The theory, which I probably misunderstand because I have a similar level of education to a macaque, states that because a simulated world would eventually develop to the point where it creates its own simulations, it’s then just a matter of probability that we are in a simulation. That is, if there’s one real world, and a zillion simulated ones, it’s more likely that we’re in a simulated world. That’s probably an oversimplification, but it’s the gist I got from listening to people talk about the theory.
But if the real world sets up a simulated world which more or less perfectly simulates itself, the processing required to create a mirror sim-within-a-sim would need at least twice that much power/resources, no? How could the infinitely recursive simulations even begin to be set up unless more and more hardware is constantly being added by the real meat people to its initial simulation? It would be like that cartoon (or was it a silent movie?) of a guy laying down train track struts while sitting on the cowcatcher of a moving train. Except in this case the train would be moving at close to the speed of light.
Doesn’t this fact alone disprove the entire hypothesis? If I set up a 1:1 simulation of our universe, then just sit back and watch, any attempts by my simulant people to create something that would exhaust all of my hardware would just… not work? Blue screen? Crash the system? Crunching the numbers of a 1:1 sim within a 1:1 sim would not be physically possible for a processor that can just about handle the first simulation. The simulation’s own simulated processors would still need to have their processing done by Meat World, you’re essentially just passing the CPU-buck backwards like it’s a rugby ball until it lands in the lap of the real world.
And this is just if the simulated people create ONE simulation. If 10 people in that one world decide to set up similar simulations simultaneously, the hardware for the entire sim realty would be toast overnight.
What am I not getting about this?
Cheers!
If our simulated universe’s framerate drops because of the extra compute required for the nested simulations we’re running, would we even notice? It stands to reason that everything would slow down, including our perception of the universe.
For all we know, the smallest unit of time we can measure in our simulated existence could take an hour or more to render outside the simulation. To us, it’s nearly instantaneous.
It’s a scenario that Neal Stephenson covers in his book “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell”. Interesting read, although it’s one of my least favorite books of him and I liked the first book in the “Dodge” series a lot better.
But if the real world sets up a simulated world which more or less perfectly simulates itself
This is the crux of the logical error you made. It’s a common error, but it’s important to recognize here.
If we’re in a simulation, we have no idea the available resources in the simulation “above” us. Suppose energy density up there is 100x as high as ours?Suppose the subjective experience of the passage of time up there is 100x faster than ours?
Another thing is that we have no idea how long it takes to render each frame of our simulation. Could take a million years. As long as it keeps running though, and as long as the simulation above us is patient, we keep ticking. This is also where the subjective experience of time matters. If it takes a million years, but their subjective “day” is a trillion years long, it becomes feasible to run us for a while.
And, finally, there’s no reason to assume we’re a complete simulation of anything. Perhaps the simulation was instantiated beginning with this morning–but including all memories and documentation of our “historical” past. All that past, all that experience is also fake, but we’d never know that because it’s real to us. In this scenario, the simulation above us only has to simulate one day. Or maybe even just the experiences of one PERSON for one day. Or one minute. Who knows?
The main point is we don’t know what’s happening in the simulation above ours, if it exists, but there’s no reason to assume it’s similar to ours in any way.
Quantum is weird. If we are in a simulation, that would explain a lot of that, because the quantum effects we see are actually just light simulations of much deeper mechanics.
As such, if we were simulating a universe, there’s every chance that we may decide to only simulate down to individual atoms. So the people in the simulation would probably discover atoms, but then they would have to come up with their own version of quantum mechanics to describe the effects that we know come from quarks.
The point is that each layer may choose to simulate things slightly lighter to save on resources, and you would have no way of knowing.
Indeed and–interesting corrollary–if we accept the concept of reduced accuracy simulations as axiomatic, then it might be possible to figure out how close we are to the “bottom” of the simulation stack that’s theoretically possible. There’s only so many orders of magnitude after all; at some point you’re only simulating one pixel wiggling around and that’s not interesting enough to keep going down.
There is not, as far as I know, any way to estimate the length of the stack in the other direction, though.
