universe and Everything" actually is. It might even need to be the size of a planet!
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 11:29 GMT Plest
Re: How many simulate consciousnesses ...
We do it now! You ever wasted a day, an afternoon playing video games? I certainly have. That's wasted electricity I'm sure my wife would have preferred me to use working in the garden or fixing the bathroom. Millions of people playing simulations of real life or fantasies, all over the planet right now with no redeeming feature other than passing time in the pursuit of pure entertainment. Entertainment achieves little other than making us feel good, seems pretty pointless as one little thing goes wrong and we're right back to moaning about everything again, so why do we waste so much time escaping and entertaining ourselves? That's energy, time and money that could be better spent on trying to stop climate change, kids being abused, people starving but we're still out there spending $300bn a year on video games!
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 18:09 GMT Tron
A simple analogy.
Draw a circle and put your pen in the middle. Now pick a direction, North, South, East or West, and move one unit in that direction at random. Your initial movements will make more of a difference as to where you end up than later movements as you get near to the edge of the circle.
Or: The big changes come early, for example in evolution. Once you are a fish, you are likely to evolve into a slightly different fish.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 21:14 GMT bazza
Re: A simple analogy.
Except that's not how evolution has actually worked. For example, whales are descended from the same land based ancestor as sheep. Some proto-sheep decided to foresake grass / legs / wool / bleating for the very different attraction of crill / flippers / blubber / ocean-spanning song. And, that proto sheep itself had an ancestor that'd decided "to hell with living in the sea, let's see what's beyond the beach".
If one goes looking for micro-evolutionary changes, one will find them. If one goes looking for macro-evolutionary changes, one will find them too, but one has to look harder. It's all about what evolutionary opportunities existed in the environment. Even within just mammals, there's a vast variety that exploded out into the world following the demise of the dinos.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 18:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
What?
Dr Vopson, who spent some of his career at disk drive giant Seagate, has developed the second law of infodynamics, which says that the entropy – or disorder – within information stays the same or decreases over time
This person is not in the same universe - simulated or otherwise - as me.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 19:55 GMT Just A Quick Comment
What was the Douglas Adams quote?
I remember something about if the purpose of the universe is discovered then that universe will be replaced with something even more bizarre. There are signs this may already have happened.
I know this is not accurate but that's the gist as I remember it...
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 22:56 GMT mevets
Physics nerds.
They couldn't grasp the concept of recreational pharmaceuticals in secondary school along with the cool kids.
They traipse along their meagre existence until they catch up to their pubescent contemporaries
And finally decide that what was bleedingly obvious to all
Reality is a facade
great news.
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Tuesday 10th October 2023 23:20 GMT Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch
Karl Popper says
The full expansion of this story is:
Observation has failed to refute the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation. If this hypothesis is true, however, the design of the simulation has thus far failed to give the game away by demonstrating a repeatable programming error that manifests as a hard contradiction, rather than a weird quirk of existence. No one has yet worked out how one might tell these two apart.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 07:53 GMT The Dogs Meevonks
An advanced race is playing 'First Life'
There's an old early 2000's reference for you... people who invested heavily in the game 2nd life now realising they're in the life simulation game called First Life.
My user is obviously a teenager based on some of the crap it gets me to spew forth from my face hole... the puerile, meme laden, pop culture laced conversations as a 44yr old has no business being that 'with it' as the young people no longer call it... and you'll be 'with it' too one day, but by then what's it will be something different and you'll feel old whilst spouting 15yr old drivel that amuses them.
At the end of the day, we are all just simulated meat sacks with an expiration date.
Fingers crossed my next user creates a more well rounded character.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 08:06 GMT SailorSteve
Will the real reality please stand up?
So, do we live in a simulation? My position is that it is intrinsically unprovable. Being such, there is really no point in not believing the universe is real. Where to begin…..let’s start with evil demons and Rene Descartes.
The story goes that there is an evil (not really necessary to term it evil) sitting between you and world. The demon intercepts all the data coming from the world and can control it, changing it how it wants to. This means that you can not know anything, absolutely, about the world. The demon controls all you see, hear, smell, etc… about the world. So, let’s make this less medieval and more sciencey sounding. I know, let change the word demon for computer simulation and presto, you can’t know anything about the world because the computer controls what your sense receive. But, you say, I have theories, experiments and data to back my conclusion. Nonsense. The simulation controls the your experiments and the data they produce. Heck, the computer controls your though on the subject (well, all subjects) and your decision on what experiments to run. You will get whatever results the simulation wants you to have as well as it controlling your understand of said results. Ok, is it possible that it has not changing anything? Sure, but how do you know? The only way you could learn the truth would be to put an observer outside the universe/simulation. Then you would finally be free from the demon’s/computer’s sphere of influence, thus able to report exactly what is occurring. Now the tricky part; putting an observer outside the universe. I’m going roll the dice on this one and say that can’t be done. So, you can’t know anything about the universe if it isn’t real. Any hint of simulation precludes the ability to tell real information from false.
