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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."
Yeah, you could explain *anything* by saying "it's this way because it's programmed to be this way". It's the same convenience of saying there is a God (sure I believe in God myself so I'm not slagging beliefs, but this guy is just saying in a different way that he thinks that some superior beings made the universe).
which is totally what she said
This wanders into dangerous territory for science that gives our critics in the religious community stronger footing with which to criticize science I believe. Aren't the phenomena we observe in the universe around us supposed to be able to build solutions and models of understanding from the ground up instead of from the top down as proposed ideas such as this one attempt to convey? Also this seems like it may be an A is B but B is not A fallacy, potentially. But I suppose in a quantum universe this explanation may really be just as viable as any other.
So how would we be able to tell if our universe was a simulation? Whitworth says that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual. But he falls short of suggesting what this might be.
This is the failure of reconciling the metaphysical with the physical. I agree with you completely. There is no way for us to remove ourselves from the universe at large to observe it. Whitworth is not a scientist when he speaks of this. He is a philosopher exploring metaphysics and ontology.
I can come up with a number of theories about reality myself, and without being able to experiment on them they are just as valid. Therefore I propose that the universe we experience is really just the eye of an aether system. Once you get beyond the aether, it really is turtles all the way down. That's just as valid, without relevant experimentation, as the universe being a vr sim. Metaphysics is cool and all, but just don't call it science or its practitioners scientists.
I got a catholic block.
The thing about all this is (preps Karma Shield) Who cares?
Ahhh good shield...
Uh oh detecting anomolies... Captain we need to reroute power from the phasers & the warp drives to the shield deflectors.
Make it so.
Ahhh it worked. Good job!
K now that my Karma is safe... Please understand what I mean.
Philosophical, unprovable arguements are by nature not worth more than discussion, and can not by nature lead to any outcome other than heated debate, War, or in this guys situation, a bad case of the munchies. I totally agree that this is like a conversation over a bowl of weed after watching the Matrix.
Personally, I believe in God because of certain situations in my life where I should have died or been seriously injured but was preppared by a "voice." But if god is just a program to inject thoughts in my head that save my life, then my belief in God is still valid, because from my perspective that program IS GOD.
Secondly if this is a VR sim, than there must be some Reality sufficiently advanced to where we could get replicated in RL from our VR selves after we proved our worth here! (another reason to be good!)
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd go beyond saying that thing wouldn't be repeatable. If you discover a bug in the "simulation", then why not fix it and then "rewind" back to the time just before this guy found the bug. That way in our time-line we never saw the bug. In that same mater, if this was a simulation, retroactively delete this guy before he was conceived,and all of the sudden he never existed or wrote any theories. The only way a simulation scenario would be found is if the simulation allowed for it (simulation QA, ancestor philosophical/psychological research, The Sims 40'000).
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
Academician Prokhor Zakharov
"For I Have Tasted The Fruit"
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather." --Bill Hicks
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
which is totally what she said
The answer is yes - chaos theory can be simulated on a computer but it is not going to be as sensitive to initial conditions as something in an analogue universe. Thus, chaotic systems on a computer can be repeated. Real-world chaotic systems never can.
The next thing that can be drawn is a better understanding of the brain. It should be obvious by now that the senses do not link directly to the conciousness but rather are used to update a mental "virtual reality" construct within the brain. Thus, everyone is living in their own virtual reality in a sense. This is easily demonstrated - there are hundreds of psychological tests that show how the brain fills in missing information, which only makes sense if there is some internal model from which such information can be obtained.
On the other hand, people on the autistic spectrum have fewer mirror neurons and show abnormal activity in the pre-frontal lobes, according to fMRI scans. They are also well-known for having an astonishing level of focus to the point where activity beyond a relatively low level is painfully overloading. This would make sense using this VR idea, as their brains' internal VR would be skewed from experience, above a certain level of input, creating intense stress and confusion. Exactly what you find with people on the autistic spectrum.
Does this internal VR model mean that all of reality is a VR model? No. If it did, then the VR models could always agree even when there is a bottleneck or information degradation. Since this is clearly not the case, it seems reasonable to conclude that the brain's VR is a crude approximation to reality and not reality itself.
Doesn't the idea of the conciousness existing within a brain-level VR contradict the notion of experimental science? No. The VR is not what you experience, the VR - or whatever you want to call it - is simply a mental construct to allow the brain to anticipate and to act in advance of actual data, or act where actual data is too noisy to directly use. Processing sensory data is hard work and can't possibly be done in real-time all of the time. However, measurements are not made in real-time. You observe a system as it exists in a snapshot of time, and you can continue observing that snapshot all you like. Since that is the case, any momentary disparity between the internal VR and the external world should be eliminated.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It is difficult to take this seriously until we are capable of running our own simulated universes. Then real consideration would be needed:
What would our subjects think? Would they ask the question we do? Would they run their own simulated universe? Would their subjects ask if they live in a simulated universe in a simulated universe?
