Scientist Suggests We Explore 'Universe is a VR Simulation' Theory

holy_calamity writes "A New Zealand physicist has written a paper saying that physicists should seriously explore the possibility the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation. He says that the existence of quantum phenomena could be due to the underlying digital nature of the simulation and also claims his VR hypothesis can explain relativity, the big bang and more. It should be possible to perform experiments to prove the hypothesis too. He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual."

Comments

1637 called, they want their idea back.

[SatanicPuppy]

In a word: Crap.

Philosophers have been pondering this nonsense for centuries, and have gotten nowhere...It's an argumentative blackhole, a solipsim. It's not testable...his "testable" experiments are like the sort of thing you see an idiot do to try and demonstrate that they have free will (e.g. "See? I just punched myself in the face, no way would anyone make me do that, so I must have free will!") If our reality is virtual, then all data is suspect, and it would be impossible to trust any sort of experimental data. Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.

It's just not a useful avenue for speculation. This guy brings nothing new to the table except the kinda crap the ID people bring..."Hey, if the universe was a simulation, it would explain why everything tastes like chicken!" Just because there is no currently workable theory for some occurrence, there is no reason to invent a wild explanation that just makes it go away.

Without some compelling proof (which he lacks) this is nothing more than a conversational topic over a bag of weed.

Re:1637 called, they want their idea back.

[Raindance]

I completely disagree. The calculus on the simulation argument is surprisingly solid when you think about it (Bostrom, for instance, has some pretty good arguments for it). You say, "It's just not a useful avenue for speculation. This guy brings nothing new to the table except the kinda crap the ID people bring." Did you read the paper? This guy Whitworth says some interesting stuff... personally I think the most interesting part of his paper is near the end, where he compares "Virtual Property" with "Physical Outcome".

Diversity of effort in science is good. This guy has a diverse approach to trying to understand the universe. He also says some interesting things and is looking for predictive qualities in his theory. That's good.

The problem is that we know nearly nothing about what simulations "have to be" or "cannot be" in the case of a system advanced enough to simulate our universe. So he might have a long road ahead of him. But it's an approach worth pursuing, if damn difficult to do so.

Re:1637 called, they want their idea back.

[inviolet]

It's just not a useful avenue for speculation. This guy brings nothing new to the table except the kinda crap the ID people bring..."Hey, if the universe was a simulation, it would explain why everything tastes like chicken!" Just because there is no currently workable theory for some occurrence, there is no reason to invent a wild explanation that just makes it go away.

I would not be surprised at all to learn that reality is a simulation. Many of my brethren seem to be bots, executing fairly simple scripts and never really introspecting.

They were probably put here, by me or whoever, to make the game more interesting. (We'd have to temporarily forget that it was a game in order to keep it fun.) Indeed, any sufficiently advanced intelligence is going to achieve such a level of safety, comfort, and (eventually) immortality, that they will then need to invest a simulated world in which they can once again experience peril, uncertainty, risk, and death.

Re:1637 called, they want their idea back.

[ChronosWS]

Um, no :)

Assume that the Universe is a VR simulation running on some machine. What we experience as time is a sequence of calculations produced by this machine. We are only aware of those parts of the calculation which the simulation specifically makes us aware of. No experiment can prove or disprove this because the calculations which the VR machine makes need not be 1-to-1 with our experiences. For example, the VR machine could 'suspend' the reality simulation while it performs some complex task, and we would be none the wiser.

Further, since the sum of our existence is contained within the VR simulation, and it can be paused OR ALTERED at will, the VR simulation could self-correct for any flaw we discover by simply rewriting the memories of any experiences we had, or deleting and replaying that part of the simulation with different variables. Again, since our experience is wholly under the control of the simulation, we again would be none the wiser.

Finally, since all information within the VR machine is controlled by the VR machine, any experiment we design is itself fully under the control of the VR machine. All data we perceive is perceived because the VR machine has elected to let us perceive it. Ergo, no experiment we could produce would allow us to discern the reality of the VR machine unless it chose to reveal itself to us.

There is nothing new here.

Re:1637 called, they want their idea back.

[Citizen of Earth]

could self-correct for any flaw we discover by simply rewriting the memories of any experiences we had, or deleting and replaying that part of the simulation with different variables. Again, since our experience is wholly under the control of the simulation, we again would be none the wiser.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster does this every instant of every day. This makes Pastafarianism logically sound while other religions are a mass of contradictions.

Re:1637 called, they want their idea back.

[Admiral Ag]

I think you're taking it too far. What you say would indeed make the claim untestable. But on the other hand, it is testable given certain assumptions about the VR machine (that it does not engage in the blocking you describe, for example). While the test could not rule out all possibilities, it could conditionally rule out that we were living in that particular kind of VR world.

Where I think your argument fails is that no scientific theory can have the kind of certainty that would prove beyond doubt that we weren't living in any sort of VR machine, so no scientist qua scientist ought to be interested in that sort of test. On the other hand, a test that merely attempted to rule out that we were living in a VR machine that did not maliciously interfere with our experiments would be genuinely scientific, and we should grant the result the same status we would grant to any other scientific conclusion.

Part of the problem here is with misuse of the verb "to know". Plato claimed that to know was to have an infallible grasp of reality, and that definition actually makes sense in his peculiar philosophical system (I happen to think it doesn't make sense in any other), but unless you are a Platonist, you should treat that understanding of the term "knowledge" with suspicion. The problem is that it has seeped into our collective consciousness and caused us to talk a lot of nonsense, and it isn't just philosophers and scientists, ordinary people now demand ridiculous degrees of proof for all sorts of petty claims.

