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How to tell if the Universe is a computer simulation

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Josh:
How to tell if the Universe is a computer simulation

Saw this, thought of our admin mouser who was an aspiring AI researcher.

It's a famous question among academic philosophers and drunken college students alike: how can we be sure we're not living in a gigantic computer simulation? Fortunately, researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany think they've cracked it.

Their reasoning is pretty straightforward, according to Technology Review: if the cosmos is just a numerical simulation, calculated on some insanely powerful supercomputer tucked away in another world, there should be clues around us that can reveal the truth. Glitches in the system, if you like, that give the game away.

Moving from that reasoning to the science required to find those clues isn't quite so easy. To kick things off, the team of researchers from Bonn have speculated that the problem with all simulations is that they're discretized: to model a physical phenomenon, the real world has to be represented by separate points in time and 3D space. Sure you can make the distance between those points reeeeeeally small—but you still have to have this kind of grid.

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Source

Renegade:
Interesting, but perhaps myopic. I don't think I buy it. I checked to see, and it appears they are presupposing a discrete system, which leads to absurdities. For example:

1) Light is both a wave and a particle
2) Zeno's paradoxes - they mostly rely on the misapplication of discrete/indiscrete systems

It makes sense for our current level of computer and software technology, but that in itself seems naive.

If anyone has a lot of time, and really really really wants to look into it, check out plasma dynamics/physics and fractals.

From the article:

To kick things off, the team of researchers from Bonn have speculated that the problem with all simulations is that they're discretized: to model a physical phenomenon, the real world has to be represented by separate points in time and 3D space. Sure you can make the distance between those points reeeeeeally small—but you still have to have this kind of grid.
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From the first bold there, I think that things will immediately break down there, so they're basically proving that things break down in a discrete system. I don't think it shows that we are a simulation though.

For the second bold there, I'm not so sure that we can represent the world in 4D. I don't have any answers, but I do have questions.

For the third bold, it just goes back to my comment on systems above and 4D. Not so sure that's true.

Still, it was quite interesting. (I've not read the entire paper, and know that I won't have time to do so.) Stuff like this is always fun to think about~! :D

mouser:
I'll just point out one more quick problem with this approach:
To kick things off, the team of researchers from Bonn have speculated that the problem with all simulations is that they're discretized: to model a physical phenomenon, the real world has to be represented by separate points in time and 3D space. Sure you can make the distance between those points reeeeeeally small—but you still have to have this kind of grid.
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There is (and has always been) a very active debate in the physics community about whether the real world is in fact discrete at the lowest level when you really get down to it.

40hz:
^Every time they ask that seemingly simple question it ends up being turtles all the way down.  8)

f0dder:
Computer simulation? That's too far out, man.

Really, we're all just in the head of somebody who's having a wicked DMT+Acid trip.

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