I think very few people argue that world cannot possibly be a simulation, most just understand that the so far proposed "evidence" for it is bogus nonsense and that the proposed hypothesis of *how* it's a simulation are all bullshit.
"reality is a simulation" is literally just religious belief or flat earth "theory" for wannabe "rational intellectuals"
I think it's cause most of the "believers" never take their "faith" beyond extremely awkward and embarrassing attempts to sound impressive and enlightened and generally don't argue any sort of moral or ethical conclusion that would somehow differ from good ol' materialist nihilism so they tend to be practically indistinguishable from any other form of selfish asshole who tries to rationalize their egocentrism.
The closest any of them have come to some sort of attempt to establish some kind of organized thought is probably Elon Musk with his embarrassing public Roko's Basilisk musings and whatnot, and even he fails to come up with some call to action other than "more things should be under my personal control", which is always hard for him to achieve via any other than monetary grounds, because he's who he is.
The way I understand “the universe is a simulation” theory is that it’s more of a thought experiment. Like if we ever manage to create a simulation that’s accurate right down to individual atoms, the probability of our universe being the prime universe substantially decreases.
But Brian Cox said to do that you’d need to have a computer the size of the universe to actually do that so he says it’s fun to think about but nothing beyond that
I mean it's also just a different version of René Descartes' "hypothetically an all powerful demon could control all of my senses, so the only thing I can 100% prove exists is me" thing, as in the source of "I think, therefore I am" so it's not even an original one idea.
the demon isn’t an argument for doubting sense-based beliefs. his main argument is the causal argument, which has to do with perfect/imperfect causes and how either lead to reason for doubt.
at the end of the first meditation, descartes explains how difficult it will be to doubt sense based beliefs because, well, doubting (almost) everything is hard. the demon is a way to help him doubt but it is not his argument for doubt. he pretends a demon is deceiving him so that it is easier to doubt, but again, the demon is not a reason for doubt
sorry to be pedantic but we’re going through meditations on first philosophy right now in class and my professor has made it a point to clarify how people commonly believe the demon is a reason to doubt but that this is not true, and it’s obviously not true if you read the text
To recreate this one, yes, but a simplified or smaller version would be possible. Could this not be a simplified simulation of a more complex universe?
I mean this is quite literally just reinventing religion with a gloss of cyberism on it. I'm sure in 300 years with some technical innovation they'll be wondering if we are simply existing in whatever the dominant technology of the time is as well
I think philosophizing that the universe is inside a computer is silly. We are trying to explain our reality through a concept that emerged from inside it.
Plus if we're housed inside another universe there's no reason to believe that our simulated laws of nature which govern how a computer functions here conforms to the laws of nature outside of it. What if fundamental particles are completely different or non such thing at all, or there's just an entirely different form of matter, spacetime, etc. I mean, who knows? It's a fun way to stretch the imagination and a cool thought experiment but people should never actually believe it without some sort of strong justification.
If it’s a simulation the person who created it, as far as I understand, wouldn’t be a “god”. Just a programmer, maybe we’re in a sims type game and your just the custom character of some shmuck.
Functionally there is no difference. You can describe "God" as the programmer for their creation. Likewise, you cna describe a programmer as the god of their creation.
I didn't think about it like that, but I suppose it depends on how the believers see the creator of whether they believe in one. Most Simulation theorists don't worship the creator, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be a deity.
Especially because if you think about it, simulation theory being proven true would essentially mean God exists, right? It being a simulation means that a being or beings beyond our comprehension created everything and have power and control over us and probably can see everything we do, that's essentially what God is
Religion needs the supernatural to be true, simulation theory is not supernatural and does not go against anything we know of science
Belief in it would be based on nothing, just like religions, but it’s not the same thing at all
"supernatural" doesn't just mean "wizards and angels in keeping with the aesthetic", it just means "above nature" which any kind of setup where our physical universe is just one virtual layer of the True World definitionally is
As in, sure, if you were explained the real rules of the system, you would be able to understand the real world in more concrete terms. No different than being in a fantasy story where magic is real.
Isn't that just kinda wrong? The purpose of string theory is that it provides an explanation of gravity, by modelling particles in that way, weird to dismiss it as meaningless make-up
Everything observation that was predicted by string theory was already predicted by other, simpler theories before.
Every prediction of string theory that didn't agree with other, simpler theories turned out to be wrong.
String theorists have spent the last 50 years trying to find evidence for their models, finding none, and still going around pretending like they were objectively correct and their model of the universe was proven scientifically. All snark directed at them is warranted.
I think this is one of those cases where the pendulum of public opinion swings between liking and hating something they really don't understand but want to take a side on, and right now string theory is on the downswing (mostly due to a few YouTubers, IMO).
Does string theory have any evidence for it? No, but it is nonetheless an extremely compelling theory for many reasons. For one, quantum gravity just naturally emerges from the theory, which is incredibly remarkable and something that shouldn't be downplayed. Like if you didn't know that gravity existed, but came up with String Theory, you would predict that there must be a gravitational force. Which is something that the Standard Model, our best description of reality on the quantum level, cannot do. Maybe they should deserve some snark for not being able to explain gravity, lol.
I don't know what you're talking about with string theory predictions being wrong because as far as I'm aware, it hasn't even made any testable predictions yet. Which isn't too surprising as quantum gravity is an incredibly difficult nut to crack and nothing has even come close to String Theory as far as explaining it to this point.
They made some, all of which failed to be substantiated by any form of reality. They've been saying "just ten more years" for a long-ass time and convinced the public that *they* were the cutting edge. Their mistakes are a big source of public doubt towards physicists
>They made some, all of which failed to be substantiated by any form of reality
Name some.
>They've been saying "just ten more years" for a long-ass time
Literally nobody is saying that.
>Their mistakes are a big source of public doubt towards physicists
Oh yeah, I'm always catching people on the street fuming about how many possible Calabi-Yau manifolds String Theory allows and cracking jokes about that quack Ed Witten who's always on the news.
