And here I was waiting to get unplugged, or maybe finding a Nokia phone that received a call.

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    5 hours ago

    “Robot, parse this statement, ‘this sentence is false’.” The robot explodes because it cannot understand a logical contradiction.

    I swear, that’s what this argument sounds like to me. Also, I’m genuinely confused why people don’t think that, if we can simulate randomness with computers in our world with pseudo random number generators, why a higher reality wouldn’t be able to simulate what we view as true randomness with a pseudo random number generator or some other device we cannot even begin to comprehend.

    Either this paper is bullshit or they’re talking about some sort of very specific thing that all these articles are blowing out of proportion.

    I don’t believe we are in a simulation but I don’t believe this paper disproves it. Just like I don’t believe in god but I don’t believe the question “can god make a rock so big he can’t pick it up?” disproves god.

  • Wilco@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    6 hours ago

    This is exactly the kind of disinformation the simulation would send out to trick us.

    • krooklochurm@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      4 hours ago

      ⬆️ ⬆️ ⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️BABA Start holy fucking shit I can see time. It’s the colour three.

  • survirtual@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    32
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    10 hours ago

    This paper is shit.

    https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488_8e072972f66d1fb748b47244c4813c86.pdf

    They proved absolutely nothing.

    For instance, they treat physics as a formal axiomatic system, which is fine for a human model of the physical world, but not for the physical world itself.

    You can’t say something is “unprovable” and make a logical leap to saying it is “physically undecidable.” Gödel-incompleteness produces unprovable sentences inside a formal system, it doesn’t imply that physical observables correspond to those sentences.

    I could go on but the paper is 12 short pages of non-sequiturs and logical leaps, with references to invoke formality, it’s a joke that an article like this is being passed around and taken as reality.

    • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      6 hours ago

      I mean, simulation theory is kind of a joke itself. It’s a fun thought experiment, but ultimately it’s just solipsism repackaged.

      In reality there’s no more evidence for it than there is for you being a butterfly dreaming it’s a man. And it seems to me that the only reason people take it at all seriously in the modern age is because Elon Musk said he believed it back when he had a good enough PR team that people thought he was worth listening to.

    • UniversalBasicJustice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      6 hours ago

      So really The Matrix should have taken place in a two dimensional world.

      Alternatively, I would also accept renaming the trilogy to The Array, The Matrix, and The Tensor.

  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    9 hours ago

    I will prove that we’re not in a simulation:

    If we’re in a simulation then whoever is operating it would not want us to know if we’re in a simulation or not.

    Anyone trying to check if we’re in a simulation or not would be stopped by the operator.

    I wasn’t stopped by an operator hence there is no operator and we’re not in a simulation.

    Q.E.D.

    • Ginny [they/she]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      9 hours ago

      Um, why? As a general rule, the point of running a simulation is to find out what happens under some circumstances where you don’t know what happens. If you’re imposing conditions like that, then you aren’t so much running a simulation as you are running some kind of procedural generation.

      • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        8 hours ago

        I’m kidding but since we’re just playing I would say:

        Let’s imagine you want to know who will win the next election. You create detailed simulation of the entire population and run it until the voting day to see how they will vote. If the simulated population realized they are in a simulation the will obviously start behaving in a different way then the real population thus making your simulation useless.

        So I would say unless the goal of the simulation is to see how fast will it realize it’s just a simulation you would try to avoid them finding out.

        Then again, checking if people will realize they are in a simulation is a valid reason to simulate them so it’s possible we’re in a simulation that is supposed to find out it’s a simulation…

  • kalkulat@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    20 hours ago

    Oh those mathers. At least scientists are humble enough to recognize that theorums about the physical world can’t be proven.

  • mhague@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    1 day ago

    “If we assume X theorem is true, Y theorem is true, and lemma Z is true, then …”

    This is actually about our models and seeing their incompleteness in a new light, right? I don’t think starting from arbitrary axioms and then trying to build reality was about proving qualities about reality. Or am I wrong? Just seems like they’re using “simulated reality” as a way to talk about our models for reality. By constructing a “silly” argument about how we can’t possibly be in a matrix, they’re revealing just how much we’re still missing.

