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Comment by lf275 | Hacker News Reader

I never bought into the theory, but I don’t think this is a good proof. I won’t pretend to understand the scientific details of their argument, but it breaks down if you assume that the creators live in a universe that does not follow the same physical laws as ours. Our universe may be simplified (possibly by necessity) and could be incapable of creating full recursive simulations of worlds as complex as our own, but that says nothing about the original universe that its based in.

Like any arguments about the existence of a higher being, it is impossible to prove that a higher being that doesn’t want to be found doesn’t exist. Just choose whichever theory you find to be more convenient, and live your life to the best of your ability.

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In addition, this doesn't really prove that the "simulation" can't use extremely aggressive "level of detail" culling, only simulating such intensive things like the quantum Hall effect when it directly effects the events of the simulation, or when a particularly curious simulatee decides to measure it. When the simulation can afford to gloss over such intensive details, it could use some much less expensive approximation, and we would never be any wiser.

Same thing with the uncertainty principle: electrons are only an approximation until we take a good look at one!

If it's assumed that the "creators" live in a universe that does not follow the same physical laws as ours, that means the "creators" have the ability to run simulations of universes that are arbitrarily different from their own. In that case the chance that they chose a universe of our type to simulate, out of all the possibilities, is vanishingly small, and thus so is the likelihood that we are living in a simulation.

This seems like a strange argument. Suppose that the creators created some simulation. This argument would apply equally no matter which simulation parameters they choose.

Is there more here I'm not getting?

When they do simulate one, wouldn't the entities in that simulated environment make that exact same argument, and be wrong? If there are now two universes, that one and the real one, you've got a 50:50 chance. And I think we can rely on super-universes to simulate "interesting ones". Look at Greg Egan's works. Somewhere in the Super Universe, there is a Super Greg Egan saying "Imagine if quantum computers didn't work. What would that look like? Wow, they wouldn't be able to solve this kind of problem: in my novels, the protagonists will have to invent some kind of computation, and then they will run into this kind of problem and call it NP-hard. Poor bastards." And then some kid will read Super Egan's book and simulate, and here you are arguing it can't happen, because "random".

You don't have enough information to conclude anything about the simulator's universe just because they thought of this one. Consider wakamoleguy's argument about Pacman above: Pacman could apply that same logic to conclude our world is like his, but the simulation's rules just don't impose such strong constraints on the simulator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709430

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