What We Still Don't Know - multiverses and the simulation argument
- Thread starter Blagsta
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Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
kropotkin said:
From the Channel 4 website
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/W/what_we_still_dont_know/arewereal4.html
Zhelezniakov
Well-Known Member
What is the cosmological constant, when its at home.
purves grundy
ambient clown remix
No glitches? No crashes?Blagsta said:
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
I'm going with the Simulation Argument.
Always have done.
There are good bloody reasons why there are multiple universes. I believe we are part of a brute force calculation.
There is only one reason why everything has been created.
The creator, created in order to survive.
Always have done.
There are good bloody reasons why there are multiple universes. I believe we are part of a brute force calculation.
There is only one reason why everything has been created.
The creator, created in order to survive.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
purves grundy
ambient clown remix
Why are you conflating these two theories?layabout said:
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
purves_grundy said:
The multiverse and the simulation argument were part of the same argument as presented in last night's programme. Although Nick Bostrom argues for simulation without resorting to the multiverse theory
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
My OWN theory is that the easiest and most sure way to achieve mortality is to create the ability to multiply time using simulated universes. If 50 years inside a simulated universe is .5 seconds outside it, you have created immortality.
You have an endless tunnel of simulated universes to go down. If one simulated universe "fails" and you don't manage to create a new simulated universe within it, you have lost a couple of seconds in your present simulated universe.
Our motivation, for going after immortality is the fear of death. It would be very unwise, to bring knowledge with you through these simulated univereses as you would only break the cycle - hence the most plausable explanation as to why we don't know for sure that we are in a simulated universe.
The simulation argument holds true, because we will have the technology for simulated universes very soon. Once a simulated universe is created, then that's it, there is no going back and an endless tunnel of sub-universes is created inside them. The chances of us NOT being in a simulated universe is rather slim - it's hardly likely. The universe IS simulated.
You have an endless tunnel of simulated universes to go down. If one simulated universe "fails" and you don't manage to create a new simulated universe within it, you have lost a couple of seconds in your present simulated universe.
Our motivation, for going after immortality is the fear of death. It would be very unwise, to bring knowledge with you through these simulated univereses as you would only break the cycle - hence the most plausable explanation as to why we don't know for sure that we are in a simulated universe.
The simulation argument holds true, because we will have the technology for simulated universes very soon. Once a simulated universe is created, then that's it, there is no going back and an endless tunnel of sub-universes is created inside them. The chances of us NOT being in a simulated universe is rather slim - it's hardly likely. The universe IS simulated.
purves grundy
ambient clown remix
There's no need to link them. We might be in a multiverse of simulated universes, or we might be in a multiverse of universes. The multiverse idea sounds possible to me - why not? but the simulation argument is far-fetched nonsense - why on earth should we believe it? Because it's possible in principle? Does the argument explain anything?Blagsta said:
Who cares if the argument they put so much focus on is philosophically unimportant.. it makes for cracking pop physics.
Top notch steven hawkings coffee table stuff.. I love it!
Top notch steven hawkings coffee table stuff.. I love it!
Donna Ferentes
jubliado
1. While I thought the series was really good and ineresting (albeit a little hard to follow at times) it did seem to me that the last programme didn't allow for any explanations of the universe other than a creating intelligence. Which bothers me a lot.
2. When midway through the chap started saying that science wasn't about being able to observe and prove things but about what you can't disprove (I am probably paraphrasing to the point of unfairness) I started wondering whether he was trying to follow Karl Popper and if so, whether Popper would have accepted his argument.
Great stuff in general though. It's Sunday evening on telly, The Royal is on the other side, come on!
2. When midway through the chap started saying that science wasn't about being able to observe and prove things but about what you can't disprove (I am probably paraphrasing to the point of unfairness) I started wondering whether he was trying to follow Karl Popper and if so, whether Popper would have accepted his argument.
Great stuff in general though. It's Sunday evening on telly, The Royal is on the other side, come on!
kropotkin said:
Actually the arguments can't be destroyed - we *could* be a perfect simulation, but there's no way to prove or disprove it.[/quote]
Didn't see the show, but while Life doesn't prove anything, it does show you can get some interesting effects emerging from just a few simple rules.
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
cynic mode
Wow, so the universe is set up in just the right way for us to exist? Good grief! It must be on purpose!
-cynic mode
Strong anthropic principle. We exist because the universe is the way it is, not the other way around.
Although the simulation thing is pretty freaky Not like it matters to the Somalian subsistence farmer, as mentioned upthread. Simulated atoms behave just like real atoms, so what's the difference?
Wow, so the universe is set up in just the right way for us to exist? Good grief! It must be on purpose!
