Why I Believe this is at least One of the Real Worlds Part I
In which I sound like a guy who got high in college, but then sobered up and harshed everyone’s mellow
Every so often, a usually very well-educated person will posit the argument that the world isn’t real. In the interests of showing that I understand these arguments I’ll explain them one by one, as strongly as I possibly can —in the forty-five minutes or so before I go to bed, knowing that I need to be brief so I can finish this up before I fall asleep. To the person who asked if I write this all as stream of consciousness, yes. I literally just start typing whenever I have a free moment. I feel sort of like a hose with a lot of backed-up pressure.
The World is Fake because… The Simulation Hypothesis
Nick Bostrum gives the best argument for this one that I’ve heard. Say video games keep advancing. The tech just keeps getting better and better. Eventually, it’s indistinguishable from the real world. So indistinguishable in fact that the people in the game start to make their own video games. The tech in those video games gets so advanced it starts to become indistinguishable from the first level video game world. So advanced in fact that the people in the second video game world start to make their own video games, which over time also become indistinguishable from reality, so indistinguishable in fact that…
And so on and so forth.
If every top level universe can create a simulation of another universe that is indistinguishable from the inside then the nesting could theoretically go down forever. This an example of exponential growth. The odds, therefore, that you live in the actual universe are infinitesimally small. There would be googleplexes more simulated universe than “real” universes.
The World is Fake because…. The Many Worlds Hypothesis
Electrons and actually everything else have some crazy particle/wave duality and there’s no obvious reason that waveforms should collapse into particles in the particular manner that they do. The double slit experiment shows us that the way these collapses fall out seems to follow a statistically random pattern.
So what if all the possible wave collapses happen… just somewhere else?
Every time a wave can collapse, it does so in all possible positions but each individual one will collapse differently in distinct universes that then become causally separate.
There’s then a big sea of universes and there’s not really even such a thing as “the real one” because all universes are the parents of many possible universes and is the child of a particular universe with near infinite sibling universe.
The World is Fake because… The Cosmic Inflation Theory
So if you just start putting numbers up on a chalkboard and screwing around with them until they work you arrive at the idea that maybe all the fundamental forces and particles of the universe could have been configured differently and the configuration we have is more or less random. There could be 10^500 other different types of universes with particles and forces completely different from our own, floating on top of each other but unable to interact because our physics is incompatible.
The World is Fake because… DMT Aliens Told You So
You have a religious vision. You meet some DMT aliens. They tell you this is all a great big test and not actually the real world, like the world they live in. Just chill out and enjoy the ride because nothing you do matters. It’s very compelling since they’re speaking to you from a reality that is totally and completely outside of your existence.
Analysis
Okay, that’s all I can lay out if I’m going to sleep in thirty minutes. So here’s the first problems I have: All of these systems, except the last one, as described theoretically reverse entropy if the simulation is as deep as described, produce duplicate universes, and then it gets even weirder than that
Let’s just take the simulation hypothesis first. You create your video game world. They start creating their own video game worlds. Then Nick Bostrum smirks and tells you to imagine a really big number that you can’t even write down with Arabic numerals, except you already have some idea of the number you call the Possiplex which is the total number of possible entropic states in the light cone of the universe. All universes must inhabit a certain configuration of the Possiplex.
In the prime layer of reality, there’s a certain size limit to the Possiplex, if their physics is anything like ours —oh don’t worry bro, I’m not going to dodge the question of what if it isn’t— and they had to use some of it up in order to create their simulation. That means the simulation can’t have the same amount of total entropy as the parent universe. It has to be less. The same goes for any of the simulated universes that simulated universe makes. In fact, all of those things will also subtract from the Possiplex of the original prime universe because you’ve increased the total amount of entropy you need to run your universe simulator. So every child universe has to become exponentially smaller in terms of entropy than the parent universe because they grow their universe simulators in an exponential fashion. This introduces an obvious limit. The number of child simulations cannot be infinite, even if it is very large.
But wait there’s more!
Surely, you think, I just don’t understand how big numbers can be. But I do! If the non-limited case you can get duplicate universes. And you can get situations where no one even knows what universe their in even if they are talking to people in other universes and everyone is letting everyone else know exactly how they tried to simulate everything and everyone else.
