Ah, no. At best they prove that we can't simulate our own universe. They don't prove ours isn't simulated or that other, higher fidelity simulations can't simulate similar ones.
The idea that the universe is a simulation proceeds as follows:
(1) Person notices that computer simulations are getting increasingly powerful. Maybe we will be able to simulate something like the universe one day which will have life in it.
(2) If simulating the universe is so easy and inevitable, what are the odds that we are at the top level?
The idea in the article would refute the inductive step.
At that point the whole idea becomes quite removed from what most people would think of when asked to consider if the universe is a simulation.
To clarify: without being able to simulate the universe from within the universe itself (i.e. needing to resort to some "outside" higher-fidelity universe), then the word "simulation" becomes meaningless.
We could just as easily refer to the whole thing (the inner "simulation" and the outer "simulation") as just being different "layers of abstraction" of the same universe, and drop the word "simulation" altogether. It would have the same ontology with less baggage.
"We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity," says Dr. Faizal. "Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone. Rather, it requires a non-algorithmic understanding, which is more fundamental than the computational laws of quantum gravity and therefore more fundamental than spacetime itself."
Seems like quantum gravity theory might be missing something, no?
It's such a silly idea that whatever is simulating us would be in any way similar or care about what's possible in our universe. It's like a game of life glider thinking it can't be simulated because someone would have to know what's beyond the neighbouring cells and that's impossible! But the host universe just keeps chugging along unimpressed by our proofs.
There's also no proof that intelligence can not be produced by an algorithm. Given the evidence so far, like LLMs seem to be able to beat average humans at most tests and exams it seems quite likely.
Anyone that has had a really vivid dream will tell you the brain needs no help in creating a simulation.
The idea that no computer or system could possibly be powerful enough for the complexities of a simulation is a very trivial way of looking at things and isn’t thinking of something that is readily available.
I have long held the theory the brain is very capable of filling in all the complex details required for a simulation.
As the simplest theory, my default position is the universe is computable and that everything in the universe is computable. Note that they are not the same thing.
Some intuition:
1. If the universe contains an uncomputable thing, then you could utilize this to build a super turing complete computer. This would only make CS more interesting.
2. If the universe extends beyond the observable universe, and it's infinite, and on some level it exists, and there is some way that we know it all moves forward (not necessarily time, as it's uneven), but that's an infinite amount of information, which can never be stepped forward at once (so it's not computable). The paper itself touches on this, requiring time not to break down. Though it may be the case, the universe does not "step" infinitely much information.
One quick side, this paper uses a proof with model theory. I stumbled upon this subfield of mathematics a few weeks ago, and I deeply regret not learning about it during my time studying formal systems/type theory. If you're interested in CS or math, make sure you know the compactness theorem.
What's the difference between a simulation and a non-simulation? Nothing, except where the simulation can be broken.
Can we accurately simulate a smaller universe in this universe? If I understand correctly, according to this paper the answer is "no". Except how do we determine the simulation is inaccurate, without either knowing what is accurate (and thus having a correct simulation), or being unable to distinguish the inaccuracy from randomness (the simulation already won't perfectly predict a small part of the real universe due to such randomness, so you can't point to a discrepancy)? What does it mean for a simulation to be “inaccurate”?
Also, you don't need to simulate the entire universe to effectively simulate it for one person, e.g. put them in a VR world. From that person's perspective, both scenarios are the same.
At best, this proves the imperative paradigm of computation with any set of instructions close to what we currently use cannot adequately simulate a universe. I like this, lest we forget there are and there can be many more ways to compete, fundamentally different from what we currently consider the typical one.
Ok, but the simulation could easily have been written to include an adjunct professor at UBC’s much-less-well-known Okanagan campus who isn’t actually that great at Gödeling.
Yup, if we're in a simulation pretty much all bets are off. Mandela Effect could merely be update patches. It could patch a proof that our world is not a simulation.
Another thing to think about: if we are here, and assuming we experience things - that is we are not biological robots - and if the universe is indeed a simulation, then how are our conciousnesses any different from the ones that exist in the parent universe?
Isn't there a deeper philosophical question on what it means to be a simulation?
Is the constraint of the "simulation" definition that the thing "simulating" the universe would be a computer less complex than the universe itself?
Consider a game world in a computer, we call it a simulation, and it is, but is it any less real than our reality, when thinking in terms of realities? In other words, we feel like our reality is more real because the game is less complex, we understand it fully and it is run using mechanisms we know and understand. So what would make us think it is a more real reality than our own?: If we didn't understand how it works? If its workings and rules are more complex than ours?