If you were to devise a test that our universe is simulated, and we were to test positive, you would never be able to test if our hosting universe simulated. It's turtles all the way down.
What is a non simulated universe like?
I think if we were in a simulated universe, our gods would be having much more fun messin' with us. By likelihood, we wouldn't be a scientific simulation, but in some curious kids' basement. Now that's scary.
Who says they're simulating *us*? Maybe we're some unrecognized emergent property of the simulation of some problem that's of interest to "them".
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Everyone in WoW knew, from ages past, that all objects in the universe were composed of "polygons", but it was the clever gnomes who
discovered the existence of the "pixel". In recent times, the exiles in Ironforge build the mighty Smoosh-O-Matic 9000 and split the pixel,
thereby determining that the previously basic particle is itself composed of four parts; red, green, blue and alpha.
Oh, how they patted themselves on their backs, congratulating each other on their brilliance, the genius that revealed the true nature of
the universe.
Just as we did when we discovered quarks and thought we knew it all now.
I suppose the gnomes could postulate the existence of our reality, though they would have no way to understand that matter could be solid
and have "insides". And they would have certainly have no way to escape their reality to visit ours!
And so, I suppose, there could be another universe containing ours. A universe not of mater and energy, but of some "otherness". A place
where we could not venture, and at whose sufferance we exist at all.
I have heard that Jesus saves.
I pray that he also makes daily backups...
Any VR simulation of the Universe also controls every aspect of our experience of it. We will only experience that which the VR simulation allows us to experience, and *all* information in this Universe is fundamentally controlled by that simulation. No test can be constructed whose outcome is itself not wholly determined by the VR simulation. Further, any flaw exposed in the VR simulation could be corrected without our knowing, because our experiences, including our memories and even the flow of time, are also wholly within the realm of control of the VR simulation.
A VR simulation of the Universe is omnipotent in this sense. There is nothing that lies beyond its control, and against it you are utterly powerless.
This is the failure of reconciling the metaphysical with the physical.
No, no! He's on to something. Consider this example:
When routing TCP/IP packets, the best available software algorithms are tree-based. You step down the branches of the tree until you find the most specific route known for the destination address. Its O(log n).
However, if you step out of the software universe running on a general-purpose computer, you can design a hardware device called a "TCAM." A TCAM is a special kind of static ram where a request is processed across all cells in the same cycle in order to produce the best match. Not only does it return a routing decision in O(1), it returns that decision in exactly one clock cycle.
Now, we could describe how a TCAM works within software and we could even simulate it but the simulation would run in O(n) because the simulation would have to activate each cell in sequence instead of activating all cells at once the way a real TCAM does.
So the challenge for detecting whether we're in a virtual reality is this: find a mathematical problem which is conceptually simple (e.g. factoring the product of large primes) but which we know to be hard ( O(x^n) ) and then construct a simulation of a finite ur-universe in which the problem is easy. The simulation itself won't run any faster than the best known factoring algorithms but it would be able to prove that given the physical rules of the ur-universe the factoring would have completed in O(1).
Successfully constructing such a simulation wouldn't prove that we're actually in a virtual reality, but proving that such a simulation can't be constructed would prove that we're not. Thus the theory is falsifiable. Thus it is science, not philosophy.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new or profound in the paper. None of the "tests" suggest any practical experiments, so it seems to me little more than amusing speculation.
However, along those lines:
The notion that the apparent quantized nature of physics could be an approximation--a way for a simulation to limit memory requirements--occurred to me some years ago. It has some potentially disturbing implications (at least if you take it seriously).
This idea is meaningful only if the simulation is embedded in a universe is not itself quantized. Of course, our universe could be an accurate simulation of a quantized universe, but then our universe's quantal nature is not any kind of evidence for our universe being a VR.
This leads to some concerns about the motivations of the creators of the simulation. Generally, one constructs a simulation to answer questions about one's own world, so we may speculate that the developers of the simulation presumed that quantizing reality at such a tiny scale would not be a major source of error.
Yet here we are, developing technologies that work only because of the quantal nature of physics, happily exploiting what are really "bugs" in the simulation. If the developers happen to notice what we are doing, they might not be too happy about this--potentially, the use of quantum technology to any major extent would undermine the validity of their simulation in terms of making predictions regarding their (presumably non-quantum) universe. What if they notice, realize that their simulation is faulty and decide to turn us off?
