More thoughts on the simulation hypothesis

I think this thread is for the Simulation Hypothesis, not to promote a random skeptic's arguments on other topics?

Apologies Sci, that was not my intention and I seemed to have gone off topic. I was rather irritated by this man's absolute dismissal of phenomena we sometimes discuss, and thus question why he thinks the Simulation Theory is a load of nonsense purely because of his absolute denial of those phenomena and rather condescending dismissal of it, and not the criticisms others have mentioned in this thread.

No worries, probably best to delete the comment after moving its content into the Skeptic/Debate forum.

A philosophical discussion by email between Tom Campbell, Brian Whitworth and John Ringland

Following is an email discussion on the topic of the nature of reality and consciousness from the perspective of computational metaphysics (virtual / simulated reality). It delved deeply at times; clearly elucidating core features of each of our ways of thinking.

The discussion eventually become bogged down by misunderstandings; the differences were so profound that communication became difficult and necessitated constant meta-analysis of why and how the misunderstandings were happening.

This process was very informative however it likely also broke the rapport, thus the discussion ended. I feel that important points were raised which were not properly addressed. It wasn't a personal conversation; the topics under discussion were of significant philosophical and scientific interest.

Hence in the interests of the broader dialogue I now publish a transcript of the entire discussion (except for irrelevant emails, e.g. about whether some file contains a virus or not, and so on). I do this in the hope that these ideas will not simply lie dormant on an email server, but will spark off further discussions that will eventually lead people to a deeper and clearer understanding of these topics.

Some old stuff but I think it's still worthwhile ->

Virtual Reality Poses the Same Riddles as the Cosmic Multiverse

Joelle Dahm

The argument for living in a simulation is based on the laws of physics and logic. But if we are living a simulation, we can’t trust those laws, so we have no basis to conclude we are living in a simulation. A scenario “where the belief that you’re in a sim reasonably causes you to doubt the trustworthiness of the very evidence that convinced you that you were likely to be in a sim,” Schwitzgebel says, “could be self-negating.”

A similar paradox comes up in cosmology: the Boltzmann brain. Physical theory suggests we are statistically more likely to arise from an ephemeral agglomeration of randomly moving atoms than from millions of years of evolution. Even our memories are more likely to be implanted than true. So, our theory has led us to conclude that our theory is illusory, like the man who proclaims, “I am a liar.”

This paradox suggests our theories are flawed. There could be a fundamental problem with creating lifelike simulations, for example. Bostrom says, “At the moment, our understanding of what consciousness is and in particular what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for some computational process to implement consciousness is not really clear.”

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The Physical World as a Virtual Reality 

Brian Whitworth 

This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.

I have a soft spot for his "rant" about how physics is a hollow science ->

"...There are equations, proofs and applications, but the models that work make no physical sense, e.g. in Feynman's sum over histories an electron travels all possible paths between two points at once, but how can one electron do that? Theory should increase understanding, but in physics it seems to take it away. In wave-particle duality particles morph into waves, denying the very sense of what waves and particles are. Given a choice between meaning and mathematics, physics chose the latter and it shows. Quantum theory still isn’t taught in high schools because who can teach what makes no sense? Modern physics is a mathematical feast that at its core is entirely empty of meaning. It is a hollow science, built on impressive equations about quantum states that everyone agrees don’t exist! And physics has chosen this way of no meaning as a deliberate strategy..."

Some news on this front:

Are we living in a Matrix-style simulated universe? New research says it's possible

The concept that we are all computer-generated characters occupying a world as real as the ones gamers explore on their PlayStation consoles isn't exactly a new one.
It's the belief of Vopson and others working in the field of science known as information physics that our physical reality could be made up of bits of information, which aren't unlike the cells of living organisms that are coded with DNA containing valuable information about themselves.

After studying digital data storage and an RNA genome, Vopson discovered in 2022 that information systems don't appear to conform to the second law of thermodynamics. That law essentially dictates that any naturally occurring process will result in a loss of energy and increase in a system's measure of disorder, or entropy (think of an ice cube that gradually melts when placed in a cup of water at room temperature.)

In fact, Vopson discovered that the entropy in information systems actually decreases, leading him to establish what he calls the second law of information dynamics.

Vopson recently set out to apply the discovery to genetics, cosmology, atomic physics, symmetry and yes, even the simulation hypothesis. Published last week in AIP Advances, Vopson's paper provides an explanation for how the removal of excess information in our universe resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing unneeded code to save storage space and conserve power.

Some news on this front:

Are we living in a Matrix-style simulated universe? New research says it's possible

A very interesting new development. Some take-away points from the Conclusions of the paper:

"We showed that the second law of infodynamics is universally applicable to any system containing information states, including biological systems and digital data. Remarkably, this indicates that the evolution of biological life tends in such a way that genetic mutations are not just random events as per the current Darwinian consensus, but instead undergo genetic mutations according to the second law of infodynamics, minimizing their information entropy. This discovery has massive implications for genetic research, evolutionary biology, genetic therapies, pharmacology, virology, and pandemic monitoring, to name a few.
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Using simple geometric shapes, we demonstrated that high symmetry always corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, or lowest information content, explaining why everything in nature tends to symmetry instead of asymmetry.
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The second law of infodynamics essentially minimizes the information content associated with any event or process in the universe. The minimization of the information really means an optimisation of the information content, or the most effective data compression, as described in Shannon’s information theory. This behavior is fully reminiscent of the rules deployed in programming languages and computer coding. Since the second law of infodynamics appears to be manifesting universally and is, in fact, a cosmological necessity, we could conclude that this points to the fact that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construct. A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimization and compression mechanism in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements. This is exactly what we are observing via empirical evidence all around us, including digital data, biological systems, atomistic systems, symmetries, and the entire universe."

It occurs to me that although this new theory implies a higher likelihood of "the Universe is a great simulation" theory, it doesn't address the fundamental problem of trying to account for consciousness in such a simulation. This problem is basically that a computer simulation is accomplished by a computer which fundamentally is a Turing machine which can absolutely only ever process algorithms, whereas consciousness is nonalgorithmic and noncomputable, and is existentially in another realm from computation (per the well-known Hard Problem). So, even if the Universe is ultimately a simulation, we ourselves in our consciousness must be the "users", not actually generated by the simulation.

It also occurs to me that this new insight of a law of information entropy dynamics is of limited value in the area of evolutionary biology. This is because this may be a new insight into the real nature of the so-called "random" mutations or genetic changes involved in the Darwinian evolutionary process of RM + NS, but it still doesn't solve the basic problem of the observed fossil record with all its abrupt jumps in complexity, which inherently seems to require periodic and abrupt massive new injections of genetic information unexplainable by the undirected semi-random walk Darwinian process. A possible information entropic law of genetic mutations doesn't explain the periodic sudden origin of massive amounts of new genetic information that actually occurred in evolution according to the fossil record.