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No, We Probably Don't Live in a Computer Simulation, Says Physicist (gizmodo.com)
Science doesn't have all the answers. There are plenty of things it may never prove, like whether there's a God. Or whether we're living in a computer simulation, something proposed by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom. From an article on Gizmodo: This kind of thinking made at least one person angry, theoretical physicist and science writer Sabine Hossenfelder from the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. Last week, she took to her blog Backreactions to vent. It's not the statement "we're living in a simulation" that upsets Hossenfelder. It's the fact that philosophers are making assertions that, if true, should most certainly manifest themselves in our laws of physics. "I'm not saying it's impossible," Hossenfelder told Gizmodo. "But I want to see some backup for this claim." Backup to prove such a claim would require a lot of work and a lot of math, enough to solve some of the most complex problems in theoretical physics.
In other words, "the universe is a simulation" is an unevidenced assertion, much like the multiverse. Yes, there may be some extrapolations of the underlying math that might point in such a direction, but at the moment, it's simply a cool-sounding idea with absolutely no experimental evidence at all. Of course, I feel the same way about string theory, though one thing string theory has produced is some pretty useful mathematical tools, so even when a theory is wrong or indemonstrable, it can still be of some use.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The objection in question ignores Bostrom's basic argument. Bostrom's primary argument for being in a simulation boils down to the observation that it is very likely that an advanced civilization would have the ability to run very accurate simulations. Moreover, one of the things they'd be obviously interested in would be their own past ancestors; if that's the case, then over the very long period that such civilizations will exist one will expect many more "copies" of people on ancient Earth than any of the originals, unless one expects civilization to die out well before we get to that technology level. If the laws of physics are simulated badly enough that we can notice, then they aren't doing an effective ancestor simulation, so the objection here doesn't make sense.
There are a lot of issues with Bostrom's argument; for example, one might question whether simulations of that level of detail will ever be able to be made on a large scale. But the argument being made here doesn't grapple with the fundamental issues.
That she demands proof is equivalent to others demanding proof that we do not live in a simulation. It is likely impossible to prove unless you're the one running the simulation.
What's needed are ways to falsify either theory, not to prove either.
And it may be that neither can be falsified either.
This is exactly what an Agent would say.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
If we can calculate how reality "should" act, we've per definition calculated how to simulate it. So the only thing we could catch is a bad simulation. But that would assume they don't have error margins, if we start looking at something with an electron microscope then it starts simulating that particular part of reality to that detail. Just like a pair of VR glasses doesn't have to simulate more than I can see.
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A previous slashdot commenter (I don't remember which, sorry) said it best. It's apparently ignorant and backwards to believe that God created the universe, but quite forward-thinking and intellectual to think a computer programmer did.
Personally the fact that recently we have found the EM drive may actually work says were are in a simulation. We just found a bug in the physics engine. That or we need to rethink many of our basic assumptions of physics.
She and other simulation-sceptics probably have had a mind-manipulating intervention done by our Simulator, as an attempt to hide the fact that we do live in one.
I find it more probable that we do live in one. There might even be a person somewhere, that is an avatar for the Simulator, just to get a 1'st person view in simulation game.
If the universe is a simulation then one can speculate on the purpose of the simulation. A good bet, based on our own world, would be it's a role playing game. If so the "players" are presumably the Elites in the game. A logical conclusion for any non-player character, such as yourself would then be that your highest calling in life is to become a groupie. That role is the only role that has any meaning beyond window dressing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Oh, and it's simulations all the way down.
She falls into the same trap that most do who think about this problem -- that the super-universe in which our simulation is embedded has physics anything like what is being simulated for us (or with us as a side effect.)
If it can do uncounted googleplex operations per second, with similar abailability of storage space (or equivalent for an analog computer!) then none of her speed concerns are valid. Indeed, the cosmic speed limit here is a curious oddity, perhaps deliberately ala Vinge's Zones of Thought.
As for Bell's inequality and hidden variables, again, if it is all simulated, none of that matters. Hidden variables is only an issue if you need to maintain Einstein's concept of reality, that there are real objects "out there" with real, measurable properties. If one gives up on that reality, one can base quantum mechanics on a deeper classical realism with no problems whatsoever.
But even that need not be the ultimate reality. But her concerns are only issues if one, needlessly, and I submit oddly, wants to maintain that that parent computer's physics is anything like the physics being sinulated.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Science does not, nor has ever, "proven" anything. The article linked demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding as well. The scientific method entails formulating a hypothesis and failing to disprove it, only becoming useful as a theory when it leads to new discovery and understanding.
