Comment by ericpauley
4 days ago
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.
Hehe yeah.. For me, its just inverted search for the God. There must be somethink behind it, if its not God, then it must be simulation! Kinda sad, I would expect more from scientist.
The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions...
>The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions...
Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy, because for all the order we create we just create more disorder.
Conway's game of life has very simple rules (laws of nature) and it ends up very complex. The universe doing the same thing with much more complicated rules seems pretty natural.
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.
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For me the biggest riddle is: why something instead of nothing ?
That's the question that prevent me from being atheist and shift me to agnosticism.
There is both in superposition.
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> The big riddle of Universe is, how
A lot of people are more interested in the Why of the Universe than the How, though.
How is an implementation detail, Why is "profound". At least that's how I think most people look at it.
Yeah I guess... But such question is not really intereseting.. Answer is simple, there is nothing behind it.. and people arent confortable with that answer. Hence "How" is more interesting and scientific..
You expect scientists to not ask :‘what is behind all this?’
Ha
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.
Computing the future is cool, but computing the past state is also really cool as it essentially allows time travel into (a copy of) the past.
The real universe might be different and far more complex than our simulated reality. Maybe a species that can freely move within 4 or 5 dimensions is simulating our 3D + uni directional time reality just like we „simulate“ reality with Sim City and Sims.
but then we don't have a universe simulating itself, but simulating a low-fi imitation
You're predicating on particles, heat death, etc as you understand it being applicable to any potential universe. Such rules are only known to apply in this universe.
A universe is simply a function, and a function can be called multiple times with the same/different arguments, and there can be different functions taking the same or different arguments.
The issue with that in terms of the simulation argument, is that the simulation argument doesn't require a complete simulation in either space or time.
It also doesn't require a super-universe with identical properties and constraints.
There's no guarantee their logic is the same as our logic. It needs to be able to simulate our logic, but that doesn't mean it's defined or bound by it.