Perhaps we would be better off to listen to Wittgenstein, who argued that we should look at the way people actually use the word in non-philosophical contexts. In science, no sane person uses the Platonic definition of knowledge, because that's not the kind of knowledge that science yields. While philosophers are blamed for some of this ridiculous brain in a vat stuff, most philosophers I know are more inclined to the anti-Platonist approach. It really is unfair. Scientists berate contemporary philosophers for arguing in favour of Cartesian doubts, which is almost as accurate as philosophers accusing contemporary scientists of practicing alchemy.

On the other hand, much religious speculation seems tied to the Platonic definition (what's the point in supposing a God as a mere working hypothesis rather than an evidence transcedent metaphysical certainty), so the Wittgensteinian approach seems rather damaging to religious claims (although Witt. himself didn't think so IIRC).

Re:1637 called, they want their idea back.

[Tollsen]

That is -- if anybody outside of our box still has any interest in us. Perhaps, our box is running on something the equalivant of a 386 running inside of af closet, collecting dust, and nobody remembers us. On the flip side, some of us might have figured out or invented something which was previously unknown to the outside (literally) world, and been applied there (that is, if the laws out there don't make it impossible) Then, of course, our universe might just as well be what we call a MMORPG. But back to the theory: Let's say some scientists will in a decade or two conclude we are indeed living in a VR: What are we going to do about it?

Re:1637 called, they want their idea back.

[RobDude]

That implies that 'time' as we know it is the same in the 'real' world. When I run an emulator on my PC, the game I'm playing doesn't know that it is being run on an emulator. If I'm playing Zelda OoT and I step on a switch that opens a door that will remain open for 30 seconds...

And then I pause the emulator for three days of 'my' time; no time has passed in the game.

Given what we know about software and what not, first and foremost - assuming we are all just a VR simulation, intentionally trying to crash the system might be a really, really, really bad idea. If we're running with a debugger attached, and we do something that throws an exception - time as we know it would stop instantly. The developer/sys admin running us could take a week, month, year, or any unit of time to come back, fix the error and continue execution.

Or, we could simply 'crash', which would be the end of the world to all of us - to the developer, he'd fix a few lines of code and re-run us.

In a simulation, everything is simulated; including our concept of time. There wouldn't need to be any outside entity watching us in 'real-time' to 'instantly' fix us.

Re:1637 called, they want their idea back.

[SatanicPuppy]

For one thing, the fact that there could conceivably be an Operator standing by to adjust the results doesn't mean that we should suspect there is.

How about "The fact that the universe could be a VR simulation doesn't mean that we should suspect it is"? That's the real root of the problem; there is zero evidence the universe is anything other than it appears to be.

As soon as you start saying, "Well this could be a simulation" then you have to throw out all knowledge that comes to you through sense data. ALL of it. It's not trustworthy when you know it could all be manufactured. That leaves you with nothing outside of deductive logic, and you're stuck trying to prove the universe as we know it a priori, which is effectively impossible.

You're treating it like you'll be able to trust empirical experimentation, and that's just not the case. Even the possibility that the simulation is being gamed from the outside is enough to screw all your results, regardless of whether they're being changed or not. As for inconsistent results...I've run simulations before where things started going haywire; the most common course is to try and fix it, and if that fails, it's time to load saved game, and move forward from there, taking care to remove whatever screwed you up the first time.

Re:Hrm

[SatanicPuppy]

One of the strengths of science is that there are always people asking weird questions.

Granted, this one is a bit over the edge, but if you force people to bend to the orthodoxy in all things, then your science has become a religion. Either the current theory can withstand a dissenting voice, or the current theory sucks, and needs to be replaced.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

[pezpunk]

We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?

- Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 (Subject termination advised)

Proving that...

[techpawn]

is like trying to prove that there is no gravity, everything just continually expands at the same rate until they collide. You can't provide outside neutral observation, anything you try to observe it with will be part of the experiment. This isn't Physics it's philosophy. Sorry sir, but your cat is dead.

Occam's Razor

[Anonymous Coward]

Occam's Razor already negates the need for testing if the universe is real or not: Because there is no proof to the contrary, and assuming that the universe is real has all of the same assumptions and results as assuming it is not, and has no change on the math involved, the universe must be real, because they are equally capable of explaining what goes on in the universe, and one requires fewer assumptions.

As a side note: HEY PHYSICISTS! YOUR JOB IS TO BUILD MODELS THAT ACCURATELY REPRODUCE THE RESULTS REALITY DOES. NOT TO DEBATE WHY THE MODELS WORK!

Or to rephrase that. Science is about the how, not the why. If you want to learn about the why that's what religion and philosophy is for. Science is concerned with things that can be quantified, and modeled, and it is the process of testing models of how the universe works against how it actually works. So all of this quantum stuff... Light behaves this way, it does not mean light IS this way, just that the math saying it behaves that way is currently the most accurate in terms of results.

Further, if the universe was a simulation there would be no random numbers, only pseudo-random numbers. Quantum physicists have to work with statistics and effectively random numbers: that is to say, with our current view of the universe, we can know every detail of every thing in the while universe, and still not be able to predict the future, or extrapolate the past with a high degree of accuracy. Old style physics allow the universe to be a simulation because all processes are reversible, and can be tracked back, but it requires a 'prime mover'. Current physics everything moves. there is no need for a prime mover, because movement occurs randomly.