There isn't even a need for each particle to have a specific value, a simulation isn't limited to a binary operation in this universe much less any conceivable one. Nor is computational complexity a way to explain it away as there would be no way to tell how much time flows on this side of the simulation with respect to the other from our perspective. All that could ever be accomplished is to show that the simulation would need to be at least of complexity/size X and run for Y operations which at this point would likely correlate with the surface area of the visible universe. Further this would have to come with a caveat that it's only basic rule based and not sentient based as it would be trivial to then overwrite peoples minds/data or start it from any point at which point it generates no useful information, even if correct.
Tldr pseudoscience
A lot of religious ideas and speculation can be explained by the "God of the Gaps" theory. That is, before human beings had acquired a worthwhile body of reliable scientific knowledge, interesting or scary things that were otherwise inexplicable were attributed to God. Like thunder and lightning, for instance. The more science has advanced, the more that kind of theological phenomenon has been squeezed out.
Much the same is true of philosophy. Since the Enlightenment or even before - say the time of Francis Bacon - science has been building up an increasingly large and fairly coherent body of reliable knowledge. That has irritated many philosophers, because the things they used to muse and pontificate about are now off limits - or, at least, explained by science to most people's satisfaction.
That's why, about a century ago, philosophy suffered an uncomfortable "fork". A lot of people who called themselves philosophers focused more and more tightly on an analysis of language and epistemology - for example, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a majority of 20th century British philosophers. Others saw this as an admission of defeat and confinement to mere analysis of words, and tried to aim higher. Karl Popper, for instance, tried to lay down rules for what scientists could, and could not, legitimately do.
So today, when they are so hemmed in by well-established scientific knowledge, some philosophers are delighted to find such promising topics as whether the universe is a simulation. It's not so very different from the preoccupation of the pre-Socratics who argued interminably about whether the world was ultimately made of water, air, earth, or the unknowable "apeiron". Not much progress, you might say; but then it's always been one of the delightful (or irritating, according to your temperament) aspects of philosophy that it never really comes to any final conclusions.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The quinque viæ is a collection of weak arguments. All of its forms boil down to: "I don't understand how this could happen, so it must be God."
Physics has already chipped away at the First Mover and Uncaused Cause. The field does not offer a complete formal explanation, but there are enough details that these arguments are no longer compelling.
Basic learning theories explain how we acquire idealized concepts, which basically eliminates the Argument from Degree. Most criticisms of Platonic idealism can be applied to it as well.
The existence of natural laws explains what the Teleological Argument seeks to attribute to God. You could argue that God established those laws, but then there is no clear line of reasoning why God is necessary in such an explanation. Natural laws imply the regular behavior we observe; there is no need to assume the laws themselves are necessary in the philosophical sense.
The Argument from Contigency was developed prior to our understanding of conservation of mass/energy. Aquinas' "things" may perish, but the matter and energy which comprised them will continue to exist, and new things may form from this material. The idea that things "go out of existence" is simply false. Things are broken and remade into new things.
E.g., the human body may die and break down, but its atoms are incorporated into new soil, bacteria, insects, earthworms, plants, and eventually larger animals. Basically, Aquinas was conflating the macro-level that we care about (people, houses, foodstuffs, animals) with the fundamental level of existence (particles and energy).
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
The only difference between what you describe and what these "simulation" theorists are is who their god is.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
In other words, "the universe is a simulation" is an unevidenced assertion, much like the multiverse.
It is far worse than that because unless we find the programmer(s) (or possibly a bug/exploit!) there will never be any evidence of the simulation. In this way believing in a simulation is just like a religion - there is literally no difference because the only way to scientifically prove a religion is to find evidence of god. Everything which religious fundamentalists explain as "god creating it that way" a simulation can explain by "the programmer(s) creating it that way" and QM is not a problem in that regard if you are simulating the universe itself because outside the simulation we have no idea what the physical laws are so we can literally just invoke magic.
The arguments made in the article about QM are not obstacles (and in some cases very poorly explained e.g. the spin of an electron is exactly known at all times because it is a fermion and has a spin-1/2, what is not known is the direction the spin vector points) because even if we restrict ourselves to the type of computers we know about they are easily solved by simply saying that the simulation is pre-determined. You can reproduce all QM phenomena, and indeed any phenomena you can imagine, this way. However since the simulation runs in a universe we know nothing about the limitations on such a computer are utterly unknown. Hence belief in a simulation is unfalsifiable and so not a scientific theory but a belief.
Wolfram gave a good presentation on this last year. The good stuff is in the last twenty minutes.
If you think about it, there's no way--even in principle--to find the programmer or a bug in the simulation. It'd simply be impossible to distinguish between that and arbitrarily odd observed natural behavior. At best, you might (might!) be able to observe the universe acting in an unexpected way.
As the Greeks mused, we're simply living in a dream of sorts, with no hope of ever knowing the true nature of reality.