this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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It is incredibly unlikely.
I know, "if an ancestor simulation is possible than it is much more likely you're in one than not in one." That's fallacious, unfalsifiable and everyone loves to leave out the word "ancestor" which is very important to the thought experiment.
In our universe, no system is entirely isolated from the rest of it. It is impossible to create a system that does not in some way interact with the outside universe. So if it is a simulation in a universe, and the universe it is running in also has this rule we would see information from that universe leak into ours in some way. How that would appear we don't know, but it would be possible to figure it out. Maybe heat dissipates out, maybe bit flips happen in our universe due to the parent's equivalent to cosmic rays, maybe the speed of light is a result of the clock speed of the simulator. We don't know what it would be, but there would be something, and it would be theoretically discernible.
at least some of the laws of our universe are laws of the parent universe. So maybe that rule, no system exists in isolation, is also true above. Or maybe our speed of light is the same for them. Whatever it is, our cumulative constraints are more than that of the simulation.
All that, unless, in the parent universe, 1) systems can exist in isolation, or 2) it is an environment with no constraints. These two are functionally equivalent, so I'll talk about them like they're the same thing. In such a universe, there would be no causality, no form, nothing that makes it unified. It's not a universe at all. It's something like a universe post heat death. In such a scenario, running a simulation isn't possible. If it were, to create an environment in which causality can be simulated, that environment wouldn't be a simulation, it would be a bona fide universe.
So I think, the fact that we see no evidence that we are in a simulation means we are probably not in one. So that means, if we are in one it is falsifiable and we can prove or disprove it empirically. And it also means we can escape, or at the very least destroy it.
Information that we are in one would appear in weird ways? Like maybe side effects of simulating a continuous universe in a calculable way which would require quantization, but would leave the universe with a seemingly incompatible framework of continuous macro behavior (such as general relativity) and discrete behavior (such as quantum mechanics)?
Yeah, the apparent effect to us could be something really weird like incongruent physical laws or constants or things like that. I have no idea what it would be, only that it would be detectable.
Like sync errors?
Sure, but I don't think that's what's going on there.
I think observation/measurement of a quantum system means entangling with the system, so the quantum system becomes larger and includes the observer. Combine that with relativity, which is absolute in the universe, and you have an e plantation for that phenomenon.
That wouldn't explain why the two results end up not agreeing sometimes.
I agree that it relates to how the observer entangles with the system, but you see this kind of error class occurring in net code all the time.
Player 1 shoots an enemy around the same time as player 2. Player 1 has a locally rendered resolution to the outcome of having killed the enemy and gets awarded the xp, and player 2 has the same result.
The server has to decide if it is going to let both local clients be correct or resolve in a way that reverses the outcome for one of the clients. For things that don't really matter, it lets both be correct.
Here, each individual outcome is basically Bell's paradox, where we know there needs to be consistent results no matter how each observer behaves. But in this case, when a second layer of abstraction is added, the results are capable of disagreeing.
It looks very similar to a sync error, and relativity doesn't in any way explain it.
Why doesn't relativity explain it? It looks like a classic case of relativity to me, what am I missing?
Relativity only relates to the relative shape of spacetime and movement through it.
So for example, things occurring faster for one inertial frame vs another, or something being closer to an observer moving quickly than for one stationary.
It's exclusive to the combination of spacetime curvature and one's momentum within it.
How do you think relativity does explain it?
Well I think relativity tells us something more fundamental, that the world emerges as interactions from relative frames of reference, even in the quantum realm. It's easy to forget, every single thing going on is a quantum system with astronomical complexity, complexity of a system is the square of the number of quantum states in the entire system. A molecule is a quantum system, a cell is a quantum system, a tree is a quantum system, a tree rustling in the wind is a quantum system. A person interacting with another person for example is entangling those systems and is itself another quantum system. And I don't think entanglement is a binary thing, it's a thing of degree and quality. You're influenced by everything in your light cone, even if you've never directly observed a specific star for example, you still interact with it to some degree, you're a part of a quantum system composed of the entire observable universe, and even part of the unobservable one. Once you observe it, now your interaction is more than that. You can picture it in your mind, look for it again later, tell people about it. If you could orbit it, or touch it, you'd get entangled with it even more. I think a lot more about our experience than what we realize consciously is quantum phenomena, I think we experience these phenomena directly but we just take for granted those experiences and don't realize what they are fundamentally, just like someone who doesn't understand gravity doesn't realize that the experience of falling from a tree is the same force as the one that keeps the planets moving around the sun.
You should look into contextual realism. You might find it interesting. It is a philosophical school from the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist that basically argues that the best way to solve most of the major philosophical problems and paradoxes (i.e. mind-body problem) is to presume the natural world is context variant all the way down, i.e. there simply is no reality independent of specifying some sort of context under which it is described (kind of like a reference frame).
The physicist Francois-Igor Pris points out that if you apply this thinking to quantum mechanics, then the confusion around interpreting it entirely disappears, because the wave function clearly just becomes a way of accounting for the context under which an observer is observing a system, and that value definiteness is just a context variant property, i.e. two people occupying two different contexts will not always describe the system as having the same definite values, but may describe some as indefinite which the other person describes as definite.