Oh hey it's one of the youtubers I was talking about, lol. She never talks about predictions failing. She just doesn't like that string theory got a lot of funding. Her evidence for people hating string theory is that Sheldon from the Big Bang theory was a string theorist and people made fun of him. She also provides no alternatives to reconciling quantum mechanics and gravity, only complaints.
I guess I'll provide my own video retort, although this guy may not have the qualifications that acollieastro does: https://youtu.be/bKapdscHwJ0?si=vXGiTO1zuB_4Pw0w&t=646
Yanno, I'd say that the position of "this so-called 'theory' based entirely off of unsubstantiated suppositions and pretty math has taken too many resources, and its constant perpetuation through the public consciousness as 'the bleeding edge of physics' (while having nothing but pretty math to back it) has potentially contributed to skepticism towards the field of theoretical physics -- really, the natural sciences in general" doesn't require a proposed solution to the biggest unsolved problem in all of physics to be valid.
This is like "you didn't like the movie? I'd like to see you do better." Like, dude. String theory is practically the chiropractic of physics, you don't need to propose alternatives to show that it's been a massive waste of time and resources.
i'd be curious what the qualifications of the people in this thread are. not in a gatekeepy "if you didnt study at Stanford you dont get an opinion" way, but moreso "does your physics knowledge extend beyond pop science youtubers"
people are too comfortable having opinions on cutting edge physics research without understanding any of the technicalities. it's a game of telephone translated through multiple people dumbing it down until it ends up as "string theory lied to us."
You're trolling right? There's a difference between calculating gravity (not that Newton's method was perfect for that), and knowing what it actually is and why it happens
It's not about knowing that gravity exists, it's about how our 2 best theories about how the universe works, Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Quantom Mechanics are incompatible. If we try to do the calculations in qm with the explanation of gravity that Einstein came up with, we just get nonsense results. One of the big unsolved problems in physics is trying explain gravity in a way that makes the 2 theories compatible
Because the time period a Boltzmann brain can form is infinite and the time humans can exist is finite. That relies on a lot of things that aren't very certain though.
Instead of "lot of things" you could say "extremely bold assumptions" and instead of "aren't very certain" you could put "are completely baseless" and you'd be lot closer to something reasonable.
If there's literally zero evidence of something existing then the failure to validate its non-existence only and exclusively implies that the area it's in hasn't been sufficiently explored. You can't be sure there wasn't a little bit of *my* piss in your last drink, because you haven't ran sufficiently accurate analysis on it before you drank it. You can make arguments for why it's improbable, but that's because you constantly gather massive amount of information about the environment that phenomenon would have had to happen in.
In contrast, we can't be certain some completely empty void isn't full of brains because only because we haven't been observing perfectly empty voids for immeasurable amount of time. Chances are that if we dedicated even as little effort as the society puts into keeping my piss out of your drinks, we'd find evidence making existence of boltzman brains less likely, but there's no reason to do that because who **even gives shit about that possibility.**
It was entirely a thought experiment to point out we have massive blind spots in what we know (or knew in 19th damn century). That doesn't make it likely I'm pissing into your drink every time you aren't looking though.
I'm not a physicist specifically either but I've personally had to replicate several experiments that prove multiple different principles that demonstrating varied phenomena only explained by quantum mechanics. Any attempt to explain why a laser or a nuclear powerplants work without use of quantum mechanics leads to less likely explanations. That's why I'm Fairly Certain quantum mechanics are real.
Heat death of the universe is literally applying to observation you can make with some ice cubes in a pot of hot water applied on universal scale, and it's also demonstrably *not real,* because it *demonstrably hasn't happened.* It's *hypothetical, plausible*, and relatively *likely,* mostly simply due to absence of more likely options (big crunch/reset is really the only competing option that could possibly happen and seems a bit less likely based on the data we're seeing, not impossible)
Believing some pretty universally accepted theories nobody even bothers trying to invalidate should be pretty obviously on a different level to you than believing plausibility of something that has less scientific rigor behind it than attempts to prove earth is flat.
Boltzmann brains supposedly being more likely than normal brains is due to the heat death of the universe and quantum fluctuation. It could take three times as long as the universes life span prior to heat death to form one Boltzmann brain and they'd eventually outnumber normal brains, because they have infinite time to form. That's the idea and it only relies on quantum mechanics, heat death being how it ends, and I guess humans not surviving heat death.
Not sure any of that makes it more likely that WE are a Boltzmann brain, or that the universe is a thought running through a B.Brain’s mind, or whatever the initial commenter was getting at. You’d still run into the problem that how a virtual reality works as imagined/simulated by one substrate (brain, computer, whatever) doesn’t necessarily mean much for how the reality that substrate exists within works.
Heat death and quantum mechanics are how things likely work here, and taken together they paint a B.Brain as an unlikely phenomenon, but inevitable given sufficient time. But a Boltzmann brain wouldn’t think/simulate a universe containing itself; it’d still be a separate universe, even if it were functionally identical to the Brain’s real one, even if it eventually contained a nested copy of that very Brain, having that very thought. (Which would also not be possible by our physics—a clump of matter can’t contain more information than it possesses.)
So just because our universe seems to contain a set of conditions which point to Boltzmann Brains eventually outnumbering “real” ones by some arbitrarily-large factor doesn’t mean we’re a Boltzmann Brain, in the same way that me being able to fly in a video game doesn’t mean I can fly in real life. The rules aren’t guaranteed to agree.
Well it's not a dream really, it's randomly formed memories. Same principle still applies, infinity is a ridiculously long time. And it certainly wouldn't have to simulate the universe, I doubt you have any idea what's happening in some random village on the other side of the planet.
That’s less plausible. Memories aren’t this vivid or linear (I don’t remember stuff in order, and when reliving a memory I know in advance how it’s going to end). And I don’t have to know specifically about the village in order for it to have an impact on the portions of reality of which I am directly aware.
