Is reality simulated?

nyarlothothep

Just thinking, we have no way of saying we're not in a simulated reality which renders it untestable and hence meaningless insofar as reality is concerned.

However, Im kinda worried because axioms just are, which makes me wonder whether theyre arbitrarily defined parameters set out by a designer? (edit- Im thinking its pretty ad hoc to assume axioms as parameters set out by a designer as in a programmer, but its still weird). If thats the case is this a simulation or a reality which bears similarities to a simulation, in that a simulation is adapted from it insofar as technologies can emulate nature? However would a simulation that is adapted from it disclose the fact that reality is really a simulation, just as the wings of a plane disclose the fact that the wing shape is useful for staying airborne and that they were copied from birds? I'd like to think we are adapting aspects of reality which lead to simulations but that we're not adapting all aspects of reality which would make the absolute comparability between it and a simulation invalid at best, given the incompleteness of our knowledge about reality.

Is there any real distinction between the subjective and objective if the universe contains all that is, thereby making thoughts just occurrences within its framework which makes them objects? How can there be multiple perceivers of the universe then if the universe contains multiple perceptions of itself, multiple versions of itself within itself? Its something I cant put into words but its strikes me as being strange that there can be multiple consciousnesses as opposed to being just one. In the sense that a person has a particular identity, when you look at your own identity critically and try to define your own meaning. Would the similarities between the multiple perceptions become resolved at a global level leading them to become one, as in there would be enough similarities (as regards physical laws etcs) to result in an intermingling when all would be taken into account? Its possible to state that the simulation theory could be a message in itself about this universe although that would be assuming too much methinks.

rocsolid

heres one for ya. the before the universe was created, there was energy, this presupposes that its following the laws that govern energy. then four forces existed. gravity electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear force. from these all matter in the universe came into existance. the earth is matter based on these principles. therefor nature and life on earth are consequences and governants of these basic laws of the universe. it is fair to say that the human mind can only comprehend in one universe, hence these laws will apply to the human minds inner workings as well as its material manifestations. therefor, referencing that axioms may point to a simulated reality is a reverse statment. a programmer can only program what is capable of being programmed, the universe came first, we are products of it so reality is what it is and its the programmer on earth emulating the universe will create something very similar when trying to create a world of sorts.
i reccomend grabbing a copy of the tao te ching, its 2500 years old and basically describes modern physics!

pwd

explain why you think the tao te ching describes modern physics?

18AD

Tao Teh Ching seconded! Great stuff.

Even if this is simulated, surely it is a simulation of someting that is 'real'. And even so, how can the programmer tell if he himself is a simulation... Infinite regress springs to mind.

The idea of multiple dimensions is pretty interesting in this case. Say the simulation makers are in a different one to this, with different laws of physics and maths, then by realising that these laws are only useful in their universe could create new universes with different physical laws.

Also if this is a simulation it kinda hints towards the idea of a creator, albeit a computer buff one. And who is to say whether they can tamper with the simulation at will...I feel a miracle coming on.

I think our definition of what is real has become out-dated. Surely what is real is so on it's own terms, not ours. Are dreams real? Or simulated? Or unreal objective realities? And so what if it's simulated, does that really detract from the experience of what is happeing right now.

I honestly don't think we can understand what is real in any objective sense, as we can only observe everything through subjectivity.

We are the universe experiencing itself. The universe is experiencing what everyone is experiencing right now. Only we can only see our seperate little viewpoints.

Any books by Douglas Hofstatder may be of interest to you.

Scigaithris

18AD wrote:

I honestly don't think we can understand what is real in any objective sense, as we can only observe everything through subjectivity.

Men set foot on the Moon first in the 1960's, then returned to earth. There must have been some measure of understanding that was objectified to accomplish this, at least from a technological standpoint? Certainly there were various subjective interpretations before, during, and after the First Man on the Moon mission, and aside from a few on-the-fringe misinformed conspiracy theorists (or Matrix film buffs), the mission was objectively real?

