what if we are just a computer simulation?

[andrew2343]

Its not as ridiculous as it sounds. We just recently invented pcs and we already have people simulators like the sims and so on... on a quantum computer, the simulation could be much much better, graphics that look exactly like real people, true IA on the charaters, extreme open world like outerra anteworld or ksp. then we could replace the people by aliens. Of course, this would open ethical questions. if they are inteligent, wouldent killing one of them be murder? With some modding and cheats, we would be their god, even if we were just a 6 year old spoiled kid. In other words, if we are a computer simulation (sorry for all religious people) our god can be just a random alien 6 year old or a random person that made a game with persons. in other words, we arent trully people, we are just some lines of code. Of course, if we can replicate that game, wouldent our gods be people from a pc simulation also? so our true god would be the scientist that invented the first game of this kind. In other words, if that 6 year old spoiled kid so wants, we can be all ded with the touch of a button... we already to that with kerbals so its possible. All disasters, from dinossaur extinction to chernobill, and all the dead people and animals resultant from it, could be his fault or just a random game event. This game would kinda be spore, sims, sim city and civilization combined, so every battle in history was the fault of that 6 year old kid or whatever. The 2nd world war would be his fault... the massacre of millions of jews would be his fault... what kind of mad guy would be the one that made that? maybe its just a question of time until he gets bored of us and kills us all... global warming would be an event caused by us, so if he decides he didnt want to lose his save game on this planet, why not murder us all? also, after death life could be possible, cuz why not? anyway its an interesting and creepy theory. It has already been proposed by more people so... why not take it seriously?

[Cheebsta]

I vaguely recall the Wachowskis making a movie similar to this idea, except better.

[ZRM]

I vaguely recall the Wachowskis making a movie similar to this idea, except better.

And with more plot holes. But we forgive them.

[falofonos]

The distinction between a simulation and a game is important to hold onto.

Also read Descartes, effectively that was the question he asked and then reassembled his world view on top of the answer he decided must be correct...

Sim-universe relies on a variety of rules of behavior to determine relationships between building blocks and then lets emergent complexity take care of the rest. As far as we can tell, which isn't that far to be honest, the rules are applicable everywhere we can see and there's no direct evidence of anything poking us to do anything.

From my perspective this explanation of the universe is as likely and verifiable as all the others and most importantly there is nothing I can do about it.

I am curious why you think humanity would feature as important within this sim-universe of the infant deity. Perhaps it's really interested in complex interactions between bacteria or viruses, humanity just provide one of many environments for these forms of life to breed and exist. Perhaps it is just a complex sudoku type puzzle being carried out by something as a learning exercise in goding, we don't and can't know.

Edited July 22, 2013 by falofonos

[andrew2343]

The distinction between a simulation and a game is important to hold onto.

Also read Descartes, effectively that was the question he asked and then reassembled his world view on top of the answer he decided must be correct...

Sim-universe relies on a variety of rules of behavior to determine relationships between building blocks and then lets emergent complexity take care of the rest. As far as we can tell, which isn't that far to be honest, the rules are applicable everywhere we can see and there's no direct evidence of anything poking us to do anything.

From my perspective this explanation of the universe is as likely and verifiable as all the others and most importantly there is nothing I can do about it.

I am curious why you think humanity would feature as important within this sim-universe of the infant deity. Perhaps it's really interested in complex interactions between bacteria or viruses, humanity just provide one of many environments for these forms of life to breed and exist. Perhaps it is just a complex sudoku type puzzle being carried out by something as a learning exercise in goding, we don't and can't know.

i think humanity could feature a somewhat important part because it would be the only intelligent species in the planet as of now. Maybe it could be a plage simulation like plague inc and humanity would present a somewhat challenge for this forms of life to breed and exist, unless they had evolved for not killing nor making symptoms on the hosts, like those bacterias that thrive on food from the digestive track. On a completely unrelated thing, please keep movies out of here, i want serious discution about this matter like falofonos did, not some random movie naming.

[Nuke]

take the red pill.

[Cronos988]

Well the obvious follow up to that "what if" is "what would that imply?"

If we frame the scenario in such a way that there is no way "out" of the simulation (unlike in Matrix), then what is the point of entertaining the theory? Pretty similar to many agnostic deistic theories, if it has no implications for anything it is utterly meaningless.