I have never understood the argument that QM is evidence for a simulation because the universe is using less resources or something like that by not “rendering” things at that low of a level. The problem is that, yes, it’s probabilistic, but it is not merely probabilistic. We have probability in classical mechanics already like when dealing with gasses in statistical mechanics and we can model that just fine. Modeling wave functions is far more computationally expensive because they do not even exist in traditional spacetime but in an abstract Hilbert space that can grows in complexity exponentially faster than classical systems. That’s the whole reason for building quantum computers, it’s so much more computationally expensive to simulate this that it is more efficient just to have a machine that can do it. The laws of physics at a fundamental level get far more complex and far more computationally expensive, and not the reverse.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that is is evidence, i merely arguing that it could be a result of how they chose to render our simulation. And just because it’s more computationally expensive on our side does not necessarily mean it’s more expensive on their side, because we don’t know what the mechanics of the deeper layer may have been.
For example, it would be a lot less computationally expensive to render accuracy in a simulation for us down to cellular level than it would be down to atomic scale. From there, we could simply replicate the rules of how molecules work without actually rendering them, such as “cells seem to have a finite amount of energy based on food you consume, and we can model the mathematics of how that works, but we can’t seem to find a physical structure that allows that to function”
As others have said, our reference of time comes from our own universe’s rules.
Ergo if rendering 1 second of our time took 10 years of their time, we wouldn’t measure 10 years, we’d measure 1 second, so we’d have no way of knowing.
It’s worth remembering that simulation theory is, at least for now, unfalsifiable. By it’s nature there’s always a counterargument to any evidence againat it, therefore it always remains a non-zero possibility, just like how most religions operate.
You’re thinking in terms of how we do simulations within our universe. If the universe is a simulation then the machine that is simulating it is necessarily outside of the known universe. We can’t know for sure that it has to play by the same rules of physics or even of logic and reasoning as a machine within our universe. Maybe in the upper echelon universe computers don’t need power, or they have infinite time for calculations for reasons beyond our understanding.
Or what if the entity that stimulates can just “dream” the simulation to make it happen?
But that’s just a guess. It’s not necessarily true. You’re just saying “simulations might be possible, therefore they are definitely possible, therefore we are likely in a simulation”.
That’s not logically sound. You can replace “simulation” with “God” and prove the existence of God similarly. It’s just a guess.
You are correct, but missed one important point, or actually made an important wrong assumption. You don’t simulate a 1:1 version of your universe.
It’s impossible to simulate a universe the size of your own universe, but you can simulate smaller universes, or to be more accurately, simpler universes. Think on videogames, you don’t need to simulate everything, you just simulate some things, while the rest is just a static image until you get close. The cool thing about this hypothetical scenario is that you can think of how a simulated universe might be different from a real one, i.e. what shortcuts could we take to make our computers be able to simulate a complex universe (even if smaller than ours).
For starters you don’t simulate everything, instead of every particle being a particle, which would be prohibitively expensive, particles smaller than a certain size don’t really exist, and instead you have a function that tells you where they are when you need them. For example simulating every electron would be a lot of work, but if instead of simulating them you can run a function that tells you where they are at a given frame of the simulation you can act accordingly without having to actually simulate them. This would cause weird behaviors inside the simulation, such as electrons popping in and out of existence and teleporting over gaps smaller than the radius of your spawn_electron function, which in turn would impose a limit to the size of transistors inside that universe. It would also cause it so that when you fire electrons through a double slit they would interact with one another, because they’re just a function until they hit anything, but if you try to measure which slit they go through then they’re forced to collapse before that and so they don’t interact with one another. But that’s all okay, because you care about macro stuff (otherwise you wouldn’t be simulating an entire universe).
Another interesting thing is that you probably have several computers working on it, and you don’t really want loading screens or anything like that, so instead you impose a maximum speed inside the simulation, that way whenever something goes from one area of the simulation to the next it will take enough time for everything to be “ready”. It helps if you simulate a universe where gravity is not strong enough to cause a crunch (or your computers will all freeze trying to process it). So your simulated universe might have large empty spaces that don’t need that much computational power, and because traveling through them takes long enough it’s easy to synch the transition from one server to the next. If on the other hand maximum speed was infinite you could have objects teleporting from one server to the next causing a freeze on those two which would leave them out of synch with the rest.
And that’s the cool thing about thinking how a simulated universe would work, our universe is weird as fuck, and a lot of those weirdness looks like the type of weirdness that would be introduced by someone trying to run their simulation cheaper.
