Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 215 posts

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#201

Post by pluma »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #167
pluma wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science isn't a religion but scientists can be zealots. The scientific principle is the antithesis of religion but scientists can be irrational like any other human. The good thing about the modern era is that even when institutional biases may momentarily prevent a theory from gaining mainstream recognition at least it will be preserved as part of the body of scientific knowledge so future generations can rediscover…

> Science isn't a religion Science might not be, but there are plenty of Scientismists out there.

Scientism is just a catchy phrase for blind faith.

Most "scientism" I see in the wild is just people who were already indoctrinated into magical thinking treating "science" the same way they previously treated religious dogma.

It's irrelevant to science the same way astrology is irrelevant to astronomy. It's cargo cult "science"-iness.

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#202

Post by monktastic1 »

andrepd wrote: post #133
monktastic1 wrote: post #2

Between modern physics suggesting time and space may be illusions, leading technologists agreeing that we're almost certainly in a simulated reality, and many ancient traditions being certain that this is all an illusion, I may have to have to go ahead and take this seriously....

I wonder, which physics claims that space and time don't exist (how could it, "exists" is a meta physical concept, physics only cares about mathematically describing the world and making predictions), and how do ancient traditions making claims work as an argument to anything (seeing as ancient traditions have made every claim form the world being in the back of a turtle to a middle-eastern bronze age carpenter being…

I found this to be a useful summary (thought I admit I don't know how accurate it really is): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-musser/space-time-illus...

> "String theory, loop quantum gravity, causal-set theory: these are just a few of the approaches that theorists have taken. ... But when you take a step back from the dispute, you notice all agree on one essential lesson: the space-time that we inhabit is a construction. It is not fundamental to nature, but emerges from a deeper level of reality."

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#203

Post by state_less »

mlechha wrote: post #174
lngnmn wrote: post #164

Then conservation laws would not hold.)

Exactly!!! To me this is the obvious consequence. Another thing is Fermat's principle, if time doesn't exist then what is light minimizing as it moves through space?

Aren't you showing necessity? If you transition from state A -> B , then X must hold. Where X is conservation of energy, charge, etc... It doesn't say anything about how long it takes to get from state A to state B. Or time existing per se, rather some relations that must hold between states. They don't actually have to hold, but you don't live in those invalid states. Similar to constructive light perhaps.

I remember the old boost mode on PCs where you could run your game 2x as fast by increasing the CPU clock speed (increasing game transitions relative to brain transitions), and yet the rules of the game still hold despite the game transitioning faster. Also making very hard to see/play (No turbo boost for the brain :)

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#204

Post by rvern »

j2kun wrote: post #186
naasking wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you wasted your own time by posting without pointing out even a single example of such an unfounded assumption?

You have already made it clear that you think his argument is undeniable. But since you insist on trolling, let me start with the obvious one. In order to simulate a human brain, you need to simulate physics. Not a mathematical model of physics, but the actual true process that governs nature. In order to do that, you need to (1) understand the true laws of physics and (2) the process needs to be simulatable in polyn…

You're making the unfounded assumption that it is necessary to simulate "the actual true process that governs nature"; Bostrom's argument does not require this, it only requires a simulation of people with our kind of experiences.

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#205

Post by naasking »

j2kun wrote: post #186
naasking wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you wasted your own time by posting without pointing out even a single example of such an unfounded assumption?

You have already made it clear that you think his argument is undeniable. But since you insist on trolling, let me start with the obvious one. In order to simulate a human brain, you need to simulate physics. Not a mathematical model of physics, but the actual true process that governs nature. In order to do that, you need to (1) understand the true laws of physics and (2) the process needs to be simulatable in polyn…

The other poster is correct to say that simulating physics isn't actually needed, because Bostrom's argument depends only on ancestor simulations, not ancestor universe simulations. So simulating people doesn't require a) simulating physics, b) simulating the minutiae of brains.

Since these are post-humans, they understand the subtle interconnected algorithms implemented by human brains, and so can in principle bypass the need for low-level simulation. But even if that were not so:

> In order to simulate a human brain, you need to simulate physics. Not a mathematical model of physics, but the actual true process that governs nature.

You seem to be drawing some implicit distinction you find meaningful between "real" and "simulated", but this distinction isn't explained, and doesn't seem meaningful in any case.