'course I'm just an undergrad...

Re:Occam's Razor

[mea37]

Trying to reason about whether the universe is real or simulated is only useful as entertainment. Not only is it philosophical, it's philosophically meaningless. The guy proposing the theory claims there's a way to test it, but he's merely given a name to the type of test he thinks will work, without considering whether such a test is theoretically conceivable. (And the author of TFA, in his zeal to discredit the theory, conflates the concepts of "describing" an algorithm and "executing" it, in an attempt to suggest such tests have already been run.)

Some of the speculation around the theory - possible ties to quantum physics and relativity, etc. - is entertaining and might make good sci fi. I've found myself wandering down similar lines of thougth at idle times. But I don't believe any true reasoning on the topic is possible.

In that spirit, here's what's wrong with your attempts to reason on the topic :)

Occam's Razor already negates the need for testing if the universe is real or not . . . the universe must be real, because they are equally capable of explaining what goes on in the universe, and one requires fewer assumptions.

For all the times I've seen Occam's Razor referenced on Slashdot and/or in pop culture, I've never once seen it used correctly in either place. This is no exception. Occam's Razor does not prove anything; it merely give guidance as to which of two competing theories is preferable to work with.

Or to rephrase that. Science is about the how, not the why.

That would be a false (or at least oversimplified) dichotomy. Speculative "why"s are often steps in reasoning that lead to more complete models of "how".

Further, if the universe was a simulation there would be no random numbers, only pseudo-random numbers.

If our world is a simulation, then you cannot know what technology exists in the "real" world. Just because we (in this world) haven't invented a true random number generator for a computer (yet) doesn't mean one can't exist, especially since we'd have no baseline for knowing basic physics in the "real" world.

Quantum physicists have to work with statistics and effectively random numbers

I question whether we know that variables in quantum physics are truly random vs. pseudorandom, but I'm a bit rusty in that field. But ironically, if they are truly random, then that suggests a perfectly sound procedure for making a truly random number generator for a computer...

with our current view of the universe, we can know every detail of every thing in the whole universe, and still not be able to predict the future

Yes, but if the universe is a simulation then any random number seeds would not be included in "every thing in the whole universe".

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[Baron_Yam]

Actually, I don't think that's a valid point.

Just because you believe some programmer in a 'higher' level of reality created this one, doesn't mean you don't believe he did it with rules that we see as the Laws of Nature. You can still investigate those Laws and try to figure them out.

This is different from the ID crowd, who apparently feel that 'God did it' means you actively refuse to even think about the rules.

mathimatical basis for this...

[Connie_Lingus]

This idea is not new...mathematicians have been exploring this for years now, and the "theory" is based on these three ideas and how "true" they may be;

1. the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a posthuman stage.
2. any post-human civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof).
3. we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become post-humans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

It all breaks down to probability...if any "post-human" species with enough computer power to model our universe down to the quantum level decides to run Sim-like models, there would almost assuredly be many many simulations run. Now, it might require a computer the size of a small planet to run the estimated 10^42 ops/second that modeling our universe may require, but it is not totally unbelievable that 200-500 years from now we, as a species, will harness this type of computer power.

The real problem is...who cares? Even if it were possible to discover this "truth" what difference would it make in our lives?

Good for him

[roggg]

I don't know why people are hating on him. I think it's great that an IT guy has found an outlet for his creative side. Not sure when NS started publishing sci-fi, but it sounds interesting nonetheless.

Not to turn this into a religious debate, but...

[VE3MTM]

You can't disprove this theory for the same reasons you can't "prove" that God doesn't exist with ontological arguments. There's no way to prove that we're not living in a simulation, because for every test you come up with, some weeny can say, "well, of course you get that result, it's part of the simulation!"

It's bad science. Hell, it's not science.

The only real proof would be...

[m4cph1sto]

... glitches in the system. Like one morning we wake up and gravity repels, and a BSoD message is written across the sky in clouds. Only then would I be convinced that our universe is in fact a digital simulation.

Re:I disagree

[roggg]

I believe it is testable. All computers ultimately reduce to the Turing Machine. This includes neural networks and at least some classes of quantum computer. (Heresy, I know. Terrible. Now go find a medium-rare steak to burn me on.) However, not all problems reduce to computable problems. If there is a non-computable system that exists in the real world, then it cannot be the product of a simulation, no matter how advanced the computer is. The problem with this is that computers, computability, Turing, and the entire field of theoretical computer science are fabrications made possible by the rules of the simulation we are running inside of. No correspondence to uber-reality is assumed or implied. You cant prove anything from inside the box.

Re:bad idea

[Locklin]

Only human arrogance would lead one to believe that the [subject of the simulation] are humans.

Simulating the universe

[Tony]

Given a quantum storage tank the size of a large sun, I could simulate the universe on a 386. It'd just take a long, long time to run.

You don't need a computer the size of the universe to model the universe. You just need a computer the size of the universe to model the universe *in real time.*

Re:I disagree

[teslar]

All computers ultimately reduce to the Turing Machine.

