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That's assuming there is a substrate that can be disturbed. That's where the parent's analogy breaks down.

As an example of an alternative analogy: think of how many bombs need to explode in your dreams before the "substrate" is "rippled". How big do the bombs need to be? How fast does the "matter" have to "move"? I think "reality" is more along those lines. If there is a substrate - and that's a big if - IMO it's more likely to be something pliable like "consciousness". Not in the least "disturbed" by anything moving in it.

discuss

cwillu|7 months ago

It's a pretty exact description: the universe is made of fields, smashing stable excitations of those fields together produces disturbances in other fields (“virtual particles”) that sometimes makes (fleetingly) stable excitations in other fields, which then fall apart through the same dance into different stable excitations than we started with, allowing us to prove that the field in the middle exists and start to determine its properties.

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...

rolisz|7 months ago

A nightmare that makes you wake up screaming? I'd say that counts as disturbing the substrate.

jerf|7 months ago

Another way to think of it. Consider breaking out of Minecraft. Can you do it?

Maybe. There are certainly ways to crash it today. But now let's go through some cycles of fixing those crashes, and we'll run it on a system that can handle the resource usage even if it slows down in the external reality's terms quite a bit. And we'll ignore the slash commands and just stick to the world interactions you can make.

After that, can you forcefully break out of it from the inside?

No.

It is not obligatory for systems to include escape hatches. We're just not great at building complex systems without them. But there's no reason they are necessarily present in all systems.

Another brain bender covering the same idea in a different direction: The current reigning candidate for BB(6) runs an incomprehensible amount of computation [1]. Yet, did it at any point "break out" into our world? Nope. Nor do any of the higher ones. They're completely sealed in their mathematical world, which is fortunate since any of them would sweep aside our entire universe without noticing.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8972

BobaFloutist|7 months ago

I mean sometimes a dream upsets you enough that you wake up