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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Not really. If we're in a simulation that just begs the question - what is the "real" universe that the simulation is running in. It pushes the question of the nature of our universe up a level where we have zero visibility. No more satisfying that "where was god before he created the universe?"

The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is sufficient for it to exist. A simulation might also be considered a mathematical model, and it would exist in the same way even if nothing ever runs the simulation. So I guess maybe it could be a simulation, but we mustn't ask what it runs on, but what is the program?

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> The mathematical universe sidesteps this problem. If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is sufficient for it to exist.

This then leads to how does math exist instead of nothing? Math is a concept, and if concepts exist then that is not "nothing".

Many people confuse "nothing" with the vacuum of space and particles appearing out of nowhere. In this case, we have something (space, vacuums, and particles), not nothing.

Because nothing is precisely what does exist. But nothing implies something, so my working theory is that nothing's implied opposite something is itself the first thing, then some cellular automata like progression results from similar logical self-reference and down the line our physics (and the entirety of every logical permutation of information n-dimensionally) results from that.

A similar conception I've heard is that its like something and nothing, at the beginning of time, made a bet whether there'd be something or nothing, but the act of making the bet was already something, rigging it in something's favor. Nothing thought that was bullshit and tried to call it so, and they've been battling it out ever since.

> But nothing implies something

Put another way, nothing has absolutely no properties - including the property of being nothing, or empty. If an empty nothing lacks the property of being empty, or nothing, then something must arise.

I'm working on writing a paper along those lines. I do believe that the answer to "why there is something rather than nothing?" may be: actually nothing is the only thing that exist, but its instability creates our apparent reality trough a self-referential observer-observed reality loop. I would love to chat, use my research email.

> A similar conception I've heard is that its like something and nothing, at the beginning of time, made a bet whether there'd be something or nothing

The problem is that nothing can't make bets.

What would it look like for math to not exist?

Does science fiction exists? Or Pokemon? In case your view is that they don't, you may argue similarly that math is a human made construct (which happen to work well to describe our universe, but it may be just survivorship bias as we use in physics only the math that works. For instance we discard imaginary solutions to classical motion equations). I do believe it is the right view, math is a man made "language" inspired by physics which is more fundamental.

If that's your view that's fine, but it's not the view of GP.

I see good arguments for both views. A way to get insights could be discovering an alien civilization math.

> It pushes the question of the nature of our universe up a level where we have zero visibility

The universe does not owe you visibility into its origins, the lack of it does not make the hypothesis any less likely.

> If there is a concise and complete model of the universe, that is sufficient for it to exist.

Sounds like the ontological argument [1], one of the worst contortions of apologia ever imagined.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

If the universe will never leak any information about its origins, then those origins cannot affect us in any way, ever. This doesn't make any such hypothesis less likely, but it makes them irrelevant to us.

If we are in a simulation and this simulation obeys similar constraints to our computational models, we can test hypotheses on the basis of information theory. Or possibly find error-correction codes encoded in string theory as some quantum physicists have suggested.

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