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Mathematician: Is Our Universe a Simulation?
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mathematician Edward Frenkel writes in the NYT that one fanciful possibility that explains why mathematics seems to permeate our universe is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics — not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used. This may strike you as very unlikely writes Frenkel but physicists have been creating their own computer simulations of the forces of nature for years — on a tiny scale, the size of an atomic nucleus. They use a three-dimensional grid to model a little chunk of the universe; then they run the program to see what happens. 'Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not,' writes Frenkel. 'If such simulations are possible in theory, he reasons, then eventually humans will create them — presumably many of them. If this is so, in time there will be many more simulated worlds than nonsimulated ones. Statistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than the real one.' The question now becomes is there any way to empirically test this hypothesis and the answer surprisingly is yes. In a recent paper, 'Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation,' the physicists Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi and Martin J. Savage outline a possible method for detecting that our world is actually a computer simulation (PDF). Savage and his colleagues assume that any future simulators would use some of the same techniques current scientists use to run simulations, with the same constraints. The future simulators, Savage indicated, would map their universe on a mathematical lattice or grid, consisting of points and lines. But computer simulations generate slight but distinctive anomalies — certain kinds of asymmetries and they suggest that a closer look at cosmic rays may reveal similar asymmetries. If so, this would indicate that we might — just might — ourselves be in someone else's computer simulation."
That paper is from November 2012. We should have been able to catch it a little bit earlier than this. That, or the person running the simulation missed an important loop bug.
Some possible ways to determine if we're living in a simulation:
Look for signs of optimizations/short cuts in the simulation:
Is there a maximum speed?
Is there a minimum size?
Is there a limit as to determining an object's position and momentum?
etc...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
This is old news mister slashdot.
According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it.
Wouldn't he have to be a computer programmer of the present, if he wrote this simulation and we're in it RIGHT NOW?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The universe was created and many thought it was a bad idea.....
Cheers, Joe
What is the definition of "not a simulation".
If I am in a simulation and it seems real to me, what is the opposite of this?
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
But this time for the science minded. It's simulations all the way up!
Oh and this idea is as old as dirt.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
one fanciful possibility that explains why mathematics seems to permeate our universe
How could math not permeate our universe? There has to be some sort of structure or priors. And once, you have that, you have something that math can work on. And once you have that, you have math permeating your universe.
First: humans observed the universe.
Next, humans invented mathematics to model these observations.
Then, humans refined mathematics over time, to even better model these observations.
Then, humans became surprised at how well their model fit the universe, seeming to have forgotten how hard they worked to make it so.
Then, humans started coming with very silly ideas about the model actually being the reality it models.
The inclination to have faith in something fanciful doesn't always come from the religious.
Here are some other questions, related to this "creationist" theory:
1. In how many dimensions is this supposed simulator living?
2. Is the simulator itself embedded inside another simulator?
3. Why then, do we have only 3 spatial dimensions?
4. What are the chances of us being at the bottom of an infinite chain of simulators?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I am not stressed out by the notion we might live in a simulation because it changes nothing about the fundemental questions about the nature of reality, it only changes the context in which we ask them. It does add a whole new layer of interesting questions to examine, but strip away the stimulation and you are left where you were before.
Maybe, but if we are living in a simulation maybe the real world has characteristics that change the question.
Maybe the real world has deities that are regularly and obviously involved with the running of the reality and our universe is the results of an experiment that says "what happens if there are no visible gods?"
Or maybe they're mostly happily atheistic and they're wondering what would happen if people were given a more superstitious nature.
Maybe they're energy beings wondering what would happen if you change the laws of physics to allow these massive fireballs they called stars to form, and we're some kind of weird phenomena that's popped up in the simulation. Our consciousness isn't really a feature of our universe but a flaw the simulation that they don't notice because in the real world consciousness is a phenomena that occurs everywhere and is easily explainable.
If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.
I stole this Sig
For this to be true in even the most allegorical sense would require that we stretch the definitions of "computer" and "simulation" well beyond anything we currently understand and well beyond the bounds of our ability to be concise and specific about what the terms mean. Using these terms here is just mixing up apples and oranges.
We might as well, in other words, say that our universe is a blender inside a giant appliance store, a stageplay inside a giant theatre district, a mildewing blow tickler inside a giant hoarder's garage mess, or anything else bearing the one of the rough relationships signal:carrier, content:form, fragment:whole, instance:structure, etc.
