I don’t think that we’re in a simulation, but I do find myself occasionally entertaining the idea of it.
I think it would be kinda funny, because I have seen so much ridiculous shit in my life, that the idea that all those ridiculous things were simulated inside a computer or that maybe an external player did those things that I witnessed, is just too weird and funny at the same time lol.
Also, I play Civilizations VI and I occasionally wonder ‘What if those settlers / soldiers / units / whatever are actually conscious. What if those lines of code actually think that they’re alive?’. In that case, they are in a simulation. The same could apply to other life simulators, such as the Sims 4.
Idk, what does Lemmy think about it?
Information that we are in one would appear in weird ways? Like maybe side effects of simulating a continuous universe in a calculable way which would require quantization, but would leave the universe with a seemingly incompatible framework of continuous macro behavior (such as general relativity) and discrete behavior (such as quantum mechanics)?
Yeah, the apparent effect to us could be something really weird like incongruent physical laws or constants or things like that. I have no idea what it would be, only that it would be detectable.
Like sync errors?
Sure, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on there.
I think observation/measurement of a quantum system means entangling with the system, so the quantum system becomes larger and includes the observer. Combine that with relativity, which is absolute in the universe, and you have an e plantation for that phenomenon.
That wouldn’t explain why the two results end up not agreeing sometimes.
I agree that it relates to how the observer entangles with the system, but you see this kind of error class occurring in net code all the time.
Player 1 shoots an enemy around the same time as player 2. Player 1 has a locally rendered resolution to the outcome of having killed the enemy and gets awarded the xp, and player 2 has the same result.
The server has to decide if it is going to let both local clients be correct or resolve in a way that reverses the outcome for one of the clients. For things that don’t really matter, it lets both be correct.
Here, each individual outcome is basically Bell’s paradox, where we know there needs to be consistent results no matter how each observer behaves. But in this case, when a second layer of abstraction is added, the results are capable of disagreeing.
It looks very similar to a sync error, and relativity doesn’t in any way explain it.
Why doesn’t relativity explain it? It looks like a classic case of relativity to me, what am I missing?
Relativity only relates to the relative shape of spacetime and movement through it.
So for example, things occurring faster for one inertial frame vs another, or something being closer to an observer moving quickly than for one stationary.
It’s exclusive to the combination of spacetime curvature and one’s momentum within it.
How do you think relativity does explain it?
Well I think relativity tells us something more fundamental, that the world emerges as interactions from relative frames of reference, even in the quantum realm. It’s easy to forget, every single thing going on is a quantum system with astronomical complexity, complexity of a system is the square of the number of quantum states in the entire system. A molecule is a quantum system, a cell is a quantum system, a tree is a quantum system, a tree rustling in the wind is a quantum system. A person interacting with another person for example is entangling those systems and is itself another quantum system. And I don’t think entanglement is a binary thing, it’s a thing of degree and quality. You’re influenced by everything in your light cone, even if you’ve never directly observed a specific star for example, you still interact with it to some degree, you’re a part of a quantum system composed of the entire observable universe, and even part of the unobservable one. Once you observe it, now your interaction is more than that. You can picture it in your mind, look for it again later, tell people about it. If you could orbit it, or touch it, you’d get entangled with it even more. I think a lot more about our experience than what we realize consciously is quantum phenomena, I think we experience these phenomena directly but we just take for granted those experiences and don’t realize what they are fundamentally, just like someone who doesn’t understand gravity doesn’t realize that the experience of falling from a tree is the same force as the one that keeps the planets moving around the sun.
You should look into contextual realism. You might find it interesting. It is a philosophical school from the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist that basically argues that the best way to solve most of the major philosophical problems and paradoxes (i.e. mind-body problem) is to presume the natural world is context variant all the way down, i.e. there simply is no reality independent of specifying some sort of context under which it is described (kind of like a reference frame).
The physicist Francois-Igor Pris points out that if you apply this thinking to quantum mechanics, then the confusion around interpreting it entirely disappears, because the wave function clearly just becomes a way of accounting for the context under which an observer is observing a system, and that value definiteness is just a context variant property, i.e. two people occupying two different contexts will not always describe the system as having the same definite values, but may describe some as indefinite which the other person describes as definite.
“Observation” is just an interaction, and by interacting with a system you are by definition changing your context, and thus you have to change your accounting for your context (i.e. the wave function) in order to make future predictions. Updating the wave function then just becomes like taring a scale, that is to say, it is like re-centering or “zeroing” your coordinate system, and isn’t “collapsing” anything physical. There is no observer-dependence in the sense that observers are somehow fundamental to nature, only that systems depend upon context and so naturally as an observer describing a system you have to take this into account.
Quantum mechanics and relativity are, at least currently, incompatible theories. Relativity depends on continuous things, which is why it has singularities and what not. But quantum mechanics has minimum discrete units that don’t play nice with gravity and relativity.
Also, it’s still an open debate as to whether quantum mechanics is applicable to all sizes of things. There’s some consequences around that being the case and it’s one of the suggestions for an assumption resolving recent paradoxes around incompatibilities between the theory and our expectations for behaviors. If it does apply to larger objects, the consequences are basically that either there’s no free will and superderminism is true or else that quanta don’t actually exist until observed.
In fact, currently we haven’t been able to observe quantum behavior in anything large enough to measure gravitational effects from. Which may be where a fundamental limit exists, given the incompatibility between relativity and QM.