LogFAQs > #946071135

The Wave Master posted...

WHOA!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50

You're just learning about this idea now, Wave? It's been a thing for years.

Hell, it's basically the plot of The Thirteenth Floor.

The argument usually just boils down to "If we ever managed to create a perfect simulation of the universe, then eventually the simulation will create simulations of its own, and so on, so the inevitable state of reality is probably just a large stack of nested simulations, so the odds of being in one of the simulations eventually becomes greater than being in the prime reality."

It's kind of a bullshit argument, though. It's sort of similar to the Drake Equation in that you're basically fudging variables to get the answer you want, as opposed to producing any real tangible objective numbers that prove the hypothesis. Once you start "guessing" at probabilities, the entire outcome of your calculations becomes meaningless because all you're really doing is creating an artificial scenario and then "discovering" the probability of the thing you made up in the first place.

(It also runs up against another wall that most people who discuss this sort of thing never think of - namely, the power requirements. It's been hypothesized that the power required to run a perfect simulation of the universe would require more energy than actually exists in the universe - so any simulation would almost certainly need to be smaller than the thing it's simulating. Then law of diminishing returns kicks in and you can only nest a very limited number of sub-simulations anyway. Again, they actually kind of touch on this in The Thirteenth Floor.)

Funny to see Chuck Nice mentioned in that article, though. I remember listening to him on the radio like 20 years ago, but I haven't really heard from or thought about him in years.
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