So - it's been a while since I posted here... Multiple reasons - moved a few thousand miles (two thirds the way across Australia) to share a new improved life with a lovely woman, several milestone illnesses later, retirement, yada yada. Reads like a game of The Sims doesn't it?
Which is why I've kind of had an interest in simulation theory for a while now. The theory has some merit.
It Explains A Few Things
Imagine 'being' in a simulation. Computers achieve things in 'ticks', the registers change states because an inbuilt 'clock' ticks at a (fast) known rate, each tick represents a group of operations, and a computer where the clock is stopped remains in whatever state it had until the next 'tick' allows everything to progress by one step. Modern computers have a clock that ticks at extremely high speeds.
That's why when you're buying a gaming PC you need a 'fast' CPU. (Central Processing Unit) That just means that the CPU can operate at a high clock tick rate (aka 'clock speed.')
And while we're on the idea of computer gaming - a typical 3D first person shooter game is a fairly realistic world in which you (as your in-game avatar or character) move around, encounter objects and random NPCs ('Non Player Characters') and interact with them. The game only 'exists' during a clock tick. You could stop the clock, go out and have a cup of coffee and a three course dinner, go back to the computer and restart the clock, and things would just continue from the exact point when you stopped the clock.
You could make the clock tick once a second, and the game would appear to jump from one frame to the next every second, The NPC opponents would move extremely slowly - but so would your avatar. If you could be the avatar, you wouldn't be aware of the clock tick rate, because you yourself would only exist at each clock tick, along with everything else.
Also, in a simulation, you can't simulate a continuous thing, because everything has to be laid out a tick at a time. Also, for some reason the characters wouldn't be able to measure time in a continuous stream but rather, in 'ticks'. The characters wouldn't be aware of this unless they were doing fiendishly complex experiments. If they did do such experiments they'd see that things are composed of certain smaller things, down to a unit that was the smallest they could measure, which in computer terms would be one pixel in size.
That would explain
(If, for example, we were actually living inside a simulation) things like Planck's Constant, a unit of length below the length of which nothing exists. And quanta of time. And quantum science in general... You can't measure light as a wave because *tick* you start *tick* a measurement *tick* and then look *tick* at the wave *tick* a clock-tick *tick* later and *tick* the wave hasn't gone smoothly from one state to the next but has appeared to jump between point A on the waveform to point B.
We could 'drill down' and find a constant such as Plancks's, that there is nothing smaller than. (And there are already exceptions to that but I'll get to those in a tick. (did you see what I did there?)) A "planck's constant' of anything would be an atom. Light would seem to exist as both a wave and a particle, the particle probably conveniently close in size to the distance light can travel in a single quantum of time.
There's also a few other things that mutely point to the clock-tick-divided (it's where our word "quantity" comes from) nature of our world. Our Universe is a quantum universe. That allows only two possibilities, either quantum universes are the most common universes, or else we're in a simulation. There is a third possibility, what if all but one of the other universes are simulations.
Programming 'Cheats'
The program that generated that Universe would have to be HUGE, and require unimaginable CPU power. Yet games developers can cram a great deal of a simulated world into a single PC and within the constraints of that PC's memory. Programmewrs have cheats that they use.
For a start, they don't hold ALL of the game's 'universe' in memory at any one time. If they did, they'd need a serious chunk of ALL of Google's computing time world-wide, some way to synchronise it all together, and a lot of other things we just don't have yet, like quantum computing, quantum entangled memories and computing elements so that ALL the parts of EVERYTHING were programmed EVERY clock tick.
So they have cheats.
If, in your game, you're standing outside a cluster of buildings and can't see inside, there is nothing inside those buildings. Nothing behind them, and nothing behind you. (NPC movements are calculated and if they come within range of your avatar, you become 'aware' of them. If they're behind you, there's still no actual NPC there until you turn around and look - and then the scene that's behind you is computed and the program 'forgets' the scene with the buildings until they're needed again.)
If you go inside a building, then the interior becomes the active scene and is computed.
Quantum particles.
So what about stuff like quantum particles? Quarks? Glad you asked. (And this explains perfectly why we can and do find quarks, read on.) Let's presume that the house you enter has rooms. While you're in the hallway, the inside of the rooms doesn't need to be computed so it isn't. Open the door and suddenly there are a lot of sub-room-sized objects inside. You open a cupboard and it's full of sub-cupboard-sized things in there. because you're looking in the cupboard, the room and the building don't need to be computed. So they aren't.
Inside the cupboard you find a large crate and look inside. *tick* and the cupboard's gone, the Scanning Electron Microscope appears. You look in the eyepiece, there's a hum and *tick* the crate and the SEM disappear and you can see atoms. They look like they have smaller parts but - *tick* the SEM has become the screen to a Large Hadron Collider and the atom disappears to become a mess of quarks and particles smaller than small.
When you zoom out to the whole planet again, you now know it's made of sub-units, sub-sub-units, sub-sub-sub-units, sub-sub-sub-sub-units, sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-units, and so on all the way down to at least the resolution of the LHC, but the program doesn't have to simulate all the particles, just the particles that are in your field of view at that time, and the range of possible effects that particles in your vicinity could cause.
