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

Existing in an un-simulated reality

iahwrites.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 94 posts

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#61

Post by mannykannot »

zach_miller wrote: post #8
jl6 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is indeed similar. It seems to take a highly reductionist pathway: reality/experience can be simulated -> simulation is computation -> computation is mathematics -> mathematical objects exist regardless of whether anybody has discovered them. This implies that all conceivable universes (including the ones where a lot of really bad things happen on an eternal loop) are possessed of the exact same reality as ours.

Am I missing something here? I can suppose a universe where the premise is false (This is a conceivable universe, I’d argue). Doesn’t that mean that this premise really is false?

The author's tenets seem to insist upon the reality of universes expressed in inconsistent formal systems, so I don't think this is fatal to the argument - though it suppose it might render pointless any attempt to treat the premise analytically.

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#62

Post by qrian »

Author should also look into complexity science, and its consequences that even if everything is determined, most information about next state quickly evaporates. If it's impossible to know most things about next state, does it even matter that it is deterministic/simulated?

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#63

Post by haltist »

qrian wrote: post #62

Author should also look into complexity science, and its consequences that even if everything is determined, most information about next state quickly evaporates. If it's impossible to know most things about next state, does it even matter that it is deterministic/simulated?

One useful way to think of the halting problem is that the future is not computable. There is no shortcut to finding out what will happen other than actually running the computer. I think all computational theories sweep this issue under the rug. Even if the universe is a computer (quantum or otherwise) it makes no difference to how people should approach their decisions. There are no royal roads so regardless of how much a situation is analyzed by symbolic simulations at the end if the day you still have to act of your own volition to actually find out what will happen.

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#64

Post by zzo38computer »

I thought of the similar thing before, including all of the details they mention, and I agree. (Of course you still might not konw what it is unless a simulation can be made, but it can exist (mathematically) whether or not a simulation is made.)

Furthermore, I think that anything existence (including mathematics, physics, etc) are by relation to everything else that is existence; there is no such thing as an "existence" that is truly independently from everything else, including mathematics (and, the various possible mathematical structures, and physical universes), etc. (If it is truly independent, how can numbers be prime and composite, and how can objects collide with each other, and how can planets moving around the Sun by gravity, and how can people have ideas about the gods, etc?)

(However, there is then the consideration if such a simulation is being made which is then being interacted with by outside (e.g. as in Star Trek); in that case, it is I/O, so you can make "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis with I/O". This could be called as a kind of nondeterminism, I suppose; although, a constraint may be produced by their combination.)

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#65

Post by ShamelessC »

14 wrote: post #51
ben_w wrote: post #48

This feels similar to something I came up with a while back; for various reasons[0], I hope it isn't true. https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematica... [0] Boltzmann brains are cognitively unstable, because the logic leading to them says you should expect to be one, but also that they have exponentially increasingly false "memories" the further back they "remember", including the beliefs leading to…

The Boltzmann brain theory is not something I have heard before but have to say I love the idea. The thing is if the universe is infinite and you believe that, then by default many other things also have to be true. I do hope the universe is infinite which means I exist many times over in many different states of being, hopefully one such state where the Canadian housing market isn’t so crappy and I get to afford a h…

Infinite universe doesn’t necessarily imply what you’re suggesting. Removing all even numbers from a set gives you another infinite set - but it is still an infinite set that will never contain a multiple of 2 in it.

Similarly, our universe may be infinite but isn’t at all guaranteed to produce multiple Earths with identical evolutionary history such that another or even many “versions” of you exist somewhere/when.

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#66

Post by fasterik »

TheBlight wrote: post #57
fasterik wrote: post #43

This is similar to David Lewis's modal realism, which says that every possible world is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism There isn't really much of a connection between this and Bostrom's simulation argument. The simulation argument is about calculating the probability that we live in a simulated universe based on certain assumptions about human behavior and technological development. Bostrom's argum…

>we can explain everything that we experience in terms of quantum field theory and general relativity. Dark matter would like a word.

As I understand it, the major candidates for dark matter are new elementary particles, so they would still fall under quantum field theory.

