Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by webkike 3716 days ago
Here's an interesting thought -- suppose the algorithm used to simulate our universe is not bound by the resources in the universe. Let's also say that our simulation results in the people in our simulation simulating our universe. In this case, who is simulating who? In every possible way you could observe them the two universes are identical.
2 comments

Well that's also interesting because it brings the potential count of simulated universes from "some N bounded by the ratio of the amount information containable by a universe to the amount of information containable by all of its simulations processed as a function of the size of the 'master' or 'original' universe" to simply "N = infinity".
It's also interesting because some neuroscientists believe that we literally do live in our own simulations of reality. This is because our consciousness has a time lag which our mental simulations trick us into believing aren't there.

The most obvious way of verifying how we create our own simulations mentally is by thinking about the blind spot in our eyes. If you hold your thumbs up at arms length in front of you and gradually move them apart, your thumbs disappear from view at some point. They are in your blind spot. However, you don't have large black holes in your field of vision, so your mind interpolates the data that it expects should be there.