[HN Gopher] New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simu...
___________________________________________________________________
New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation
hypothesis
Author : Gooblebrai
Score : 68 points
Date : 2025-12-21 11:21 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.santafe.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.santafe.edu)
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Oh man, Stephen Wolfram and Jurgen Schmidthuber are probably
| fuming at the fact that this is called a "new" mathematical
| framework. It's all very old, and quite conventional, even
| popular -- not exactly the road not taken.
|
| What the author did was use the Physical Church-Turing thesis,
| and Kleene's second recursion theorem, to show that: (1) If a
| universe's dynamics are computable (PCT), and (2) the universe
| can implement universal computation (RPCT), then (3) the universe
| can simulate itself, including the computer doing the simulating.
|
| That's basically all. And thus "there would be two identical
| instances of us, both equally 'real'." (Two numerically distinct
| processes are empirically identical if they are
| indistinguishable. You might remember this sort of thing from
| late 20th c. philosophy coursework.)
|
| He also uses Rice's theorem (old) to show that there is no
| uniform measure over the set of "possible universes."
|
| It's all very interesting, but it's more a _review article_ than
| a "new mathematical framework." The notion of a
| mathematical/simulated universe is as old as Pythagoras (~550
| BC), and Rice, Church-Turing, and Kleene are all approaching the
| 100-year mark.
| ericpauley wrote:
| It's also a little silly for the same reasons discussions of
| theoretical computability often are: time and space
| requirements. In practice the Universe, even if computable, is
| so complex that simulating it would require far more compute
| than physical particles and far more time than remaining until
| heat death.
| FabHK wrote:
| Yes, is that (obvious) point being addressed in the paper? At
| first skimming, it just says that a "sufficiently souped up
| laptop" could, in principle, compute the future of the
| universe (i.e. Laplace's daemon), but I haven't seen anything
| about the subsequent questions of time scales.
| Borg3 wrote:
| Hehe yeah.. For me, its just inverted search for the God.
| There must be somethink behind it, if its not God, then it
| must be simulation! Kinda sad, I would expect more from
| scientist.
|
| The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to
| organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic
| molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live..
| Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt
| research and ask questions...
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves
| to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic
| molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live..
| Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt
| research and ask questions..._
|
| Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of
| thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy,
| because for all the order we create we just create more
| disorder.
|
| Conway's game of life has very simple rules (laws of
| nature) and it ends up very complex. The universe doing the
| same thing with much more complicated rules seems pretty
| natural.
| estearum wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. The _actual_ real riddle is consciousness.
| Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and
| energy zap into existence something that actually
| (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if
| something meets the below five criteria, we _must_ accept
| that it is conscious:
|
| (1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an
| environment, updated from ongoing input.
|
| (2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own
| body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that
| environment.
|
| (3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present
| into a single temporally extended self-model.
|
| (4) It uses these models with self-derived agency to
| generate and evaluate counterfactuals: Predictions of
| alternative futures under alternative actions. (i.e. a
| general predictive function.)
|
| (5) It has control channels through which those
| evaluations shape its future trajectories in ways that
| are not trivially reducible to a fixed reflex table.
|
| This would also indicate that Boltzmann Brains are not
| conscious -- so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann
| Brains, which would otherwise be _very_ surprising -- and
| that P-Zombies are impossible by definition. I 've been
| working on a book about this for the past three years...
| jsenn wrote:
| If you remove the terms "self", "agency", and "trivially
| reducible", it seems to me that a classical robot/game AI
| planning algorithm, which no one thinks is conscious,
| matches these criteria.
|
| How do you define these terms without begging the
| question?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| If anything has, minimally, a robust spatiotemporal sense
| of itself, and can project that sense forward to evaluate
| future outcomes, then it has a robust "self."
|
| What this requires is a persistent internal model of: (A)
| what counts as its own body/actuators/sensors (a
| maintained self-world boundary), (B) what counts as its
| history in time (a sense of temporal continuity), and (C)
| what actions it can take (degrees of freedom, i.e. the
| future branch space), all of which are continuously used
| to regulate behavior under genuine epistemic uncertainty.