I mean, what sort of computer are we talking about here?
What is its nature, not just logically, but physically? Do we even know that we're speaking "physically"? Isn't this the scale at which such quantities break down?
And doesn't our idea of computation and simulation require precisely that mathematical rules apply for these to be carried out in the first place?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If the simulation is completely perfect, then it also must have a near infinite amount of memory as well, or else little inconsistencies would be manifest and detected. But philosophically, if one were to create a simulation, and that simulation is perfect and infinite in size and scope, then it is by definition the same as if you had created the universe. So really it doesn't matter, except to mathematicians whether or not it's a simulation or reality. It's fundamentally equivalent at this scale.
If we are living the simulation, then the program has already been written, so it must have been a programmer of the past. There is nothing 'futuristic' about it, except that the programmer might have a better computer than any of ours.
Many people dream every night. Statistically there would be many more dream worlds than real worlds. So therefore this world is more likely to be a dream world than a real world.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Quantum physics seems to be the ultimate proof that the universe is a simulation.
The universe, intuitively, seems to be analog and continuous. That "feels" right to us. But quantum physics shows that it is actually discrete. But that is exactly how computer simulations work! They use very small time scales to make things appear continuous. We know that below certain time scales, things are essentially random. This is consistent with a computer simulation. You can't accurately simulate something that happens in less time than one "frame" of time. There is a whole area of mathematics that deals with how to make simulations work accurately given the limitation of discrete time scales.
The same happens with physical sizes. Below the Planck scale the universe starts to break-down and become random. This is exactly how things would work if the universe was using binary arithmetic. Suppose that every particle in the universe has a coordinate. You can represent it's position over a vast scale, but only with limited accuracy. The plank scale is that limit, and it indirectly tells us how many bits are in the coordinate field of each particle. When we try to measure the position of something accurately, we find that the position becomes random. And if you try to measure it's speed to more resolution than one "frame" of time, it becomes less accurate. Worse-yet: the only way we can measure the position or speed of a simulated particle is by comparing it to another simulated particule, which introduces yet more error. We are ultimately limited by the accuracy of the simulation.
One side-benefit of this is that we have an awesome source of stastically predictable randomness. Quantum computers are actually using the randomness of the simulator to take advantage of cpu-cycles that are "outside" of our universe. Within the simulator, we can only build a computer that is so fast. But if we find a way to tap into the computing power of the simulator, like by using the side-effects of one of it's built-in functions, then we can compute a result faster than anything we can do ourselves. It is like calling into "native code" while we are running in the interpreted bytecode.
Another indication that we are in a simulation is that quantum physics shows us that wave functions collapse when we observe them. That makes sense: why should the universal simulator waste time calculating quantities that are not currently being measured? Imagine a vast number of inputs, a vast number of calculations that produce outputs, and a smaller number of observers of those outputs. You can easily optimize away things that are not being observed. But we found a way to notice the side-effect of not calculating certain values. It's like a side-channel attack on an encryption algorithm. You can tell how many bits of a password are correct even without the output by seeing how long it took to calculate, or how much power the computer consumed. I wonder if the designers of the simulator didn't know that we could see these kinds of side-effects, or if they are too difficult to fix. Either way, we are seeing side-effects of some of the shortcuts and optimizations.
Perhaps one day one of the programmers will look over at their printer and find a little note from someone way down here inside the simulation. If you could hack a few words outside of the system, what would they be?
Mathematics, especially simulation, is actually a very weak approach to physical phenomena in themselves. It's good for human insight *about* the phenomena, but in most cases the equations are intractable and a simulation is miserably inefficient at getting the specifics right. A small molecule can assemble itself in picoseconds without mathematics, but a simulation takes a huge supercomputer run. If you'd like to simulate something bigger, you'll find that simulation scales very badly.
A couple of thoughts come to mind: one is what the nature of the simulation (if we accept the simulation argument for a moment ) tell us about the nature of the programmers? Certainly we know that, considering the tens of millions killed in our various recent world wars as well as the millions of innocent children who starve to death every year, that the whatever the "programmers" of our universe are, they have no more consideration for us as we would for various cultures of bacteria killed off to test a new antibiotic. I wonder what else we could infer about the "programmers" simply by observing our own world.