-cynic mode
Strong anthropic principle. We exist because the universe is the way it is, not the other way around.
Although the simulation thing is pretty freaky
Not like it matters to the Somalian subsistence farmer, as mentioned upthread. Simulated atoms behave just like real atoms, so what's the difference?Blagsta said:
i think youve got the right idea : its pop physics, its fun. the actual philosophers and physicists are taking this far too seriously ..
Evenin' all... I didn't see the show, I suddenly fell asleep at 10 last night and I'm dog-tired again now.
So, what shall we argue about?
There's something very interesting happening among the permutations and in the gaps between these very different ideas. I'd be particularly interested to hear whether Rees alluded to the Penrose idea.
Terms in "quotes" are useful google searches, with the names.
So, what shall we argue about?
- The "weak anthropic principle" - that we observe a universe exquisitely tuned so that, er, it is possible for it to contain observers...
- Everett's 1957 "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics - one expression of which is that each time an observation is made (e.g. of the state of health of a cat) the universe bifurcates...
- "Budding universes" - e.g. the proposal by Gott and Li (1977) that the Big Bang event could have been a "pinching-off" of our space-time from some other space-time - with the added nuance that there is a kind of (warning: cosmologists using word loosely) "evolution" of universes, in that some will have physics that give rise to more progeny than others do (I hope this is in fact the Gott and Li flavour and not some other - there are several) ...
- Some proposal emanating from Roger Penrose's 1971 idea about the quantisation of space-time. I'm not sure that anyone has worked this up into a form that can be described in plain English, and I confess I retained only the vaguest dream-like echo of the maths in the vaguely popularised version at the end of The Emperor's New Mind (1994) - and I'm not sure Kauffman understood it fully either, and he v. smart... Poetically, rather than physically: space-time is a network of mathematical points interconnected by operators that represent the smallest scale allowed by quantum mechanics - i.e. the Planck length, which is 10^-35 metres, or the corresponding time (it makes no odds which is which). This is Penrose's "spin network" - for a certain purely-mathematical meaning of "spin". The extension, and I can't remember a reference, is the idea that the network grows by the addition of new points and operators and thus space-time itself grows... and maybe buds...
- Stephen Wolfram's extended riff (2002) on the analogies between cellular automata (of which Conway's Game of Life are an example) and... ideas a bit like Penrose's, I think. (That may be a bit cruel, but I nicked a pre-publication copy of A New Kind of Science, which is 1192 pages, and had to return it the following morning )...
- Some other, more abstract multiverse theory which essentially starts from the proposition "consider the set of all possible universes" without necessarily positing a mechanism...
- I know there's another one...
There's something very interesting happening among the permutations and in the gaps between these very different ideas. I'd be particularly interested to hear whether Rees alluded to the Penrose idea.
Terms in "quotes" are useful google searches, with the names.
Doesn't uncertainty mean that the points can't be h-length apart but just at least an h-length apart? I assume that if a particle is connected to a point that just means it is within one planck length of that point.
If branched-off universes can't influence or be reached by this one (could they in theory?) does the idea have any truth-value at all?
If branched-off universes can't influence or be reached by this one (could they in theory?) does the idea have any truth-value at all?
888 said:
Umm. Maybe. But an alternative emphasis is to say that the Planck length is the shortest scale at which the notion "length" has meaning. And that emphasis suggests a different picture, one in which space-time is "grainy". Which it certainly is in the Penrose picture, though the "points" don't correspond to anything remotely physical, not even as physical as a "guage particle" like the gluon. I forgot to mention that the geometrical concept is important in "quantum loop gravity"... the major rival to "string theory" and the associated "m-branes".
888 said:
Good questions.
If there were some falsifiable prediction (in this universe, obviously) of a theory that also entails branching - any of the kinds of branching I noted - that'd do me as a kind of second-order test...
Everett's many worlds are, as far a I recall, defined to be non-communicating. That's their point, since they're there to deal with the deep strangeness of the role of observation in the Copenhagen Interpretation. I have a sort of intuition that the other kinds are non-communicating in the same kind of way that, for example, anything happening "now" a million light-years away in this universe is non-communicating with us here "now" (strictly, anything outside our "light cone" in Einsteinian space-time).
Oh, and I forgot:
- Gell-Mann and Hartle's "many histories" interpretation (1989), which... er... sort of turns Everett inside-out and claims that observations select between possible pasts.
* Finds the paper *
* Blenches *
* Makes small spliff *
Yes, that's close enough for one sentence
Donna Ferentes
jubliado
Yeah, I know, but I wasn't sure that what he was saying was in fact congruent with Popper's actual criteria. Not that I know exactly what they were anyway.Blagsta said:
Carry on.
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