Aug 13, 2020 03:43 AM
(This post was last modified: Aug 13, 2020 05:47 PM by C C.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...-to-crash/
EXCERPT: . . . Intriguingly, the simulation hypothesis might be testable, under certain assumptions. For example, we might suppose that a simulation has its limitations. The most obvious one, extrapolating from the current state of digital computation, is simply that a simulation will have to make approximations to save on information storage and calculation overheads. In other words: it would have limits on accuracy and precision.
[...] But the neatest test of the hypothesis would be to crash the system that runs our simulation. Naturally, that sounds a bit ill-advised, but if we’re all virtual entities anyway does it really matter? Presumably a quick reboot and restore might bring us back online as if nothing had happened, but possibly we’d be able to tell, or at very least have a few microseconds of triumph just before it all shuts down.
The question is: how do you bring down a simulation of reality from inside it? The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process. And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole. If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.
You could argue that any species capable of simulating a reality (likely similar to its own) would surely anticipate this eventuality and build in some safeguards to prevent it happening. [...] But interventions like this risk undermining the reason for a species running such simulations in the first place, which would be to learn something deep about their own nature. Perhaps letting it all crash is simply the price to pay for the integrity of the results. Or perhaps they’re simply running the simulation containing us to find out whether they themselves are within a fake reality... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: . . . Intriguingly, the simulation hypothesis might be testable, under certain assumptions. For example, we might suppose that a simulation has its limitations. The most obvious one, extrapolating from the current state of digital computation, is simply that a simulation will have to make approximations to save on information storage and calculation overheads. In other words: it would have limits on accuracy and precision.
[...] But the neatest test of the hypothesis would be to crash the system that runs our simulation. Naturally, that sounds a bit ill-advised, but if we’re all virtual entities anyway does it really matter? Presumably a quick reboot and restore might bring us back online as if nothing had happened, but possibly we’d be able to tell, or at very least have a few microseconds of triumph just before it all shuts down.
The question is: how do you bring down a simulation of reality from inside it? The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process. And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole. If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.
You could argue that any species capable of simulating a reality (likely similar to its own) would surely anticipate this eventuality and build in some safeguards to prevent it happening. [...] But interventions like this risk undermining the reason for a species running such simulations in the first place, which would be to learn something deep about their own nature. Perhaps letting it all crash is simply the price to pay for the integrity of the results. Or perhaps they’re simply running the simulation containing us to find out whether they themselves are within a fake reality... (MORE - details)