Someone suggested reading Descartes, I think Berkeley entertained the notion that we are all just a simulation in god's head.

[Cheebsta]

i think humanity could feature a somewhat important part because it would be the only intelligent species in the planet as of now.

If you were making the rules you would put yourself halfway, or at the top? Humans serve no unique purpose to the universe, we are just energy converters like everything else. We might like to think thinking makes us nifty, but there are organisms on this planet that surpass us by miles on just about every other level. The universe is also so massive that the chances there is something out there "better" than us are actually higher than the chance there isn't.

And, if you didn't laugh at my first post you need to get a sense of humor.

[Monkeh]

I seem to remember a Stephen Baxter short story that explored this idea. The processing power required to accurately model a thunder storm on this planet is phenomenal. Now consider what processing power you'd need to model, say the Great Red Spot, or the movement of the trillions upon trillions of particles in even a small nebular, then multiply that out over the rest of the galaxy and then the universe and it becomes impossible, something like a computer, even a quantum computer, would have to be twice the size of the universe it was simulating...something like that anyway. Making it both pointless and even more pointless. If you're capable of this kind of thing then you may as well just make a universe.

To test this theory in the story they bounced a laser off of some object far enough away to encompass a volume of space that would take immense processing power to keep looking real, inverse square rule and all. The 'bubble' burst and reality came crashing down, the outer planets disappearing one by one, then the inner planets and then the Moon and then...

It went and finished there, damn you short stories, why you leave me wanting!

I highly recommend Stephen Baxter's novels by the way, most interesting. Most relevant to you lovely Kerbal enthusiasts would be 'Titan' and 'Voyage'. All about planning and executing manned missions to Mars and Titan. Fascinating stuff.

Any of his Xelee sequence are down right amazing as well, especially 'Ring'.

[Brotoro]

It doesn't matter to me what form of universe-ware I'm being run on... I will continue to do my best to act in a responsible, moral, and productive manner. And occasionally play Kerbal Space Program, since the pursuit of happiness is a good thing for being a well-rounded human being.

[Dunbaratu]

I am curious why you think humanity would feature as important within this sim-universe of the infant deity. Perhaps it's really interested in complex interactions between bacteria or viruses, humanity just provide one of many environments for these forms of life to breed and exist. Perhaps it is just a complex sudoku type puzzle being carried out by something as a learning exercise in goding, we don't and can't know.

One thing you can be absolutely certain of is that if the universe is the result of deliberate design, be it as a simulation or as a divine creation, humanity is still an accidental emergent property within that universe, rather than the deliberately planned intent of it, just as we would be if there was no creator. All you have to do to see this is look at how our entire existence rounds down to nearly zero in the grand scheme of things. You don't deliberately create an entire universe in order to generate a very tiny amount of sentience in a very tiny speck of a mote of a pixel of the huge creation, leaving the entire rest of it as just wasted extra space.

Mass of the universe is on the order of 10^56 Kilograms.

Mass of Earth is on the order of 10^24 Kilograms.

Earth is about 1 / 10^32 of the matter in the universe.

And thats' just matter, not taking into account how sparsely spread out that matter is in distance.

If the universe is a deliberate creation, it wasn't created FOR US.

[Cheebsta]

I seem to remember a Stephen Baxter short story that explored this idea. The processing power required to accurately model a thunder storm on this planet is phenomenal. Now consider what processing power you'd need to model, say the Great Red Spot, or the movement of the trillions upon trillions of particles in even a small nebular, then multiply that out over the rest of the galaxy and then the universe and it becomes impossible, something like a computer, even a quantum computer, would have to be twice the size of the universe it was simulating...something like that anyway. Making it both pointless and even more pointless. If you're capable of this kind of thing then you may as well just make a universe.

In the realm of possible, this strikes me as a rather close minded theory. Why would the simulator be restricted by things relative to the simulation it's running?

[Albert VDS]

Is reality just a computer simulation?

The big problem with this idea is that you are applying human made situations and tools to a non human system.

It's giving this idea that the things that humans do can be applied to an outside factor, a factor which in turn explains why our reality isn't real.

