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[Reelya]

If we want to go over all the other points.

(1) bell's theorem says there purely local hidden variables cannot explain quantum phenomena deterministically. But it says nothing on whether there are non-local deterministic influences and unknown non-local variables we haven't taken into account. That's stated in the link. So it rules out one single mechanism, not the concept.

As for the electromagnetic field thing, is there a citation for that that doesn't link back to bell's theorem?

I'd argue he has not successfully refuted even a single point I brought up.

He made a lot of nonsensical arguments like that a simulation must be able to change the laws of physics. Now that's really a non-sequiter. A simulation can change whatever is inside the simulation, so it's a no-brainer there. And it doesn't need to change anything in it's own externel frame of reference, so how is this even a point? The argument was that something that needed so much memory implied that whoever had that much ram would be powerful enough to change the laws of physics in their own universe to spawn baby universes. Now, that's far from a given thing. It's like saying "well if you have enough bricks to build a pyramid that big you can obviously change the laws of physics!". In other words, it's entirely not obvious that having sufficient processing power implies the ability to redefine your own universes' physical laws however you feel like.

[Sergarr]

If we want to go over all the other points.

(1) bell's theorem says there purely local hidden variables cannot explain quantum phenomena deterministically. But it says nothing on whether there are non-local deterministic influences and unknown non-local variables we haven't taken into account. That's stated in the link. So it rules out one single mechanism, not the concept.

How would non-local deterministic influences explain quantum phenomena deterministically? I'm curious.

As for the electromagnetic field thing, is there a citation for that that doesn't link back to bell's theorem?

Electromagnetic field is, for your information, a field. It's continuous. It's defined at each point of its existence. There is an infinite incalculable number of point in any volume of space. Therefore it would take an infinite amount of memory to fully describe it to use in simulation.

I'd argue he has not successfully refuted even a single point I brought up.

He made a lot of nonsensical arguments like that a simulation must be able to change the laws of physics. Now that's really a non-sequiter. A simulation can change whatever is inside the simulation, so it's a no-brainer there. And it doesn't need to change anything in it's own externel frame of reference, so how is this even a point? The argument was that something that needed so much memory implied that whoever had that much ram would be powerful enough to change the laws of physics in their own universe to spawn baby universes. Now, that's far from a given thing. It's like saying "well if you have enough bricks to build a pyramid that big you can obviously change the laws of physics!". In other words, it's entirely not obvious that having sufficient processing power implies the ability to redefine your own universes' physical laws however you feel like.

It's not any simulation that must change the laws of physics, it's a simulation of entire universe that must do it because of sheer quantities of information involved and the issues of continuum I've delineated above.

Right now, with the whole might of super-computers available, we can calculate the movements of 100-1000s of atoms in a lattice using quantum mechanics for about 10^-12 seconds. The model after that diverges from reality as the errors accumulate. Now, with systems like these (weather prediction is a good example, too), to increase the stable processing time by a fixed amount, you need to increase your computing time exponentially.

This is why we can't predict weather for more than a week with good results, and this is why a computer capable of simulation the whole universe for 14 billions of years is going to be either unimaginably big or work for an unimaginably long period of time for every moment which passes in our reality. Both require reality warping to function, first one - to deal with pesky relativity and "not enough matter in the meta-universe to construct such a machine", second one - to deal with pesky second law of thermodynamics.

[forsaken1111]

To touch on one of your points, time wouldn't really be a factor. Even if every 'frame' took a million 'years' to determine outside of the simulation, the simulation itself wouldn't notice that time lag.

And without knowing what the universe outside the simulation is like, it is hard to make assertions about what is possible there.

[Andres]

...created by humans who perished after the technological singularity. You're programmed not to believe this, of course.

That is all.

But the singularity was just a software simulation created by aliens, _{who were just a software simulation created by smarter aliens, who were just a software simulation created by God, who was just a software simulation created by the Elder Gods, who were just a software simulation created by...}

"You may think you are being clever, son, but
it's TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN!"

I was disappointed that that wasn't a reference.

I've read that it's actually very likely that we're in a matrix. The theory goes like this...
Given enough time, a race of beings will create a perfect or near-perfect matrix. As it is a perfect matrix designed to simulate their world, the beings within said matrix will create their own matrix, and in that matrix the beings there would create their own matrix, ad infinitum. The odds that we share the same reality with the first race is thus infinitely small as their matrix has created an infinite number of virtual universes where perfectly-simulated existence can take place.

[Bauglir]

Ehh, that reasoning is really about as solid as extrapolating Moore's Law off into infinity. There's a finite amount of information to play around with in the universe. At some point, the abstraction runs out and an actual machine has to execute instructions; and there's only so small we can build a machine.

