Live data from Hacker News

New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

santafe.edu

11–20 of 112 posts

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#12
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.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#15

Oh man, Stephen Wolfram and Jürgen 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 imple…

I'm no mathematician, but doesn't this come up against Gödel'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"

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?

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#16

Oh man, Stephen Wolfram and Jürgen 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 imple…

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.

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.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#18

Oh man, Stephen Wolfram and Jürgen 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 imple…

I'm no mathematician, but doesn't this come up against Gödel'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"

Any decent Lisp can reimplement eval, apply and the rest of functions/atom within itself.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#19
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.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#20

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.

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.

Post reply on HN