cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/56676015
Their findings, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, go beyond simply suggesting that we’re not living in a simulated world like The Matrix. They prove something far more profound: the universe is built on a type of understanding that exists beyond the reach of any algorithm.
The problem I see here is that the “outside” that would run such a simulation would be totally foreign to us. Keep in mind that e.g. time is an inside parameter of our universe, and as causality depends on the existence of time, we can neither say what was before the big bang, nor what caused it.
Gödels incompleteness theorem could actually stem from such a simulation situation. Anyone who has ever played a simulation game knows that this does not simulate reality perfectly.
Maybe the outside universe that runs our universe does not have such an incompletion - we’ll never know, as we lack the ability to comprehend even the basics they run on if they don’t even have causality like we do.
I think is a very rational take indeed, and while it means that the simulated nature of our universe cannot be disproven (nor proven), it does mean that we cannot simulate a universe like ours.
But the simulation theory does rely on the reasoning that there is a (possibly infinite) chain of simulated universes in order to argue that it is more likely that our universe is simulated than not. But if we cannot simulate a universe like ours, it also becomes pure conjecture to suggest another universe can, and therefore the chain is broken.
In fact, the universe “above us” would need to have mathematical rules that are beyond what we know to be true. At that point, even the discussion of determinism vs nondeterminism goes out the window, because our understanding of truth would no longer apply. But calling the/a/any universe a simulation implies knowledge of determinism, otherwise it no longer fits our understanding of algorithm. So if you believe the universe is a simulation, you may as well say that you believe in spirituality (not the hand-wavy non-scientific kind, but the kind that acknowledges an understanding that is at a higher level than ours). I think it’s hard to argue against a higher-level understanding beyond ours. But calling it a simulation has implications that don’t seem to hold. So maybe calling it spirituality is actually the fairer description.
Exactly. We cannot simulate a universe with the same complexity as ours. That’s Gödel applied to our universe. But we can simulate a simplified universe where Gödel does not come into play for us. Think “Sim City” or “Civilization”. And likewise I cannot rule out that our universe is a simulation within the higher universes’ own Gödel limits.