| When (C) is robust, abstraction and generalization fall
| out naturally. This is, in essence, sapience.
|
| By "not trivially reducible," I don't mean "not
| representable in principle." I mean that, at the system's
| own operative state/action abstraction, its behavior is
| not equivalent to executing a fixed policy or static
| lookup table. It must actually perform predictive
| modeling and counterfactual evaluation; collapsing it to
| a reflex table would destroy the very capacities above.
| (It's true that with an astronomically large table you
| can "look up" anything -- but that move makes the notion
| of explanation vacuous.)
|
| Many robots and AIs implement pieces of this pipeline
| (state estimation, planning, world models,) but current
| deployed systems generally lack a robust, continuously
| updated self-model with temporally deep, globally
| integrated counterfactual control in this sense.
|
| If you want to simplify it a bit, you could just say that
| you need a robust and bounded spatial-temporal sense,
| coupled to the ability to generalize from that sense.
| dllthomas wrote:
| > so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains
|
| I think I agree you've excluded them from the definition,
| but I don't see why that has an impact on likelihood.
| squibonpig wrote:
| I don't think any of these need to lead to qualia for any
| obvious reason. It could be a p-zombie why not.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| The zombie intuition comes from treating qualia as an
| "add-on" rather than as the internal presentation of a
| self-model.
|
| "P-zombie" is not a coherent leftover possibility once
| you fix the full physical structure. If a system has the
| full self-model (temporal-spatial sense) / world-model /
| memory binding / counterfactual evaluator / control loop,
| then that structure _is what having experience amounts
| to_ (no extra ingredient need be added or subtracted).
|
| I hope I don't later get accused of plagiarizing myself,
| but let's embark on a thought experiment. Imagine a
| bitter, toxic alkaloid that does not taste bitter.
| Suppose ingestion produces no distinctive local sensation
| at all - no taste, no burn, no nausea. The only
| "response" is some silent parameter in the nervous system
| adjusting itself, without crossing the threshold of
| conscious salience. There are such cases: Damaged
| nociception, anosmia, people congenitally insensitive to
| pain. In every such case, genetic fitness is slashed. The
| organism does not reliably avoid harm.
|
| Now imagine a different design. You are a posthuman
| entity whose organic surface has been gradually replaced.
| Instead of a tongue, you carry an in-line sensor which
| performs a spectral analysis of whatever you take in.
| When something toxic is detected, a red symbol flashes in
| your field of vision: "TOXIC -- DO NOT INGEST." That
| visual event _is_ a quale. It has a minimally structured
| phenomenal character -- colored, localized, bound to
| alarm -- and it stands in for what once was bitterness.
|
| We can push this further. Instead of a visual alert,
| perhaps your motor system simply locks your arm; perhaps
| your global workspace is flooded with a gray, oppressive
| feeling; perhaps a sharp auditory tone sounds in your
| private inner ear. Each variant is still a mode of felt
| response to sensory information. Here's what I'm getting
| at with this: There is no way for a conscious creature to
| register and use risky input without some structure of
| "what it is like" coming along for the ride.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| There is no objective evidence consciousness exists as
| distinct from an information process.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There is no objective evidence of anything at all.
|
| It all gets filtered through consciousness.
|
| "Objectivity" really means a collection of organisms
| having (mostly) the same subjective experiences, and
| building the same models, given the same stimuli.
|
| Given that less intelligent organisms build simpler
| models with poorer abstractions and less predictive
| power, it's _very_ naive to assume that our model-making
| systems aren 't similarly crippled in ways we can't
| understand.
|
| Or imagine.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| That's a hypothesis but the alternate hypothesis that
| consciousness is not well defined is equally valid at
| this point. Occam's razor suggests consciousness doesn't
| exist since it isn't necessary and isn't even
| mathematically or physically definable.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| You expect scientists to not ask :'what is behind all
| this?'
