91–100 of 112 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this sort of self-reflection is exactly what makes Gödel/Turing/etc impossibility results work ("strange loops" and all that).
Can you explain further? Maybe I'm too out of this scope but if you want to simulate Universe X plus the computer Y that simulates X then you'd need at least 1 extra bit of memory (likely way more) to encompass the simulation plus the computation running the simulation (X+Y). The computer running the simulation by definition is not part of the simulation, so how can it be that it can truly simulate itself?
By thinking of memory usage, you’re restricting yourself to our perceived physical limits withine our perceived reality.
But, what if the things running the simulation did not have those limits? E.g. maybe data could be stored in an infinite number of multiverses outside of the infinite simulations being discussed. Any of the simulations could potentially simulate universes like ours while still allowing those simulations to contain others, to be contained by others, to have references to others, to have reflective references, etc. The makes anything and everything possible while not necessarily removing limits we have in our own simulation. It just depends on what’s running the simulation.
The whole “simulation hypothesis” thing has always irked me. To me, the question of whether our universe was [“intentionally” “created” by some other “being(s)”] vs [“naturally” happened] is meaningless. Whatever it was on the other side is way too insanely unfathomable to be classified into those 2 human-created ideas. Ugh the whole thing is so self-centered.
It appeals to sophomoric modern atheists who can't comprehend that infinity and nothing exists at the same time. People seek a reason "why" not realizing the question is the answer. The universe exists because 'why not?' because Infinity seeks to prevail over nothing. Nothing strikes at the heel of infinity. The truth is not in these lines or that theory but betwixt here and there and once "you" realize it, it realiz…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appeals to sophomoric modern atheists who can't comprehend that infinity and nothing exists at the same time. People seek a reason "why" not realizing the question is the answer. The universe exists because 'why not?' because Infinity seeks to prevail over nothing. Nothing strikes at the heel of infinity. The truth is not in these lines or that theory but betwixt here and there and once "you" realize it, it realiz…
yes haha, it is mumbo jumbo to the uninitiated (which can mean many different things!)
Right; that's the feeble public imagination. What captures my imagination is the idea that the existence of the rules alone is enough to obtain the universe; no simulator is required.
We can make an analogy to a constant like pi. No division has to take place of a circumference by a diameter in order to prop up the existence of pi.
The requirement for a simulator just punts the rock down the road: in what universe is that simulator, and what simulates that? It's an infinite regress. If there is no simulator, that goes away.
If certain equations dictate that you exist and have experiences, then you exist and have experiences in the same way that pi exists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, agreed. The actual real riddle is consciousness. Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and energy zap into existence something that actually (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.
I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious: (1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input. (2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment. (3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally exte…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain further? Maybe I'm too out of this scope but if you want to simulate Universe X plus the computer Y that simulates X then you'd need at least 1 extra bit of memory (likely way more) to encompass the simulation plus the computation running the simulation (X+Y). The computer running the simulation by definition is not part of the simulation, so how can it be that it can truly simulate itself?
Not quite, compression enables you to simulate / represent / encode x data with less than x memory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An explanation of the observer effect may be that the universe is lazily evaluated at the moment of observation. Outside of that experienced reality, it might as well be all a cloud of latent possibilities, rough outlines and low-res details, enough for a plausible simulation.
This would allow for a dds attack on reality where a bunch of simulants attempt to perform computationally expensive observations at the same time.
A non-realtime simulation would allow you certain solutions (such as perfectly recreating a past state of the current universe), but might not allow you to practically see a future state.