Second, let’s say it is a simulation. So? What do you plan to do with this information? Escape? How? You are a product of the computer simulation; you have no existence outside of it. Master Chief can’t jump out Halo, so why should you be able to escape the simulation? And even if you could, why would the real universe be anything like the simulation? Our simulations are generally always fantasies. Magic, super-soldiers, portals, FTL, the list goes on. Why would whatever created the simulation, just do their universe in miniature? So, if it is a simulation, you can’t escape and you still don’t know anything about the real universe.
In fact, believing the universe is a simulation might be quite harmful. You and I are just bits of computer code; does it really matter what we do? It relieves us of responsible for who and what we are. Just a bit of computer fantasy that can be turned off at any moment. Moral choices and ethical decisions; just an invention of choice the computer provided. No. The universe is real. I am responsible for who I am and what I become. It is my duty, no matter how small, to leave the world a better place than when I was brought into it. The idea of a simulation is harmful me, you and everyone around us because it absolves us of responsibility.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 08:25 GMT amanfromMars 1
Re: "But why would a simulation create El Reg? Mmm... pizza" .... Lindsay Clark
:-) An easier question to answer with the usual avalanche of smart and SMARTR respondent commentary would be .... Why would a simulation not entertain and host El Regers? ...... for such are as vital blood transfusions are to severely wounded, and in dire straits need of vital blood transfusions, patients.
And is it just a coincidence that the subject of alternate virtual realities, albeit with it being cloaked in some obfuscating ambiguity/strange and stealthy narrative, was touched upon earlier, and rather appropriately, on El Reg's, TheNextPlatform.
amanfromMars 1 says:
OCTOBER 9, 2023 AT 12:51 PM [2310091751]....... replying on https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/10/06/openai-to-join-the-custom-ai-chip-club/
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“Can any part of life be larger than life?” one asks.
Well Yes, of course, ...... they be all of those parts self-actuated to practically remotely realise with physical abandon, virtualisable phorms, absolutely fabulous dreams and rogue renegade nightmares in reciprocal agreement with both Einstein and Rushian thoughts, and without the worryisome fear of unwarranted doubt forbidding and preventing total information awareness access providing ITs AWEsome Utility for Enhancing Abilities ...... "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world, and all there ever will be to know and understand” [Einstein] ...... "And the knowledge that they fear is a weapon to be used against them .... And the things that he fears are a weapon to be held against him" [Rush]
And the future really holds no fears for masters and mistresses of ultimate weapons with almighty arsenals of smart ammunition and even smarter intelligence leads and feeds.
:-) Naturally though, will many a soul imagine all of that to be completely wrong .... and miss out catastrophically on all of the available fun. That be their great loss, Timothy Prickett Morgan. And of that there is no shadow of doubt.
Bravo, El Reg, and take a Well Earned and Fully Deserved Bow ..... Forging Novel Paths many SMARTR Jumps and Quantum Leaps Way Up Ahead and Leading Failed Intellectually Bankrupt Competition and Petrified Terrifying Opposition Boots and Reboots into the Future.
And I'd bet there's not many global outfits/virtual publications able to publish truly live future information and additional advanced intelligence worthy of following, or denying, on that situation.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 09:07 GMT mpi
It's not a simulation, it's an MMORPG
The graphics are amazing, but the NPCs AI is beyond ridiculous.
Also, admins refuse to do anything about rampant trolling, or constant cheating that is ruining the ingame economy.
Quests are boring, grindy and repetitive af. After level 27 you have basically seen all the content, and are just doing daily quests. You can't avoid them however due to the inflated prices to satisfy the constantly naggig stat system. Ingame housing is well done in theory, but the requirements for even a modest hovel are so imbalanced that many players have no chance to experience what would otherwhise be a really enjoyable feature. Sorry, but that is just inexcusably bad design, period.
The faction-conflict system is completely illogical, with randomly erupting violence with no warning, and zero logical reason given. Not fun. All it does is disrupt normal people who are just trying to enjoy the game.
I will admit though, that the pet-minigame system is really nice.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 09:20 GMT Conundrum1885
Fermi paradox
Could thus explain the lack of actual verified alien signals.
I have often wondered if there is alien life out there but if so did they make the same mistakes we did? Did their 'Cuban Missile Crisis' or another close call end in mutually assured destruction?
Perhaps they learned the hard way, abandoning nuclear energy in favour of a more potent energy source?
There is more potential energy locked in a kilo of 40K or 176Lu than uranium, if we could only harness it. Isomer power would take us to the nearest stars, eventually.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 10:26 GMT Bebu
Perhaps sort of right.
If you think of minutest fragment of space and time as having what we call the laws of physics embedded in it then one might imagine space-time as being an (almost?) infinite distributed (data flow?) computer evaluating some sort of declarative code (physics.)