And you can prove this, of course. Let's rephrase this to be more realistic and correct:
All currently known computers can ultimately be related to the classical Turing Machine

That being said, your general argument is of course an allusion to von Neumann's quote "Anyone attempting to produce random numbers by purely arithmetic means is, of course, in a state of sin." - saying basically that since the universe contains true randomness, it cannot be the product of a calculation. This is a fallacy, since you're making assumptions on the calculations and computations that can be performed in the world simulating our Universe ("their computational limits are the same as ours"), but you have no way of supporting that assumption. None of what holds true for our Universe might even apply out there. So no, you cannot test (better: falsify) the hypothesis this way.

No meaningful argument *against* simulism either

[mkcmkc]

What you say is (mostly) true enough, but it doesn't follow that Simulism is nonsense. It is non-testable, at least as far as we know from our perspective, and therefore falls outside of the realm of science. But it may nonetheless be true.

Not only that, but it seems like a distinct possibility. Who among us would not set up such a simulation if we had the capability? And who among us, watching the progress of technology over recent decades, seriously doubts that we will soon have the capability to set up such simulations?

Ummm no

[poptones]

Just because someone says "god did it" they have not automatically excluded any attempts at information gathering.

God did it... now let's see why, and what rules he put into place.

Software systems can test their sandbox for signs of a virtual host, so why can't we? This whole thing about ID intrinsically representing an end to knowledge seeking is a strawman argument.

Re:not quite a paradox but..

[tompaulco]

If you paint a painting, should that painting expect that someone painted you? Assuming we were created by some being that exists outside our universe, it does not necessarily follow that the fact that we were created implies that the being was also created.
If you write a computer program with certain restraints, that certainly does not mean that those restraints apply to you outside of that program.

Re:I disagree

[rasputin465]

Do such problems exist? Well, chaos theory is full of them. You cannot have a system that is truly chaotic and computable at the same time - the two are mutually exclusive. Both are deterministic, but only one is predictable.

While this isn't the main point of your comment, I should call a red card on your reference to chaos theory, determinism, and predictability. First of all, I'm not sure you understand the meaning of the word "deterministic". If a system is deterministic, then by definition it is, at least at some level, predictable. In terms of physics, the alternative to a deterministic system is a probabilistic system (which is the general interpretation of quantum mechanics). But even probabilistic systems are predictable to a degree (one can predict the probability of certain outcomes).

But when one talks of chaos theory, and a chaotic system, this has nothing to do with its predictability. A chaotic system is in fact predictable. The 'chaos' label refers to the system's sensitivity to initial conditions. But given a set of initial conditions, the later dynamics of that system can be computed.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[richlv]

this has always puzzled me.
i can't see believing in god as something that can withstand simple questions.
i mean, if the life on earth is too complex to have originated on itself and somebody created it, then that how did that somebody come to be ? did somebody else create him (and why not her ;) ) ?
if somebody else, we get into a loop, where we still have to break out at some point.
if not, then there can be no scientific, critical thinking that could accept the "he just exists, you may not question that".
so how could a chain of logical arguments convince a person of gods existence ?

Re:bad idea

[Floody]

Only human arrogance would lead one to believe that the [subject of the simulation] are humans.

Agreed. Although, perhaps, the "point" of the simulation/experiment is to evolve intelligence to a given (as yet unknown) level.

Consider that there are between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, 27 galaxies (IIRC) in our local group alone and (probably) over 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's a lot of opportunity for all kinds of interesting things to happen over 13+ billion years.

Still, as others have pointed out, it ultimately fails the falsibility test. One can always argue that the simulation has been set up to be undetectable and/or modified to that end.

Human beings are quite obsessed with "purpose." We know that the universe and physical laws appear to be deterministic, but this doesn't help much with advancing the "why" answer. Personally, I am a strong believer in the weak anthropomorphic principle: the universe is deterministic because it must be in order to exist. It's perfectly plausible within that framework that there is no specific reason or purpose behind its existence, no matter how uncomfortable that might make homo sapiens feel.

The reality of the reality

[caseih]

I don't think it particularly matters if we are in some kind of metaphysical simulation or not. If there is some sort of uber virtual reality, the simulation, and thus simulator, would have to be so large and so complex that it would also itself be reality. On a smaller scale, if you want to simulate every single aspect of a system (and I do mean *everything* about it), then you've pretty much created the system itself again, albeit in some sort of equivalent way. Supposing such a simulation existed, and it was in some sort of computer, for argument's sake, and being in a computer it allowed reality of size x to be modeled in a much smaller, finite space, then if you run multiple realities in parallel, that's pretty much the equivalent of the multiple universe theory. So as far as we're concerned it's the exact same thing!

Additionally, reality being some kind of "VR" begs all kinds of questions. Like how was the VR created (it's existence as a simulation implies it was created). What is the "reality" that the simulator resides in? If the VR was created, how was it created? Does this imply some sort of intelligence at work here? The only possible interesting thing that could come about if reality is some sort of simulation is whether or not there are glitches in the simulation. Everything else, if it ran perfectly, is irrelevant because the simulation would be indistinguishable from any form of reality.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[EagleEye101]

Well fine. If you want to say that for God, how would it be without God then. You say its an infinite loop to explain God well its the same for explaining the universe. How did all this mass come into existence anyway...

Re:I disagree

[DragonWriter]

I believe it is testable. All computers ultimately reduce to the Turing Machine. This includes neural networks and at least some classes of quantum computer. (Heresy, I know. Terrible. Now go find a medium-rare steak to burn me on.) However, not all problems reduce to computable problems. If there is a non-computable system that exists in the real world, then it cannot be the product of a simulation, no matter how advanced the computer is.