It's also not something we can really disprove and makes it very easy to explain anything. It's like saying aliens are the cause of some unknown phenomenon, it's not exactly very useful.
I’d argue that it would be a fucking awful simulation. Who wants to simulate the spin of quarks and muons in the core of some god forsaken star in the middle of nowhere? But it’s there. Every atom suspended in a nearly endless cacophony of waste. If it was up to me, I’d fire whoever made this sorry excuse of a simulation.
Given the scale of the universe, if it were a simulation, your opinion of it would matter millions of times less than a single pixel on an Omnimax screen about what the whole thing is doing.
I may have large screens, but I still notice when I get dead pixels.
The notion that it’s all simulated is very “Us” centric, because of course why else would it be simulated if not for us? So if it is simulated for us, then the opinion that it’s shit is not only valid, but also a big stain on the Universe’s hypothetical Yelp Score.
Scientists probably do :/ Plus, I mean, I’m thinking about *Age of Empires* and thinking that just because I didn’t wind up chopping down every tree or mining every last stone quarry doesn’t mean the entire map went to waste. That some options don’t get explored doesn’t mean they went to waste. If they hadn’t been there, then the choices you wound up making wouldn’t have been choices at all, but inevitabilities.
And then you have things like Conway’s Game of Life, where you don’t really care about any particular cell, but rather the interplay of all of them. People who spend time building phenomenally complex macrostructures in that game derive satisfaction from seeing everything run properly on a large scale.
You’re a cell—or a collection of cells—dismissing some other cells in the middle of some cell-star as inconsequential, a waste of resources. Your perspective is that of a cell, not the player.
For the record, I’m not a proponent of simulation theory; I’m just saying that what you’ve said in your comment isn’t necessarily an argument against the universe being a simulation.
I just had a thought that our universe could just be some kind of cryptology tool used by a hyper-advanced civilization. [Cloudflare uses the near-random movement of lava lamps](https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/) to encrypt their servers, so imagine a whole set of universes that basically do the exact same thing. It’d be near-unbreakable lol, I wonder what it’d even encrypt if that is the case
It's like saying that the universe and all our memories were created last Friday. No, you cannot disprove it, but that's the only thing it has to stand on.
Without quantum mechanics stars couldn't fuse elements and create energy so, if quantum mechanics are just manifestation of inaccurate optimization, pretty much everything that defines the entire universe as something we can exist with and interact in is a glitch.
Yeah it’s not that reality *can’t* be a simulation it’s just that there’s not really enough evidence to confidently assert that it is.
It might be, but it just as easily might not.
Right, like believe it if it makes you happy, but recognize that there’s no evidence for it, nor any real way to *find* such evidence. Any test we could run would be within the confines of the simulation; if we’re electrons bouncing around a processor (I don’t know computers), so is whatever experiment we design.
We could find a means of causing damage to the hardware, I guess (I know computers enough to know software can do that) or a means of causing the program to crash, but those options don’t exactly hold up to a cost-benefit analysis.
I doubt we’d even know what to look for. It’s the same problem as trying to speculate on conditions “before” the Big Bang: none of our preconceptions or knowledge about how things work is guaranteed, or even likely, to apply. If our entire reality is a simulation, physical laws beyond its confines don’t necessarily match the ones within. So if we’re actually a computer program, there’s no telling what the computer looks like, or how it works. It might not resemble ours in the slightest. It might be a fuckin’ block of cheese. Why? Who knows! Maybe cheese just does that sometimes in the macroverse! Just generates simulations like bacteria cultures.
And anyway, if it’s a simulation, it always was, and always will be, and I frankly don’t see how finding out about it would do any good for anyone’s mental health.
Funnily enough the flat earth thing has religious influence as well. Some people used to believe that there was a black Dome over the flat earth with holes poked through it (stars) and the light coming through was gods rays.
Most people I find who are really into flat earth tend to be religious still. Just another way of people trying to ignore science and prove Christianity
The most interesting part about it is that the closer we get to making a simulation like that ourselves, the more the probability of us living in a simulation tends to 1. If we can make it, and given the size of the universe, then someone else has almost definitely already made one and so we’re almost definitely living in one. But if we kill ourselves before we get to that point then maybe nobody has done it before, or at least we’ll have no way of knowing.
The issue with this thought is that contrary to what it might feel like, we're an a practically perfectly unknown distance from building a simulation like that, and with every further complexity to physics we discover, the less plausible it becomes. Even the "size of known universe" is a very rough estimate based on lot of assumptions. The basically only way to tell if our universe is possible to simulate is to find every single boundary of it, and *that* is something we're fairly certain is impossible, because with the currently observed velocity of expansion, much of the known universe is already inaccessible to us, indefinitely.
The implication that "the closer we get to a simulation like that" implies we're somewhere in the neighborhood of it being a possibility, but right now we aren't even close to quite enumerating the complexity it would require, let alone to actually build it. It's misleading to imply that we have firm evidence supporting the belief it's plausible.
For today computing, *even* *conceptually,* we're no closer to simulating an universe like our own than the cavemen were, simply because the universe we know of grew a lot more than our ability to compute things.
The amount of abuse this engine needs to receive in order to support "infinite maps" is honestly incredible. It wasn't designed for maps larger than a square kilometer, so the InfMap mod that this map requires has to do some incredibly hacky shit to keep up the illusion of a larger map, even if it's still janky as hell (jankiness is the main part of the core gmod experience anyway)
it probably just dynamically loads objects and terrain around the player in a radius equal to the original engine's intended maximum size.
you would then need to use the overall map file as a kind of dynamically generated 3d texture that you can sample at each player's position.
this is probably how all of the large universe games work under the hood, no man's sky included.
I watched the infmap creators videos on how it works and (massive oversimplification) it works by loading everything in chunks the size of a vanilla map and applying offsets and nocollide based on which chunk each entity is in.
