Don’t get me wrong. I am all about comedy and parody. All in good fun! And to point out the comedy of hubris, what could be better than to suggest that all the world is nought but what we say it is and nothing more? The world is nothing more than a selection of words, for dear reader, after all what else do I have at my disposal to describe to you the world? Pure information, and number – as in that symbolic portion of our minds – make up the world around us. The universe is nothing more than a simulation, a finite state machine. The territory is a map. Symbol is reality! Fake it til you make it.
Ha! Yeah, well spoiler alert: sorry but it’s not.
Lets go through some of the evidence and common sense against anything at all really being “just a simulation”:
- Simulations have never exactly predicted any physical system
- Even abstract simplifications of reality such as the three body problem cannot be accurately simulated, and will be wildly and quickly different from perfection at any finite simulation strength.
- Simulations can not even perfectly simulate what other simulations will do.
- Simulations are run on real hardware which at the base level must exist in reality, hence there must be a reality which isn’t a simulation.
Yeah it’s really quite amusing to me. I like to smoke because I know all the extra terabytes of storage being used to simulate the hydrodynamics of the smoke diffusing and convecting. Think about how many extra processors must get put online to simulate the fluid mechanics every time you put some cream in your coffee. Right now there is a subroutine whose job it is is to figure out if we are stupid enough to believe this nonsense. Do you think that particular subroutine was handled recursively?
You know that’s not what Descartes meant when he said “cogito ergo sum” right? It wasn’t that the world is actually thoughts, nor that the territory is just the map, rather he was saying that the “I” implied in “sum” , the beingness of the self is the thinking. He was saying he was a thinker at heart, the one who thinks is the self, and that is why he never would have for one second considered such an amusingly puerile proposal as the real world being a computer simulation.
I mean do you want an actual apple in your hand or just the word “apple”? These guys are arguing it’s the same thing, the world is really just the words. Oh, so you are simulating the apple, the feel, the metabolism, the digestion, and.. what, graphing some predictions? What is the purpose of this simulation? Is this whole simulation running just to fire a few input signals into a brain in a vat somewhere unspecified which doesn’t count as part of the world because it isn’t being simulated? You gotta wonder how far down into Jupiter the simulations are running because there’s a lot of hydrodynamics going on there.
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When we say “the world is three dimensional” we mean that we can put three numbers on any object and specify its position, and do pretty well with describing the world around us. We mean nothing more and nothing less. There’s none of this about how the world “is solely those numbers”.
Here’s another one. Brace yourself.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211019120142.htm
You like that? Information is now a physical thing, because we can simply pretend nobody actually read Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication and that we can just make up numbers and publish them for comedy purposes.
I mean we could point out that information has a definition as a quantity of communicated material, but that would ruin such a pretty story, when we could just pretend information exists without communication. Lets say a particle simply is information. Why not? How about 1.509 bits per particle? The black hole guys got away with it, why not the armchair solipsists?
Well obviously the position of a single particle could encode quite a lot of bits of information, as could the spin, mass, charge, flavor, and plenty of other stuff. It seems likely that one could even encode an arbitrary amount of information in a single particle if one was so inclined. Timing of arrival could hold a lot of information, limited only by the resolution of our clocks. Definitely many kilobytes. Make up a number, because hey it doesn’t matter here – we’re having fun. A megabyte of fun per gram. Every electron in the universe contains 12.441 bits of comedy, lets squeeze them out with our bit-juicer.
A more compelling story is that the entire world is exactly ONE bit of information. “On” it is telling us. Not “off”.
Or perhaps we should stick to actual physics where our communication and labels are not the real world itself but are merely here to describe the real world as best we can, in a series of always improving approximations. Would that be too much to ask? Not enough clickbait there I suppose.
The world is just a map, said the cartographer. The world is a song, said the musician. The world is just words, said the writer. All the world is a stage, said the playwright. Can I get in on this? Maybe the world is a blog post. A wordpress site.
“Physicist writes blog post which turns out to create the universe in which he sits, and in which every electron has <NaN> bits of information”.
That’s not the strange loop that Hofstadter had in mind you know.
And don’t give me this “Boltzmann Brain” nonsense. I don’t care how much more difficult it would be for us to construct the entire universe than it would be for us to construct a brain in a box thinking it was in our universe.. because where is the brain and the box? Is it brains in boxes “all the way down”? Why am I imagining myself capable of constructing a universe? The world doesn’t care how improbable we think it all is, really it doesn’t. When something most definitely is undeniably happening, it’s no longer all that improbable is it?
The world simply is here, go take a look for yourself, I’ll wait. It’s not a simulation because A) who would be simulating what on what hardware here? B) everything we know about simulation, computer science, and chaos theory says that would be impossible anyway and C) Error: $C Flle Not Found – Aborting Simulation
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As an aside, we can look at the psychology of anyone who might actually believe this nonsense of the world as a simulation. The “sorcerer’s explanation” describes two aspects of our psychology, one which defines the world as symbolic, things with names and communicable properties, and the other which recognizes a real world beyond the symbols. Such a “real world” is exemplified in the “real numbers” which are made up mostly of uncomputable numbers as demonstrated by Cantor, uncountable and outside the world of the symbolic.
The portion of the brain which focuses on the symbolic and communicable is said to be a “tyrant” which wants to control and explain everything. It doesn’t like the existence of the uncomputable. These theories about the world as a simulation or pure information are perhaps an act of desperation from that portion of the psyche which doesn’t want to acknowledge anything outside the symbolic and computable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
Some are desperate enough to assume that future humans have infinite computing ability and that this somehow enables them to evade the laws of chaos and simulate to arbitrary precision something or other. Oh, and we’re going to put this assumption far ahead of the evidence that we are alive here in a world of uncomputable numbers and inherently chaotic behavior.
You see that sun and those stars? And feel the cold wind on bare nipples? All that was created by an advanced man on a silicon computer. Bwahaha.
If in fact I’m wrong and the universe was created by a future human via programming it on a finite state machine, I would like to personally thank whoever was responsible for programming the laugh reflex which chokes me up when I think about how totally wrong headed the idea of the world being a simulation is. Nice job buddy! Are you paid by the line of code? Wanna get a drink sometime?