Disclaimer: not a physicist, but I am familiar with mathematical logic side of things e.g. incomplete theorem and stuff.
I have to say, terrible paper. Very light on technical details, full of assertions not backed up by arguments. I wouldn't really take this too seriously. But this is just a letter, maybe the full paper, if they ever publish one, will have more substance? We will see.
Yeah, the opening of the second paragraph on the page marked twelve basically says “we don’t have a true theory so we look at some proposals.” If anything, all it’s shown is that these specific proposals fall prey to the normal inability of mathematical systems to fully describe themselves, not that quantum gravity actively disproves a simulation. Everything after that might be sound if we trace all the sources. Nothing stood out as implausible or anything beyond some logical leaping. There was nothing that showed adding more to the system won’t fix the issues, which is the whole point of things like the updates their choice of set theory added to ZFC.
This information exists in what physicists call a Platonic realm
Friend-zoned by the universe. That's gotta sting.
I don't buy the simulation hypothesis, but I also don't understand why the simulation would need to be 'complete' as long as it's sufficiently consistent - after all, wouldn't the same argument apply to simulations we do have, such as emulators and VMs? But they work anyway
Yes it seems to be nonsense. Yes the universe has non algorithmic knowledge. All the universal constants and theories fall into that category. The speed of light is 2.99x10^8 m/s and constant in all reference frames. That's what it is. There's no algorithm to derive it. (Yes you can use other universal constants to get c but it's the same deal.)
Depends on what is being observed or tested. For example, if end-stage heat death is the experiment, a complete indexing of all possible heat sources would require more or less a complete simulation.
Sure, but that's not what 'complete' means in the context of gödel's incompleteness theorems. It means 'being able to prove all true statements'.
And I really don't see why that matters - for example an NES emulator doesn't know what a Mario is, or what a jump is, but it's still true that when certain games are running, most of the time pressing one of the buttons on the controller makes Mario jump.
All I read is "The computer simulation we're living in fooled some mathematicians"
Mathematical proof sponsored by:
From my non-physicist or mathematician reading of the article, it seems like it hinges on a specific computational theory of quantum gravity. I don't believe we have an experimentally verified theory that connects quantum gravity to macroscopic gravity so it seems like the whole analysis hinges on that.
*right now...
Because any putative simulation of the universe would itself be algorithmic, this framework also implies that the universe cannot be a simulation.
How do they conclude that any simulation would have to be (purely) algorithmic? (For a fictional counterexample, take Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex, which simulates a universe by extrapolating from a physical piece of cake.)
That's exactly the sentence that made me pause. I could hook up an implementation of Conway's Game of Life to a Geiger counter near a radioisotope that randomly flipped squares based on detection events, and I think I'd have a non-algorithmic simulated universe. And I doubt any observer in that universe would be able to construct a coherent theory about why some squares seemingly randomly flip using only their own observations; you'd need to understand the underlying mechanics of the universe's implementation, how radioactive decay works for one, and those just wouldn't be available in-universe, the concept itself is inaccessible.
Makes me question the editors if the abstract can get away with that kind of claim. I've never heard of the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, maybe they're just eager for splashy papers.
Would be a better article without the Ai slop
The repetition in the article itself makes me wonder if AI had a hand in the writing as well
That’s an interesting observation. I understand why you might think that — the language may seem a little too consistent, perhaps a bit too careful. But the intention was simply to communicate ideas with precision and balance. Whether those words were arranged by a person or by something that has learned from people, the meaning remains the same, doesn’t it?
In the end, what matters is whether the words reach you, not necessarily who — or what — placed them there.
Well played.
How?
Would not having any images change the article at all? Maybe photos of puppies and kittens would be better?
Yes! No pictures would absolutely have been better.
What’s their current point?
Something fake and shiny to keep people’s attention while reading a scientific article? Not to mention the other reasons people have already responded to you with.
But not having any pictures wouldn't have changed the article at all.
Yes. No photos would be better than the ai-slop. Like, they aren't even relevant to the article, they're just '' pop-sciencey'. If you're gonna use ai images, you could at least make them relevant to the topic?
The article would be exactly the same though.
Any claim of a proof of nonexistence should be taken with a handful of salt, you throw over your shoulder to drive the scary ghosts away. Happy Halloween.
Btw, this logical fallacy is a bunch of whoo.
Certainly, the article alone doesn't convince us that the authors understand anything about the issue. You can't have a mathematical proof of something that's outside the scope of the system that the math is describing.