How do you distinguish a deterministic system governed by a non-computable function without first finding a practical technique for solving non-computable problems?

OTOH, if any system for solving non-computable problems can exist within our universe/simulation, we can incorporate that system into any simulation we design, and thus such a simulation can feature systems which are "non-computable" in the Turing sense; and if a simulation in our universe can do so if our universe is not a simulation, a simulation that governs our universe could do so, as well.

Do such problems exist? Well, chaos theory is full of them. You cannot have a system that is truly chaotic and computable at the same time - the two are mutually exclusive.

No, they aren't. Chaos and Turing computability are not exclusive. Though, of course, a large chaotic system will be hard to compute in terms of practicality. But Turing computability isn't about pragmatics.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[JWSmythe]

Ahhh, and you've figured it out.

    Hallucinations are hallucinations. It doesn't matter if they're induced by illegal drugs, abused products (like the DXM in Robitussin, the nitrous oxide in whipped cream cans, or other of thousands of abused products), lack of sleep, or lack of oxygen to the brain, they're all still hallucinations.

    A few that have been passed on to me have been...

    Are they giant purple lizards crawling along the roof tops, following you around?

    Separating from your body, having your spirit become one with the universe, being everywhere, and then thinking to yourself, "I had a body once. I wonder what that was like..." only to be slammed back into reality a few seconds later.

    The ceiling turning into a gridwork, then the cells of the grid being filled with green paisley patterns, which all began to spin simultaniously. The sound of the music turned into taste and color, and your body becomes one with the waves of music.

    Or..

    Lying in a bed, a dark spirit floats above you, with an evil face, and large tattered black wings, who simply says "it's not your time yet", and then disappears.

    Some people relate that when hallucinating, they are easily guided into their hallucination, either through ideas that have been impressed upon them before, or during the hallucination. "Are those ants all over your body??". We've all heard of the floating spirit hallucination, and the light at the end of the tunnel hallucination. Since those have been so impressed on us as the way it's going to be, it's very easy for that to be a driving factor in such hallucinations.

    In my only near death experiences, I saw .... black .... Lots of nothing. There's nothing in the great beyond, because I have no preconceptions to guide my hallucinations.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[khellendros1984]

I believe that life isn't too complex to have been generated by natural laws; on the contrary, said laws were designed by a creator with the express purpose of generating the life we see.

"He" is just a convenient grammatical construct to refer to a God, which I actually suspect is genderless. Appearing to a male-dominated society, "He" took on a male persona, which is how we now think of Him.

As to the question of how God came to exist, the Bible school answer would be "He just always has". Personally, I think that before the universe was created, time was undefined, so "always" loses its meaning. There wasn't some amount of aeons of time with God sitting doing nothing.....of course, I don't have any evidence that it's not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down ;-)

Re:I disagree

[Hatta]

Do you have anything to actually back that up?

It's called the Church Turing Thesis

They haven't even invented quantum computers yest, and if by "neural network" you mean livingbrain tissue, you're flat wron, and it's based on facts, not speculation. The brain is a chemical process using various mixes of chemical. Thought, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, are nothing more than a complex chemical reactions.

Right, and all those chemical reactions are defined by laws of physics. The same laws of physics that govern the computers we all know and love. What is it that makes you think computers can't be implemented with chemistry?

If brains were turing machines than dogs could do math.

Wow. To paraphrase Charles Babbage, I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

First off, what makes you think that dogs don't do math? Just think about their brains controlling their muscles. Somehow they have to be calculating how much neuronal stimulation to apply to a muscle to get the desired amount of force. Isn't that math?

Secondly, what would make you think that dogs being an implementation of a computer implies that they would be able to consciously do math? You've got your logical levels hideously confused. Have you ever seen the animal simulation toy program "Dogz"? I don't think there's any question that that dog is an algorithm. But can it do math?

Re:I can think of ways to test it.

[cnettel]

Detecting a well-implemented simulation is hard. It's like trying to determine for sure that you're in a VM from user mode, when you haven't even been told what a non-VM would look like. Arguments like timing assume that somehow we would still be simulated in real time. While possible, there is no reason to do it that way. If I write an explicit time-stepping scheme in a for loop, the scheme won't be affected if my code is swapped out and then loaded again. I can even hibernate the machine and start it up later, the simulated environment will be totally unaffected.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[jafuser]

What piss me off is people disbelieving in God's existence just because they can't scientifically prove it.

Why do you have to be "pissed off"? Why not just let people believe what they want and go on with your life?

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[lgw]

OK, let's say that God exists. Which one? We've imagined about a million of em. Pick the wrong one and you go to Hell for sure.

Stipulating that some god or goddess or pantheon exists, please provide proof (or even a little evidence) that your religious views won't doom yourself and everyone who listens to you to eternal torment.

The thing about statements that can't be falsified is that they have 0 predictive power. True or false, it doesn't matter: no reason to care.

Questions vs. assertions

[Dire Bonobo]

One of the strengths of science is that there are always people asking weird questions.

Yes, but asking them by way of sloppy logic and weird assertions is not a good way to do it.

Consider, for example, this excerpt from p.8:

One of the mysteries of our world is how every photon of light, every electron and quark, and indeed every point of space itself, seems to just "know" what to do at each moment. The mystery is that these tiniest parts of the universe have no mechanisms or structures by which to make such decisions. Yet if the world is a virtual reality, this problem disappears.

