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by helloTree
4694 days ago
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As a computer scientist I like the idea as I also believe that information (and time or a unifying concept of them) is one of the most fundamental building blocks of the universe, however we have to keep in mind that we leave the territory of science here. The statement: "The universe is just a simulation." is just not a scientific theory as this is probably unfalsifiable [0] or am i wrong? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability |
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For example, statistical Physics tells us that a system can be full of complex, random fluctuations, but it can still be 'stable' if those fluctuations cancel each other out. Boltzmann hypothesised that we could just be a random fluctuation in some otherwise stable system (perhaps a vast cloud of gas). This hypothesis is falsifiable, since large fluctuations are far less likely than small fluctuations. It's very unlikely that the room I'm in, including me, is a fluctuation in a gas cloud, but the anthropic principle says that I wouldn't notice all those small fluctuations which don't produce me. If I am a fluctuation then I can predict that it's incredibly likely that the fluctuation is limited to this room, as anything larger would be far less likely. However, when I step outside I find a whole city, which falsifies the hypothesis. Likewise we can observe a whole planet, solar system, galaxy, local group, cosmic web, etc. which goes exactly against the predictions of the fluctuation hypothesis.
However, from a digital physics perspective we can get the opposite result. Let's hypothesise that we're running on a giant Turing Machine and our program is a random fluctuation on its tape; ie. a random series of bit flips on an otherwise empty tape. Since small fluctuations are vastly more likely than large fluctuations, we would expect to be part of a small program rather than a large one. Again, the anthropic principle says that I'll never observe tiny programs that don't produce me, but what can I say about tiny programs which do produce me? Well, randomness and asymmetry is hard to produce using a computer program: it must be encoded as part of the program, since it can't be produced spontaneously. Hence I would predict small programs to have less randomness and asymmetry than large programs, so I would predict a symmetric and uniform Universe, which is largely what we see.
One falsifiable prediction of such a digital physics theory is that quantum phenomena are actually pseudorandom, ie. deterministic and predictable, since the only way to encode unpredictable values in a program is to write them out bit-for-bit in the source. A pseudorandom number generator would require far fewer bits, and hence is more likely; also, a smaller pseudorandom number generator is more likely than a large one. If we find that quantum phenomena cannot be predicted by any short program, we can falsify this hypothesis.