Of course, we could go on forever attempting to subjectively define the one word "real," and even longer if we combine the words "objective reality," but how does that diminish the (objective?) technology that allowed for extraordinarily complex space travel?

rocsolid

it starts with some thing called the supreme absolute, this is described as the state prior to all thingss existing. in an effort to know itself the absolute created the tao, this is described as the force that governs all forces, ie energy, from this was created yin and yang( positive and negative forces ie polarity) from all these forces came matter. its basically the big bang theory, modern physics works out pretty much the same when describing the first billionth of a second when it happened. it goes pretty deep into how nature has obvious patterns when you consider the forces at play and after that its all philosophy and such but totally worth the read

Roc

bonkey

18AD wrote:

I think our definition of what is real has become out-dated.

What definition is that?

I wasn't aware a single agreed-upon definition existed....so I'm not sure how it can become out-dated.

18AD

Scigaithris wrote:

Men set foot on the Moon first in the 1960's, then returned to earth. There must have been some measure of understanding that was objectified to accomplish this, at least from a technological standpoint? Certainly there were various subjective interpretations before, during, and after the First Man on the Moon mission, and aside from a few on-the-fringe misinformed conspiracy theorists (or Matrix film buffs), the mission was objectively real?

Of course, we could go on forever attempting to subjectively define the one word "real," and even longer if we combine the words "objective reality," but how does that diminish the (objective?) technology that allowed for extraordinarily complex space travel?

I don't think technology is objective, it requires a subject to exist.
I do think there is some sort of object reality outside ourselves, but that we cannot know what it is because we can only experience it. So we can have some sort of knowledge about it. Is it something beyond experience? because that's how it would seem.

bonkey wrote:

What definition is that?

I wasn't aware a single agreed-upon definition existed....so I'm not sure how it can become out-dated.

I apologise. My comment was a bit ignorant. I should have said my definition.
But also, surely what is real (if anything is, and reality is not ONLY a concept) exists on it's own terms and whatever we have to say or think on the subject is superfluous. So this would apply to any definition.

Another book which may be relevant to this is Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm. Apparently written for the layman of physics, like myself.

Offalycool

Our brains interpret what our senses interpret off the world. Our eyes can only gather information from a limited spectrum of light bandwidth, our brains interpret from this information distance, form etc. Our interpretation of the world is perceived as fact, yet it is merely a simulation of something exterior we can not know for sure. This is evident in all people insofar as one and one is an idealistic methods of understanding and in specific ways such as color blind people who are incapable of differentiating some colors. The world is what you make it.

Seloth

http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

Sorry theres not a direct link in this but one of the things talk about a simulated reality.It gives it a good talk aobut it too.I would look for it myself but need to make a 8am bus.

18AD

Cool website. Lots of interesting stuff there.

Thanks.
AD.

hundredmillionl

Jean Baudrillard's ideas on reality and simulation are particularly incisive in addressing the question, is reality simulated? Introducing the concept of 'hyper-reality' Baudrillard (he died earlier this year) argued that what is taken for reality is already hyper-real (more real than real): Baudrillard's point is that this kind of 'dialectical' opposition between the real and simulation can no longer be maintained in the era of generalised simulation. The simulacrum qua simulacrum is not a dissimulation - which it remains in so many conceptions: for instance, in numerous contemporary cultural productions, from Reality TV (which Baudrillard predicted 30 years ago) to numerous films (The Matrix, The Truman Show, eXistenz, etc) is that they assume too straightforward an opposition between 'the real' and 'the illusory' (an epistemological rather than an ontological position). It's what people who haven't read Baudrillard think Baudrillard is all about. But what Baudrillard tirelessly insisted upon was the way in which the hyperreal had invaded and superceded the real. The very ambivalence of the 'Reality' in 'Reality TV' demonstrates this. No one really imagines that this 'reality' is some unmediated primal authenticity unaffected by mediatization or televisualization. In many ways, for example, the Truman character in The Truman Show is the only person who lives in 'reality', the 'true man'; the rest of us are condemned to endure hyperreality.

In this sense, the simulacral hyperreal arises from the very ability of technologies to 'capture' the real with increasingly unerring accuracy. If there is a falsifying of the real here, Baudrillard suggests, it arises not because of any dissimulatory intent or technical failing on the part of the technology (media etc), but because of the inevitable elusiveness of the real itself - in allowing itself to be captured, it transmutes, of necessity, into the hyperreal.

The post-structuralist Baudrillard posited 4 successive phases in the historical evolution of the image/simulation in society:

1. The image as the reflection of a profound reality; as mimetic, as representation. 1st order simulation.
2. As masking and denaturing a profound reality; 2nd order simulation .
3. As masking the *absence* of a profound reality; 3rd order simulation.
4. As having no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum; post-modernity under late capitalism; the 'reality principle' is lost.