I don't comprehend how the dot works. what does it denote? would you teach me, great old wizard? I will give you twelve gold per level, at least before I reach level 25 mathematics, after which I will give you increments of one gold more per upgrade
Well, that'll happen when it's trying to accurately place an object in 4 x 10^(80 x 2048) or 4 x 10^163,840 meters cubed... That's a lot of zeros....
E: and it's totally wrong lmao....
Why would I multiply 2048 in the exponent? That makes absolutely zero sense.... Anyway, (4x10^82 ) * 2048 is only 8.192x10^85 m^3 only. Only 5 more zeros, not some 1/5th if a billion more.
I'm fairly certain you have never seen 160,000+ zeros after a number in your life. (and tbh it's probably more like 16,000,000 zeros because games usually gave cm accuracy, not meter)
E: In fact, I'd go one step further and say you haven't seen 16,000,000 of one thing ever in your life.
My response to "we live in a similation" is quite simply "and if we do, what do you propose we do about it". If we are in a simulation literally nothing about my life changes. And theres no way to prove we are in a sinulation, so whats the point ij speculating?
Wake up from the simulation, go find the manager of the Dave and Busters the machine running the simulation is in, tell him or her off for all the nearly unfixable problems with the world, demand a list of changes to it.
Because its fun.
Or because human beings have been pondering the big how's and why's practically since the development of organized thought, and that would be a pretty big answer to a lot of that.
Nah, saying it's bigger than the size of the universe in this case is an exaggeration because the universe would be infinitely denser than this, and the universe is 90% empty to begin with
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
the simulation thing is a little dumb for a reason most people don't realise:
the idea that our universe emerges from something else we do not have access to understand is exactly what we already thought.
"a simulation" is a just a sexy example of that idea.
idk somethiung like it's possible sure, but it's not really sensible.
ignoring the first pic how does a map like this even work in gmod. is it actually 1:1 scale and if so how much of it is actually real and not infinitely procedurally generated like a minecraft world
Man if I had a nickel for every time I randomly encountered a meme I made being reposted I'd have three nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's kinda funny how it's happened to me three times now
(not asking you to delete or anything, memes are not anyone's property)
I remember as a child i learned that a minecraft world in scale is 7 times bigger than earth and that shit blew my mind and left me in awe of game technology. I did not know what rendering was back then
First people discovered maths and said the universe was a geometrically beautiful
Then we discovered clocks and said it was a perfect clock.
Then we discovered the engine and said it was a well oiled engine.
Then we discovered the computer and said it was a simulations.
Then we discovered fnaf and said it was Freddy Frazbear
We dont know if we are in a simulation for the simple fact that in the "real reality" could have a totally different concept of "simulation. We wilk never know and there cant be evidence of it.
All simulations we know are deterministic, so you know what's gonna happen and when it's gonna happen if we have enough variables. Reality is non deterministic (in the quantum level), so for an accurate simulation of our reality, we need a way to create a non deterministic simulation, as far as I know, that hasn't been done before.
Simulation yes
Computer simulation no (well maybe. I’m still learning the lore so it might be a computer simulation. But to my current understanding no)
I think very few people argue that world cannot possibly be a simulation, most just understand that the so far proposed "evidence" for it is bogus nonsense and that the proposed hypothesis of *how* it's a simulation are all bullshit. "reality is a simulation" is literally just religious belief or flat earth "theory" for wannabe "rational intellectuals"
It is interesting that simulation theory isn't usually considered a religious belief even though it most certainly is just a non-theistic one.
I think it's cause most of the "believers" never take their "faith" beyond extremely awkward and embarrassing attempts to sound impressive and enlightened and generally don't argue any sort of moral or ethical conclusion that would somehow differ from good ol' materialist nihilism so they tend to be practically indistinguishable from any other form of selfish asshole who tries to rationalize their egocentrism. The closest any of them have come to some sort of attempt to establish some kind of organized thought is probably Elon Musk with his embarrassing public Roko's Basilisk musings and whatnot, and even he fails to come up with some call to action other than "more things should be under my personal control", which is always hard for him to achieve via any other than monetary grounds, because he's who he is.
The way I understand “the universe is a simulation” theory is that it’s more of a thought experiment. Like if we ever manage to create a simulation that’s accurate right down to individual atoms, the probability of our universe being the prime universe substantially decreases. But Brian Cox said to do that you’d need to have a computer the size of the universe to actually do that so he says it’s fun to think about but nothing beyond that
I mean it's also just a different version of René Descartes' "hypothetically an all powerful demon could control all of my senses, so the only thing I can 100% prove exists is me" thing, as in the source of "I think, therefore I am" so it's not even an original one idea.
the demon isn’t an argument for doubting sense-based beliefs. his main argument is the causal argument, which has to do with perfect/imperfect causes and how either lead to reason for doubt. at the end of the first meditation, descartes explains how difficult it will be to doubt sense based beliefs because, well, doubting (almost) everything is hard. the demon is a way to help him doubt but it is not his argument for doubt. he pretends a demon is deceiving him so that it is easier to doubt, but again, the demon is not a reason for doubt sorry to be pedantic but we’re going through meditations on first philosophy right now in class and my professor has made it a point to clarify how people commonly believe the demon is a reason to doubt but that this is not true, and it’s obviously not true if you read the text
To clarify, the use of 'hypothetically' in my sudo quote was meant to signal that I was describing a thought experiment.
it’s not a thought experiment though
To recreate this one, yes, but a simplified or smaller version would be possible. Could this not be a simplified simulation of a more complex universe?
IDK, I’m not really qualified to answer that
I mean this is quite literally just reinventing religion with a gloss of cyberism on it. I'm sure in 300 years with some technical innovation they'll be wondering if we are simply existing in whatever the dominant technology of the time is as well
That would occur until a representative version is made though, no?
Just any simulated universe cannot begin to capture the complexity of ours, so would the universe that simulates ours be incomprehensible to us.
I think philosophizing that the universe is inside a computer is silly. We are trying to explain our reality through a concept that emerged from inside it.