Secondly I wonder if it would be somehow possible for the beings inside the simulation to "hack" the simulation itself somewhat how a computer virus in our machines can cause unexpected/unwanted/unplanned for behaviors in our computer systems. What would you have to do to corrupt and possibly take over the program running the simulation of our universe?
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Maybe we are, and maybe we aren't. Without a way to find out...
They're proposing exactly that, or at least a way to get started.
a way to get out, or a way to influence the outside in a way that's useful to us inside, what is the point of this speculation?
Really? Speculation got our species where we are today. If scientific discoveries had to wait around until someone in pursuit of a practical goal found them, we'd still be leaving in hovels and crapping out of the window.
And even without that: because it's interesting.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It could explain that weird green diamond thing floating over my head.
>If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.
I beg to differ. We can probably infer a lot. For instance:
- Considering the amount of injustice, starvation, and people killed in wars we can assume that the programmers are indifferent to us , much as we would be indifferent to the millions of bacteria colonies killed off when we test a new antibiotic.
- We can infer that time runs much slower for the programmers (or perhaps that they are almost unimaginably long lived and patient) because why run a simulation that only runs in real-time?
- We can infer that (unless the simulation started very recently and is going to end in a relatively short time that the universe that the programmers live in is far more information dense than our own. The number of particle interactions which need to be simulated is limited by the light cone in the time frame from which the simulation (i.e. our earth) starts to the time that it ends. Unless this period is relatively short ( a thousand years, a million years??? ) then the number of particles which need to be simulated is enormously large. If that were the case then the "programmers" must live in an entirely different kind of universe with more dimensions than 3 (or 11 of you go string theory - whatever) otherwise there would be no room in the parent universe to keep the simulation machine. So either our "simulation" is going to be short lived or the programmers are unimaginably different from us.
I bet there are a lot of other things one could reasonably infer as well.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Every once in while people claim that the universe works at our current level of technology. Right now we are at the computer and simulation stage. This has been going for years. In fact there are a couple interesting books that posit certain things in our universe, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, on the basis of information theory, i.e. that we can only know limited things about the universe as there are only a limited number of bits that can be stored. The flaw in all these hypothesis is that although we have modeled the universe for the past 400 years using math, those models have always been a simplification of our observations. The predication we make from them have always been an projection of what we think exists. In most cases we do not observe these predictions directly, so it may be that we create the formulation we expect to see. This is not to say that science models are not the best we have available. These models allow us to fly to far off planets, build computers, and create complex networks. The practical extent to science cannot be underestimated. But that is actually explains what is happening 'for real'. The is epistemology. It unscientific. It is extrapolating outside of the domain of our knowledge with no real way of testing if the extrapolation is valid.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I find it hilarious, though, that people are open to this possibility but so hostile to the idea of creationism.
If you ask me, it's the same shit in a different package. Throughout most of early history, man had a pretty bad understanding of scientific principles and "God made everything" was an answer that fit what was observable at the time. As advances in scientific understanding were made, we've come up with theories as to why we're here that are have a higher likelyhood of being true based on observations (the Big Bang, for example). It's also just as likely we were observing some advance's alien race's fireworks show that predated our known universe, but just because that fits the observation, does not mean it's true.
For example, if I put you in a completely darkened room and you heard meowing, would you know for absolute certain that there was a cat in the room? It could've been a recording of a cat, a person making a meow noise or even a parrot that was trained to meow. You could've said that "I heard a cat, so there is a cat in the room." and it would've fit your observation, but it could still be entirely incorrect. Likewise, these scientists may believe "the universe is a simulation" fits their observations. Just remember, until you can turn on the lights and see for sure - all that meows may not be a cat.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Looping or restarting is one thing, the fact that someone's running us in the background while playing a galactic edition of their favourite strategy game raises a whole other set of existential questions.
Zug-zug, brother.
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Can you count to 100? Of course you can. We all can. Can you count to one billion? You could, but you don't have to. You know it's out there. Every number is out there in the grand continuum of numbers.
Consider how much RAM and disk space you have in your computer. It's finite, right? There are a finite number of possible combinations of all those ones and zeroes.
So every possible memory state of your PC is a really big number that's already out there. You don't need to program your PC to count that high to make those numbers real; they're real numbers by definition - and this holds true no matter how much RAM you can imagine.