  • Geodad@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    It’s possible that the universe could be simulated by an advanced people with vastly superior technology.

    Hard solipsism has no answer and no bearing on our lives, so it’s best to not give it another thought.

    • arendjr@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      23 hours ago

      It’s possible yes, but the nice thing is that we know we are not merely talking about “advanced people with vastly superior technology” here. The proof implies that technology within our own universe would never be able to simulate our own universe, no matter how advanced or superior.

      So if our universe is a “simulation” at least it wouldn’t be an algorithmic one that fits our understanding. Indeed we still cannot rule out that our universe exists within another, but such a universe would need a higher order reality with truths that are fundamentally beyond our understanding. Sure, you could call it a “simulation” still, but if it doesn’t fit our understanding of a simulation it might as well be called “God” or “spirituality”, because the truth is, we wouldn’t understand a thing of it, and we might as well acknowledge that.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        18 hours ago

        But that sounds like disproving a scenario no one claimed to be the case: that everything we perceive is as substantial as we think it is and can be simulated at full scale in real time by our own universe.

        Part of the whole reason people think of simulation theory as worth bothering to contemplate is because they find quantum physics and relativity to be unsatisyingly “weird”. They like to think of how things break down at relativistic velocities and quantum scale as the sorts of ways a simulation would be limited if we tried, so they like to imagine a higher order universe that doesn’t have those pesky “weird” behaviors and we are only stuck with those due to simulation limits within this hypothetical higher order universe.

        Nothing about it is practical, but a lot of these science themed “why” exercises aren’t themselves practical or sciency.

        • arendjr@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 hours ago

          I’m not sure I agree with the “no one claimed” part, because I think the proof is specifically targeting the claim that it is more likely than not that we are living in a simulation due to the “ease of scaling” if simulated realities are a thing. Which I think is one of the core premises of simulation theory.

          In any case, I don’t think the reasoning only applied to “full scale” simulations. After all, let’s follow the thought experiment indeed and presume that quantum mechanics is indeed the result of some kind of “lazy evaluation” optimisation within a simulation. Unless you want to argue solipsism in addition to simulation theory, the simulation is still generating perceptions for every single conscious actor within the simulation, and the simulation therefore still needs to implement some kind of “theory of everything” to ensure all perceptions across actors are being generated consistently.

          And ultimately, we still end up with the requirement that there is some kind of “higher order” universe whose existence is fundamentally unknowable and beyond our understanding. Presuming that such a universe exists and manages our universe seems to me to be a masked belief in creationism and therefore God, while trying very hard to avoid such words.

          The irony is that the thought experiment started with “pesky weird behaviours” that we can’t explain. Making the assumption that our “parent universe” is somehow easier to explain is really just wishful thinking that’s as rational as wishing a God to be responsible for it all.

          I’ll be straight here: I’m a deist, I do think that given sufficient thought on these matters, we must ultimately admit there is a deity, a higher power that we cannot understand. We may as well call it God, because even though it’s not a religious idea of God, it is fundamentally beyond our capacity to understand. I just think simulation theory is a bit of a roundabout way to get there as there are easier ways to reach the same conclusion :)

        • Tattorack@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 hours ago

          Just blaming god again for all the unexplainable stuff. Only instead if god it’s a simulation.

  • sonofearth@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 day ago

    The uptime is too good to be a simulation. It has an uptime of like 14 billions years! AWS has a lot of catching up to do. /s

  • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    1 day ago

    Lol, because these guys imagine the outer universe in which ours is built has the same rules and limitations. Also because they can’t wrap their minds around our universe’s rules doesn’t mean they make no sense to higher beings. Life in conway’s game would equally produce the same wrong statement

    • bluGill@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      3 hours ago

      We are reasonably confident that mathematical limitations apply to both the inner and outer universe. However they don’t understand the mathematical limitations enough to understand how little they matter. Pi is pi everywhere - that doesn’t change anything.

      There are truths we can’t prove true - again it doesn’t say anything about all the other trues we can prove.

      • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 hours ago

        Funny that your example is wrong. Pi isn’t always 3.14, it’s only 3.14 in euclidian worlds. We are not even sure ours is one