His argument is nonsensical. It's like asking how a hammer "knows" to fall if you lift it up and then let go of it. The standard explanation of this "mystery" is simply that the innate nature of objects makes them behave in a manner we characterize as physical laws. They don't "know" what to do, they simply do, and we describe the result.

He's mixing up causality; particles follow the laws of nature because the laws of nature are defined by their ability to describe the actions of particles.

Other examples of how a VR approach could illuminate current physics issues include:
1. Virtual reality creation. A virtual reality usually arises from "nothing", as the big bang
theory proposes our universe did (see next section).

Contrary to his claim, this solves nothing - it just shifts the "where did everything come from?" out of the simulation and into the real universe around it.

2. Maximum processing rate. The maximum speed a pixel in a virtual reality game can cross a screen is limited by the processing capacity of the computer running it. In general, a virtual world's maximum event rate is fixed by the allocated processing capacity. In our world, the fixed maximum that comes to mind is the speed of light. That there is an absolute maximum speed could reflect a maximum information processing rate

Argument from spurious similarity fallacy. It's like saying "the universe has a speed limit, and highways in my state have a speed limit, so maybe my state government is responsible for the universe's speed limit."

Besides, how does it "illuminate current physics issues" like he claims? His list doesn't "illuminate" anything - he's just listing in a vague, handwavy kind of way how computers and the universe might be similar. Putting that kind of list under the heading "A prima facie case that the physical world is a virtual reality" is nothing short of misleading.

Individually none of the above short points is convincing, but taken together they constitute what a court might call circumstantial evidence

And a scientist might call it data dredging. If you compare two huge lists (of properties, in this case), eventually you'll find similarities by sheer chance.

More powerful evidence is provided by cases which a VR theory explains easily but which OR approaches have great difficulty with. Two such cases are now given in more detail.

He should, at the very least, cover this - his real argument - first, before launching into his little "look at all the similarities!1!" diatribe. Or just leave out the latter part entirely, and stick to the regular scientific practice of seeing how theories handle problems and predictions.

Unfortunately, his arguments on these two points are simply wrong. He claims that "VR theory" explains where the universe came from, but all he's doing is explaining where the simulation came from, and his theory offers nothing on how the entire universe (simulation+outside) came from. He's not solving anything - all he's

Re:bad idea

[darkstar949]

However, as another poster pointed out, the system could first place the simulation residents into a "paused" state, preform the universal state calculations, and once complete updated the residents of the simulation with the current universal state. Thus, the computation time to generate the state might increase, but from the perspective of residents the updates would be real time.

Not necessarily VR- Compressed

[flappinbooger]

There are a lot of people saying the universe is really something like 10 dimensions.

But, we live in 3, and are constrained in one direction in the 4th (time).

So, the universe is compressed, and the quantum weirdness is a (digital?) artifact resulting from the compression.

It's like we're an mp3, and it works well until you look too closely and then the weirdness and approximations start to show up.

I feel like I'm a .WAV living in an MP3!

Re:I disagree

[Hatta]

But chemicals aren't electricity.

So? You can make mechanical computers, even hydraulic computers. The physical substrate doesn't matter.

And I imagine you could make a chemical computer, but it woudn't necessarily be a Turing archetecture.

You just don't understand Turing equivalence. Any algorithm anywhere ever imagined by anyone can be implemented on a turing machine. If you can express a process as an algorithm, as you can chemical reactions, then the same algorithm can be implemented on a turing machine. That is what the OP meant when he said "All computers ultimately reduce to the Turing Machine."

My brain controls my muscles but I don't calculate anything, I just point and it goes.

Right, so your muscles are executing an algorithm that eventually terminates and outputs the right signals to move your muscle. Hence it can be implemented as an algorithm that can be performed on a turing machine. The fact that you don't consciously apprehend that is irrelevant. (though it would be tremendously amusing to hear you explain why you think it is relevant).

I don't believe an abacus is a Turing machine, either, but it is in fact pretty much how a digital computer works (alveit decimal instead of binary).

No, an abacus is not a turing machine. But you can implement an abacus with a turing machine.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[the_B0fh]

What pisses me off is people thinking that their version of God exists just because they say so.

What pisses me even more off is people thinking that they can use stupid arguments (intelligent arguments are welcomed, of course) to *PROOF* that their God is the real one, and you should convert.

What pisses me off even more off is people telling me to believe in their God just because they asked me to - what is this, a fscking popularity contest? And I am just a weak willed brainless luser who'll believe you just because you said you're telling the truth? What if my next new best friend also has The Truth, but from a different God? Should I convert to the new religion and leave yours?

Buncha fscking moronic wankers.

I think "bugs" could reveal themselves

[lamer01]

What if the simulation had "bugs"? Those bugs could manifest themselves albeit temporarily. Once fixed they could rerun that part of the simulation but we should be able to temporarily detect weirdnesses in the known universe. I mean, this could lend some credence to "paranormal" phenomena.

And bugs in the simulation produce magic.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I completely disagree. The calculus on the simulation argument is surprisingly solid when you think about it (Bostrom, for instance, has some pretty good arguments for it). You say, "It's just not a useful avenue for speculation. ..."

Hear hear!

One interesting avenue for speculation: What if there are bugs in the simulation? Perhaps algorithmic, perhaps the equivalent of the "pentium floating-point bug" or the lack of denormals in the Weitek floating-point acceleration coprocessor chip that was used in the Sun4.