There's also another problem with it. The computer, which is simulating us, would need to be in a universe far larger than our own.

Simply because you can't store and compute every single bit, down to the smallest particle, of a universe in a universe of the same size.

[Themohawkninja]

Is reality just a computer simulation?

The big problem with this idea is that you are applying human made situations and tools to a non human system.

It's giving this idea that the things that humans do can be applied to an outside factor, a factor which in turn explains why our reality isn't real.

There's also another problem with it. The computer, which is simulating us, would need to be in a universe far larger than our own.

Simply because you can't store and compute every single bit, down to the smallest particle, of a universe in a universe of the same size.

The first part of your explanation doesn't necessarily have to mean that a computer simulation can't happen. I myself have wondered this question, and you can look at it like some astrobiologists look at life. Humans are made up of DNA, but who is to say that E.T. is "alive" because of DNA. If we apply that to computers, while humans use silicon plates with gold wires to compute data, who is to say that an alien (or in this case, the creator of our universe) uses human computers to accomplish the task. They could still use computers, but they could look very... alien to us.

Secondly, I recall seeing a quote from a someone who was seriously looking in to the computer simulation theory, and he stated that the universe can have created no more than 10^120 bits of data, which is quite reasonable for a super computer to do AFAIK.

Now, if you were to ask me about the idea, there is a lot to it. For one thing, there is an limit to how small we can see, as past this point, everything is grainy (like zooming in to far on a digital camera).

Secondly, if our creators create programs in the same way that humans do, than perhaps they have at times tried to tinker with the simulation, which from our perspective was divine intervention, and we created organized religions. Such a thing has happened within our own world, as in Vietnam, the natives viewed the Americans as gods because they game the natives wooden crates of food from airplanes, and such airplanes were so far beyond the level of technology that the natives used, that there are now effigies of airplanes to try and call the "gods" back.

Thirdly, it would explain the big bang. While there is overwhelming evidence that it happened, we don't really know WHY it happened. What if "God" really did make the big bang, but God was just a programmer (or a group thereof)?

Lastly, and probably the most philosophically significant of them all, is what if the programmers ARE human. Humans strive to make better and better simulations of the universe, so what if there comes a point where humans can generate there own version of the universe (cue the above stated 10^120 bits)? This would mean that there is the possibility of infinite recursion whereby while we were made by humans, we will eventually create a computer simulation that makes humans, and our simulation will make it's own simulation? The implications of this leads to the inverse question of how many recursions in are we from the original creator?

[Monkeh]

In the realm of possible, this strikes me as a rather close minded theory. Why would the simulator be restricted by things relative to the simulation it's running?

This is a very good point. They wouldn't. They could be sat in 8 dimensional super space, rotating themselves through the x,y,z,a,b,c,d AND e meridians, laughing maniacally at our pathetic 4 dimensional spacetime, puffing on black hole cigars and eating worm holes for breakfast.

[Themohawkninja]

In the realm of possible, this strikes me as a rather close minded theory. Why would the simulator be restricted by things relative to the simulation it's running?

Why do humans restrict simulations to things relative to the simulation it's running?

[Cheebsta]

This is a very good point. They wouldn't. They could be sat in 8 dimensional super space, rotating themselves through the x,y,z,a,b,c,d AND e meridians, laughing maniacally at our pathetic 4 dimensional spacetime, puffing on black hole cigars and eating worm holes for breakfast.

lol, exactly.

Why do humans restrict simulations to things relative to the simulation it's running?

Because that is the point of simulation? I am still pretty sure computers that run Minecraft are not restricted to being made of cubes, and playing KSP doesn't turn me into a Kerbal. But hey, what do I know? Maybe I am a Kerbal, made of cubes, and wearing a hat with badass horns. >.>

[Buzzkil88]

One thing that always had me a part believer in this kind of thing was the Matrix take on deja vu. Have you ever had deja vu? its very strange, and anyone who has had deja vu will swear up and down that they remember the particular event like it already happpened. In the Matrix it is a glitch in the program. Which makes more sense than the current explanation.... which is "idk"... How can anyone explain it? Deja Vu seems so real, just like a memory of anything else. But we all know that it never happened before.