[Sergarr]

To touch on one of your points, time wouldn't really be a factor. Even if every 'frame' took a million 'years' to determine outside of the simulation, the simulation itself wouldn't notice that time lag.

And without knowing what the universe outside the simulation is like, it is hard to make assertions about what is possible there.

As I've said, it would require for the universe outside the simulation to not be adherent to second law of thermodynamics or to circumvent them somehow.

Also time is still a factor, if only because random information loss is a thing. Over a really long period of time, there will be significant loss of information in transit due to errors and random noise. Either the meta-universe doesn't have errors/random noise, or there are some time constraints.

In general, simulation isn't the problem, it's the precise simulation that's impossible to do without either reality warping or having a literal magic universe with no second laws of thermodynamics, no random noise and who knows what else.
At this point, Occam's razor tells me that a spontaneous emergence of universe as a random fluctuation, if not more likely, is at least more plausible.

[Reelya]

Actually, as an aside, weather prediction is not a problem of processing power, it's a problem of measurement accuracy. They do dozens or hundreds of runs of the same data, with added fluctuations each time, and they take the average of multiple runs. So, we actually have excess computing power for weather prediction (as evidenced by them running the same simulations over and over) but we lack sufficiently detailed measurements to feed into the systems.

Also time is still a factor, if only because random information loss is a thing. Over a really long period of time, there will be significant loss of information in transit due to errors and random noise. Either the meta-universe doesn't have errors/random noise, or there are some time constraints.

Quantum fluctuations are a measurable thing. So "errors and random noise" aren't a conceptual problem. We have errors and random noise in our subatomic processes. Maybe they built the system to cope with that, and we are actually measuring that in our quantum processes. So the time constraints or "no noise" rule would only be valid if we never noticed quantum fluctuations or the like ourselves. Also fuzziness, and imperfect information ... our attempts to measure subatomic happenings are plagued with their apparent fuzziness. It's not inconceivable that a simulation would take such shortcuts to reduce data storage needs. Say you were modelling electrons, but instead of a precise location you store a vague location and add a random perturbation every time that data is accessed so it's not too smooth. Hell, that sounds a lot like quantum phenomena, right?

Also the heisenberg uncertainty principle, that if you closely measure the velocity of an object, it's position becomes less well-defined, and vice-versa. That sort of implies there's a finite amount of memory associated with each quantum, and that there's some mismatch between the granularity we can measure and the information granularity of the quantums themselves. Maybe it's a dynamic system which reduces the bits used to store one value when the other needs to temporarily be better described. Sort of like noticeable level of detail popping in a game but no-one ever expected you to look that closely.

[Sergarr]

Also time is still a factor, if only because random information loss is a thing. Over a really long period of time, there will be significant loss of information in transit due to errors and random noise. Either the meta-universe doesn't have errors/random noise, or there are some time constraints.

Quantum fluctuations are a measurable thing. So "errors and random noise" aren't a conceptual problem. We have errors and random noise in our subatomic processes. Maybe they built the system to cope with that, and we are actually measuring that in our quantum processes. So the time constraints or "no noise" rule would only be valid if we never noticed quantum fluctuations or the like ourselves. Also fuzziness, and imperfect information ... our attempts to measure subatomic happenings are plagued with their apparent fuzziness. It's not inconceivable that a simulation would take such shortcuts to reduce data storage needs.

Just because it's measurable, doesn't mean it won't screw you over. You can't build a system to cope with that, because it will kind of screw you over if you do calculations that take an immeasurable amount of time. Like, the whole computing structure will start quantum tunneling itself into a sphere because of that. Can't exactly cope with that, unless you somehow manage to notice every mistake that has ever happened and redo all the part where mistakes were made.

But theoretically you can do something like that, maybe.

But the total data storage needs are still infinite because fields take infinite amount of memory to store information for and even if that wasn't the case, with relativity you also need to store information for all moments of time, which are infinite in count, too.

Say you were modelling electrons, but instead of a precise location you store a vague location and add a random perturbation every time that data is accessed so it's not too smooth. Hell, that sounds a lot like quantum phenomena, right?

It sounds like quantum, but it is not actually quantum. Look up quantum entanglement to understand why.

Also the heisenberg uncertainty principle, that if you closely measure the velocity of an object, it's position becomes less well-defined, and vice-versa. That sort of implies there's a finite amount of memory associated with each quantum, and that there's some mismatch between the granularity we can measure and the information granularity of the quantums themselves. Maybe it's a dynamic system which reduces the bits used to store one value when the other needs to temporarily be better described. Sort of like noticeable level of detail popping in a game but no-one ever expected you to look that closely.