Taking a step back, are we as humans even capable of understanding a reality that isn't ours, even as a concept? Things like time, space, and fundamental logic are properties of a reality. I can't imagine a reality without them (at least time and space). We keep thinking in terms of "another place with time and space", how about a place with just one or neither? Imagine a computer program trying to understand a reality that isn't memory and clock rate. memory isn't space as in the space we know, it is capacity. clock rate isn't time as in the time we know, but it is very similar. In an SMP system you have "clock rate" spread across cores and processors so it is a concept different from our concept of linear time. If our reality is in an SMP, there would be multiple separate parallel but converging timelines, but then again is dejavu speculative/preemptive execution?
I know I'm all over the place with this post, but my goal is to question the entire concept of a "simulation". Is it simply a relativistic and human-centric way of expressing our perception of reality relative to other realities? When We dream, is that dream world any less real than ours? Certainly, for us it is no different than any unreality, but that's only for us.
I'm thinking the whole concept of "simulation" stops making sense if there are multiple realities (which I'm only talking about hypothetically, I don't actually believe that). In terms of a single reality within the same time-space and rules of physics and all that, what does it mean for the universe to be a simulation?
With multiple realities, you have to stop presuming things like time and space as we understand them, just the same as time and space in a dream, or in a video game (or any program). Is the world of bits, bytes, processor instructions and memory addresses any less real or more of of a simulation than ours would be in a multiple-reality scenario?
Consider the very basic assumption of causality, that things originate from somewhere and sometime, if the space-time assumption isn't a given, then the very concept of causality might not apply in some realities, and thus in the relationship between realities, and therefore the whole concept of our reality being a simulation depends on causality being a thing, because we're saying our reality is caused by another reality. For there to be a causal relationship, not only does space-time need to exist but it needs to be in the same space-time reference-frame for one to cause another. But again, we can't assume the rules of causality are the same or that there isn't some other fundamental element of reality that makes it all work when talking about inter-reality relationships.
I think we are too tethered to things like mass, energy, time, space. 1+1 resulting in two. What I would like to see explored more (by people smarter than me) is the fundamental element of reality that is information. Before all of those things (time,space,mass,energy, rules,etc...) there is information. Similar to the realities we create in our computers and how they need information to exist first and foremost, and then things can be done with that information and our own little primitive proto-reality is created. All those other things may be different from the perspective of a computer program, but information, while transformed in the way it is represented and processed, at least in our simulations (or proto-realities), the information from our reality is the whole point of that sub-reality's existence.
You can infer things about our reality as a computer program if you focus on the information. no matter how well it is described to a computer program, it can look at a picture and think "hmm.. an apple" but it simply cannot perceive things as we do. it does not experience time,space, color,taste like we do.
So, if we consider reality relative to the experience of the observer as defined by the properties of the world they're in, then the concept of a simulation is entirely relative to our experience in our world and its properties. But if our reality is "caused" by and "executed on" (presumptive concepts) elsewhere, then we would need to understand elsewhere's world's properties and perceive that super-reality, and only then can we experiencially claim that our reality is simulated?
It's a bit like motion and relativity isn't it? if you can't define the frame of reference you can't measure the motion in any meaningful way. You can't tell how fast a car is going if you can't define from what perspective you're measuring from. That sounds silly at first until you consider the entire planet is in motion around the sun, and the solar system hurtling through the galaxy. Not to mention another car traveling at the same speed would not observe any motion in relation to itself. We're trying to measure simulation, but from our perspective (we're the thing that's "moving" if it were motion), we can potentially measure it from the other reality's perspective but not without knowing what that reality is.
Can a computer program tell that it is in a computer reality?
Can you write code that can do that? Certainly it can print output that claims as much, we can even simulate the entire computer system within a program running in that system. But it still can't figure out what "space" means or "time" means as we experience it, it can learn about energy, rules of physics,etc..but it can't experience them. So when it determines that that is in a simulation, its definition of things is still relative to its own experience so it isn't really determining that it is in a simulation, it is just describing things we told it via information transfer about our reality. When you tell that program "We created your reality" its concept of "created" or "originated" is vastly different from ours, so unless it can test for things it can't even conceptualize, how can it truly tell that it is in a simulation?
Sorry for the really long post! I just wanted to sort of dump my philosophical thoughts on this (and I was bored). I think theoretical physics and philosophy need to work very closely together. Questioning philosophical assumptions is important before talking about theoretical physics. The title says "Physicists prove", that's what I keyed on, you can't prove something whose definition we (at least I?) don't entirely agree on, or haven't resolved. If we can't write a computer program that can prove it is in a computer on its own, how can we prove that we're in a simulation?