Of course I guess this poses another metaphysical(?) question of how the universe came into being and why does it have the physical laws it does have rather than something else anthropic principle notwithstanding. Personally I wonder how small does a chunk of space-time have to be as not to be able contain all of physics ie how far down the pile of turtles or tortoises before they start missing bits like a leg or a flipper? ;)
Still if Musk reckons 'tis so its then one can be certain 'taint so beyond even unreasonable doubt.
The glider gun in Conway's life is probably its version of Musk. :)
All in all I think Douglas Adams did a much more amusing job on pontificating on the question of life, the universe and everything.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 12:08 GMT lidgaca-2
'He said the fact that physical systems show a tendency towards declining disorder showed "excess information is removed" and "resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimize power consumption. And as a result supports the idea that we're living in a simulation." '
Sounds (smells ?) like dingoes kidneys to me ...
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 13:53 GMT DJO
Missing the point of a simulation
Many things to consider such as:
Granularity - how detailed does a simulation need to be? Why does a simulation need to simulate down to quark level?
Predictability - Is the simulated universe deterministic or random? If random it's pointless, nothing of value can be found. If it's deterministic it's just as pointless as it does not reflect reality.
Capacity - There is a physical limit to how small memory can be - I suppose the final limit is using electrons to store a 1 or 0 by spin or some other property. To simulate 7 billion people each with 100 trillion synapses as well as an close to infinite number of other animals and plants as well as the climate and issues from space or from inside the Earth and then repeat all that for every other planet would require a computer memory module of planetary dimensions - just not practical.
And so on, at every point the question "Simulation or Reality" breaks down as a simulation either does not fit with the observed universe or is impossible using any form of computational device.
All good fun to argue over but ultimately as important and soluble as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 14:15 GMT Eclectic Man
A worrying thought
If the universe is a simulation, then maybe life, including us, is not merely an accident, but unknown to our 'creator', who is more interested in watching the pretty stars and nebulae shine and galaxies interact.
e.g. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231011.html
I don't know how much processing power it takes to run us here on planet Earth, but I guess that compared to the REST OF THE UNIVERSE, it is not much.
Maybe we should redouble our attempts to contact extra-terrestrial civilisations in the hope our overlord(s) notice and take pity on us?
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 14:42 GMT Erik Beall
So he explains it all using something else he can't explain, entropy, nice card trick. Seriously though I'm sure he doesn't see the irony. The thing that gets me about simulations is if indeed we are being simulated with fidelity even within twenty orders of magnitude of reality, the simulation hardware would consume many universes. So we must be a low res simulation or we're actually inside a much much bigger universe (or it has different laws of physics). Fluency in computational complexity should be required for more physicists (although I didn't learn much about it until over a decade in).
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 18:37 GMT Lomax
Maybe...
...but where are the wires?
Based on my own experience working as a programmer in various projects, it seems to me that systems do get more disorganised over time, and that they invariably bloat and sprawl and become less predictable. I'm thinking that predictability can be seen as a measure of order, in that the more ordered a system is the more predictable it is. Size seems to be an important factor; bigger projects appear to gain more entropy per unit of time than smaller ones. Some approach black hole levels of chaos attraction, where the only way to avoid having every hour of the day sucked into the crushing hell at its core is the rewrite that the beancounters won't let us have. And so we go back to work, trying to distil some semblance of order from our mess of wires - knowing full well it's a losing battle.
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Thursday 12th October 2023 09:14 GMT Mike 137
Hold your horses for a moment
Having at last managed to plough through the incredibly turgid paper, the only direct reference to the universe as a simulation is in the conclusions:
"A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimization and compression mechanism in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements. This is exactly what we are observing via empirical evidence all around us, including digital data, biological systems, atomistic systems, symmetries, and the entire universe."
That's actually a hopelessly weak argument, not least because it assumes that the empirical evidence can be supportive of no alternative hypothesis than the one proposed. Ergo, not even bad science -- in fact not really science at all. And, ironically, quite a bit of the supposed 'evidence' was apparently derived from guess what? Simulations.
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Thursday 12th October 2023 10:04 GMT Mike 137
Hold yet another horse!
The paper references a book by the author: M M Vopson PhD, Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe, IPI Publishing Hampshire, UK, 2023
So I thought I'd look it up.
The publisher lists its contact details solely as Information Physics Institute, Gosport, Hampshire, United Kingdom with an email address of information.physics.institute@gmail.com
People can join the institute as 'research fellows' just by subscribing £20, and the web site states "All proceeds from the membership contributions will be used to finance the experimental testing of the M-E-I equivalence principle, confirming that information is the fifth state of matter and the simulation hypothesis."
Conducting experiments to confirm a hypothesis does not constitute objective scientific research (particularly when the hypothesis is so bizarre as this one).
BTW, the privileges of being a 'research fellow' include "access to the IPI blog, allowing to post unlimited articles on the IPI site / blog, to promote or sell your books, software or relevant products and to access freely all our events including live talks. Research Fellows are also encouraged to participate in the IPI research projects and to publish in our online magazine, IPI Letters).". So for twenty smackers you too can get published on theoretical physics, without the need to go though all those years of boring preparatory study.