That means that the outcome of every possible computer simulation is already out there, regardless of whether or not a computer even exists. The idea that a machine exists and is running the simulation as well is completely unnecessary. It's like postulating that there's no such number as 1,000,000,000 unless some intelligent being actually counts that high.
We can just say "the universe may be pure math" and be done with it.
The primary problem with this assumption is that it assumes that "time" exists outside of the simulation.
I've written simulations in the past that allowed me to rewind time and try a different possible random outcome. It's not that hard, provided you can store the states, and the things inside the simulation (asynchronous logic gates) could not have detected that it happened. They always saw a legitimate consistent history. It's only from our position outside the simulation that you would know that time had been rewound and a different path taken. What's more, if I'd used a breadth-first search strategy for enumerating the simulation states, the time trace inside would've been completely different to that outside. In fact, due to peculiarities of the simulation code, time advancement didn't necessarily result in a new state and where you had the same state reachable by two paths, it's entirely possible for observed time to have actually gone backwards (though not really, depending on exactly what you could observe).
The point of this is that if you are in a simulation, you can assume nothing about the nature of time outside the simulation. It's totally unrelated. Any simulation worth the name is total; inconsistencies are either undetectable or "just the laws of nature". Which makes wondering whether we're in a simulation worthless; we won't be able to observe it. It's solipsistic silliness.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Great point. I was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution, and also have written several computers simulations, and I have known about Fredkin's "the universe is a simulation" ideas since the 1980s. As I said before in some Slashdot posts, if you are serious about scientific skepticism, you have to admit is is possible we live in a simulation that has only been running for 6000 (or whatever) simulated years, and was started either from a check pointed version or started from some hand-crafted parameters and data files. Creators of such hand-crafted environments might perhaps be assisted by guided evolutionary processes like used in our PlantStudio 3D software or EvoJazz musical software, where a user picks from a set of variations over and over again to craft something (and originally inspired by Richard Dawkins "Blind Watchmaker" software). Using such tools may muddy the waters of what a "generation" means though, and it also seems likely organisms evolved together to produce their complex interrelationships in ecological webs.
In any case, the universe might be a simulation. It might even just be a game we stepped into for an afternoon, with artificial memories implanted as in some Star Trek Holodeck scenarios. And we may not know until it is over (if then, if our consciousness persists). And even then, how many levels of nesting and branching are they in a multiverse of universes? Maybe C.S. Lewis was right, when characters feel at the end of the Narnia novels that a better heaven even closer to "God" somehow remains "ever inward, ever upward"? Still, does God have a God? And so on? If so, do they all agree on what morality should be in a consistent way? Or is it just turtles some or all the way up and we need to make a morality that promotes life and community? Or is it just exactly the way some specific version of the Christian Bible say, and the fossil record and geological record is a test of faith?
Anyway, I hope considering the universe is a simulation helps more people move beyond a purely materialistic and "scientistic" view of the universe. There are so many interesting questions ignored, denied, or belittled by "materialistic scientism" (to use Charles Tart's phrasing).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
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All that said, on a practical basis we can see evolutionary processes happening all around us (like with the flu virus mutating every year or bacteria become antibiotic resistant over time). As I said above, even if the universe was designed and only running for 6000 simulated years, evolutionary processes may have been be part of tools used to help make it. The fossil record may indeed have been placed there as a test of faith, and yet, would such a god be worthy of worship except out of fear? So, on a practical basis, we have to work with a lot of assumptions about a vast universe in age, extent, and complexity where evolutionary processes are important -- while at the same time honoring the mystery of it all, especially the mystery of consciousness we dwell in every second.
The universe might also have been run for a long time up to a check point (like getting Linux set up nicely in VirtualBox) and then might just be run endlessly from that checkpoint. I'm not sure how "old" that would make this current run of the universe simulation then if the run was started only 6000 simulated years ago, but the check pointed version it was started from was let run for 14 billion simulated years before that?
Anyway, just various interesting speculations on the great mystery which probably is way beyond human-brain-sized comprehending. It is the height of hubris to think we really can understand the universe of universes in
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
@anonymous: "Apart from the intelligent life that wrote our simulation, if this simulation behaves according to the laws of mathematics, including statistics, then I presume it's safe to conclude that there must be other intelligent life here in our simu-verse."