The simulation hypothesis runs in the Exponential Resource Problem:
To simulate a system with N states/particles with full fidelity, the simulator needs resources that scale with N (or worse, exponentially with N for quantum systems).
This creates a hierarchy problem:
- Level 0 (base reality): has X computational resources
- Level 1 (first sim): needs X resources to simulate Level 0, but exists within Level 0, so can only access some fraction of X
- Level 2: would need even more resources than Level 1 has available.
Every simulation layer must have fewer resources than the layer above it (since it is contained within it), but needs more resources to simulate that layer. This is mathematically impossible for high-fidelity simulations.
This means either:
a) we're in base reality - there's no way to create a full-fidelity simulation without having more computational power than the universe you're simulating contains
b) simulations must be extremely "lossy" - using shortcuts, approximations, rendering only what's observed (like a video game), etc. But then you must answer: why do unobserved quantum experiments still produce consistent results? Why does the universe render distant galaxies we will never visit?
c) the simultation uses physics we don't understand - perhaps the base reality operates on completely different principles that are vastly more computationally efficient. But this is unfalsifiable speculation.
This is also known as the "substrate problem"; you can't create something more complex thatn youself only using your own resources.
Even more devastating is the CASCADING COMPUTATION PROBLEM.
Issue: it is not just that you need resources proportional to the simulate system's complexity, you need resources to compute every state transition.
The cascade:
a) simulated universe at Time T: has N particles / states
b) to compute time T+1: the simulator must process all N states according to physics laws
c) that computation itself has states: the simulator's computation involves memory states, processor states, energy flows. Let's call that M computational states
d) but M > N: the simulator needs additional machinery beyond just representing the simulated states. It needs the computational apparatus to calculate state transitions, store intermediate values, handle the simulation logic itself.
The TIME PROBLEM
There's also a temporal dimension:
- one "tick" of simulated time requires many ticks of simulator time (to compute all the physics)
- if the simulator is itself simulated, its ticks require even more meta-simulator ticks
- time dilates exponentially down the simulation stack
So either:
a) we're in base reality, or
b) we're in a very shallow simulateion (maybe 1 - 2 levels deep max), or
c) the sim uses radical shortcuts that should be observable
DangitBobby|2 months ago
WhyOhWhyQ|2 months ago
(1) Person notices that computer simulations are getting increasingly powerful. Maybe we will be able to simulate something like the universe one day which will have life in it.
(2) If simulating the universe is so easy and inevitable, what are the odds that we are at the top level?
The idea in the article would refute the inductive step.
harpiaharpyja|2 months ago
To clarify: without being able to simulate the universe from within the universe itself (i.e. needing to resort to some "outside" higher-fidelity universe), then the word "simulation" becomes meaningless.
We could just as easily refer to the whole thing (the inner "simulation" and the outer "simulation") as just being different "layers of abstraction" of the same universe, and drop the word "simulation" altogether. It would have the same ontology with less baggage.
derbOac|2 months ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1362
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4169/amer.math.monthl...
imtringued|2 months ago
DuperPower|2 months ago
p1esk|2 months ago
Seems like quantum gravity theory might be missing something, no?
viraptor|2 months ago
malux85|2 months ago
Then it was spirit
Then it was geometry
Then it was a machine
Then it was an equation
Then it was a network
Now it’s a simulation
They always remake the universe to the fashionable transcendent thing of the era,
Human mortality obfuscates this a little but if you were around for it, you’d see this clear repeating pattern of humanity
jqpabc123|2 months ago
The same may apply to "intelligence" --- aka AGI.
As far as I know, there is no proof that AGI can be produced or simulated by a binary logic algorithm running on a finite computer.
Hence, some people support the idea of "emergence" --- aka alchemy, aka PFM --- Pure Friggin Magic.
Kim_Bruning|2 months ago
On the other hand, looking at the state of the world, some may have their doubts.
[1] (A,T,G,C) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_and_RNA_codon_tables#Stand...
Kim_Bruning|2 months ago
Say you want to see what a car is made of. You can take it apart (reduce it) into parts on the workshop floor. Now you know what it's made of.
But you have to put it back together again before you have something you can start and drive away (emergent properties)
At no point does anything magical happen:
parts x organization_of_the_parts <-> the working car
reduction <- -> emergence
daymanstep|2 months ago
tim333|2 months ago
iJohnDoe|2 months ago
The idea that no computer or system could possibly be powerful enough for the complexities of a simulation is a very trivial way of looking at things and isn’t thinking of something that is readily available.
