[hn_throawlles]

interesting... i don't buy the 'we live in a simulation' idea though.

per my own living understanding, the simulation is in my head, each of us are running our own 'local instance' of this matrix/simulation.

this is made out of culture understood as an expression of software (but understood as a substance, I guess on this much I do agree with Vopson, information as a fifth state of matter? interesting)

finally, I think somebody should try to measure the gravitational contribution (if any?) of information.

with the most precision that is available measure a difference between a flash card (or similar, the denser the best) in which it is all zeros Vs one with the most random, highest entropy, sequence of 0s and 1s stored in it.

[svnt]

They looked into this but the experiment they devised (erasing/writing the densest forms of information storage — an SD card I think (Vopson was in a former life a magnetic storage researcher/engineer)) required several orders of magnitude greater sensitivity in mass detection than the current state of the art. I’m also not totally certain it would have worked.

The more recent proposal comes at it the opposite way: looking for two extra very low energy photons when a particle is demolished (representative of the Landauer limit).