Message to the Overlords (Not even wrong)

[Martin]

The idea that the universe might be a simulation run in somebody Else's computer has got into the the Noo Yo'k Tahms----the SCIENCE section, not Entertainment.

 

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=586

 

there is Templeton money behind it. the author of the Times piece is at a Templeton funded dream-tank called Future of Humanity Institute

and he is attacking Peter Woit for being skeptical of the idea that we are in Matrix.

 

So Peter Woit, in the firm belief that his blog is being read by the Overlords has sent a message to them begging them not to turn us off.

 

the blog post I linked to here has further links to the NYT article and the house-blog at the Future of Humanity (what a name!) Institute.

[SkepticLance]

It is true this is not science. Science requires hypotheses to be testable, and tested. I see no way you could test this one.

 

So, we have to call this either speculation or religion. Of course, that don't mean it is wrong.

[CPL.Luke]

not neccessarily tre, if we were a simulation you would expect to see certain artifacts of the simulation develop, for instance there might be certain minimums that would defy eplanation, and also simulation "noise" while the theory could never be falsified it could be confirmed.

[SkepticLance]

luke

Do you not agree that, for some hypothesis to be science, it must be falsifiable, if it is in fact, incorrect?

[CPL.Luke]

depends, in my oppinion if there are ways of eventually proving it then it could be science, however I wouldn't spend to much of my time looking for it.

 

however as one example you could take the search for gravitational waves, there have been multiple searches that haven't turned up anything, but that can be blamed on the experiment.

 

similarly I could make an experiment designed to find simulation noise, but I might not be able to get to the required level of acccuracy and precision required to find such noise.

[foodchain]

TO me I would fund the science just to end what could be some new and wild religious explosion in the human race. All I could ever not want is a bunch of "neo" want to be people running around looking for the oracle. Then again like religion in general there may be no way to end such a "faith" with anything called logic or what not, or evil words like objective and empirical...

[Sisyphus]

The general statement, "our existence is a simulation," is not falsifiable (as far as I can think of) and hence not science. However, there could be many ways you might make a more specific statement in which there would be testable consequences.

 

What's amusing is that even if such a hypothesis were confirmed correct, it still wouldn't really be confirmed, because the "true" reality might or might not be in itself a simulation, and we a simulation within a simulation.

 

What makes this idea so annoyingly plausible is that we could one day design such a simulation, in which we design a reality complete within its own rules and even it's own intelligent beings who don't know they're in a simulation.

 

Presumably we could design whatever rules we want, even rules that are "physically" inconsistent but intuitively work out, so our simulated beings could live in a world of gods and magic spells and ghosts and whatever else we want.

 

That, of course, gives a plausible (if extremely unlikely) account of how such things might exist in our world, if our world is, in fact, a simulation.

 

It also gives an account of how seemingly nonsensical and inconsistent behaviors we see in nature in say, quantum mechanics, might in fact really be nonsensical and inconsistent, because the gods are playing dice in a much more literal sense than Einstein meant...

[Martin]

One of the Overlords has replied to Peter Woit

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=586#comment-27566

[bascule]

This idea has been floating around transhumanist circles for years, and was most recently popularized by World Transhumanist Association cofounder Nick Bostrom.

 

Sadly, I know many transhumanists who think it MUST BE COMPLETELY TRUE!

 

I'm of the opinion that it's probably easier to create a universe from scratch than it is to simulate one in software.

[Martin]

there'v been some thoughtful comments at the N.E.W. blog

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=586#comment-27553

 

Wolfgang said:

Is it really coincidence that Karl Rove resigned exactly at the same time people finally figured out that we live in a simulated, fake world?

 

John Armstrong quoted a logician named Smullyan:

“I don’t believe in astrology because I’m a Scorpio, and Scorpios never believe in astrology.”

 

Finally, after a couple of days of comments like these one of the Overlords, the great Root himself, replied:

 

I am the sysadmin responsible for running the simulation.

