Cryptizard t1_ixc8hcu wrote on November 22, 2022 at 10:30 AM

Reply to comment by theabominablewonder in Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program by garden_frog

I mean that we know for a fact (the Nobel prize was just given for this) that when you aren’t looking at something it behaves in a diffuse manner described by a probability distribution, and effectively follows multiple paths and interacts in multiple different ways. This is more complicated to calculate than if you are looking at it, in which case it collapses to a single path.

This is the reason that we can’t simulate quantum mechanics with computers, it is exponentially more complicated than macro scale classical physics.

theabominablewonder t1_ixc8s1e wrote on November 22, 2022 at 10:34 AM

hmm okay, interesting.

But then we have billions of stars which are effectively unobserved so the computational power would be massively high for things that aren’t important? That would not be efficient design.

AsheyDS t1_ixd9i6h wrote on November 22, 2022 at 4:03 PM

Observation doesn't mean a person (or anything) viewing a thing. It basically means that one particle interacts with another particle, affecting it in some way. And so that particle has been 'observed'. It doesn't mean something only exists if we see it. If you want to use your eyes as an example, imagine a photon careening through space just to stop inside your eyeball. You just observed it, altering it's trajectory. You don't even need to be conscious for it to have been observed, the particles that make up your eye did that for you. I'm probably not making that very clear, but I suggest learning more about observation in the quantum mechanical sense. It's not what you think.

theabominablewonder t1_ixdbzho wrote on November 22, 2022 at 4:20 PM

thanks

Cryptizard t1_ixc90xg wrote on November 22, 2022 at 10:37 AM

Yes, some evidence against simulation.

MyceliumRising t1_ixdeuvw wrote on November 22, 2022 at 4:39 PM

Ok, but is efficient design a requisite to successfully simulating a universe? Does efficiency matter as much when the efficacy of the simulation meets the design goal?

theabominablewonder t1_ixdldqv wrote on November 22, 2022 at 5:22 PM

If the speed of light is something that is constrained by the processing power and the processing power could be dropped significantly then maybe it is important.