Technology

When we dream we often believe it to be reality, despite that in retrospect we can identify clear contradictions with logic in those dreams.

A Matrix-like simulation doesn't have to be perfect. We are a bunch of dumb-dumbs who will suspend disbelief quite easily and dismiss those who claim to see a different truth as crazy.

You don’t even need to reject the applicability of Gödel, because there’s no proof that our universe doesn’t include a bunch of undecidable things tucked away in the margins. Jupiter could be filled with complete nonsense for all we know.

I mean, simulation theory is kind of a joke itself. It’s a fun thought experiment, but ultimately it’s just solipsism repackaged.

In reality there’s no more evidence for it than there is for you being a butterfly dreaming it’s a man. And it seems to me that the only reason people take it at all seriously in the modern age is because Elon Musk said he believed it back when he had a good enough PR team that people thought he was worth listening to.

⬆️ ⬆️ ⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️BABA Start holy fucking shit I can see time. It's the colour three.

Definitely was patched in the newest update

So really The Matrix should have taken place in a two dimensional world.

Alternatively, I would also accept renaming the trilogy to The Array, The Matrix, and The Tensor.

I think the "what if we're all in a video game" take is a thought terminating cliche based solely on our own culture and experience.

I'm less certain that we're not a brane stretched across the cosmological horizon projected backwards in time by the collapse of a universe-sized supermassive black hole, and that the answer of who runs the simulation or who's making the hologram is no one. But mostly I think that because I cleave hard to the idea that any natural process that we hypothesize about should have a basis in an existing model. Black holes are something that we largely exist outside and can study and have a number of comparable features that make them ideal to test these thought experiments. There's obvious uncertainties, like whether our universe is spinning, whether it even needs to be spinning, and the inconclusiveness of whether galaxies have inherited spin from that or not, but I also don't buy for a second that the big bang doesn't have an origin or natural cause or that it could possibly be "just is."

I'm a proponent and I definitely don't think it's impossible to make a probable case beyond a reasonable doubt.

And there are implications around it being the case which do change up how we might approach truth seeking.

Also, if you exist in a dream but don't exist outside of it, there's pretty significant philosophical stakes in the nature and scope of the dream. We've been too brainwashed by Plato's influence and the idea that "original = good" and "copy = bad."

There's a lot of things that can only exist by way of copies that can't exist for the original (i.e. closure recursion), so it's a weird remnant philosophical obsession.

All that said, I do get that it's a fairly uncomfortable notion for a lot of people.

Yes but, also, no.

You already seem familiar but, for the uninitiated playing along at home, Wikipedia's entry for Simulation Theory is a pretty easy read. Quoting their synopsis of Bostrom's conjecture:

1. either such simulations are not created because of technological limitations or self-destruction;
2. advanced civilizations choose not to create them;
3. if advanced civilizations do create them, the number of simulations would far exceed base reality and we would therefore almost certainly be living in one.

it's certainly an interesting thought. I agree it shouldn't inform our ethics or disposition toward our lived experiences. That doesn't mean there's zero value in trying to find out though. Even if the only positive yield is that we develop better testing methods which still come up empty: that's still progress worth having. If it nets some additional benefit then so much the better.

I'd argue that satisfying curiosity is, in itself, and worthy pursuit so long as no harm is done.

That all still sets aside the more interesting question though. If such simulations are possible then are they something we're comfortable creating? If not, and we find one has been built, what should we do? Turn it off? Leave it alone? "Save" those created inside of it?

These aren't vapid questions. They strike at the heart of many important unresolved quandries. Are the simulated minds somehow less real than unsimulated ones? Does that question's answer necessarily impact those mind's right to agency, dignity, or self-determination?

The closer we get to being able to play god on a whim the more pressing I find such questions. That's not because I wring my hands and labor anxiously at truth or certainty for lack of better idols. It's because, whatever this is, we're all in it together and our choices today have an outsized impact on the choices others will have tomorrow. Developing a clearer view of what this is, and what we're capable of doing in it, affords future minds better opportunity to arrive at reasonable conclusions and decide how to live well.

I think if we're ever going to find an answer to "Why does the universe exist?" I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is "yes, it's a simulation and we can demonstrate as much" then the next question becomes "OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?" which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Alternatively, if the answer is "no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality" then... well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

They also identity the particular junction that seems the most likely to be an artifact of simulation if we're in one.

A game like No Man's Sky generates billions of planets using procedural generation with a continuous seed function that gets converted into discrete voxels for tracking stateful interactions.

The researchers are claiming that the complexity of where our universe's seemingly continuous gravitational behaviors meet up with the behaviors of continuous probabilities converting to discrete values when being interacted with in stateful ways is incompatible with being simulated.

But completely overlook that said complexity itself may be the byproduct of simulation, in line with independent emerging approaches in how we are simulating worlds.

Yes, just like Minecraft worlds are so antiquated given how they contain diamonds in deep layers that must have taken a billion years to form.

What a simulated world contains as its local timescale doesn't mean the actual non-local run time is the same.

It's quite possible to create a world that appears to be billions of years old but only booted up seconds ago.

From our perspective, sure. But we wouldn't know if it was stopped and started running again, or if it was reverted to a previous state.

But would we even notice an outage? Like hitting pause on a simulation and restarting it. There could be nightly maintenance and we may never know. Or maybe that's what deja vu is after all...