the universe is relative to the observer.

He seem pretty confident about a bunch of theoretical stuff..

Wouldn't you need an enormously powerful computer to stimulate a universe?

In what reality or universe does that computer exist?

Aren't we right back at the "big bang doesn't work because what happened before it" paradox?

Interesting.. but sorta silly.

I feel like the Tenth Dimension theory explain things better.

you only need to simulate it,,for one person..do wow toons,know they are in wow?

No, WOW toons don't know anything....but you know they're toons when you interact with them, no?
There's one hell of a lot of assumptions and mathematical fudging in his argument.

wow toons dont know they are a simulation,,,you would only need to make the simulation,,,for one person..

That's true only if there's only one person in the simulation. If we are supposed to ALL be in a simulation, you either need a separate simulation for each person, or one that combines all simulations into one.

The problem here is he makes silly assumptions in his math. It's like he's saying 'you can either be wet, or dry, so mathematically I can say 1/2 of people are underwater.'. It simply doesn't follow.

And his argument also completely ignores the 'why'. A simulation takes energy to operate, reality just operates on it's own. Why would it make sense to use the huge amounts of energy and effort to 'trap' entities in a simulation and keep them there? The whole 'humans as batteries' thing was the worst part of the Matrix by far, IMO. You know what makes a better energy capture/storage device? Just about anything.

He is making the first cause arguement,,by simply rewording it, by saying everything has a catalyst,,,it doesnt,,,nothing does,,,energy and matter transform...he says everything has a catalyst,,but it doesnt,,,nothing does,,

Realistically recreating human consciousness - along with every event in the universe - is no small task.

It would require:

- quantum computing
- a data storage room the size of texas (if not all north america)
- easily more energy than is consumed by the entire planet in a year

So stating - "only one person would need to experience that simulation"..

..is like saying - "you would only need one person",

to recreate the Great Wall & Pyramids & Grand Canyon & Himalayas, etcetera..

Sure, I guess. But the amount of time & energy make it extremely improbable.

..Much more likely the civilization would collapse first.

The guy even concedes that point multiple times.

you dont need to recreate every event in the universe at all,,if you are living in a simulation, then there were no dinosaurs,,,see?,,there was no WW2,,the big bang never actually happened,,etc...,and you only need to do it,,for one person,,,,

You clearly have a misconception of the theories being discussed here.
Not being rude or anything

Even the Matrix was a continuously running program, that only crashed & rebooted occasionally.

So don't think it the theory as a videogame with logins and save states..

It's more like.. popping in a dvd and watching until the end.

The big bang is when you pressed play.

So while, I guess, you could pause without anything knowing the simulation was paused..

If you stopped and started, that would create an entire collapse of the universe and another big bang..


So yeah, not World of Warcraft.

More like Cookie Clicker
..with browser cookies disabled..
close the window and you'll have to start from scratch.

He did say it could take 500 years for us to reach the point where we can create such simulations. Considering what we have done in 60 years it seems feasible to me.

The real question is if you are living in a simulation what's to say you yourself aren't an AI construct built for the real players to interact with.

Who are these real players? Do they know they are in a simulation? If they do surely they are doing crazy shit and having wild time. Could we all be serving the 1% in a more direct way than we even realize? Could they switch us off as soon as they are done playing?


Maybe we are all part of the latest GTA for this guy:
https://40.media.tumblr.com/20fdd0cf285da76d00423336fbce9ac2/tumblr_mxhmetV29n1s9x4auo1_500.jpg

none of that has to happen...the entire simulation could have started yesterday...its a simulation. None of that actually happened....see?

I'll keep this fairly brief for once but, why is everyone so hung up on the idea that the theoretical "simulation" is somehow distinct from "reality"?

To put it another way, what are the laws of physics themselves?

We do appear to inhabit a reality defined by laws we can describe mathematically. The mathematical models may be abstracted, but whatever they describe is presumably in some sense analogous in its "true" nature right? (even if we can't get at it directly)

If you take the leap into thinking that reality may be more mathematical than physical in nature (or rather that "physical" is a property of what we could think of as mathematical phenomena interacting in the right way), then questions about who's computer were in kind of become moot.

If reality itself is fundamentally mathematical in nature, we don't need a computer in which to run it, so much as reality itself is the computer.

I really don't think it's an either or thing, more like a shift in how we think about the concept of "reality" itself. Even if an experiment could prove that the universe is holographic in nature, it needn't change anything about it's validity as a "real" thing.