I have long held the theory the brain is very capable of filling in all the complex details required for a simulation.
seeknotfind|2 months ago
Some intuition:
1. If the universe contains an uncomputable thing, then you could utilize this to build a super turing complete computer. This would only make CS more interesting.
2. If the universe extends beyond the observable universe, and it's infinite, and on some level it exists, and there is some way that we know it all moves forward (not necessarily time, as it's uneven), but that's an infinite amount of information, which can never be stepped forward at once (so it's not computable). The paper itself touches on this, requiring time not to break down. Though it may be the case, the universe does not "step" infinitely much information.
One quick side, this paper uses a proof with model theory. I stumbled upon this subfield of mathematics a few weeks ago, and I deeply regret not learning about it during my time studying formal systems/type theory. If you're interested in CS or math, make sure you know the compactness theorem.
Paper direct:
https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488.html
I enjoyed some commentary here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/1om3u47/pub...
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
anikom15|2 months ago
rurban|2 months ago
armchairhacker|2 months ago
Can we accurately simulate a smaller universe in this universe? If I understand correctly, according to this paper the answer is "no". Except how do we determine the simulation is inaccurate, without either knowing what is accurate (and thus having a correct simulation), or being unable to distinguish the inaccuracy from randomness (the simulation already won't perfectly predict a small part of the real universe due to such randomness, so you can't point to a discrepancy)? What does it mean for a simulation to be “inaccurate”?
Also, you don't need to simulate the entire universe to effectively simulate it for one person, e.g. put them in a VR world. From that person's perspective, both scenarios are the same.
johnnienaked|2 months ago
aljgz|2 months ago
yawpitch|2 months ago
congratulator|2 months ago
zkmon|2 months ago
gus_massa|2 months ago
_tk_|2 months ago
karmakaze|2 months ago
beardyw|2 months ago
andsoitis|2 months ago
tim333|2 months ago
sir0010010|2 months ago
notepad0x90|2 months ago
Is the constraint of the "simulation" definition that the thing "simulating" the universe would be a computer less complex than the universe itself?
Consider a game world in a computer, we call it a simulation, and it is, but is it any less real than our reality, when thinking in terms of realities? In other words, we feel like our reality is more real because the game is less complex, we understand it fully and it is run using mechanisms we know and understand. So what would make us think it is a more real reality than our own?: If we didn't understand how it works? If its workings and rules are more complex than ours?
Taking a step back, are we as humans even capable of understanding a reality that isn't ours, even as a concept? Things like time, space, and fundamental logic are properties of a reality. I can't imagine a reality without them (at least time and space). We keep thinking in terms of "another place with time and space", how about a place with just one or neither? Imagine a computer program trying to understand a reality that isn't memory and clock rate. memory isn't space as in the space we know, it is capacity. clock rate isn't time as in the time we know, but it is very similar. In an SMP system you have "clock rate" spread across cores and processors so it is a concept different from our concept of linear time. If our reality is in an SMP, there would be multiple separate parallel but converging timelines, but then again is dejavu speculative/preemptive execution?
I know I'm all over the place with this post, but my goal is to question the entire concept of a "simulation". Is it simply a relativistic and human-centric way of expressing our perception of reality relative to other realities? When We dream, is that dream world any less real than ours? Certainly, for us it is no different than any unreality, but that's only for us.
I'm thinking the whole concept of "simulation" stops making sense if there are multiple realities (which I'm only talking about hypothetically, I don't actually believe that). In terms of a single reality within the same time-space and rules of physics and all that, what does it mean for the universe to be a simulation?
With multiple realities, you have to stop presuming things like time and space as we understand them, just the same as time and space in a dream, or in a video game (or any program). Is the world of bits, bytes, processor instructions and memory addresses any less real or more of of a simulation than ours would be in a multiple-reality scenario?
Consider the very basic assumption of causality, that things originate from somewhere and sometime, if the space-time assumption isn't a given, then the very concept of causality might not apply in some realities, and thus in the relationship between realities, and therefore the whole concept of our reality being a simulation depends on causality being a thing, because we're saying our reality is caused by another reality. For there to be a causal relationship, not only does space-time need to exist but it needs to be in the same space-time reference-frame for one to cause another. But again, we can't assume the rules of causality are the same or that there isn't some other fundamental element of reality that makes it all work when talking about inter-reality relationships.
I think we are too tethered to things like mass, energy, time, space. 1+1 resulting in two. What I would like to see explored more (by people smarter than me) is the fundamental element of reality that is information. Before all of those things (time,space,mass,energy, rules,etc...) there is information. Similar to the realities we create in our computers and how they need information to exist first and foremost, and then things can be done with that information and our own little primitive proto-reality is created. All those other things may be different from the perspective of a computer program, but information, while transformed in the way it is represented and processed, at least in our simulations (or proto-realities), the information from our reality is the whole point of that sub-reality's existence.