> In order to do that, you need to (1) understand the true laws of physics and

The laws of physics needed for such simulations are sufficiently understood by post-humans, ie. for all physical observations simulated ancestors might make, posthumans understand physics far beyond that. So even without a perfect understanding of physics, they merely need to replicate the physics understood by their simulated ancestors.

> (2) the process needs to be simulatable in polynomial time (at the very least).

I don't see why. We already run non-polynomial simulations all the time (such as to solve fluid dynamics for aerodynamics, or climate models). As long as the results are expected to be useful, we will run them. This is actually a core premise driving Bostrom's argument: that ancestor simulations will be useful to future social sciences and such.

But all of this is neither here nor there, because Bostrom's argument is exhaustive. If there are legit reasons why post-humans cannot run such simulations, and there very well might be, he already covers this possibility as "we will go extinct before reaching the posthuman stage".

Like I said, Bostrom's argument is solid and there is no wiggle room. You get to choose one of the possibilities, for properly articulated reasons, and no more.

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#206

Post by voidz »

ikeboy wrote: post #171
lohankin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a classical word, you must simulate only one path. In a quantum word, you must simulate both. You don´t need some magical conscious observer to force the collapse of the wave function. A CCD detector of a camera or a simple wall is enough to force that the "wave" collapse into a "particle" and the detector or wall gets a small spot where the "particle" hits it. This is a common misconception (among programmers).…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem#Practical_exper...

Can we get some arguments with that link, please? Just posting a link does not contribute to the discussion.

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#207

Post by therein »

padobson wrote: post #110
therein wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like a bit of malware breaking out of a sandboxes virtual machine Since you're trying to demonstrate the impossibility of the situation, I think the analogy you're looking for is ransomware breaking out of your computer and kidnapping you. The data/code/simulation can't suddenly escape the sandbox and materialize into whatever the "reality" is made of. For that reason, it is trivial if we are in a simulation.

>The data/code/simulation can't suddenly escape the sandbox and materialize into whatever the "reality" is made of. For that reason, it is trivial if we are in a simulation. 3D Printer owners would disagree with you.

But that requires there to be 3D printers in place; designed, manufactured and connected to the universe simulator, by whomever it is that created this infrastructure, with the intention of allowing "real" objects to be created from within the simulator and provided (in a way) a public API for it.

There is also the fact that we can't use 3D printers to create "perfect" or generic objects.

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#208

Post by xorxornop »

baytrailcat wrote: post #59
romanhn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are pretty fascinating observations. Are there any books/articles on the concept of "reality = dirty hack"?

Search for "Digital physics", you will bump into some info.

Check out arXiv:1405.1548v3

The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Gerard ’t Hooft

The author is very far from a crank, too, being one of the most important influences in the Standard Model...

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#209

Post by TuringTest »

stale2002 wrote: post #200
echelon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe WE collapse the camera by observing IT. That sounds ridiculous. The double slit experiment is a small system. The detector apparatus is much larger. The world outside of that, even more so. If your view is how the universe works, the number of superpositions of states that must exist between the "magical human observer" and the experimental result must be huge. Every particle in contact with every other parti…

This issue is that what an "observer" is isn't defined. According to your argument, a situation like Schrödinger's cat, where a Cat is both dead and alive, is completely ridiculous. Which is a fair point. But apparently a whole lot of quantum physicists believe that Schrödinger's cat is a perfectly reasonable situation.

I never understood why the cat isn't considered an observer in that experiment. Certainly a live cat must know that it's alive?

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#210

Post by mannykannot »

j2kun wrote: post #186
naasking wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you wasted your own time by posting without pointing out even a single example of such an unfounded assumption?

You have already made it clear that you think his argument is undeniable. But since you insist on trolling, let me start with the obvious one. In order to simulate a human brain, you need to simulate physics. Not a mathematical model of physics, but the actual true process that governs nature. In order to do that, you need to (1) understand the true laws of physics and (2) the process needs to be simulatable in polyn…

I don't think there is any requirement for a simulated universe to have any fully consistent laws of physics, let alone the 'true' laws (whatever they are - the laws imputed to hold in the universe in which the simulation is actually run?)
Post reply on HN