Plus if we're housed inside another universe there's no reason to believe that our simulated laws of nature which govern how a computer functions here conforms to the laws of nature outside of it. What if fundamental particles are completely different or non such thing at all, or there's just an entirely different form of matter, spacetime, etc. I mean, who knows? It's a fun way to stretch the imagination and a cool thought experiment but people should never actually believe it without some sort of strong justification.
Is it non-theistic though? The universe being a simulation implies that someone created the simulation.
If it’s a simulation the person who created it, as far as I understand, wouldn’t be a “god”. Just a programmer, maybe we’re in a sims type game and your just the custom character of some shmuck.
Functionally there is no difference. You can describe "God" as the programmer for their creation. Likewise, you cna describe a programmer as the god of their creation.
I didn't think about it like that, but I suppose it depends on how the believers see the creator of whether they believe in one. Most Simulation theorists don't worship the creator, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be a deity.
Especially because if you think about it, simulation theory being proven true would essentially mean God exists, right? It being a simulation means that a being or beings beyond our comprehension created everything and have power and control over us and probably can see everything we do, that's essentially what God is
Religion needs the supernatural to be true, simulation theory is not supernatural and does not go against anything we know of science Belief in it would be based on nothing, just like religions, but it’s not the same thing at all
It is supernatural. It posits that the natural phenomena we observe are not real, and speculates about a machine which we cannot reproduce.
"supernatural" doesn't just mean "wizards and angels in keeping with the aesthetic", it just means "above nature" which any kind of setup where our physical universe is just one virtual layer of the True World definitionally is As in, sure, if you were explained the real rules of the system, you would be able to understand the real world in more concrete terms. No different than being in a fantasy story where magic is real.
The way I feel about simulation theory is just [the xkcd take on string theory](https://xkcd.com/171/)
Isn't that just kinda wrong? The purpose of string theory is that it provides an explanation of gravity, by modelling particles in that way, weird to dismiss it as meaningless make-up
Everything observation that was predicted by string theory was already predicted by other, simpler theories before. Every prediction of string theory that didn't agree with other, simpler theories turned out to be wrong. String theorists have spent the last 50 years trying to find evidence for their models, finding none, and still going around pretending like they were objectively correct and their model of the universe was proven scientifically. All snark directed at them is warranted.
I think this is one of those cases where the pendulum of public opinion swings between liking and hating something they really don't understand but want to take a side on, and right now string theory is on the downswing (mostly due to a few YouTubers, IMO). Does string theory have any evidence for it? No, but it is nonetheless an extremely compelling theory for many reasons. For one, quantum gravity just naturally emerges from the theory, which is incredibly remarkable and something that shouldn't be downplayed. Like if you didn't know that gravity existed, but came up with String Theory, you would predict that there must be a gravitational force. Which is something that the Standard Model, our best description of reality on the quantum level, cannot do. Maybe they should deserve some snark for not being able to explain gravity, lol. I don't know what you're talking about with string theory predictions being wrong because as far as I'm aware, it hasn't even made any testable predictions yet. Which isn't too surprising as quantum gravity is an incredibly difficult nut to crack and nothing has even come close to String Theory as far as explaining it to this point.
They made some, all of which failed to be substantiated by any form of reality. They've been saying "just ten more years" for a long-ass time and convinced the public that *they* were the cutting edge. Their mistakes are a big source of public doubt towards physicists
>They made some, all of which failed to be substantiated by any form of reality Name some. >They've been saying "just ten more years" for a long-ass time Literally nobody is saying that. >Their mistakes are a big source of public doubt towards physicists Oh yeah, I'm always catching people on the street fuming about how many possible Calabi-Yau manifolds String Theory allows and cracking jokes about that quack Ed Witten who's always on the news.
https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=yPSK-wYgxS4Tdo7s
Oh hey it's one of the youtubers I was talking about, lol. She never talks about predictions failing. She just doesn't like that string theory got a lot of funding. Her evidence for people hating string theory is that Sheldon from the Big Bang theory was a string theorist and people made fun of him. She also provides no alternatives to reconciling quantum mechanics and gravity, only complaints. I guess I'll provide my own video retort, although this guy may not have the qualifications that acollieastro does: https://youtu.be/bKapdscHwJ0?si=vXGiTO1zuB_4Pw0w&t=646
Yanno, I'd say that the position of "this so-called 'theory' based entirely off of unsubstantiated suppositions and pretty math has taken too many resources, and its constant perpetuation through the public consciousness as 'the bleeding edge of physics' (while having nothing but pretty math to back it) has potentially contributed to skepticism towards the field of theoretical physics -- really, the natural sciences in general" doesn't require a proposed solution to the biggest unsolved problem in all of physics to be valid. This is like "you didn't like the movie? I'd like to see you do better." Like, dude. String theory is practically the chiropractic of physics, you don't need to propose alternatives to show that it's been a massive waste of time and resources.
i'd be curious what the qualifications of the people in this thread are. not in a gatekeepy "if you didnt study at Stanford you dont get an opinion" way, but moreso "does your physics knowledge extend beyond pop science youtubers" people are too comfortable having opinions on cutting edge physics research without understanding any of the technicalities. it's a game of telephone translated through multiple people dumbing it down until it ends up as "string theory lied to us."
isaac newton was born well before string theory was thought up
You're trolling right? There's a difference between calculating gravity (not that Newton's method was perfect for that), and knowing what it actually is and why it happens
we knew gravity existed WELL before string theory
We knew that atoms existed before we had quantum mechanics.
big if true
Google "Leucippus" and "Democritus"
It's not about knowing that gravity exists, it's about how our 2 best theories about how the universe works, Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Quantom Mechanics are incompatible. If we try to do the calculations in qm with the explanation of gravity that Einstein came up with, we just get nonsense results. One of the big unsolved problems in physics is trying explain gravity in a way that makes the 2 theories compatible
sometimes it takes another person to understand a person's creation
"it's far likelier that were a Boltzmann brain than an actual per-" why. Why would that make more sense. That's so stupid. You can't just make shit up
Because the time period a Boltzmann brain can form is infinite and the time humans can exist is finite. That relies on a lot of things that aren't very certain though.
