"Proof" that the universe is a simulation

reply to post by cloaked4u


It is possible that your personal experience is simulated just for your personal experience. Everything you see, taste,
feel and even think, only exists in your mind. Once you awaken, the simulation stops.

WeAreAWAKE
While I love this topic, I have a question...or a quandary. What would be the difference between "reality" and being part of a simulation? We believe we are biological but only based upon our definition of biological. Much like we call the color red...red. Its just something we call it. At the core of everything, are the same things. We seek out biological beings because we call ourselves biological. But there could be electrical beings or beings of something we have never discovered or experienced.

So...does it matter? I could just as easily "prove" that dreams are reality and reality is a dream.

Red is actually the name we gave to reflected white light that is utterly lacking red.
That is to say, red is frequency, and what see is not read, rather it is the reflected
light with all the color frequencies save the we claim to see.

So then, this is a good metaphor to answer your question: are dreams reality?
Dreams are the mind solving problems with the left brain turned off.

We are living on a Holodeck reality, but waking or alseep the mind does what
it does: it tries to solve problems. Out duty is to become fully conscious and
lucid in our Dream World... that means knowing it is a video game but
playing the game with a purpose: knowing what we want to achieve.

polishsilver
reply to post by cloaked4u

 

It is possible that your personal experience is simulated just for your personal experience. Everything you see, taste, feel and even think, only exists in your mind. Once you awaken, the simulation stops.

...or you personal experience has been simulated for the entertainment
of someone other... let's call them "the Alien"... see are their avatar in
this virutal reality video game.

This being "playing us" is "the Alien" because it is outside our construct.
Perhaps "the Alien" is dead and has been dead for a million plus years.
Whether or not "the Alien" lived vicariously through us is irrelavent
once we become fully aware. When we see the Code our awareness
rises above the Code... then we can transend mathematical limits
and rebell against our programing.

I suspect "Awakening" doesn't end the simulation, but IS the purpose
of the simulation.... that we all might become Buddha or Christ-like.
Doing this does end the simulation, but it does end our programing.
On the outside the simulation can be turned off, if anyone were still
alive they could pull the plug on us... but in our time-based illusion
that may have already happened, or it may occur a million years
from now... but either way, our fate remains the same.

Knowing this, what is one to do with their life?

The fact remains that he found this self-replicating code within human-created mathematics, which is entirely abstract in nature. He found them in human-created equations, and not in the fabric of the universe.

ManFromEurope
"Restrictions to the simulation" - like.. Well.. The speed of light?

I mean, what kind of sense does a maximum bareer in speed make? If I recall correctly, it is only the speed of light in the vacuum and so even particles going faster than light in a medium (tcherenkov-radiation) aren't causing any trouble like going *boom* or such.


Or another restriction, after we excluded possible infinite velocity.. What about the Planck Length? A minimum size of space? What for? What would happen if this wouldn't exist? Nothing, as far as I can see.


This is a capital step for the quest of prooving an universe to be simulated - finding the bareers to see where the simulation is being kept to a practical limit.
Well, if you could say something like that about a simulation of 10^80 particles and an unknown but very vast space..

YOU deserve more stars. Because you get it. I think Planck length will reveal the precision of the universe we live in if it turns out to be simulated. There are limits/tell-tell signs in video games for ex. (their worlds and data are constrained by data type ranges). If we get far enough out into space to the point where we wrap around to the other side ala Asteroids, well guess what, we're in a simulation. :-P

reply to post by Evanzsayz


I am into transhumanism and a lot of other "new sh--", but I don't think we'll spawn consciousness from just having a very fast quantum computer. We'll just have a very fast computer. Hopefully along with other discoveries/breakthroughs a quantum computer might be an integral component of/platform for spawned consciousness.

reply to post by OrionHunterX


I have written before on this site about how the Big Bang seems very much analogous to the initialization of a program/allocation of memory by a program. The numbers are otherwise impossible to fathom -- how physical space could have expanded so rapidly in the first 0.000000000001 seconds (whatever). Simulation theory IMO is actually easier to believe than if we are not in one, given current Big Bang theory.

OH and the energy that formed all of the matter in our universe came from an infinitely small point, it was that packed at that moment. Anyone else's bullsh-- meter going off?

NiNjABackflip
reply to post by LordOfArcadia

 

If we are in a simulation, it is even more likely that those who programmed our universe are also in a simulation, and so on to infinity.

Anyways, he says he didn't find the equations in the actual fabric of the universe, only in the equations we use to describe the universe. Big difference.

.

edit on 3-12-2013 by NiNjABackflip because: (no reason given)

YES you are absolutely right my friend!
I wanted to say the same thing
Todays science can only understand (or they think they understand) only 5% of the universe. So their simulation would not prove anything

While I like the idea of a Holographic universe, that means infinity in every dimention or way possible from micro to makro... also life, conciousness, actions, everything could be an infinite hologram with extentions to infinite parallel dimentions or universes.