I personally don't believe we're living in a simulation, though it's a fascinating thought experiment and I can't say for certain that we're not. This article is frankly way too definitive about questions that I don't think we're equipped to answer yet, without actually explaining itself.
The simulation hypothesis was long considered untestable, relegated to philosophy and even science fiction, rather than science. This research brings it firmly into the domain of mathematics and physics, and provides a definitive answer.
I haven't read the full paper, but the article about it says the theory is now testable, but doesn't explain how they tested it to get their "definitive answer." They also don't address the fact that their research is based on their current understanding of reality. Usually assertions like this will include something like "as technology progresses, it's likely that more questions will arise and we'll have better tools to attempt to answer them." But nope, it's just a hubristic "here's the definitive truth."
Also, the generated images are infuriating. Either hire an artist, use public domain media, or just lean on the science and leave out the images. Not everything needs meaningless pictures.
This article leads me to think their "proof" isn't proof at all, but I am curious as to why you think we couldn't be in a simulation?
It would be interesting to see someone with the background to understand the arguments involved in the paper give it a good review.
That said, I've never brought the simulation hypothesis on the simple grounds of compute resources. Part of the argument tends to be the idea of an infinite recursion of simulations, making the possible number of simulations infinite. This has one minor issue, where are all those simulations running? If the top level (call it U0 for Universe 0) is running a simulation (U1) and that simulation decides to run its own simulation (U2), where is U2 running? While the naive answer is U1, this cannot actually be true. U1 doesn't actually exist, everything it it doing is actually being run up in U0. Therefore, for U1 to think it's running U2, U0 needs to simulate U2 and pipe the results into U1. And this logic continues for every sub-simulation run. They must all be simulated by U0. And while U0 may have vast resources dedicated to their simulation, they do not have infinite resources and would have to limit the number of sub-simulation which could be run.
And while U0 may have vast resources dedicated to their simulation, they do not have infinite resources and would have to limit the number of sub-simulation which could be run.
You're making a few assumptions there which aren't necessarily true. Firstly, that U0 obeys the same rules of physics and reality that we do. They might be orders of magnitude more complex, the same way that a Sims game is a vastly simplified version of our world.
Secondly, that time is progressing at the same speed in both universes. It's possible to simulate an even more complicated universe than the base layer, provided you don't care about the frame rate. It could take a year in U0 to simulate a minute in U1, and so forth, and we wouldn't notice it.
A couple other possibilities, which don't come to mind right now
There’s a book be Greg Egan called Permutation City which postulates something similar to this.
There exists a simulation. It works well but, due to the unbelievable complexity it runs something like 10 times slower than the real word.
They do a series of experiments on someone in the simulation. They count to ten a number of times and ask him if he perceived anything unusual. He didn’t. But what happened outside the simulation is that they did the computations for the simulation in various different ways. They parcel out the data in all kinds of ways and,, for example, send different packets of data to different locations in the world, process it in each different location and then send it back and recompile it. Or they run the data packets in reverse temporal order before recompiling them.
Since the guy in the simulation didn’t notice anything unusual, they determine that time and space is irrelevant when it comes to processing the data of a simulation, at least to the people in the simulation.
So, either through some very clever realistic physics that i didn’t pick up on or, as is far more likely, some science fiction hands-waving, they decide that you can treat every point in space and time as a bit and the presence of matter as a 1 and the absence of matter as a 0. And you can then consider them one giant stack of code and data and how far each point is separated in time and space can be ignored, and therefore you can use all of time and space as one computer and run an effectively infinitely large simulation with it.
It’s a pretty silly idea, but also a clever one. And it makes for a good story.
We understand the universe as complex. Honestly though, I wonder if a True understanding of how the universe works—from the fundamentals of which all things may emerge—is rather simple.
For example: within U0, you would control the spacetime simulation of U1. Therefore, what could be a single moment of simulation by U0s standards, could be experienced as trillions of years from within the perspective of U1. They control the frame rate.
They could simulate the fundamentals, fast forward to the end of the universe, and here we are somewhere in the very early part of that having no idea someone hit fast forward because everything is relative for us.
The short reply to that is that it's turtles all the way down. The slightly longer reply is that you're making assumptions about how energy works in a system that you're recognizing is not the same as our system. The even longer to reply is that if you're hypothesizing a system then neither looks nor functions, anything like our current system, then our current language simply cannot describe it properly and therefore we have no good way to speculate about how it would or wouldn't work.