 

First, I would like to apologize for having to resort to this quantum stuff after the late 1800’s. You see, with you starting to observe more and more of the “universe” we started to run out of computational power so doing monte-carlo became a necessity and this still manifests itself as what you known as quantum phenomena.

 

Second I would also like to apologise for that glitch in Utah regarding cold fusion. They were right, but it was a glitch (known for some time I might add) that was confined to Utah so we never though that people would pick it up. We were wrong and the guy who debugs had a hard time fixing that one. We still don’t know whether we introduced some unexpected side-effect elsewhere so if you guys discover something that later turns out not to be reproducible you can always suspect what happened.

 

Regarding the LHC we are still debating what we will show you. I don’t make these calls (upper management does) but due to lack of resources we might not introduce anything new. Having or not having a Higgs is still under heated debate. SUSY is just way too complicated (too many free parameters) and we are running low on storage as I write so wouldn’t count on that for now.

 

Regarding quark confinement, forget it. It’s just a kludge the programmers introduced so you won’t be able to figure that one out. You can’t, there is really no reason for it. The guy devising the theory that explains matter really messed things up and we had to solve it this way. Sorry.

 

By the way, I almost forgot to mention. Of all the ~6E9 humans most are not really “sentient” and have no “free will”. They are just extras we added to keep things interesting for the others and to accommodate the population grows laws. Plus extras are very easy to simulate and sometimes we just simulate the whole group and add a bit of random noise in each “individual”. The real people never even suspect the end-result.

 

Roughly there are as much “sentient” and “cogent” humans now as in the beginning (roughly 5% now). The world/Earth is really 6 thousand years old and the entire fossil record was just a way for you guys to believe there was something before and to add more fun to the simulation. Religions fall under this category also and the afterlife if existed would be being stored o tape.

Reincarnation does exist but only for those 5% I mentioned. What you usually feel as past memories are pieces of reused storage blocks that weren’t completely erased, just recycled. Allocating the memory at birth with calloc instead of a simple malloc would solve this but we like the fun factor due to the current implementation.

 

Finally, as for you being afraid of us pulling the plug, I must say so far the ratings have been very good and as long as Lubos is around and has a blog I will personally run a subset of the simulation out of my own pocket as long as I can just for the fun of it.

 

If you guys have any questions feel free to ask me, no one will actually believe me so I don’t think I’ll mess the simulation. Besides, humans are not the crux of this experiment. I bet you didn’t see that one coming.

 

If anything goes wrong, I’m root and I can always delete things, logs included and management would remain oblivious.

[Sisyphus]

!

 

I'm of the opinion that it's probably easier to create a universe from scratch than it is to simulate one in software.

 

That would depend on how big your simulation is, eh?

[Reaper]

That would depend on how big your simulation is, eh?

 

Nah, I would have to agree with bascule. The information required to create the universe, even one the size of the Milky Way, on a computer simulation far outstrips what is physically possible, unless it is programmed so that only a very small part of it actually exists.

[Sisyphus]

The Milky Way still seems way, way bigger than you'd need to fool a few billion beings. I'd also point out that what is physically possible is quite unknown, since, by hypothesis, everything we know about physics is just a part of this particular simulation. Only metaphysics could give us useful information on the "real" reality.

[John Cuthber]

CPLuke,

when you wrote "not neccessarily tre, if we were a simulation you would expect to see certain artifacts of the simulation develop, for instance there might be certain minimums that would defy eplanation, and also simulation "noise" while the theory could never be falsified it could be confirmed."

how did you know what the laws of the real universe (in which our universe is a simulation) are?

How can you presume to guess about noise in a realm of which you do not, and can not, have any experience.

 

Just a thought but perhaps the limits we see in this world like the Planck time and so on are just the noise you are talking about much as Martin suggests.

I don't think this is a likely scenario and I don't think that begging them not to switch us off makes any sense but I still don't see how you could test the theory.

 

In the same way- arguments about it being far to complicated are odd. Too complicated for what? Since we would have no idea what was doing the simulating we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we know what it could do.

The idea, like the existence of God, is in principle, untestable.