Let’s say that I’m parent universe A, I have child simulations B, C, D. They all have a billion other simulation children. Except one of those children, a great-great-great x eight billion grandchild ZZZ13JDZ is born, and is exactly to every detail identical to universe A in all ways that anyone in either universe can verify, including the nesting of the other universes. If you built a machine that just checked to see if the universes are identical you’d run into physics limits and you still wouldn’t know. It’s parent simulation assumes that it is the original simulator of the entire simulation-verse.
Now you smile, raise your eyebrows and think “ah, but when you turn someone off that’s the real test…”
No it isn’t. That doesn’t work. Think about it.
That’s like throwing up an event horizon between yourself and that other universe. Once you’ve turned it off, you can’t say it’s not running. In fact, what if ZZZ13JDZ had yet another unfalsifiable duplicate? What if twelve other simulations are running ZZ13JDZ in the simulation-verse version of the AWS cloud? What if in fact.. this whole thing ends up being not verifiably hierarchical very quickly? There’s no reason that couldn’t be true.
You start to get to something like the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Two electrons cannot occupy the same orbital with the same spin. Why not? Because then they’d be the same electron. They would have no informational distinction between them. You would have deleted matter from the universe.
Oh you say, sipping your wine in your castle in Sweden or wherever Nick Bostrum lives, but I really like to imagine it’s a castle in Sweden with people doing really stereotypically Swedish things —he seems like a nice guy but I’ve been on an anti Swedish crusade since spending four hours at IKEA to buy my wife an office desk a few weeks ago. Also he may not even be Swedish— what if you just make an edit? Only the parent universe could have the ability to edit the child universe.
Again. How?
And then think about it for a good long while, when you’re in your garage and your wife is like “Why doesn’t our base moulding meet up right?” And you’re like “because I’m using a miter saw I originally bought for my dad when I was in high school and the deck isn’t level anymore and you throw a fit every time I talk about getting something like the DWS780.”
How do you think that would work? In fact, how are you able to view this other universe at all or even execute search functions or search queries? There’s stuff here that I suspect but cannot prove that what makes our universe a “real” universe is the fact that you can’t do that kind of stuff to it but let’s just say you do this. You go in and you write some code and say “I want to turn the whole world to peanut butter.”
How does that work inside the universe you’re trying to turn into peanut butter?
You’ve either 1) introduced a discontinuity to their physics. You just wrote over their save file and said “the whole of their universe is now peanut butter.” Or 2) just to be a humongous dick you figured out a program that would somehow —and this is the part I suspect isn’t even possible, without violating their laws of physics which then produces the discontinuity above— inserted an edit that causes a natural process to occur that turns their whole universe to peanut butter.
In the case of 1, what you did, you philosophically did not even do to their universe. Their universe was a chain of cause and effect going back to the moment their universe began. You just deleted their simulation and wrote “peanut butter” into the void of a new reality. Not distinguishable from removing a server from a cloud application that continued to run after you removed that particular server.
In the second case, who is to say the natural thing you did wasn’t already happening in their universe? In fact, you would have had to do that in order to not introduce a discontinuity, which again I don’t even thing you could do. It’s more like you’d have to sift through a sea of possible universes and find one where the thing you wanted to happen was already happening anyway. Which again, depending on you define universe, means you didn’t do it to that universe. You just found one where it was already happening.
And you have no way of knowing that the universe you intended to delete or turn to peanut butter isn’t just running its simulation just fine on the original flow somewhere else in the simulation verse.
What if they on purpose made a simulation of your universe while you were messing with their universe and tortured millions of versions of you? Everyone is in a Mexican Voodoo Doll standoff, threatening suffering on those they suspect to be above or below them. Again, you can’t tell. Some people further down appear to be you in every way that you can possibly tell.
And yeah you could say, well I measured the size of my Possiplex and it was the biggest, but how do you know the limits of your simulation are that the entirety of your Possiplex are simulated and they didn’t just simulate enough to give you a feeling that you are real and that your reading that your entire Possiblex is the biggest? You don’t. You can’t. —I actually think you can but I’m not trying to convince myself here. It has to do with the limits of making a self-consistent reality.
So what am I even saying?
I think the best way to think of a simulation is something I will have to describe tomorrow as I have to go to bed now.
But to leave you something to chew on.
Describe a universe as a sequence of information transforming under rules, where each new state depends on the state that came before and each transformation is self-consistent under the rules of that universe.