By cheating, the programmers have gone from computing an almost infinite number of particles to only the size of particles that you can observe at your current zoom level. If you make the leap and decide that for the purposes of simplification, every other sentient being in your sphere also exists independently in the simulation, then that's still a manageable number of computations. Today, that number of synchronised calculations isn't possible. But tomorrow it might be different.
This also speaks to 'continuity of self', a conundrum that's haunted philosophers and psychologists for a long time. Basically, you go to sleep and lose consciousness - what happens in between? Are you the same person - when you wake up - as you were - when you went to sleep? Your memory is what shapes who you think you are, but memory is frangible and fragile, you can be convinced of complete untruths and end up believing implicitly that they are real memories.
How can you be sure that the 'you' that went to sleep is the same 'you' that you are right now? How can you guarantee that you were even the same species yesterday?
And by extension, we stop in between clock ticks, in between quanta of time. How can we know what happened in the preceding tick? (If you're looking at the room and see the cupboard, then look in the cupboard, there's one *tick* when your view is the room, then next *tick* your view is inside the cupboard. Why do we think the same doesn't happen to us - and how could we tell?)
So if we're in a simulation, then (for example) we could have parts of our personality, memories, or even appearance changed and as it's all part of the program we wouldn't necessarily know it.
We wouldn't know how long between clock ticks, either. In theory, we could - right now - compute a Game Of Human Sim Life as detailed as our own Universe. But we might need to code thew game asynchronously - that is, have a network of computers computing away like hell and producing a single - detailed - 'frame' of the game every six weeks. The characters wouldn't be aware of how far apart the clock *ticks* are. And if we're in this game, we also wouldn't be able to tell how much time we spent in stasis between *ticks*.
Even more brain-bending is that we have no way of knowing if the simulation has been run all the way already, or if it's been saved and restored to various points, nor do we know its purpose. How would we know if we've been rewound to 6AM yesterday a thousand times before, and if there isn't the same program running on the same computer as us, only different by a few *ticks*?
Could It Be Turtles All The Way Down?
And thereby we come to the next step. If I can just step back a bit in time (and even if that makes any sense in the context of a simulation) to Victorian times, there was a similar theory that we existed as characters in an author's book. The technology at the time was printing presses, pen and ink, and possibly typewriters. We could imagine even then that we are not really real.
Step back a bit further and we're the creations of gods, again created not naturally occurring, and the world in most religions also shaped by those gods.
So what we could see, experience, and discover - those things are what would shape our 'knowledge' at each stage of the simulation. When fire, light, and dark are the limits of our science, we frame it in terms of supernatural entities. When we have widely available printed books, we have the 'author' theory.
And now that we have fairly powerful computers, we have the 'simulation' theory. We're not real, some other Universe is the real one and we're just collections bits and bytes of a program running on a computer in that Universe. THAT in turn calls to mind the question of whether that Universe is a simulation.
As the original article at the top of this post says, there will always come a point where the topmost computer that's running simulations of computers that are in turn running simulations of computers is going to run out of processing power to run each and every one of those next-level Universes and at least ONE computer simulation in that Universe capable of running the next level simulation.
BUT. What if the topmost Universe (with that computer running a whole series of Universes with computers running yet more Universes) is doing what I suggested, taking a week to render a single *tick* of it's computer simulator? At such a point, you could then posit that there could still be another Universe above the topmost one, that runs its simulation program an order of magnitude more slowly. And so on. In effect, I'm describing the Multiverse done in computer code.
We don't really know what time is, or real actual space or matter or gravity for that matter - because they all exhibit the typical signs of being a simulation with no physical quantities whatsoever.
And what about a truly analog world? Does it have to be a DIGITAL computer simulation?
Now I suspect that I'm going to blow your mind completely. What would a truly analog world look like? Could we even imagine what that would be like? How light behaves when it's no longer constrained by quantum effects? Distance that isn't granular but continuous? Matter that is truly homogeneous? What sort of properties would a chemical have when it isn't composed of individual atoms? How far - how fast - would homogeneous analog light travel, how much force would it exert, what colour spectrum would it have?
Simply put, we can't. Not without doing some serious hypothesising and playing mind experiments. And even then it'd be like trying to truly visualise a tesseract or other high-dimension shape. We don't even have the sense to perceive it nor do we have words to describe what we perceive.
Try this: Time is suddenly a three dimensional space, we can see tomorrow off in that direction, yesterday behind us, to the left - let's call it widdershins, so then to the right would be deasil. And what about up? Down? You see the problem. We can't imagine going at right angles to time, how would that work? When would that work?
Now try to imagine that you're Doctor Who. "Tomorrow I'll be having had dinner yesterday with a widdershins fuzzbud that I'l be have cook(ing)ed at 5 redds to redactil."
And here we are trying to imagine analog time with our quantised brains...
HOW exactly would a computer function of there are no discrete quanta? You'd have to create a quantising device that made time ticks possible, and then settle for the fact that the closest we'll come to realistic is as far removed there as a movie film is from reality here, a series of frenetic snapshots of change.
So I'm saying that it's almost 100% certain we're in a simulation, since we experience everything in a 'pixellated' (aka quantised) form. Which means we're a program, and from our experience most programs have a purpose. Perhaps our purpose is to drill down into our reality until we hit the limits of the program we're running. So let's keep doing the science, drilling down, and maybe we'll hit the end. EOF.
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