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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."
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)
"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
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.
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.
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.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;)