Bugs enable exploits. Exploits of a bug in the (simulation of the) physical laws of the universe would be the equivalent of magic: Do this incantation, get that result which violates the otherwise consistent physical laws in some radical way.

And if the bug is later fixed "the magic goes away".

Perhaps this has already happened. (What passes for the historical record a couple millennia or more back certainly seems at odds with a lot of science developed in the last 1500 years.)

And perhaps this might happen again.

(I have joked for decades that "The universe is a computer simulation and quantum numbers are as far as the machine takes the arithmetic." and had once done a plot sketch for a novel based on this concept - where a move of the simulation to a new machine with higher resolution changes the scale of quantization - somehow managing to avoid breaking the chemistry on which our lives depend but causing all the current semiconductor electronics to fail due to the change in bandgap and tunneling scale. This leads (along with the retooling of electronics) to the identification of the simulated nature of the universe and the successful hunt for simulation bugs that enable industrial magic and eventual communication with the operators of the simulation.)

Re:Not to turn this into a religious debate, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

> god commanded the Israelites to kill the men of the rival tribe and take the women as sex slaves

Ahh, but you're making the mistake that many Fanatic Literalist Christians make. You're assuming that:
"Every claimed "command from God" was interpreted correctly and never falsified for personal benefit".

Original sin means that people will (either intentially or unintentially) corrupt the word of the bible to their ends...even those that are inspired by God. So you have cases in the early bible where people will kill a person's sons because of the sins of their father, and believe that God approved because things worked out favourabily after their action (e.g. the drought ended or they won a battle). But later Jewish prophets and Jesus himself make it explicit that the sins of the father are not the sins of the son, so those indirect inferences were wrong. Jesus raised the bar on this one. If you hate, you're a murdering in your heart, and thus you've broken the 10 commandments. There's no equivication on this one. The early tribes committed mass murder and didn't please God. The fact that "everyone else was doing it too" is no excuse, but God takes people from where they are and tries to elevate them from the dirt and muck. It just takes some people a few generations to get the message but that's what happens when an infinite being tries to reach people with such puny minds.

But getting to your main point, which is the problem of evil. If God is good and powerful, why does he tolerate such evil, especially evil in his own name. Isn't that a proof against God.

The Book of Job also makes clear that earthly delights are not the purpose of living, and it's repeated time and time again.

It's a poor reason for existence anyway. If you believe it is, then suppose I offered you a way to get extacy for the rest of your life. There's one catch, you'd have to get a lobotomy and get your brain rewired so that your pleasure receptors are wired directly to your consciousness. You'd be confined to a small tube and kept alive in a controlled disease-free enviroment for the rest of your artificially extended life of 150 years and never have to suffer again. Would you do it? Most people wouldn't, because it would be equivalent to death.

And imagine you could have anything you wanted for eternity. Wouldn't you get bored after the first thousand years? (See "History of the World in 10 and a half chapters" or "Star Trek: Generations" for examples).

If pleasure is a dead end pursuit, would a good God hoodwink us into believing that it was?

To a theist, suffering exists for a purpose, so that can't be given as a disproof of God. It's actually proof.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[Fred_A]

What are the odds that every living organism that is currently still here survived the thousands of required generations of revisions to be where they are today? That's easy, the odds are exactly one.

Re:I disagree

[x2A]

"But chemicals aren't electricity"

Err... actually it's pretty blurry, chemical reactions are the results of electrical charge between atoms, and the human brain is actually a lot more digital than you might think, with each neuron being not too dissimilar to transitors... they have gates that get opened, which allows ions to flow into the neuron, which changes its potential (overall charge). When its charge reaches a certain level, it will fire. Equivalent would be a transistor with multiple connections attached to each section instead of just one.

"but they lacked the rounding errors that haunt digital computing"

Quantum physics would seem to indicate that rounding does in fact occur everywhere, even things that appear analog, when broken right down, do go up and down in steps and cannot be divided indefinitely.

"My brain controls my muscles but I don't calculate anything, I just point and it goes"

You might not be conscious of it, but it's certainly happening. If someone throws a ball, you ccan predict that path it's going to take and 'calculate' where your hand needs to be to catch it. Sure, you might not be thinking about it in terms of x, y, times and divide, but remember, maths is just language, used to describe things that happen, not dictate them, and so can be expressed in a wide variety of ways.

"but it is in fact pretty much how a digital computer works (alveit decimal instead of binary)."

Binary is just how things are stored at the transitor level within the computer; a level of abstraction up, and things are generally processed in higher powers of two (logic operations can for example be used to manipulate individual bits, but it makes no sense for maths operations to be the same, so these operations work on larger units).

Don't let the complexity of millions of things working together confuse quite how simple the underlying components are by themselves. If you can simulate a single neuron perfectly, simulating a whole brain becomes just a matter of providing the processing power to support the extreme number of them you'd need to. The fundamentals are much simpler and much more attainable than they appear while looking at the big picture.

Testability is irrelevant.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I've read your description of the "halting problem", which is fairly interesting, but it doesn't save you here.

Put simply, let's suppose you do prove that it's a simulation. You write a paper about it, and you publish it in a major scientific journal.

Fine, then the simulation notices. It subtly alters your results, inserting fnords (which really work, as they can directly control anyone's brain) into every published copy, and altering everyone's memory to suggest that your experiment had either failed utterly, or proved conclusively that the Universe was not a simulation.

