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by __MatrixMan__ 791 days ago
Wouldn't it be crazy if there was a snow storm that had so many flakes, the gravitational constant was reduced because of the extra time it took to render them all?
1 comments

The excellent performance characteristics of the natural world may indeed be the best rebuttal of the popular theory that we live in a computer simulation!
Good simulations have constant time step and may not run in real time. From inside such simulation, you would never know.
It's only meaningful to consider that our world is a simulation if it is an imperfect one, otherwise you're just using "simulation" as an awkward synonym for "reality".

Click the "snow" button enough (https://catdad.github.io/canvas-confetti/) and you'll get a horizontal line separating the pre-slowdown flakes from the post-slowdown flakes. I suppose that's the kind of simulation imperfection that we might look for.

Personally, I don't think we're hacking our way out of this one any time soon, so I'm happy to just call it reality.

What would it even mean for a simulation to be imperfect, though, from the perspective within the simulation? You can only observe the simulated phenomena. So it would be perfectly normal, say, if things become non-deterministic at the hardest to observe small scales, or if there were minor inconsistencies between the smallest scale behaviors and the largest. You'd just call it "physics".
See that's hard because I do call it physics, and I do not call it a simulation. I am here in this world, and from where I stand it's as real as anything will ever be for me.

My point is that I don't think there's any sense in entertaining counterfactuals that, if true, will be impossible to come up with evidence for, and I think the assertion that our world is a simulation is one such counterfactual.

That is, unless the physics gets so absolutely insane that "it's just physics" fails to scratch the itch. One example would be if we discover an artifact that lets us see each particle's corresponding unique ID such that, once we have that ID, we can then type it into a console and arbitrarily set properties like its mass.

If simulated entities gain control over the parameters that govern the simulation itself... well is it really a simulation anymore?

How to detect imperfect simulation: some unexplainable missing wavelength bands, or quantisation of results where it should be continuous would hint at "cutting corners" in simulation, like steps in energy levels from very distant xray sources perhaps?

As far as we know, our "physics" does not show any possible imperfections, or we didn't thought of all imperfections which could arise in simulation.

I was introduced to this idea by the book Permutation City. Great read.
The idea on Permutation City is way crazier than a mere computer simulation.
I agree, it's awesome. I wish more scifi authors were as ambitious as Egan.