Maybe we all have a destiny and we are just along for the ride, and deja vu is just a quick glimpse of whats to come... maybe we are in a program and its a glitch... maybe the human brain is the most complex system of atoms we will ever know of and it will never be fully explainable.

[Albert VDS]

Secondly, I recall seeing a quote from a someone who was seriously looking in to the computer simulation theory, and he stated that the universe can have created no more than 10^120 bits of data, which is quite reasonable for a super computer to do AFAIK.

10^120 is the exact number of unique possible chess games. I highly doubt that chess is as complex as a simulation it's created in.

Let's say you can start a universe with that amount of data. The expansion, of the simulated universe, alone would would exponentially increase the memory requirement.

[Cronos988]

Thirdly, it would explain the big bang. While there is overwhelming evidence that it happened, we don't really know WHY it happened. What if "God" really did make the big bang, but God was just a programmer (or a group thereof)?

"What if" that is the case? Well then nothing. Who cares. It is an assumption without any implications.

Lastly, and probably the most philosophically significant of them all, is what if the programmers ARE human. Humans strive to make better and better simulations of the universe, so what if there comes a point where humans can generate there own version of the universe (cue the above stated 10^120 bits)? This would mean that there is the possibility of infinite recursion whereby while we were made by humans, we will eventually create a computer simulation that makes humans, and our simulation will make it's own simulation? The implications of this leads to the inverse question of how many recursions in are we from the original creator?

I am under the impression that a perfect simulation of the universe would be the universe. The point of a simulation is to simplify things. So if this universe is a simulation, then whatever is simulating it must be more complicated.

One thing that always had me a part believer in this kind of thing was the Matrix take on deja vu. Have you ever had deja vu? its very strange, and anyone who has had deja vu will swear up and down that they remember the particular event like it already happpened. In the Matrix it is a glitch in the program. Which makes more sense than the current explanation.... which is "idk"... How can anyone explain it? Deja Vu seems so real, just like a memory of anything else. But we all know that it never happened before.

The Brain does not have a "reality flag" that enables it to discern between memories of reality and imagination. That is why, when you are dreaming, you do not realize that you do. You can also create real emotions by just imagining things. The fact that you cannot tell whether the deja-vu is an actual memory or not is therefore not an exception, but the rule. I blame selective perception: We probably constantly "remember" things that we actually only imagined, but we usually don't notice. It is only certain imaginations (like a deja-vu) that pique our interest enough to seem special.

[Themohawkninja]

Grr... slow servers... double posting... now I see what that blog post by the dev meant...

Edited July 22, 2013 by Themohawkninja

[Themohawkninja]

10^120 is the exact number of unique possible chess games. I highly doubt that chess is as complex as a simulation it's created in.

Let's say you can start a universe with that amount of data. The expansion, of the simulated universe, alone would would exponentially increase the memory requirement.

Does conservation of mass and energy not mean conservation of data? Is that not the basis for the (now debunked) black hole paradox?

[Albert VDS]

One thing that always had me a part believer in this kind of thing was the Matrix take on deja vu. Have you ever had deja vu? its very strange, and anyone who has had deja vu will swear up and down that they remember the particular event like it already happpened. In the Matrix it is a glitch in the program. Which makes more sense than the current explanation.... which is "idk"... How can anyone explain it? Deja Vu seems so real, just like a memory of anything else. But we all know that it never happened before.

Maybe we all have a destiny and we are just along for the ride, and deja vu is just a quick glimpse of whats to come... maybe we are in a program and its a glitch... maybe the human brain is the most complex system of atoms we will ever know of and it will never be fully explainable.

Deja Vu is a mistake by the brain, it stores the moment before you experience it.

The human brain is poor device to proof something scientifically, as it's easily fooled.

Edited July 22, 2013 by Albert VDS

[Monkeh]

Deja Vu is a mistake by the brain, it stores the moment before you experience it.

This is impossible.

I read once that deja vu is a mix up of the 'memory' part of the brain cross conecting with the 'experiencing now' part, so as you experience it you simultaneously remember it as well.

Sounded plausible to me.

[Albert VDS]

That's basically the same, right?

Anyway, the whole idea of being in a simulation borders on creationism.

It service as great setup for a sci-fi book or movie, but to use it to explain the real world requires a whole lot of faith.