Of course, there is always the possibility that another revolution in physics happens, but even then our current theories will still be valid in most domains, in the same way that Newtonian mechanics is still valid in most domains.

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#67

Post by AntiMS »

javajosh wrote: post #18
iahwrites wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but this argument is for simulation theory... not what is described here. What I'm suggesting is that the calculation never needs to be done, which means the complexity of it does not matter . Whether it's O(1) or O(a^N) they're both far smaller than the infinite number of potential states.

>the calculation never needs to be done Well, that's your preference then. But personally I want to see the Mets play the Yankees because it's profoundly unsatisfying to believe that all possible outcomes are computable and therefore on an equal basis. I daresay that idea is so bad that if you took it seriously, it would die out with your genes/memes. (Not that that matters since you could travel to and impregnate ev…

If Iah's view is correct, after the game, there will be at some versions of you who witnessed the Mets winning, some that witnessed the Yankees winning, and some that saw the game end in a tie. (As well as some for which the game was interrupted by aliens landing on the field and some where all the players spontaneously disappeared etc.)

So, subjectively, it'd still feel as if you'd gone to the game without knowing what was going to happen and then exactly one outcome (and not all outcomes) happened. But from a more objective perspective, all outcomes are indeed on an even footing.

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#68

Post by AntiMS »

smokel wrote: post #13

This argument seems to mix up "existence" and "construction". The number states do not magically appear in the physical universe merely by thinking up the construction. The numbers could be configured as (temporary) patterns in physical objects, such as brains, books, or in ink molecules on paper. But the states are not physical objects themselves. Also, if our universe happens to be universal, in the sense that it e…

Much ink has been spilled by many a philosopher on the topic of whether or not numbers "magically exist." Plato was the obvious example of a philosopher who believed numbers "exist" independent of our universe. Though no one is saying they exist "in the physical universe", but it's not a given that they cna't possibly exist if not "within our universe."

Think of it this way. Graham's number is an absolutely enormous number, right? Let's assume for the sake of argument that nobody has ever computed the Graham's-number-th digit of pi. We know for certain that there is a Graham's-number-th digit of pi. And we know that if two people calculated it independently, they'd get the same digit. But (at least in this hypothetical) nobody has actually ever done the calculation to see what the Graham's-number-th digit of pi is. Given all I've said so far, the act of finding out the Graham's-number-th digit of pi seems more like an act of discovery of something that already existed than an act of invention of something that didn't already exist. So, it seems quite reasonable to many to conclude that numbers "exist."

Also, Iah's view does imply that our universe does not encompass all of existence. It also implies that no calculation device need exist anywhere.

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#69

Post by 14 »

ShamelessC wrote: post #65
14 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Boltzmann brain theory is not something I have heard before but have to say I love the idea. The thing is if the universe is infinite and you believe that, then by default many other things also have to be true. I do hope the universe is infinite which means I exist many times over in many different states of being, hopefully one such state where the Canadian housing market isn’t so crappy and I get to afford a h…

Infinite universe doesn’t necessarily imply what you’re suggesting. Removing all even numbers from a set gives you another infinite set - but it is still an infinite set that will never contain a multiple of 2 in it. Similarly, our universe may be infinite but isn’t at all guaranteed to produce multiple Earths with identical evolutionary history such that another or even many “versions” of you exist somewhere/when.

I’m not sure I agree on your take. There are of course different definitions of infinity which would have different rules based on said definition. But if our universe is infinite and physics as we know it remains true then we would have to run into all the variations of every molecule combination possible again and again.

Saying we won’t see any even numbers in an infinite set of odd numbers is obvious as the rules of that infinite set have been defined. There are no such rules in the universe.

Re: Existing in an un-simulated reality

#70

Post by dilyevsky »

mcronce wrote: post #55
iosystem wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know consciousness is real, and we're not just the same as robots or a tv series? Couldn't every moment throughout the universe have been encoded in every atom before the Big Bang?

That's certainly possible, but it doesn't make your experiences any less real

It certainly does because in this case there is no “you”
Post reply on HN