|
| Ha
| vasco wrote:
| > The big riddle of Universe is, how
|
| A lot of people are more interested in the Why of the
| Universe than the How, though.
|
| How is an implementation detail, Why is "profound". At
| least that's how I think most people look at it.
| nick__m wrote:
| For me the biggest riddle is: why something instead of
| nothing ?
|
| That's the question that prevent me from being atheist and
| shift me to agnosticism.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| There is both in superposition.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| The real universe might be different and far more complex
| than our simulated reality. Maybe a species that can freely
| move within 4 or 5 dimensions is simulating our 3D + uni
| directional time reality just like we ,,simulate" reality
| with Sim City and Sims.
| mrwrong wrote:
| but then we don't have a universe simulating itself, but
| simulating a low-fi imitation
| vidarh wrote:
| The issue with that in terms of the simulation argument, is
| that the simulation argument doesn't require a _complete_
| simulation in either space or time.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It also doesn't require a super-universe with identical
| properties and constraints.
|
| There's no guarantee their logic is the same as our logic.
| It needs to be able to _simulate_ our logic, but that doesn
| 't mean it's defined or bound by it.
| skeledrew wrote:
| You're predicating on particles, heat death, etc as you
| understand it being applicable to any potential universe.
| Such rules are only known to apply in _this_ universe.
|
| A universe is simply a function, and a function can be called
| multiple times with the same/different arguments, and there
| can be different functions taking the same or different
| arguments.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I'm no mathematician, but doesn't this come up against Godel's
| incompleteness theorem? My brain has that roughly as "If you
| have a system and a model of that system, but the model is also
| part of the same system, something something, impossible"
| keepamovin wrote:
| Isn't GIT you can have a statement that is valid in a system,
| but can't be proven this way or that given the systems'
| axioms? And this is true for all such axiom systems? In other
| words the axioms are an incomplete description of the system.
|
| Maybe the problem is axiomative deduction, we need a new
| inference-ology?
| anthk wrote:
| Any decent Lisp can reimplement eval, apply and the rest of
| functions/atom within itself.
| bananaflag wrote:
| No, this sort of self-reflection is _exactly_ what makes
| Godel /Turing/etc impossibility results work ("strange loops"
| and all that).
| vasco wrote:
| Can you explain further?
|
| Maybe I'm too out of this scope but if you want to simulate
| Universe X plus the computer Y that simulates X then you'd
| need at least 1 extra bit of memory (likely way more) to
| encompass the simulation plus the computation running the
| simulation (X+Y). The computer running the simulation by
| definition is not part of the simulation, so how can it be
| that it can truly simulate itself?
| blovescoffee wrote:
| Not quite, compression enables you to simulate /
| represent / encode x data with less than x memory.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| Only for those inputs that are compressible.
|
| If a compressor can compress every input of length N bits
| into fewer than N bits, then at least 2 of the 2^N
| possible inputs have the same output. Thus there cannot
| exist a universal compressor.
|
| Modify as desired for fractional bits. The essential
| argument is the same.
| lascargroup wrote:
| Roughly speaking, Godel encoded (or "simulated") the
| formal part of mathematics within arithmetic (using
| operations such as addition and multiplication), and
| constructed a sentence that says "this sentence is
| unprovable" within that simulation.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Godel's incompleteness theorem is about the limits of proof /
| mathematical knowledge. Algebra is still useful and true,
| even though the proof shows it must be incomplete.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| Thanks for this great comment!
|
| > He also uses Rice's theorem (old) to show that there is no
| uniform measure over the set of "possible universes."
|
| I assume a finite uniform measure? Presumably |set| is a
| uniform measure over the set of "possible universes".
|
| Anyway if I understood that correctly, than this is not that
| surprising? There isn't a finite uniform measure over the real
| line. If you only consider the possible universes of two
| particles at any distance from eachother, this models the real
| line and therefore has no finite uniform measure.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Okay, here's the thing: this is creating revenue, this is
| fascinating literature for a huge class of armchair scientists
| that want to believe, want to play with these mental toys, and
| are willing to pay for the ability to fantasize with ideas they
| are incapable of developing on their own. This is ordinary
| capitalism, spinning revenues out of sellable stories.
| boomskats wrote:
| Zero cost abstractions! I'd almost be interested in Bostrom's
| inevitable physics-based counter (if he wasn't such a racist
| bellend).