The "simulation" and "reality" needn't be mutually exclusive, merely different ways of understanding the same phenomenon i.e. that we exist and experience things.

@robdot

You're either trollin' or just real thick.

Yes, the simulation could in start an arbitrary place.
Yes, the devs could pre-programmed our knowledge of historical events.

That's besides the point, you're missing the point.

One philosophical tool we humans use to analyze the world is called - Occam's Razor.

Meaning, hypotheses that are overly complex should be simplified to their bare minimum in order to draw the best conclusions.

You COULD make a simulation with pre-programmed historical events.. and procedurally generated galaxies..

but that's even complex than simply setting up a few simple rules and variables.. and letting that simulation play out.

THE EVEN MORE GLARINGLY POINT THAT YOU KEEP GLOSSING OVER is..

It's much more likely that any civilization advance enough to create such simulations...

Would probably be extinct or too busy living in utopia to do so.

AGAIN, a point the author of the video concede MANY times.

So if someone is gonna make a simulation of the universe..

It would likely be some Fermi Lab scientist who wanted to study the Big Bang.

They would reverse engineer the expansion of the universe as much as possible..

[ a thing that's already been done and being tweaked to get even better Planck length "resolution", as it were ]

And once they got the best estimations..

Would dump all those rules and variables into a quantum computer and run sim after sim, checking to see WHAT HAPPENS AT THE END!

Much like The Game of Life sim developed by mathematician John Conway.

Your assuming these things are really there,,,in a simulation, they are not..im not here...only you are..

Everything else you said is just blind assertions,,,if a civilization has the power to do something,,,history has shown us,,they will...As soon as your civilization shows the technology to run a simulation like this,,,then the odds you are in one rise dramatically...

Ludus Sim 0.42

Disregard, I mark this each time we get here.

Should be out of beta soon.

A computer big enough to accurately calculate the position and properties of every "particle" (and ever decreasing subdivisions of energy and matter) would need to be the size of the universe in the first place. We can't even simulate enough particles in an n-body simulation to match the number of stars in a galaxy, let alone individual molecules, or shall we go further and say atoms, or further and say protons, neutrons and electrons? And that's for ONE galaxy amongst hundreds of billions in the OBSERVABLE universe... using only ONE force - gravity!

The guy has a great point about the Big Bang - a billion billion galaxies worth of matter and energy created in a split second from nothing? Doesn't sound like like the conservation of energy that is so fundamental to physics, right? But that's no reason to throw out hundreds of years of evidence and research which has proven conservation of energy to be true since then. The big bang makes the most sense given what we see today... if you want to propose a better theory, it has to make more sense than the Big Bang theory. Saying that the big bang doesn't make sense is not an appropriate starting point for a new theory, and doesn't lead to "so therefore we're in a simulation."

And it's not good enough to appeal to simplicity like @robdot is doing - basically saying that everything we see could very easily be an illusion for our benefit. That's an argument for God, in my opinion... just like how religious fanatics say "it was God's will for this to happen" we'd instead say "well, that's what the simulation wanted to show us" and call it a day. Furthermore if the manifestations of physical laws out there in the universe are illusions, they are at least consistent illusions that we can calculate and predict. And in that case, what is the difference to our lives whether we call it "reality" or "simulation" or "computer"? It it still what we always knew it was. If something created our universe and allowed it to run like a simulation, it is almost certainly intangible to us and for all intents and purposes meaningless too, because we can't touch, feel, see or understand it on any level.

This is one of the topics i asked of my favourite professor - how can we trust what we see if it could be faked, and what exists beyond our universe? His answer was, if i have to doubt what i see, i might as well not do anything at all, and if you want an answer to the second question talk to a philosopher. This is a philosophical discussion, not a scientific one. The scientific method doesn't care what you call the place you live in nor "who" we think "created" it. You can't hope to understand anything if you don't base it on the evidence you have. You certainly can't form a theory on the basis that all evidence is untrustworthy.

In about 350 years, we should start seeing the light from the giant eyeball of the sysadmin gazing at us wondering if the latte he spilled on us back in the dark ages did anything bad.

Is he doing an impersonation of Terence McKenna? Or is his voice just that spot on? (Or did Terence McKenna come back from the dead?!)

Entertaining, but I stopped listening when he got to that myth about entanglement.