There is no simu-verse per se. This planet is simulated to a high degree of resolution, but the star fields we see `out there' are actually point sources on a 2-D plane mapped onto a very big distance. This allows the simulation to expend less processing resources on rendering the rest of the `universe'. When we see a close up of a galaxy group such as is produced by the Hubble, the simulation is temporarily creating the high-res image in the telescope.
if we're conflating matter with information or information-processing.
A blender perfectly simulates what happens in a blender, mapping matter to information. It is empirically perfect, in that every possible unit of information is represented by a dedicated unit of matter, without shortcuts; it is a perfect simulation of what happens in the theoretical case of "something being blended" which is a subset of the logically possible set of phenomena connected to the physical manifestations found in an appliance store as a "universe" of a particular kind.
"Ah," goes the response, "but in conventional simulations, the physical nature of the reality being simulated is different from the physical nature of the substance of the simulation, i.e. there is a logical congruence reliant upon some measure of generalization, but not a physical congruence, because the only reason to 'run a simulation' is for the case in which physical resources are inadequate to the computational task with complete fidelity, i.e. the case in which we can not 'simulate the concept' using a perfect and total material instance of it."
So be it. But that's my point. If all of this—you, me, the universe—is just a simulation in a "computer" of a physical order so radically different from it as to be analagous to the physical differences between—say—the simulation of a nuclear explosion and the explosion itself (the sorts of things that we need to run simulations of)—then we're talking about a "real" (i.e. non-computed, non-simulation) space so different from our own as to make the use of our terms ("computer", "simulation", and so on) in it, bound up as they are with our own ontological and epistemological limitations and assumptions, essentially meaningless—or worse, ideological—suggestive of something (by virtue of the intuitive and connotative properties of 'computer' and 'simulation') that simply isn't (and, practically speaking, can't be in any universe that we're familiar with) the case.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If we are in a simulation, and it's like any of the games we play or simulations we run for science there's some purpose or driver. Since were simulating at the level life and not just some abstract physics, then it's reasonable that some of the beings here are avatars. Who might those be? Well Duh. Celebreties. Or people who seem to achieve huge success with little effort like say Branson or J.P Diamond.
So go be a groupie. If you aren't interacting with a celebrity then your life is wasted. It's your highest purpose.
Or go on a thrill kill rampage, and get noticed by the game sys admins.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I don't think anyone is proposing putting this idea in an introductory science textbook or discussing the idea seriously in a science classroom.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
If we are trapped in a VR, so a tree that fall in a forest when nobody is there to listen wont do any noise because it's it's will be a use of computer power unuseful.
Contrast with "Butterfly effect": how can you know the fall of the tree will not be needed for future events?
If you assume the VR programmer is able to determine it in advance, then what would be the motivation behind the simulation?
To me, it's more likely that the VR tree failing will still produce a VR sound; to determine the evolution of the system, it is more likely the programmer does not have any solution with a "lower cost" than actually running the simulation.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Even if the universe actually is deterministic, it appears to present us with an illusion of free will, that is, we can analyze a set of data presented before us, and make what we believe is a free willed decision about what to do in the future. This apparent free will is indistinguishable to us from what actual free will may be, and is, in fact, sufficient to suggest that both that free will actually does exist and in turn that the universe is non-deterministic.
Because if the universe were deterministic, then it would be somehow possible to anticipate what its state will be in the future from a given state, but with the appearance of free will, we can still make a decision (that appears to be free willed) with the data of such a prediction, which could, in turn, affect the state and change its outcome from what was predicted, if even only on a scale that is insignificant (for example, determining the color of socks that the person will supposedly wear the next day, and making the decision beforehand to deliberately wear a different color from whatever the prediction indicates). And if we could not choose to do something like this, then it would not be the case that we appear to have free will at all. Therefore we do, and the universe is non-deterministic.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yep, but that external world could be a simulation.
Personally, if I had my own simulation, there would be a god, and it'd be me. I'm sure it'd run slower because of all the omniscient stuff that would have to go an about intent and action, but it'd be worth it to strike evildoers with lightning every time they got out of line. Anyway, slower or not, no one in the simulation would know, because they'd measure time by their own perceptions and environment, which, of course, would also be running slower.
And of course, I'd write it in, uh, c. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Creationists say the gods created the universe. But who created the gods? They always existed, they say. See, unnecessary step. Can simplify it to "Who created the universe? It always existed."