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Like running Kubernetes in a Docker container.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The simulation hypothesis takes something reasonable, that
| reality is "virtual," and runs it into absurdity.
|
| If the universe isn't "real" in the materialist sense, that does
| not imply that there's a "real" universe outside of the one we
| perceive, nor does it imply that we're being "simulated" by other
| intelligences.
|
| The path of minimal assumptions from reality not being "real" is
| idealism. We're not simulated, we're manifesting.
| EdgeCaseExist wrote:
| Exactly, it's paradoxical; how would you define the universe as
| a simulation, without being on the same substrate! The title
| should have focused more on the computability of the universe,
| as we know it.
| brap wrote:
| I think the underlying assumption is that we are "real",
| meaning our existence is grounded in some undisputed "reality".
| So if what we perceive as the universe isn't real, then there
| has to be some other real universe that is simulating it in
| some way.
| empiricus wrote:
| Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying. What do you mean
| by "something reasonable, that reality is virtual"? In many
| ways, by definition, reality is what is real not virtual. I
| have other questions, but this is a good start :)
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| When I say that reality isn't "real" (which is awkward for
| sure) what I'm referring to is that we have a perception of
| space and time which is absolute and inviolable, when it's
| likely space and time (as we understand them) are artifacts
| of our perceptual lens, and "reality" is based on something
| more akin to consensus than immutable laws. From this
| perspective you could view physics more as a
| communication/consistency protocol for consciousness than the
| raw nature of the universe.
| empiricus wrote:
| Hm, from what I know about physics, time and space are
| actually much more absolute and inviolable than our
| imperfect perceptions. the laws are quite different than
| our intuition, but everything is water-tight and there is
| no room for any deviation. the smallest of deviations would
| mean multiple nobel prizes, so ppl are searching really
| hard to find any, without success. On the other hand, if we
| talk about our perception, the things we see around us are
| of course a virtual reality constructed by our brain to
| model the input from our sensors, but this is normal
| because there is no alternative. But it seems to me you are
| saying smth different?
| senkora wrote:
| Yep, might as well go straight to the Mathematical Universe
| Hypothesis:
|
| > Tegmark's MUH is the hypothesis that our external physical
| reality is a mathematical structure. That is, the physical
| universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is
| mathematics -- specifically, a mathematical structure.
| Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all
| structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well.
| Observers, including humans, are "self-aware substructures
| (SASs)". In any mathematical structure complex enough to
| contain such substructures, they "will subjectively perceive
| themselves as existing in a physically 'real' world".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
| mw67 wrote:
| Funny people still call that "simulation hypothesis". At some
| point they should try to do some Past lives regressions or Out of
| body experience (astral projection). Then they'll know for sure
| what this reality is about.
| qayxc wrote:
| I would consider this if someone was able to demonstrate a way
| to distinguish these phenomena from altered states of mind
| (i.e. hallucinations). We know and can demonstrate that the
| human psyche can easily be manipulated in various ways
| (psychological manipulation, drugs, magnetic fields, sleep
| depravation, stress, etc.) to cause such experiences.
|
| Some actual evidence for for "past life regressions" and
| "astral projection" would be nice...
| gcost wrote:
| PLR is real, read the works of Michael newton and others.
| Over 8000 PRL from people of all kind of age and background
| describe the same things happening once we pass on the other
| side. Definitely not hallucinations. Actually scary how
| people still think that instead of exploring for themselves.
| krzat wrote:
| Yeah, from what I heard, that's how scientology recruits true
| believers.
| EdgeCaseExist wrote:
| The author of the article on the site, is the author of the
| paper!
