this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
175 points (96.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35806 readers
1702 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago (6 children)

According to some, assuming it's even possible to fully simulate a universe to the degree that life in it can't tell, then there should be multiple simulations running, so there would be more sim-universes than real ones, and odds would be high that any given universe you find yourself in would be a sim.

Personally I don't buy it, I think if we were in a sim the laws of physics would have to be easily computable (they aren't, see gluons) and I think it would take the computing power of an entire universe to simulate one of similar complexity at anywhere close to reasonable speed. (Note how emulators and virtual machines can only emulate a weaker system then the host system, at least at speeds comparable to native hardware)

[–] FelipeFelop@feddit.uk 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That falls apart because of the argument: Just because we find our universe complex and difficult to understand doesn’t mean that there isn’t a more complex universe that could run our universe as a simulation.

[–] AsimovsRobot@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Exactly. Liu Cixin's trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past has some great writing on different technological levels between alien species and how one could influence a lower tiered civilization by using physics.

[–] webghost0101@lemmy.fmhy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

Thanks for typing out what i was gonna say.

I am agnostic about simulation theory. If an advanced enough “something” can create a simulation undistinguishable from the lives we experience now then i would bet that we do live in one. But thats a big if and goes a bit further than one where life cant tell. (A simulated single cell organism is miles of from simulated mammals and society)

[–] Spzi@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

there would be more sim-universes than real ones

This ties back to the mediocrity principle. If there are 10 billion people living on Earth, but 10 quadrillion living in simulations, the chances for you to live in the latter is much higher.

Along goes the simulation argument by Nick Bostrom. If simulation is possible, and practiced, we likely are simulated ourselves.

Isaac Arthur) noted that housing a population in a simulation is much more efficient than doing so physically. It seems like a convergent choice for powerful civilizations which want to maximize the life supported by fading stars (or energy potentials in general).

I think it would take the computing power of an entire universe to simulate one of similar complexity

Two objections:

  1. It might be sufficient to simulate the experience, without fully simulating the underlying physics. That's how we do 3D games anyways. No one cares if we actually simulate individual air molecules. If the cloth moves indistinguishable as if, that's as good as the original, for a much lower cost. You can also cull unobserved parts of the universe.
  2. Host and simulation can have completely unrelated laws of nature. Specifically, inhabitants of the simulation cannot study their host environment. As such, I think making assumptions about the host makes no sense.
[–] AsimovsRobot@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Those are some really interesting points, thanks for your input.

[–] webghost0101@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

How much would speed matter to a simulated lifeform. Ive often wondered if time would suddenly stop and then continue we would probably just experience it like it didn’t stop.

[–] Matte@feddit.it 5 points 1 year ago

but time is relative. we might very well live in a simulation that takes a minute of “external time” to compute a single tick of our time. we just can’t experience it.

[–] Mirodir@lemmy.fmhy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I'm not really a believer of the whole simulated universe theory, but I find your arguments against it weak.

You're basing what is and isn't easily calculatable off of our experiences. Same with "complexities of the universes". However, if our world is indeed simulated, there's no telling what the host universe is like. It might have crazy different math and be far far more complex than ours. Us trying to understand it would essentially be an excercise in futility.