Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds • Hacker News Board

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#151

Post by FranOntanaya » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 10:42 AM UTC

hasenj wrote: post #84

I'm not familiar with this particular experiment, but all my pondering on the subject - as a layman - leads me to a simple conclusion. The properties these experiments are measuring are simply bogus. They are not well defined. The answer that comes out is not some intrinsic property of the "particle", but the result of the environment in which the particle interacted with the "measurement" system, so to speak. The pa…

Intuition tells me this is like saying a droplet of water can both be a sphere and a single point because it'll pass through several holes on a net, but capillary action makes it collapse into a needle.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#152

Post by lordnacho » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 10:43 AM UTC

andybak wrote: post #134

Xophmeister wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality wouldn't type check.

Reality lacks a compile stage entirely - hence all the runtime errors.

Reality is interpreted.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#153

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 10:44 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #61

marwatk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wanted to read (or write?) a book about us determining we are in a simulation, but we find subtle flaws like this we're able to exploit in weird ways. Kind of like breaking out of a VM through register flaws or something. Anyone know of a story along those lines?

> Kind of like breaking out of a VM through register flaws or something The difficulty is keeping track of the context while you attempt the exploit. You would have to be able to plant code outside the simulation without causing it to crash. OTOH, from within, you'd only see a successful attempt to escalate privileges. Imagine being able to edit reality.

[deleted]

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#154

Post by antimagic » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 10:47 AM UTC

zw123456 wrote: post #86

And perhaps someday we'll get to meet the great programmer in the sky the developed the simulation we are living in and we will ask him why he designed it that way and he will say something like "oh I just wanted to optimize the code so I simply excluded reality subroutines when there were no beings looking. I just never thought you guys would notice. As soon as I saw that you guys noticed the flaw, I was going to lo…

I always find it fascinating at just how much of our fundamental physics ends up being constraints on information movement. The laws of thermodynamics are about entropy, general relativity puts constraints on the movement of information (for example, Spooky Action as a Distance(tm) is faster than light, but you can't transmit information with it), the Uncertainty Principle puts limits on how much information you can have on a given system.

Information information everywhere you look in fundamental physics. It does make me wonder why.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#155

Post by tiatia » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 10:51 AM UTC

graycat wrote: post #4

We know that light bends near a gravitational field with a big gradient before it is "measured". Sounds like that light existed and generated and responded to a gravitational field after it was emitted and before it was detected or measured.

The light may be in a state of being bended and being not bended until you observe it...

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#156

Post by caf » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 11:02 AM UTC

zw123456 wrote: post #86

And perhaps someday we'll get to meet the great programmer in the sky the developed the simulation we are living in and we will ask him why he designed it that way and he will say something like "oh I just wanted to optimize the code so I simply excluded reality subroutines when there were no beings looking. I just never thought you guys would notice. As soon as I saw that you guys noticed the flaw, I was going to lo…

Surely, "As soon as I saw that you guys noticed the flaw, it became part of the ABI and had to be maintained."

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#157

Post by DennisP » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 11:05 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #128

zw123456 wrote: post #86

And perhaps someday we'll get to meet the great programmer in the sky the developed the simulation we are living in and we will ask him why he designed it that way and he will say something like "oh I just wanted to optimize the code so I simply excluded reality subroutines when there were no beings looking. I just never thought you guys would notice. As soon as I saw that you guys noticed the flaw, I was going to lo…

> developed the simulation we are living Well, the way I understand this, is that this result proves that we do NOT live in a simulation. Because if reality does not exist until measured, then we apparently cannot compute reality ahead of time. And if we cannot compute reality ahead of time, it does not exist yet.

If the purpose of the simulation is to simulate us, then it would make sense for it to not bother computing anything we don't measure.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#158

Post by tempodox » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 11:13 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #157

amelius wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developed the simulation we are living Well, the way I understand this, is that this result proves that we do NOT live in a simulation. Because if reality does not exist until measured, then we apparently cannot compute reality ahead of time. And if we cannot compute reality ahead of time, it does not exist yet.

If the purpose of the simulation is to simulate us, then it would make sense for it to not bother computing anything we don't measure.

True in principle, but you run the risk of premature optimization. Spontaneous changes of will would be impossible.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#159

Post by exch » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 11:27 AM UTC

ghosthamlet wrote: post #96

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html says: at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows…

What does 'post human' mean? Unless we go extinct, we will always be humans, regardless of what species we evolve into. Our current species is "Homo Sapiens Sapiens", not "Human". Ergo, if we evolve into amorphous blobs of space goo, we will still be Human but not "Homo Sapiens Sapiens". Which means it is physically impossible for us to ever reach a "post-human" stage.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#160

Post by violentvinyl » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 11:27 AM UTC

zw123456 wrote: post #86

And perhaps someday we'll get to meet the great programmer in the sky the developed the simulation we are living in and we will ask him why he designed it that way and he will say something like "oh I just wanted to optimize the code so I simply excluded reality subroutines when there were no beings looking. I just never thought you guys would notice. As soon as I saw that you guys noticed the flaw, I was going to lo…

Off to be the Wizard by Scott Meyer is a very funny fiction book that is based on the concept of reality being a computer program that hackers can manually manipulate to do cool stuff. It mostly occurs in King Arthur's Court, which happens to be the chosen time and place all these hackers wind up.