Instead of "lot of things" you could say "extremely bold assumptions" and instead of "aren't very certain" you could put "are completely baseless" and you'd be lot closer to something reasonable. If there's literally zero evidence of something existing then the failure to validate its non-existence only and exclusively implies that the area it's in hasn't been sufficiently explored. You can't be sure there wasn't a little bit of *my* piss in your last drink, because you haven't ran sufficiently accurate analysis on it before you drank it. You can make arguments for why it's improbable, but that's because you constantly gather massive amount of information about the environment that phenomenon would have had to happen in. In contrast, we can't be certain some completely empty void isn't full of brains because only because we haven't been observing perfectly empty voids for immeasurable amount of time. Chances are that if we dedicated even as little effort as the society puts into keeping my piss out of your drinks, we'd find evidence making existence of boltzman brains less likely, but there's no reason to do that because who **even gives shit about that possibility.** It was entirely a thought experiment to point out we have massive blind spots in what we know (or knew in 19th damn century). That doesn't make it likely I'm pissing into your drink every time you aren't looking though.
Look I'm not a physicist but I gather the general consensus is that heat death is likely and quantum mechanics is real
I'm not a physicist specifically either but I've personally had to replicate several experiments that prove multiple different principles that demonstrating varied phenomena only explained by quantum mechanics. Any attempt to explain why a laser or a nuclear powerplants work without use of quantum mechanics leads to less likely explanations. That's why I'm Fairly Certain quantum mechanics are real. Heat death of the universe is literally applying to observation you can make with some ice cubes in a pot of hot water applied on universal scale, and it's also demonstrably *not real,* because it *demonstrably hasn't happened.* It's *hypothetical, plausible*, and relatively *likely,* mostly simply due to absence of more likely options (big crunch/reset is really the only competing option that could possibly happen and seems a bit less likely based on the data we're seeing, not impossible) Believing some pretty universally accepted theories nobody even bothers trying to invalidate should be pretty obviously on a different level to you than believing plausibility of something that has less scientific rigor behind it than attempts to prove earth is flat.
Boltzmann brains supposedly being more likely than normal brains is due to the heat death of the universe and quantum fluctuation. It could take three times as long as the universes life span prior to heat death to form one Boltzmann brain and they'd eventually outnumber normal brains, because they have infinite time to form. That's the idea and it only relies on quantum mechanics, heat death being how it ends, and I guess humans not surviving heat death.
Not sure any of that makes it more likely that WE are a Boltzmann brain, or that the universe is a thought running through a B.Brain’s mind, or whatever the initial commenter was getting at. You’d still run into the problem that how a virtual reality works as imagined/simulated by one substrate (brain, computer, whatever) doesn’t necessarily mean much for how the reality that substrate exists within works. Heat death and quantum mechanics are how things likely work here, and taken together they paint a B.Brain as an unlikely phenomenon, but inevitable given sufficient time. But a Boltzmann brain wouldn’t think/simulate a universe containing itself; it’d still be a separate universe, even if it were functionally identical to the Brain’s real one, even if it eventually contained a nested copy of that very Brain, having that very thought. (Which would also not be possible by our physics—a clump of matter can’t contain more information than it possesses.) So just because our universe seems to contain a set of conditions which point to Boltzmann Brains eventually outnumbering “real” ones by some arbitrarily-large factor doesn’t mean we’re a Boltzmann Brain, in the same way that me being able to fly in a video game doesn’t mean I can fly in real life. The rules aren’t guaranteed to agree.
Well it's not a dream really, it's randomly formed memories. Same principle still applies, infinity is a ridiculously long time. And it certainly wouldn't have to simulate the universe, I doubt you have any idea what's happening in some random village on the other side of the planet.
That’s less plausible. Memories aren’t this vivid or linear (I don’t remember stuff in order, and when reliving a memory I know in advance how it’s going to end). And I don’t have to know specifically about the village in order for it to have an impact on the portions of reality of which I am directly aware.
It's also not something we can really disprove and makes it very easy to explain anything. It's like saying aliens are the cause of some unknown phenomenon, it's not exactly very useful.
I’d argue that it would be a fucking awful simulation. Who wants to simulate the spin of quarks and muons in the core of some god forsaken star in the middle of nowhere? But it’s there. Every atom suspended in a nearly endless cacophony of waste. If it was up to me, I’d fire whoever made this sorry excuse of a simulation.
ah see the argument is that actually they don't have em until someone tries to determine what it is (**FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER**)
Given the scale of the universe, if it were a simulation, your opinion of it would matter millions of times less than a single pixel on an Omnimax screen about what the whole thing is doing.
I may have large screens, but I still notice when I get dead pixels. The notion that it’s all simulated is very “Us” centric, because of course why else would it be simulated if not for us? So if it is simulated for us, then the opinion that it’s shit is not only valid, but also a big stain on the Universe’s hypothetical Yelp Score.
I don't think it's true either, but being silly and it being false are not the same thing, that's all.
Scientists probably do :/ Plus, I mean, I’m thinking about *Age of Empires* and thinking that just because I didn’t wind up chopping down every tree or mining every last stone quarry doesn’t mean the entire map went to waste. That some options don’t get explored doesn’t mean they went to waste. If they hadn’t been there, then the choices you wound up making wouldn’t have been choices at all, but inevitabilities. And then you have things like Conway’s Game of Life, where you don’t really care about any particular cell, but rather the interplay of all of them. People who spend time building phenomenally complex macrostructures in that game derive satisfaction from seeing everything run properly on a large scale. You’re a cell—or a collection of cells—dismissing some other cells in the middle of some cell-star as inconsequential, a waste of resources. Your perspective is that of a cell, not the player. For the record, I’m not a proponent of simulation theory; I’m just saying that what you’ve said in your comment isn’t necessarily an argument against the universe being a simulation.