"Observation" is just an interaction, and by interacting with a system you are by definition changing your context, and thus you have to change your accounting for your context (i.e. the wave function) in order to make future predictions. Updating the wave function then just becomes like taring a scale, that is to say, it is like re-centering or "zeroing" your coordinate system, and isn't "collapsing" anything physical. There is no observer-dependence in the sense that observers are somehow fundamental to nature, only that systems depend upon context and so naturally as an observer describing a system you have to take this into account.
Quantum mechanics and relativity are, at least currently, incompatible theories. Relativity depends on continuous things, which is why it has singularities and what not. But quantum mechanics has minimum discrete units that don't play nice with gravity and relativity.
Also, it's still an open debate as to whether quantum mechanics is applicable to all sizes of things. There's some consequences around that being the case and it's one of the suggestions for an assumption resolving recent paradoxes around incompatibilities between the theory and our expectations for behaviors. If it does apply to larger objects, the consequences are basically that either there's no free will and superderminism is true or else that quanta don't actually exist until observed.
In fact, currently we haven't been able to observe quantum behavior in anything large enough to measure gravitational effects from. Which may be where a fundamental limit exists, given the incompatibility between relativity and QM.
Quantum mechanics is incompatible with general relativity, it is perfectly compatible with special relativity, however. I mean, that is literally what quantum field theory is, the unification of special relativity and quantum mechanics into a single framework. You can indeed integrate all aspects of relativity into quantum mechanics just fine except for gravity. It's more that quantum mechanics is incompatible with gravity and less that it is incompatible with relativity, as all the other aspects we associate with relativity are still part of quantum field theory, like the passage of time being relative, relativity of simultaneity, length contraction, etc.
Gravity is where the whole continuous singularities are, so yeah.
You presuppose that all the people in the world and scientists are actually people too. Sure the laws of the universe seem to be consistent in a Newtonian fashion as far as yourself have bothered to check. I don't think you've done much personal quantum mechanics.
The problem is more Cartesian, in the first place, maybe Trumanian. The others might be bad faith actors. Are you able to trust your senses, if so the other people?
There is no requirement for a subset of something to have the same properties as the superset. Just because everything in our universe is interconnected is no guarantee that the same applies to the hypothetical universe in which our simulation is run. This is ignoring that the idea is that we can't see out of the simulation, i.e., there is no uncontrolled information being inserted into the simulation. This doesn't preclude static from the outside impacting us in some measurable way...such as a background level of noise that is pervasive in the simulation, like the CMB.
I don't know if we're in a simulation, but a lot of people smarter than me and more knowledgeable in the field have come to the conclusion that this idea isn't falsifiable, and I doubt your proposal is a new idea for them. This leads me to believe they probably had a good reason to dismiss it, better than my points listed above.
I addressed this already.
Okay, but you're glossing over the point, so let's talk about black holes. They are part of our universe, information can go in past the event horizon, but no information can come out past the event horizon. Are they connected? Yes, absolutely. Can we collect any information from them, beyond a few basic physical measurements (gravity, momentum, rotation, mass-energy)? No, that whole event horizon again. So are you proposing that causality doesn't exist in black holes, doesn't exist in our universe, or that maybe we can have an interconnected system with a one-way transfer of information?
Again, I'm sure someone with a PhD could not only come up with better reasons for the flaw in your assessment, but has probably already articulated it somewhere. Perhaps you should search that up.
Information comes out of black holes. That's the whole point of the Hawking radiation thing. And information enters, obviously. Also those few basic measurements are information. Black holes are falsifiable and detectable.
Causality inside black holes is not like causality out here, but it does exist. Once you enter, there's only one direction you can go, no matter what you do. The outcome of everything was decided the moment you touched the event horizon. That outcome is that you will eventually evaporate as hawking radiation.
I'm not glossing over the point. I've already addressed the crux of it. An environment in which systems can be totally isolated cannot function in any conceivable way as a universe. Everything inside would not be able to interact at all. It would be more like a substrate on which universes exist, if an environment can be isolated that does not allow for anything inside it to be 100% isolated.
Energy is not information. You are misinformed.
Yes it is lol I love being called misinformed by misinformed people. You should look into hawking radiation and why it was theorized.
Well, after doing some reading, you may be right. I didn't hear about the issues brought up, and Hawkings responses in 2004. It seems the consensus is that information is conveyed somehow, with some limits on practicality. That may still raise issues with determining whether you're in a simulation, if the capability to determine if you are is beyond the reach of your technology. At that point though, the only way you can falsify the hypothesis is to increase your capabilities to the point where you can test that, and I don't think we're there now.
If we aren't there yet, no point in believing it's true. It's like believing in god because we don't have the technology to prove or disprove god. We can't believe something that's not currently falsifiable, we have to disbelieve it until we see evidence of it. I don't think we are in a simulation.
I do think though that if it were true it could be detected with current capability, just that, if it is true, nobody has drawn the conclusion and investigated it yet. And information leaking in or out could be anything. The expansion rate increase of the universe could be energy leaking into the simulation. The speed of light could be a hard limit in the outside environment or something like a "clock speed" of the machine the simulation is running on. A slowly changing constant of nature, it could be anything. If it is true, there are indicators we are probably detecting, it's just that we haven't figured out what they're indicating.
You can believe or disbelieve anything you want. I don't think we're in a simulation. I dismiss the idea because we don't appear to currently be able to prove or disprove it and the outcome currently doesn't have a bearing on our options.