That's actually more complex than they'd have to -- simply swoop in at the last second and change your results.

So, it's impossible to prove that the universe is not a simulation, because if it were a simulation, all "proof", in any form, is suspect. That's assuming the physics and math involved is sound.

Now, is it possible to prove that the universe is a simulation?

Depends on your definition of "simulation". After all, if you saw a character come out of the sky claiming to be the avatar of the Universe's programmer, that would be proof that either the Universe is a simulation, or that you are insane. But insanity, and dreams, could be described as a kind of simulation.

But I kind of doubt you could find any other proof. Wouldn't it always be possible to find another theory? For example: Suppose you claimed the movement of Mercury, being so unpredictable with regards to Newtonian physics, was "proof" that the Universe was a simulation. Well, it certainly proves Newton wrong, but we now have General Relativity.

So, in that sense, you can't poke holes in reality simply by finding something that doesn't make sense. You also have to have a corresponding theory which does make sense, and which makes testable predictions, and which is generally described mathematically.

That last part -- I don't have enough computer science theory to be sure, but I don't see how you can express "this is a simulation" mathematically.

Suggestions

[JoeInnes]

There are four possible scenarios (simplifying a little):
o We are living in a VR and don't know it
o We are living in a VR and come to realise it
o We are not living in a VR and do not believe we are
o We are not living in a VR but believe we are

In case one: No problems.
In case two: Either the simulation ends, or the simulation is not geared towards working out how long we take to find out. Either way, there is no higher level of understanding in either, as we still wouldn't know the goal of the simulation, and there would be know way of knowing until the simulation ended, meaning we would not profit from it.
In case three: No problems.
In case four: We progress to trying to work out what this simulation is aimed at, failing miserably. The only thing wasted is time (and money, in the form of research grants).

As I look it at, it's no different to religion, really. Believe what you like; it doesn't really affect the environment in which we live.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[virgil_disgr4ce]

Come on, who modded this insightful? You can convince yourself of ANYTHING with very little effort, if you WANT to be convinced of something. What we need a "chain of logical arguments" for is to PROVE something. So if you don't care about proving the existence of god or your husband's love because you just know it, great! But you'll run into problems real quick when asked to prove those things exist. That's where those "chain[s] of logical arguments" come in really handy--at least with the love thing you seem to have some evidence to start with; I'm not so sure about the evidence of god.

Amazingly enough, being a scientist does not automatically meant that I must be 100% logical in all things What the hell kind of scientist is that!? Seriously, good luck with your research with that attitude. I'm not trying to flame here, but I'm pretty disturbed by that remark.

Re:Flamebait mod unfair

[ancientt]

Very simple points to consider:

1. Rules for running a nation or war are not the same as a moral code
2. Accurately recording history is not the same as endorsing immoral behavior

I don't feel this is the right place for a point by point examination, but it presents no arguments not already adequately addressed by Christian apologists in other places.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[lessthan]

Maybe I am misreading your statements, but to be literal, there are religions that threaten science. Many of the ones in the U.S. are Christian denominations. Science is threatened, because the meme of the literal reading of the KJV Bible is spreading to more denominations. The Bible, by definition, is not scientifically accurate, therefore depending on your point of view, either science or religion is wrong.

Re: it's programmed to be this way

[Plutonite]

Ssh, don't tell anyone! There are too many people here with preconceived agendas wherein science and religion are in conflict. It's going to disrupt their world view if they find out that, no, religion is not opposed to science and is in no way threatened by it. The reverse should also be true.

Preconceived my ass. Religion has always put God at the limit of scientific knowledge, and so was always threatened by scientific advance, and both Galileo and Darwin know a thing or two about that. The mysteries explained by science are the source of wonder that people are supposed to take as blinding evidence of bearded friends in the sky. Take away the mystery and you suddenly get a bunch of embarrassed preachers left holding their dicks and looking confused. I'm tired of reading this thread and seeing how everybody is making the astute observation that not all christians are "extreme" like ID nutjobs. Well guess what guys, your extreme is yesterday's norm. Every time science collides with some religious "belief" about the universe, it takes a while to convince the clergy to come up with some half-assed explanation of how "abstract" the biblical account actually is(we're not orbited by the sun after all, sorry) and how there really is no problem in the least. And the honest few who still cling to the words handed down to them (from people who are more religious than this generation, and who will go to heaven for believing in these ideas) are called "extreme". These are people who lived and died by the books you're talking about, and who would call YOU heretics. What kind of sick deity would think up this sort of scenario?

In fact, science has covered so much ground today that "rational" christians are forced to reduce godly activity to a bare minimum of meta-physical abstraction. They talk "first causes" and quantum behavior and other cute topics, because that's where the knowledge (god did it!) barrier lies. And as soon as the next breakthrough happens, the rhetoric will change.

I normally do not care to excite emotions by attacking the beliefs that make people happy. I honestly don't care if someone thinks we are here because a snake covinced a woman in a garden in the sky to make her man eat from a magical tree, or that the millions of other religions (and sects of those religions) are going to suffer eternal damnation in Hell because of technical differences in their version of the story about the deity that is playing The Sims with us as characters. Believe what you want. Have a blast. Drinks are on the house. That's what freedom is all about.
But all the nonsense posted here today needed reality check. You are trying to be more rational than the books you follow. Religion is at odds with science because religion depends on ignorance as "evidence" for its outrageous claims, and science has always suffered, and continues to suffer.