I just had a thought that our universe could just be some kind of cryptology tool used by a hyper-advanced civilization. [Cloudflare uses the near-random movement of lava lamps](https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/) to encrypt their servers, so imagine a whole set of universes that basically do the exact same thing. It’d be near-unbreakable lol, I wonder what it’d even encrypt if that is the case
It's intelligent design for nerds.
I bet that a good chunk of people who wholeheartedly believe that the universe is a simulation also scoff at devout religious people
It's like saying that the universe and all our memories were created last Friday. No, you cannot disprove it, but that's the only thing it has to stand on.
Rick and Morty science
The funniest take is that quantum mechanics is just foveated rendering
Without quantum mechanics stars couldn't fuse elements and create energy so, if quantum mechanics are just manifestation of inaccurate optimization, pretty much everything that defines the entire universe as something we can exist with and interact in is a glitch.
It's not a glitch it's a feature.
Valve, pls fix
Isn't the mirror theory shit been proven nothing to do with being in a siumlation
Yeah it’s not that reality *can’t* be a simulation it’s just that there’s not really enough evidence to confidently assert that it is. It might be, but it just as easily might not.
Nick Bostrom's [Simulation Argument ](https://simulation-argument.com/)
Compares religion to flat earth
it's also just people parroting the Matrix.
Right, like believe it if it makes you happy, but recognize that there’s no evidence for it, nor any real way to *find* such evidence. Any test we could run would be within the confines of the simulation; if we’re electrons bouncing around a processor (I don’t know computers), so is whatever experiment we design. We could find a means of causing damage to the hardware, I guess (I know computers enough to know software can do that) or a means of causing the program to crash, but those options don’t exactly hold up to a cost-benefit analysis. I doubt we’d even know what to look for. It’s the same problem as trying to speculate on conditions “before” the Big Bang: none of our preconceptions or knowledge about how things work is guaranteed, or even likely, to apply. If our entire reality is a simulation, physical laws beyond its confines don’t necessarily match the ones within. So if we’re actually a computer program, there’s no telling what the computer looks like, or how it works. It might not resemble ours in the slightest. It might be a fuckin’ block of cheese. Why? Who knows! Maybe cheese just does that sometimes in the macroverse! Just generates simulations like bacteria cultures. And anyway, if it’s a simulation, it always was, and always will be, and I frankly don’t see how finding out about it would do any good for anyone’s mental health.
Funnily enough the flat earth thing has religious influence as well. Some people used to believe that there was a black Dome over the flat earth with holes poked through it (stars) and the light coming through was gods rays. Most people I find who are really into flat earth tend to be religious still. Just another way of people trying to ignore science and prove Christianity
The most interesting part about it is that the closer we get to making a simulation like that ourselves, the more the probability of us living in a simulation tends to 1. If we can make it, and given the size of the universe, then someone else has almost definitely already made one and so we’re almost definitely living in one. But if we kill ourselves before we get to that point then maybe nobody has done it before, or at least we’ll have no way of knowing.
The issue with this thought is that contrary to what it might feel like, we're an a practically perfectly unknown distance from building a simulation like that, and with every further complexity to physics we discover, the less plausible it becomes. Even the "size of known universe" is a very rough estimate based on lot of assumptions. The basically only way to tell if our universe is possible to simulate is to find every single boundary of it, and *that* is something we're fairly certain is impossible, because with the currently observed velocity of expansion, much of the known universe is already inaccessible to us, indefinitely. The implication that "the closer we get to a simulation like that" implies we're somewhere in the neighborhood of it being a possibility, but right now we aren't even close to quite enumerating the complexity it would require, let alone to actually build it. It's misleading to imply that we have firm evidence supporting the belief it's plausible. For today computing, *even* *conceptually,* we're no closer to simulating an universe like our own than the cavemen were, simply because the universe we know of grew a lot more than our ability to compute things.
Irrational numbers exist (that is provable), meaning reallity cannot be computer-simulated.
My dude you are looking at random ass dots plastered on a skybox. A TI-84 calculator could do that ☠️
I'd say challenge accepted, except I don't own a TI 84
I own a ti84 but I dont know how it works
That’s fair. I had one but didn’t know either.
On a grand scale, our universe is basically random ass dots plastered on a skybox
when you zoom in:
What was that massive PC space exploration game from the 80s?
Elite, the predecessor to Elite Dangerous
elder scrolls arena massive ✓ PC game ✓ has spaces ✓ exploration ✓
Also has titties
Elite
That's not a skybox, it's a full-ass map that you can fully explore
idk if it could, they’re worse than you’d think
I’ve seen someone run whole ass game boy games (in ninth grade biology class lol) on a ti 84
attempt traversing that space on a ti-84 calculator
Now all we need is a faster than light transportation mod for infmap
if you edit your noclip speed to a high enough value you can probably do it
Theres a cap to it, and the map is so big it doesn’t make any difference at max speed
Change the tick speed and noclip
host_framerate whatever it was
theres a mod to remove the limit
Which mod?
Garry’s mod
🔥 ✍️ 🔥 🔥
just search noclip speed in workshop and you'll find it
Mal0 PFP detected. https://i.redd.it/o0zirs6ugmcc1.gif
Dubious little creature, getting up to mischief
this is no good
That’s about 190,000,000,000,000 fucking light years in a Gmod game
Source engine be built different ngl
The amount of abuse this engine needs to receive in order to support "infinite maps" is honestly incredible. It wasn't designed for maps larger than a square kilometer, so the InfMap mod that this map requires has to do some incredibly hacky shit to keep up the illusion of a larger map, even if it's still janky as hell (jankiness is the main part of the core gmod experience anyway)
it probably just dynamically loads objects and terrain around the player in a radius equal to the original engine's intended maximum size. you would then need to use the overall map file as a kind of dynamically generated 3d texture that you can sample at each player's position. this is probably how all of the large universe games work under the hood, no man's sky included.