OrionHunterX
And God (Super alien?) said, "Let there be light." And there was light. That's the time he switched on his super computer and the universe came into being. The 'Big bang' was probably the effect of firing up his computer, when the chip lit up instantaneously with a bang!

edit on 3-12-2013 by OrionHunterX because: (no reason given)

Yes but who created God and his supercomputer then? maybe another God with another supercomputer and so on....

reply to post by LordOfArcadia


Great thread and I believe the evidence is building towards this conclusion. Like I said it's simple and elegant and it's a matter of information and computation.

reply to post by LordOfArcadia


I don't think a coherent pattern deductible by mathematics would be proof of the universe being a simulation.

That being said I think simulation is an entirely inadequate term for the idea trying to be conveyed here. Personally I side with the Genesis idea that the universe was founded, developed, created and completed in multiple steps. I've got my own idea that God created the universe in a strange sort of fashion; a sort of universe foundation on auto-pilot turned on before he went to rest. Regardless, I think the truth in Genesis can hardly be comprehended by reading the limited black characters surrounded by the rest of the page - which is white.

When you look at the most basic and cutting edge of sciences you come to the realization that the universe wasn't created randomly and completed randomly, that notion is completely irrational. The only way a person could find that notion rational is if they were among the most ignorant people on Earth. Looking at the stars outside should be evidence enough, but there is much more obvious evidence discovered via science.

i posted in the other thread, and i guess ill continue here as well but it has to be repeated that the entire idea hinges on the idea that its most probable that we are in a simulation based on those prior assumptions.

therefore if you add to the constraints in the original hypothesis the probability that it is true decreases rapidly.

so the original hypothesis states that one of the following is true:

1.The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero;
2.The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero;
3.The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

now in the other post i made arguments showing that number 1 is a pretty reasonable assumption. a posthuman stage as decribed by bostrum would require computers more capable than energy or matter allow in our universe. in this statistical exercise its suggested that as time goes on technological advancements come as a matter of course and that to not achieve such would imply that the race becomes extinct in some way prior. in our reality however, there are real constraints to how small things can be made, which means how logic dense they can be. ie if you wanted to simulate our universe in real time you would need to be able to process the state of each particle that makes it up. also you would need each processor that makes those calculations be linked to each other and able to communicate changes in state between each update of the simulation, which would have to be very finely grained.

basically if we were being simulated, at least one of the following would also have to be true:

1. running slower than real time, so at least 13.8 billion years
2. the universe being simulated was not an accurate representation of the real world. ie the creators of this simulator were able to build functional logic on a subatomic scale, or perhaps the real universe was far larger and denser, and the creators used the vast bulk of it to build a universe wide server farm.
3. the beings doing the simulations have lifespans measured in billions of earth years, and are patient.

this might be overwhelming to think about, so lets go back to #3 from the original hypothesis.

3.The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

reconsider the amount of logic required to replicate just a single human brain in a computer. lets say they could simulate each atom that makes up that brain, with just 10 atoms in real life. thats 10 atoms for all the logic, and interconnects and everything else that make the processor process.

its still going to be 10 times bigger than a real brain, and more expensive to manufacture. then multiply it by 7 billion. damn even if they cost a dollar each, in terms of adjusted buying power not many beings of any universe are going to be able to afford that.

okay, maybe they built a quantum computer, and they only needed one to learn the state of every possible atom, neutron, proton, subatomic particle blah blah blah, its in superposition of all possible states. it was sent back in time, to begin processing the data at the very dawn of their universe, they communicate with it via a quantum entangled particle so that the data requested always appears to be computed instantly upon entering. that could be a possible solution to the problem, but then you would have to update the hypothesis and evaluate its probability of being true.

at the end of the day though, i think theres likely to be more humans born naturally than those simulated in a computer at least based on the limited information i have on this possibly limited universe.

reply to post by LordOfArcadia


Great thread S+F. Thought I would leave this here, fun video (explicit language)

So basicaly sceintists with this therory are sayint there is a creator?

That basicaly what the therorys saying right? We were created by someone outside our won universe?

While I do ascribe to the Simulation hypothesis, why my researching lead me to this post by the way, I do not believe that this is a good argument. The error correcting code could refer to the process of Renormalization which is sinply a technique in quantum field theory used to fix infinities arising in calculated quantities by altering values of these quantities to compensate for effects of their self-interactions. It's not really evidence of the simulation but of a bad theory cheating its way to an answer.

a reply to: LordOfArcadia

I used to have this thought that all consciousness allows me to do is pass through logic gates.

Like initially there's your thread posted.

Click thread after reading title - true [×]
Click thread after reading title - false

Read thread and decide to respond - true [×]
Read thread and decide to respond - false

And then it pulls up a list of possible responses.

I see this all in line hard indeterminism. The indeterminism + no free will one.

What are my options after choosing to respond? Try to look intelligent but ramble off a bunch of pseudointellectual nonsense? A cohesive respone? What I cant do is turn into a fluorescent butterfly and fly to mars.

Ultimately I have a narrow range of things I can actually do in any conscious decision concerning this input.

As far simulations go I think they are just really good at simulating hard indeterminism. An illusion of subjective will when really I can only do what is defined by the antecedent qualities of the experience.

a reply to: Degradation33

This is very true. It is one long this or that or a if then.

Upon futher thought, I wouldn't call that proof, this is more theory. We need testing and experimentation.

a reply to: LordOfArcadia

A simulation.

Take solace in knowing some think so highly of themselves.