You also do not have to believe "you may not question that" to believe "He just exists." You can easily believe that you can question it all you want - but a) questioning it doesn't make it less true and b) the fact that you can't get good answers to your questions right now doesn't make it less true. Maybe someday we'll know the answers to those questions, maybe not. Maybe our piddly little brains just aren't capable of comprehending whatever it is that created God, so we can physically never know.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Some apples are green, are all apples green? No.
Even the Vatican is starting to back Evolution. Not all Christ-lovers are insanely trying to get ID accepted as science.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
There are reasonable people on both sides of the question of god's existence. In this case, the issue is one of causality. Specifically, the "it's watchmakers all the way up" fails because it posits an infinite series of causes.
We exist right now at a point in the series of causation. But an infinite series cannot be traversed, so the infinite series of watchmakers cannot lead us to any present we are part of.
This doesn't connote necessarily the existence of god. It does mandate at some point a cause which is uncaused, non-contingent and necessarily existing as the foundation of existence, but there is no purely logical reason that says a higher order universe cannot have these attributes.
The idea that what we experience as the universe is a VR simulation really doesn't advance the question about ultimate being at all, it just moves it down (or up) one layer.
Ultimately, though, since all we know and experience is both caused and contingent (including the universe itself) there must be something uncaused and non-contingent behind it. Non-being cannot give rise to being, so self-creation is out as well. Again, this doesn't on purely logical grounds have to be god, and even if one suggests that god is the ground of being this sort of argumentation doesn't come anywhere near proving the existence of any particular god.
In my own case I am a theist, but I have reasonable friends who disbelieve on reasonable grounds (I also have both theistic and atheistic friends who are unreasonable - I hope I'm not falling into that camp by this post). Hope this helps a bit at least to clarify the implications of the concept of causality.Actually, the lazy god theory makes a lot of sense. In this model, God came into being at the same time as the universe. The infantile God watched as the universe exploded into reality, bedazzled by the show of shiny lights. This God bumbles around, putting conveniently-sized objects into its mouth -- leaving a trail of slime, germs and all manner of excrement; hence life on Earth. Perhaps the God is not lazy, but in some phase akin to "terrible twos" (or perhaps teen angst, it's hard to know the difference from our perspective), alternating between wanton destruction, bemused obeservation, and boredom.
Belief in God doesn't necessarily imply belief in ID. If the universe *were* a simulation, whoever had access to the machine that the simulation runs on would effectively be a god. This computer must have been designed by something intelligent, but that intelligent thing might not know about the Earth -- and won't unless humans effect a change in the universe so incredibly large that an outside observer can't help but notice and respond do -- perhaps we create a time machine, and send the energy from billions of stars towards a single point in space-time and cause something like a big bang. Or worse, we find and exploit a bug in the simulation, which causes the whole thing to crash (whoops).
This brings up an interesting point - quite a few people attack muslims for not speaking out louder against islamic fundamentalists, saying it is their responsibility to do so.
I'm curious how that view is applied to ID christianity by normal (as in, non stupid, non-lying) christians - should it be their responsbility to speak out against ID as well?
Philosophical, unprovable arguements are by nature not worth more than discussion, and can not by nature lead to any outcome ...
However if the simulation is buggy it could lead to some useful special-cases in the (simulated) natural laws. "Special cases" that violate, say, conservation of momentum, or mass/energy, or a host of other stuff. Think of the technologies you could build on exploiting such bugs: Free power. Teleportation. Duplication of organized matter. Etc.
Such bugs might have a form that would expose the buggy simulation as a simulation. And a model that presumes "the universe may be a buggy simulation" might lead to searching for the bugs in different parts of the search space than one saying merely "the universe's laws may have some odd kinks".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Your first paragraph is sadly, all too true. I'm sure many people have met some of these types.
Your second paragraph, however, does not follow at all. There's simply no need implied by science, to automatically ask who created God. If there was, then back when science took the Steady State theory seriously, it would have been automatically rejected as unscientific. Since there's no "before the steady state" in that model, there's no meaning in asking what that before was like. People ask what was before the universe now, because the Big Bang theory has a starting point and other finite properties, so questions about 'before' or 'outside of' at least may make sense. Modern variations on the Big Bang are treated the same way - they either drive the question "What happened before?", or like Hawking's brief history model, are specifically written to make that very question irrelevant/unmeaningful.
If only things with starting points were allowed by science, then instead of relying on evidence (Penzias and Wilson's), science would have been able to automatically dismiss the Steady State theory before any of that evidence was even gathered.
Now as for alien computers and geeks, both of those things as we usually define them are commonly assumed to have origins in time and space, so yes it makes perfectly good sense to ask where they came from (Well first, the mommy and daddy alien computer have to love each other very much, and then....). But it's just as legitimate to assume that God didn't have a starting point but was around forever, as to assume that about the Universe itself, or time, or mathematics, or many other hypothetical entities.