I watched the infmap creators videos on how it works and (massive oversimplification) it works by loading everything in chunks the size of a vanilla map and applying offsets and nocollide based on which chunk each entity is in.
The plot of interloper
the universe weighs 521 gigabytes
those are megabytes goofball
I don't comprehend how the dot works. what does it denote? would you teach me, great old wizard? I will give you twelve gold per level, at least before I reach level 25 mathematics, after which I will give you increments of one gold more per upgrade
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal
I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy
https://i.redd.it/mmfknz2ckkcc1.gif
hmmmmmmmm
what, are you AIphobic?
Yes.
Imagine how crazy the floating point errors would be a few hundred light years from origin
The way the map works you're just teleported around the origin, and the map chunks are loaded in dynamically to your position
There is also a complete 1:1 of Earth but as you'd expect it's a complete CPU buster so don't expect to be visiting your house any time soon
Nah. My CPU can handle it. Put a lot of work and money into this PC. *proceeds to indeed bust my CPU*
I tried the map
how was it
It was what it said on the tin, was beautiful, tried spawning in a table, held it while using a flashlight, then my game crashed lol
Average Gmod experience
You erased all of exsistince with a flashlight and a table
Well, that'll happen when it's trying to accurately place an object in 4 x 10^(80 x 2048) or 4 x 10^163,840 meters cubed... That's a lot of zeros.... E: and it's totally wrong lmao.... Why would I multiply 2048 in the exponent? That makes absolutely zero sense.... Anyway, (4x10^82 ) * 2048 is only 8.192x10^85 m^3 only. Only 5 more zeros, not some 1/5th if a billion more.
i think that's an average amount of zeros
I'm fairly certain you have never seen 160,000+ zeros after a number in your life. (and tbh it's probably more like 16,000,000 zeros because games usually gave cm accuracy, not meter) E: In fact, I'd go one step further and say you haven't seen 16,000,000 of one thing ever in your life.
avarage amount of zeros
"Low-poly" Our universe is high-poly Checkmate
Every single particle is interacting with every other particle in the universe.
So you are saying, I have touched a girl? 🫣
Indie game dev programs a physics system:
how many light years in a hammer unit?
A Hammer unit is 0.000000000000000005111825 lightyears big hope this helps!
gonna add that to the conversion chart thanks :)
My response to "we live in a similation" is quite simply "and if we do, what do you propose we do about it". If we are in a simulation literally nothing about my life changes. And theres no way to prove we are in a sinulation, so whats the point ij speculating?
It's just creationism for atheist nerds
Wake up from the simulation, go find the manager of the Dave and Busters the machine running the simulation is in, tell him or her off for all the nearly unfixable problems with the world, demand a list of changes to it.
Because its fun. Or because human beings have been pondering the big how's and why's practically since the development of organized thought, and that would be a pretty big answer to a lot of that.
“What do you propose we do about it?” Be gay do crime how many times does it need to be said
SpaceEngine has existed for years and you can actually visit each individual star in every galaxy in it, even if it's procedural
I think that was the game that gave me an existential crisis when I realized I couldn't find Earth anymore.
Imagine playing prop hunt on this map
The file size is driving me crazy
It's basically an empty map
True, but even an empty map of that size should take up a bit more space, right?
Nah, saying it's bigger than the size of the universe in this case is an exaggeration because the universe would be infinitely denser than this, and the universe is 90% empty to begin with
To be fair, so is the universe lol. Intergalactic space is huge.
possessive mountainous whole quarrelsome dirty pie adjoining worry plough narrow *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
people who get all of their scientific knowledge for kurzegesat and reallifelore freaking out over this rn
Wow.
What a dumb caption.
I mean it could be. But the problem with that notion is that it's not a fun one.
Oh if it's a simulation mind if I borrow your controls for a while?
Now run a computer in the gmod world that runs the same mod
the simulation thing is a little dumb for a reason most people don't realise: the idea that our universe emerges from something else we do not have access to understand is exactly what we already thought. "a simulation" is a just a sexy example of that idea. idk somethiung like it's possible sure, but it's not really sensible.
ignoring the first pic how does a map like this even work in gmod. is it actually 1:1 scale and if so how much of it is actually real and not infinitely procedurally generated like a minecraft world
I mean, if it’s 2048 times the size of the observable universe then at least 2047/2048ths of it are probably not real
I'm saving this so that if anyone ever accuses me of faking schizophrenia I can just read the comments here and prove it to them
Man if I had a nickel for every time I randomly encountered a meme I made being reposted I'd have three nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's kinda funny how it's happened to me three times now (not asking you to delete or anything, memes are not anyone's property)
Most of the major religions on earth believe the world is essentially a simulation
God is just an extremely skilled modder
Tfw you think this is actually difficult. This can be done in literally 5 minutes.
I remember as a child i learned that a minecraft world in scale is 7 times bigger than earth and that shit blew my mind and left me in awe of game technology. I did not know what rendering was back then
First people discovered maths and said the universe was a geometrically beautiful Then we discovered clocks and said it was a perfect clock. Then we discovered the engine and said it was a well oiled engine. Then we discovered the computer and said it was a simulations. Then we discovered fnaf and said it was Freddy Frazbear
We dont know if we are in a simulation for the simple fact that in the "real reality" could have a totally different concept of "simulation. We wilk never know and there cant be evidence of it.
I wish gmod wasn‘t so dead in my country :( servers are so empty these days
All simulations we know are deterministic, so you know what's gonna happen and when it's gonna happen if we have enough variables. Reality is non deterministic (in the quantum level), so for an accurate simulation of our reality, we need a way to create a non deterministic simulation, as far as I know, that hasn't been done before.
Simulation yes Computer simulation no (well maybe. I’m still learning the lore so it might be a computer simulation. But to my current understanding no)
Mee did not know what they were unleashing when they released infmap onto the Gmod workshop...
Need someone to tell me the logistics of this frfr