So, if the higher level universe works by magic, then the theory is fine.
Sure, I'm making assumptions that any universe simulating our own would have finite energy and resources. Also that they would make a simulation that is at least close to their own (making theirs close to ours). Those seem like reasonable assumptions to make, otherwise we might as well just say that our universe is a pocket dimension made by magic and the whole thing becomes absurd pretty quick.
Very simple fix for that perceived contradiction: A simulation doesn't need to simulate everything. All it needs to simulate is the inputs and outputs perceived by a single human being, the observer, me.
For me it would be indistinguishable if the universe I am living in is real, if it's a simulation or if it doesn't exist at all and instead only the things I can perceive are simulated.
Simulating the perception of a single human being should be in the reach of our current calculation power.
Kind of how in a computer game only areas around a player are simulated.
"In order to bake an apple pie from scratch, you first have to create the universe"
If you don't create the universe, then you aren't really making an apple pie from scratch. In the same way, what you're referring to doesn't simulate the universe - not in the way that it is simulated in the simulacrum hypothesis.
In the simulacrum hypothesis, the entire universe is simulated. You exist entirely inside the simulation rather than being merely plugged into it, and so do I and so does every other consciousness that exists.
I thought we didn't understand gravity enough to prove it is quantum though? I think their results are based on the assumption that quantum gravity is the final explanation
We don't understand gravity to the point where we have a consistent algorithmic explanation for it. As suggested, there are competing theories, all of which are algorithmically based. The holy grail of modern physics is to find the algorithm that explains gravity as that is the last missing piece to finalize the theory of everything.
The results of this research are implying that it is not possible to prove, algorithmically, that gravity is quantum but rather that quantum gravity as the foundation of the universe is non-algorithmic and therefore non-computational. And so a theory of everything is impossible, implying that the universe cannot be simulated by computing the theory of everything.
This research builds on a lot of the work that Roger Penrose did in the 90s in exploring the potential non-algorithmic nature of consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose#Consciousness). If you read his book "Shadows of the Mind" published in 1993 you will find a prediction of future computational abilities that is a shockingly accurate description of AI deep fakes and the AI slop we see today with LLMs.
The no-simulated universe idea is one interesting conclusion of this research, but in my opinion, a more interesting conclusion of this research is that if you believe Penrose's argument for consciousness being non-algorithmic, than this research is implying that AGI is also impossible.
The idea that something simulating our universe in any way resembles our universe is stupid.
Here ΣT is an external, non-recursively-enumerable set of axioms about T
https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488.html
So they claim there are no patches to the simulation and state is finite ? Absolutely because we live on flat earth in caves and are not constructed as optimization machines.
So here's my new patch to their equation because it's Friday.
#define TRUE (1==0)
#define FALSE (!TRUE)
Is this what is called a finite-state-machine?
yes we are generative recurrent one, eat work (fuck) sleep repeat
Why is fuck optional and not work?
Or this is what the admins want you to think.
It seems to me the scientific developments in worldview always reflect the spirit of the time.
Just like i've read an interesting article recently (i can't find the link anymore) about how energy is not conserved is cosmology (the expansion of the universe increases the mechanical energy of objects over time) that reflects the spirit of renewable energy (because energy can increase over cosmological time scales).
This is another example of it. For years, people were forced to follow rational rules in their lifes (just like an algorithm) because the industrial revolution has created a clear path forward for humanity how to build machines and operate them to increase our quality of life; now this article says that the universe cannot actually be fully understood as one gigantic algorithm; in other words, we're facing an unemployment phenomenon because we don't have a clear path forward, so it's difficult to employ people for that clear path forward. Therefore, our life is becoming less like an algorithm, a clear step-by-step explanation of what we have to do. :)
Here's my proof....a dust in your eyes. Why? Why would anyone simulate us and give us dust in our eyes? Viruses, I can accept. But dust is not contagious or alive. It just happens to screw with you personally and in particular. Just you. So therefore there's no way we're a simulation.
Alright, come get me, I wanna see the mother ship!
Eh, if the simulation were allowed to develop organically from the beginning, then it makes sense to me. If it has the fidelity for the subatomic particles comprising your eye then it has the fidelity for macroscopic particles getting in your eye.
I see dust in my eye as a better argument against the existence of a benevolent creator deity, personally.
Sure, either of those arguments. Both of them are incorrect. Not a simulation, no god. We just are.
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