Who is John Cabal?
The flamebait mod of the parent was unfair. Yahweh would be a scary, immoral bastard if he were real. Thank non-god he isn't. Silly theists, myths are for kids!
If a book is of divine revelation, does that not mean that it has to be true in its entirety? Christians do not follow many of the practices talked about in the Old Testament, and, in fact, would be abhor many of them if they were to take place in modern times.
The fact that Christians pick and choose which verses to incorporate into their moral code, and which to ignore shows that their sense of morality comes from somewhere other than the Bible itself.
I invite anybody to check my references.
Numbers
According to the Book of Numbers, Moses commanded his people to kill all Midianites, except for the female virgin children, which the soldiers were to "keep alive for [themselves]":
Numbers 31:15-18 (King James Version) (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%2031:15-18;&version=9;)
This passage implies pedophilia, rape, and genocide. Certainly this is not anything that we would condone today.
Judges
According to the Book of Judges, the same fate was sentenced to the inhabitants of Jabeshgilead:
Judges 21:10-24 (King James Version) (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges%2021:10-24;&version=9;)
> He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.
Some of the material falling into a black hole escapes as Hawking radiation, and also adds to the mass, spin and and/or or charge of the hole, but there's no evidence these are increased by an amount equal to the infalling matter/energy according to E=MC^2. Disappearance of the time dimension at the event horizon also 'freezes' processing and any information there gets locked up.
Does information processing theory (by itself) provide a mechanism for complete loss of some information?
Even if the hole later 'explodes' and becomes a naked singularity (something I can't hold with) there's no indication that what's already in the singularity can affect what's outside other than by the forces noted above.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The Bible is the writings of mortal (and thus fallible) men inspired by God, filtered through several episodes of hand-copying and translation.
Some of us don't claim that you can draw every word in it out of context and have God's truth.
I can't explain about the killing the enemies, at least not entirely, but I'll give it a shot. Bear with me, because I've heard all the arguments before, and if you're busy thinking up clever replies, you won't see the possibility (slim though you apparently think it be) of reason.
But if the clever reply is more important, by all means, go ahead. Ignore reason.
The world was a different place back then. At times, it was kill-or-get-killed. (Okay, there are still such times and places now, depending on where you live and what you do and when.) From the ten commandments, we have a commandment not to kill. Then we have places where Israel, when at war, was commanded to kill. We can profitably read that as telling us not to kill for fun and profit, but that killing may be justified in self-defense. (Very traditional interpretation, I know, leave that saw alone.)
So, you wail, what about the married women and the male children? (Not to mention the men.)
The Midianites.
Moses' father-in-law was a Midianite.
This was not the entire nation of Midian, but a group with which the camp of Israel had stopped to have a celebration that got out of hand. If it had been genocide, you would not read of Midianites later attacking Israel and taking control of parts of their lands.
What's the problem with a celebration getting out of hand? The group of Midianites in question induced many of the Israelites to commit sexual sins with them. What's wrong with that? you ask?
STDs, among other things. Yes, it was extreme, but remember, in modern times, we have penicillin, so we don't have to worry so much about the spread of STDs. We also have jails and police, to help keep problem cases under control.
So, Israelites who had joined in the "fun" were also killed, which, of course, you will call barbaric. Perhaps you will say that there should have been no cleansing, that the offenders should have been left alive to seduce and/or rape (and thus infect) others.
Yeah, if Jethro Tull had been either a Midianite or an Israelite on this occasion, we can be pretty sure he'd have been one of those condemned.
But sex is fun, right? So even in a world where there are no regular police to run to when someone wants to give you more intimate attention than you want, and no penicillin if you get unlucky in the process, this should all just be tolerated, right?
We do not have to assume "having" means raping, nor do we have to assume the girls in question suffered any more by force than they had suffered with their own people. Taking the young women with them might have been better than killing them, was probably much better than leaving them to die.
JabeshGilead (and Benjamin).
I wonder why you don't find fault with the Bible for the fact that Israel almost did commit genocide against one of their own tribes (Benjamin)? Anyway, in this particular case, the Bible doesn't say that they were commanded to do either of those things, whether by God or by a prophet. One of the problems of the times, mentioned in the Bible itself, was that was no authority at all, and the local governments sometimes found themselves doing things that weren't right.
This is an unadorned record.
Near as I can tell, it was left in as an example of the ways Israel tended to mess up without a king.
Judges 5: 30?
Are you serious? Have you even read the whole chapter, much less the story about Sisera getting his in the previous chapter?
Verse 30 is an imagined quote of Sisera's mother, imagining why that particular enemy of Israel was so long in returning from the battle. It was Sisera's mother supposedly thinking that Sisera and his army must be just doing to Israel what you are accusing Israel's God of commanding
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.