"In the first case, the image is a good appearance--representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance--it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance--it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation."

Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," Simulacra and Simulation , p. 6.

"The real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models -- and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere."

In fact, in Baudrillard's conception, there is no outside, or "ideal instance" from which to judge the simulation, and this lack of referentiality is the very definition of the simulation. The very question of an 'inside' and an 'outside' becomes problematic in such a conception: are you 'in' cyberspace or is cyberspace is 'in' you? Cyberspace does not merely represent data; it _is_ data, in the raw, as it were. It is no 'false representation' of what is outside any more than it is a transparent, 'accurate representation' of what is outside: in part because there is no 'outside' of cyberspace at all. Cyberspace is a complete map of the non-cyberspatial real that _is also a part of that non-cyberspatial_real.

Now Baudrillard's point about the real is to do with the inability to get to a real 'in itself'. Modern culture is fixated upon 'reality', Baudrillard says, but it is faced with paradoxes whenever it attempts to confront that reality in the raw as it were. The obvious example is reality TV; Baudrillard's example is the 'fly on the wall' documentary. Do such documentaries give us an accurate picture, or has the presence of the camera completely altered how people behave? The situation is undecidable. But if such cultural products - ostensibly stripped of all artifice and fictionality - do not give us 'reality' what would?

Another example. The opinion poll. Do opinion polls simply reflect or represent a pre-existing reality? No - even if they accurately record people's views [views which may in turn derive from 'prior' opinion polls], that very recording cannot but intervene in the very process they are supposedly only representing.

Both these examples are what Baudrillard means by hyperreality. Not the departure, the diminution, the evaporation of reality, but its metastization - the more real than real.

And not forgetting that Nietzsche too had an inkling of all of this:

"But how did we do this?
How could we drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving?
Away from all suns?
Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?"

JoeB-

Hmmm, I was thinking about this and I now reckon that in theory it would be possible to distinguish between a simulated reality and a 'real' one...

It comes down to reliability and processing power... these would (may) need to be infinite in order for a simulation to be indistinguishable from a 'real' reality.

What I mean is that any failure of the simulation would allow us to tell the difference as we would never expect the laws of physics to fail... i.e any 'glitch' would give the game away...

As far as processing power goes it would need to be infinite unless the simulation could be stopped and started with absolutely no effect... what I mean here is that, for example, the force of gravity operates over an infinite distance... so every atom is attracting every other atom, even over a range of billions of light years, in theory we could test this and if the simulation was required to be indistinguishable from 'reality' then it would have to be capable of infinite processing speed..
(unless of course the simulation could be stopped for as long as was necessary to work out the next millisecond and then restarted...)

Another way of looking at this would be to say that we as humans could never produce a simulation which was indistinguishable from reality as we could never produce a reliable enough simulation...

It has raised the question for me as to how the 'real' universe manages to always work, how it never fails....

This post is a bit garbled, I am finding it hard to put into words the concepts which are a little clearer in my head... they sort of come and go, I just about have it and then it slips away...

Cheers

Seloth

Well if reality was simulated how would we know,we have never known reality or know anything about it.Infact Is reality Simulated is a flawed question as for us reality is not simulated as this is reality as we know it.

bogwalrus

Simulate in the dictionary is described as "Pretend. Imitate the form or condition of."

So i imagine if what we see (our reality) is an imitation of something else and as one person mentioned above that "it is impossible for us to imitate/simulate our reality exactly", then can we say that our reality is a close representation of something else as it is not exactly that which we have been imitated on. Then again this implies that someone is the controller and has created our reality which is close to what they want but not exact.

Daithio

No.

Seloth

Wtf kind of response is "No"?

Well a simulation dosent have to be something that they know.

For instance take notice of say,the SimEarth,You start of with a basic planet which evolves itself,Continents form which ever way,atmospheremforms,species grow in a complelty unique way.Same for the up comming spore.

If we are a simulation we could be a random one,or we mighten be the focus of it at all.

For instance say we are indeed in a simulation,it may be focusing on some other Alien civilization who's decentans built this to watch its history and we are some how involved adidng us to it as well.

davej

Surprised no one has brought up this link:

ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

davej