You can infer things about our reality as a computer program if you focus on the information. no matter how well it is described to a computer program, it can look at a picture and think "hmm.. an apple" but it simply cannot perceive things as we do. it does not experience time,space, color,taste like we do.
So, if we consider reality relative to the experience of the observer as defined by the properties of the world they're in, then the concept of a simulation is entirely relative to our experience in our world and its properties. But if our reality is "caused" by and "executed on" (presumptive concepts) elsewhere, then we would need to understand elsewhere's world's properties and perceive that super-reality, and only then can we experiencially claim that our reality is simulated?
It's a bit like motion and relativity isn't it? if you can't define the frame of reference you can't measure the motion in any meaningful way. You can't tell how fast a car is going if you can't define from what perspective you're measuring from. That sounds silly at first until you consider the entire planet is in motion around the sun, and the solar system hurtling through the galaxy. Not to mention another car traveling at the same speed would not observe any motion in relation to itself. We're trying to measure simulation, but from our perspective (we're the thing that's "moving" if it were motion), we can potentially measure it from the other reality's perspective but not without knowing what that reality is.
Can a computer program tell that it is in a computer reality?
Can you write code that can do that? Certainly it can print output that claims as much, we can even simulate the entire computer system within a program running in that system. But it still can't figure out what "space" means or "time" means as we experience it, it can learn about energy, rules of physics,etc..but it can't experience them. So when it determines that that is in a simulation, its definition of things is still relative to its own experience so it isn't really determining that it is in a simulation, it is just describing things we told it via information transfer about our reality. When you tell that program "We created your reality" its concept of "created" or "originated" is vastly different from ours, so unless it can test for things it can't even conceptualize, how can it truly tell that it is in a simulation?
Sorry for the really long post! I just wanted to sort of dump my philosophical thoughts on this (and I was bored). I think theoretical physics and philosophy need to work very closely together. Questioning philosophical assumptions is important before talking about theoretical physics. The title says "Physicists prove", that's what I keyed on, you can't prove something whose definition we (at least I?) don't entirely agree on, or haven't resolved. If we can't write a computer program that can prove it is in a computer on its own, how can we prove that we're in a simulation?
andsoitis|2 months ago
To simulate a system with N states/particles with full fidelity, the simulator needs resources that scale with N (or worse, exponentially with N for quantum systems).
This creates a hierarchy problem:
- Level 0 (base reality): has X computational resources
- Level 1 (first sim): needs X resources to simulate Level 0, but exists within Level 0, so can only access some fraction of X
- Level 2: would need even more resources than Level 1 has available.
Every simulation layer must have fewer resources than the layer above it (since it is contained within it), but needs more resources to simulate that layer. This is mathematically impossible for high-fidelity simulations.
This means either:
a) we're in base reality - there's no way to create a full-fidelity simulation without having more computational power than the universe you're simulating contains
b) simulations must be extremely "lossy" - using shortcuts, approximations, rendering only what's observed (like a video game), etc. But then you must answer: why do unobserved quantum experiments still produce consistent results? Why does the universe render distant galaxies we will never visit?
c) the simultation uses physics we don't understand - perhaps the base reality operates on completely different principles that are vastly more computationally efficient. But this is unfalsifiable speculation.
This is also known as the "substrate problem"; you can't create something more complex thatn youself only using your own resources.
Even more devastating is the CASCADING COMPUTATION PROBLEM.
Issue: it is not just that you need resources proportional to the simulate system's complexity, you need resources to compute every state transition.
The cascade:
a) simulated universe at Time T: has N particles / states
b) to compute time T+1: the simulator must process all N states according to physics laws
c) that computation itself has states: the simulator's computation involves memory states, processor states, energy flows. Let's call that M computational states
d) but M > N: the simulator needs additional machinery beyond just representing the simulated states. It needs the computational apparatus to calculate state transitions, store intermediate values, handle the simulation logic itself.
The TIME PROBLEM
There's also a temporal dimension:
- one "tick" of simulated time requires many ticks of simulator time (to compute all the physics)
- if the simulator is itself simulated, its ticks require even more meta-simulator ticks
- time dilates exponentially down the simulation stack
So either:
a) we're in base reality, or
b) we're in a very shallow simulateion (maybe 1 - 2 levels deep max), or
c) the sim uses radical shortcuts that should be observable