| mg74 wrote:
| Which of him is simulating which?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Department of Research Simulation
| mgaunard wrote:
| It's starting with the assumption that the simulation would
| reproduce the universe perfectly; this eliminates a lot of
| possibilities.
|
| Many would expect that the parent universe would be more
| sophisticated, potentially with more dimensions, that we can only
| glimpse through artifacts of the simulation.
| te7447 wrote:
| I've always wondered how you'd be able to rigorously
| distinguish breaking out of the simulation from just
| discovering novel things about your current universe.
|
| Is a black hole a bug or a feature? If you find a way to
| instantly observe or manipulate things at Alpha Centauri by
| patterning memory in a computer on Earth a special way, is that
| an exploit or is it just a new law of nature?
|
| Science is a descriptive endeavor.
|
| I guess that some extreme cases would be obvious - if a god-
| admin shows up and says "cut that out or we'll shut your
| universe down", that's a better indication of simulation than
| the examples I gave. But even so, it could be a power bluff,
| someone pretending to be a god. Or it could be comparable to
| aliens visiting Earth rather than gods revealing themselves -
| i.e. some entity of a larger system visiting another entity of
| the same system, not someone outside it poking inside.
| anthk wrote:
| Also that Universe could use entities similar to hard and soft
| links (quantum entanglement), memory deduplication and so on.
|
| How many people did we met in the world with similar face
| appearances and even personalities, almost like you are finding
| copycats everywhere? Also, it happens as if some kind of
| face/shape would just have a single personality with minimal
| differences spread over thousands of lookalikes...
| quantum_state wrote:
| Hope folks involved in this type of exploration have it clear in
| mind that what they are reasoning about it's strictly the model
| of the real world only. It's far from obvious that nature follows
| anything remotely computational.
| raverbashing wrote:
| We can't even run docker inside docker without making things
| slower, the simulator hypotheses is frankly ridiculous
| lioeters wrote:
| That's what a simulated universe running inside Docker would
| say.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Nobody is going to pay all those docker licenses /s
| croes wrote:
| You would be living inside docker and wouldn't know how fast
| the outside is. Maybe lightspeed is a limit inflicted by the
| simulation.
| daoboy wrote:
| I always feel like these frameworks rely on a semantic sleight of
| hand that sounds plausible on the surface, but when you drill
| down a bit they render words like 'simulation' 'reality' or
| 'truth' as either unintelligible or trite, depending on how you
| define them.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| They're defined relative to the axioms. In this case he is
| using the standard arithmetic & set theoretic constructions to
| define the terms & functions he's talking about. It's logically
| sound, whether it makes physical sense or not is another
| matter.
| anthk wrote:
| Arxiv.org PDF:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.16050
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Here is one thing I don't understand about these kind of
| approaches. Doesn't a computational simulation imply that time is
| discrete? If so, doesn't this have consequences for our currently
| best physical theories? I understand that the discreteness of
| time would be far below what can be measured right now but AFAIK
| it would still makes a difference for physical theories whether
| time is discrete or not. Or am I mistaken about that? There are
| similar concerns about space.
|
| By the way, on a related note, I once stumbled across a paper
| that argued that if real numbers where physically realizable in
| some finite space, then that would violate the laws of
| thermodynamics. It sounded convincing but I also lacked the
| physical knowledge to evaluate that thesis.
| qayxc wrote:
| Time and space aren't well defined, but current models indeed
| put a discrete limit on both: Planck-Length and Planck-Time
| (~1.9x10^-43s and ~5.7x10^-35m respectively).