Each object doesn't actually have a single more-or-less-well-defined position, but a whole cloud of positions and velocities corresponding to these positions that it can take with different probabilities. Of course that also takes an infinite amount of memory to store (because it's a GODDAMN FIELD OF PROBABILITIES), but it doesn't really matter to you, doesn't it.

You're both assuming that the creators of the universe are super-smart (being able to create a simulation of the universe), and also super-stupid (by taking shortcuts which are not actually shortcuts at all), which sounds to me like they're not really intelligent at all. Which means that at this point it might as well be random fluctuation. Which means that it's not a simulation.

[Reelya]

If something can take on near-infinite set of values with a random probability, in computing you would never do that as "infinite information per item", you'd have a central table of values, and do a random roll and pick one as needed. In that sense, a seemingly infinite set of possibilities per item actually implies that there isn't any data there, not that there's lots of data there.

Consider a set of chests in a game that you can open any time, and any one of a huge set of objects can appear in the chests, seemingly at random. Does this imply that lots of data is needed to specify what's in each chest? Or that there is really no data about each chest and it's drawn from a single data pool as needed? Entirely random processes imply there is no actual data to be had until you need it. So we can question the implications that quantum randomness imply to the true amount of information a system contains. Entirely random information that changes as needed doesn't really imply large data stores. They imply vastly reduced data storage requirements.

Also the idea that atoms can hold infinite amounts of data is sort of at odds with the implications of the heisenberg uncertainty principle, which heavily implies there's a limit to how much data they can actually represent. But ... if we accept that one atom can in fact hold infinite amounts of data, then we have also solved the RAM issue for a super-race running universe simulators right? They could easily set up each a single atom to represent as much data as needed, and simulate a large universe in only a finite amount of atoms, since each atom can hold infinite data.

Also with entanglement, if you have two piece of information digitally encoded, link two separate things to that one data field, you also get entanglement of the states of those separate pieces of information. Imagine a shared pointer in an existing computing system. You can save memory by sharing data fields between disparate objects, but tweaking one object will now change the state of the other object. This could explain the otherwise inexplicable "at a distance" effects of quantum entanglement that we can't explain in terms of normal forces or fields. In other words, many of these things can plausibly be explained as either the limits of simulation technology or "plain old quantum weirdness for no specific reason".

[Sergarr]

Ok I surrender you win we do really live in a simulation that's filled with weird buggy stuff

[Reelya]

I don't really believe it, but yeah it would be funny if it did turn out we're in a simulation and all the "deep" physics is actually a result of them being cheap with shoddy coding because that quantum stuff was considered too small for anyone to notice the problems. Maybe the devs don't even know about half the glitches we're noticing, and if we could talk to them they'd be like "huh?".

[forsaken1111]

Also time is still a factor, if only because random information loss is a thing. Over a really long period of time, there will be significant loss of information in transit due to errors and random noise. Either the meta-universe doesn't have errors/random noise, or there are some time constraints.

Random errors can be corrected for. We do it already in our own computers by using checksums and error checking. If you store information in multiple locations and crosscheck it, you can tell when things go wrong.

It's not foolproof obviously.

Ok I surrender you win we do really live in a simulation that's filled with weird buggy stuff

Oh don't be that way, we're just having a discussion. I don't believe it any more than anyone else.

[Tawa]

I don't believe it any more than anyone else.

In that case, can you please not phrase the OP and thread title in the most presumptuous, condescending way possible?

[Reelya]

http://theawakenment.com/theoretical-physicist-james-gates-finds-computer-code-in-string-theory-equation/#sthash.sHwZ7w8J.dpbs

Relatively recently, whilst exploring the mathematics of string theory, Theoretical Physicist James Gates and his researcher discovered something rather interesting buried deep within the mathematical equations of super symmetry.

They found computer code.

And it isn’t just random 1’s and 0’s either. Bizarrely, the code they found is code which is used in computer browser operating system software.

Specifically; Block Linear Self Dual Error Correcting Code.

So apparently some physicist found known binary error-correcting codes hidden in string theory.

More is discussed here:
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/the-peer-to-peer-hypothesis-and-a-new-theory-of-free-will-a-brief-overview/

Apparently a lot of the weird properties of physics are shared by peer-to-peer network architectures, as well as the error correcting codes which are specifically of the type browsers use for dealing with incomplete data over networks.

[forsaken1111]

I don't believe it any more than anyone else.

In that case, can you please not phrase the OP and thread title in the most presumptuous, condescending way possible?

Sure. Let me fix that.

Didn't realize someone might take offense at what I thought was an obvious joke.