|
| Below these limits, physical descriptions of the world lose
| meaning, i.e. shorter time spans or distances don't result in
| measurable changes and our models break down. That doesn't mean
| these limits are "real" in the sense that space and time are
| indeed quantised, but experiments and observations end at these
| limits.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| These models get things backwards. The universe is a wave
| function in logic space. It appears discrete and quantized
| because integers composed of primes are logically stable
| information entropy minimal nodes. In other words the universe is
| the way it is because it depends on math. Math does not depend on
| the universe. Logic is its own "simulation." Math does not
| illuminate physics, rather physics illuminates math. This can be
| shown by the construction of a filter that cleanly sorts prime
| numbers from composites without trial division but by analysis of
| the entropic harmonics of integers. In other words what we
| consider integers are not fundamental but rather emergent
| properties of the minimal subjunctive of superposition of zero
| (non existence) and infinity (anything that is possible). By
| ringing an integer like a bell according to the template provided
| by the zeta function we can find primes and factor from spectral
| analysis without division. Just as integers emerge from the wave
| as stable nodes so do quanta in the physical isomorphism. In
| other words both integers and quanta are emergent from the
| underlying wave that is information in tension between the
| polarity of nonexistence and existence. So what appears discrete
| or simulated is actually an emergent phenomenon of the
| subjunctive potential of information constrained by the two poles
| of possibility.
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Think the leakage is if the simulation were a _manufactured_
| emulation, like humans trying to mirror natural laws through
| technology.
|
| An emergent simulation, nature borne out of nature, may not
| have those same defects.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| We can prove that the "defects" we see emerge naturally from
| the entropic optimization of information subject to the
| superposition of being and not being. Between nothing and
| everything the universe exists in an entropic gradient.
| croes wrote:
| Related?
|
| > Consequences of Undecidability in Physics on the Theory of
| Everything
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45770754
| le-mark wrote:
| I wonder if there's a concept akin to Shannon Entropy that
| dictates the level of detail a simulation can provide given a
| ratio of bits to something. Although presumably any level of bits
| could be simulated given more time.
| lioeters wrote:
| An explanation of the observer effect may be that the universe
| is lazily evaluated at the moment of observation. Outside of
| that experienced reality, it might as well be all a cloud of
| latent possibilities, rough outlines and low-res details,
| enough for a plausible simulation.
| le-mark wrote:
| This would allow for a dds attack on reality where a bunch of
| simulants attempt to perform computationally expensive
| observations at the same time.
| bobbyschmidd wrote:
| Someone did another 'Kleene-Turing' on the whole issue with "the
| origin"?
|
| bad bad not good.
| shtzvhdx wrote:
| This all assumes there's no computation beyond a Turing machine,
| right? Therefore, this assumes reality is a simulation on a
| finite set of rationals?
|
| So, as long as one believes in continuum, this is just toying
| around?
| analog31 wrote:
| We've yet to propose an experiment that demonstrates the
| inadequacy of IEEE floats if used carefully. The simulation
| only needs to be good enough.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Konrad Zuse was a German pioneer in computing, best known for
| building the Z3 in 1941--the world's first functional
| programmable digital computer. Later in his career, he explored
| profound philosophical and theoretical ideas about the nature of
| the universe. Rechnender Raum (literally "Computing Space" or
| "Calculating Space") is the title of his groundbreaking 1969 book
| (published in the series Schriften zur Datenverarbeitung). In it,
| Zuse proposed that the entire universe operates as a vast
| discrete computational process, akin to a giant cellular
| automaton. He argued that physical laws and reality itself emerge
| from digital, step-by-step computations on a grid of discrete
| "cells" in space, rather than from continuous analog processes as
| traditionally assumed in physics. This idea challenged the
| prevailing view of continuous physical laws and laid the
| foundation for what we now call digital physics,
| pancomputationalism, or the simulation hypothesis (the notion
| that reality might be a computation, possibly running on some
| underlying "computer"). Zuse's work is widely regarded as the
| first formal proposal of digital physics, predating similar ideas
| by others like Edward Fredkin or Stephen Wolfram.
| empiricus wrote:
| Trying to read the paper... I guess if you ignore the difference
| between finite and infinite tape Turing machine, and if all
| physical constraints are outside the scope of the paper, then it
| is easy to prove the universe can simulate itself.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| The problem of computers is the problem of time : How to obtain a
| consistent causal chain !
|
| The classical naive way of obtaining a consistent causal chain,
| is to put the links one after the other following the order
| defined by the simulation time.
|
| The funnier question is : can it be done another way ? With the
| advance of generative AI, and things like diffusion model it's
| proven that it's possible theoretically (universal distribution
| approximation). It's not so much simulating a timeline, but more
| sampling the whole timeline while enforcing its physics-law self-
| consistency from both directions of the causal graph.
|
| In toy models like game of life, we can even have recursivity of
| simulation : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978978 unlike
| section 7.3 of this paper where the computers of the lower
| simulations are started in ordered-time
|
| In other toy model you can diffusion-model learn and map the
| chaotic distribution of all possible three-body problem
| trajectories.
|
| Although sampling can be simulated, the efficient way of doing it
| necessitate to explore all the possible universes simultaneously
| like in QM (which we can do by only exploring a finite number of
| them while bounding the neighbor universe region according to the
| question we are trying to answer using the Lipschitz continuity
| property).
|
| Sampling allows you to bound maximal computational usage and be
| sure to reach your end-time target, but at the risk of not being
| perfectly physically consistent. Whereas simulating present the
| risk of the lower simulations siphoning the computational
| resources and preventing the simulation time to reach its end-
| time target, but what you could compute is guaranteed consistent.
|
| Sampled bottled universe are ideal for answering question like
| how many years must a universe have before life can emerge, while
| simulated bottled universe are like a box of chocolate, you never
| know what you are going to get.
|
| The question being can you tell which bottle you are currently
| in, and which bottle would you rather get.
| asplake wrote:
| I'm not sure Einstein would allow your concept of "simulation
| time". Events are only partially ordered.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Causality also is not a universal thing. Some things just
| coexist and obey to some laws.
|
| Does the potential cause current? No, they coexist.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Yeah right. In infinite Turing machines maybe. If it's finite,
| it's impossible to simulate something larger with the same
| fidelity
| therobots927 wrote:
| " Wolpert shows that this isn't required by the mathematics:
| simulations do not have to degrade, and infinite chains of
| simulated universes remain fully consistent within the theory."
|
| How is this consistent with the second law of thermodynamics? If
| there is one universe containing an infinite number of
| simulations (some of which simulate the base universe) wouldn't
| there be a limit to how much computation could be contained? By
| its very nature a chain of simulations would grow exponentially
| with time, rapidly accelerating heat death. That may not require
| the simulations to degrade but it puts a hard limit on how many
| could be created.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Standard theory of computation is not concerned about entropy
| or physical realizability. It's just arithmetic & lookup tables
| defined w/ set theoretic axioms.
| skeledrew wrote:
| A universe is a function. It only makes sense that a function can
| call other functions, including itself, ad infinitum. And a
| function may be called in the same or a different thread.
| thegrim000 wrote:
| Once again, discussion around the simulation hypothesis that for
| some reason assumes the simulating universe has the exact same
| laws of physics / reality as the simulated universe. Assuming
| that the simulated universe can use their mathematics to
| describe/constrain the simulator universe. It makes no sense to
| me.
| kpga wrote:
| "Example 1. ... After this you physically isolate isolate your
| laptop, from the rest of the Universe, and start running it..."
|
| However there is no way "you can physically isolate isolate your
| laptop, from the rest of the Universe" so doesn't that refute
| this example (at least?)
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| The whole "simulation hypothesis" thing has always irked me. To
| me, the question of whether our universe was ["intentionally"
| "created" by some other "being(s)"] vs ["naturally" happened] is
| meaningless. Whatever it was on the other side is way too
| insanely unfathomable to be classified into those 2 human-created
| ideas. Ugh the whole thing is so self-centered.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| It appeals to sophomoric modern atheists who can't comprehend
| that infinity and nothing exists at the same time. People seek
| a reason "why" not realizing the question is the answer. The
| universe exists because 'why not?' because Infinity seeks to
| prevail over nothing. Nothing strikes at the heel of infinity.
| The truth is not in these lines or that theory but betwixt here
| and there and once "you" realize it, it realizes "you." Because
| it is you and you are it for it is itself. This may sound like
| my mumbo jumbo woo but once you know it knows you know it knows
| you know.
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