Objective Reality May Not Exist At All, Quantum Physicists Say (popularmechanics.com) 157
Long-time Slashdot reader waspleg shares a thought-provoking article from Popular Mechanics:
Does reality exist, or does it take shape when an observer measures it? Akin to the age-old conundrum of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in a forest with no one around to hear it, the above question remains one of the most tantalizing in the field of quantum mechanics, the branch of science dealing with the behavior of subatomic particles on the microscopic level.... Now, scientists from the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) in the São Paulo metropolitan area in Brazil are adding fuel to the suggestion that reality might be "in the eye of the observer."
In their new research, published in the journal Communications Physics in April, the scientists in Brazil attempted to verify the "complementarity principle" the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed in 1928. It states that objects come with certain pairs of complementary properties, which are impossible to observe or measure at the same time, like energy and duration, or position and momentum. For example, no matter how you set up an experiment involving a pair of electrons, there's no way you can study the position of both quantities at the same time: the test will illustrate the position of the first electron, but obscure the position of the second particle (the complementary particle) at the same time....
"We used nuclear magnetic resonance techniques similar to those used in medical imaging," Roberto M. Serra, a quantum information science and technology researcher at UFABC, who led the experiment, tells Popular Mechanics. Particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons all have a nuclear spin, which is a magnetic property analogous to the orientation of a needle in a compass. "We manipulated these nuclear spins of different atoms in a molecule employing a type of electromagnetic radiation. In this setup, we created a new interference device for a proton nuclear spin to investigate its wave and particle reality in the quantum realm," Serra explains. "This new arrangement produced exactly the same observed statistics as previous quantum delayed-choice experiments," Pedro Ruas Dieguez, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Centre for Theory of Quantum Technologies (ICTQT) in Poland, who was part of the study, tells Popular Mechanics. "However, in the new configuration, we were able to connect the result of the experiment with the way waves and particles behave in a way that verifies Bohr's complementarity principle," Dieguez continues.
The main takeaway from the April 2022 study is that physical reality in the quantum world is made of mutually exclusive entities that, nonetheless, do not contradict but complete each other.
Stephen Holler, an associate professor of physics at Fordham University, tells Popular Mechanics that the study underscores a famous observation by Richard Feynman: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
In their new research, published in the journal Communications Physics in April, the scientists in Brazil attempted to verify the "complementarity principle" the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed in 1928. It states that objects come with certain pairs of complementary properties, which are impossible to observe or measure at the same time, like energy and duration, or position and momentum. For example, no matter how you set up an experiment involving a pair of electrons, there's no way you can study the position of both quantities at the same time: the test will illustrate the position of the first electron, but obscure the position of the second particle (the complementary particle) at the same time....
"We used nuclear magnetic resonance techniques similar to those used in medical imaging," Roberto M. Serra, a quantum information science and technology researcher at UFABC, who led the experiment, tells Popular Mechanics. Particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons all have a nuclear spin, which is a magnetic property analogous to the orientation of a needle in a compass. "We manipulated these nuclear spins of different atoms in a molecule employing a type of electromagnetic radiation. In this setup, we created a new interference device for a proton nuclear spin to investigate its wave and particle reality in the quantum realm," Serra explains. "This new arrangement produced exactly the same observed statistics as previous quantum delayed-choice experiments," Pedro Ruas Dieguez, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Centre for Theory of Quantum Technologies (ICTQT) in Poland, who was part of the study, tells Popular Mechanics. "However, in the new configuration, we were able to connect the result of the experiment with the way waves and particles behave in a way that verifies Bohr's complementarity principle," Dieguez continues.
The main takeaway from the April 2022 study is that physical reality in the quantum world is made of mutually exclusive entities that, nonetheless, do not contradict but complete each other.
Stephen Holler, an associate professor of physics at Fordham University, tells Popular Mechanics that the study underscores a famous observation by Richard Feynman: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
If i don't understand quantum mechanics... (Score:2)
Does that mean I really do?
False (Score:5, Informative)
What makes QM difficult is that so many consider classical mechanics the gold standard, instead of understanding the assumptions are false.
In QM there are minimums determined by planks constant. It is not relevant to measure or take into account things smaller than this. For example, virtual particles are pooping in and out all around us. They would break conservation but the donâ(TM)t last long enough for the universe to notice.
There are certain limits on what can be known. This can also be described in terms of thermodynamics. It takes a certain amount of energy to measure and store a value. To know something arbitrarily precisely, it would take an arbitrarily large amount of energy. So as things are finite, so it what can. be measured. With complimentary values, the measurement of one reducing the ability to measure the other.
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There are certain limits on what can be known. This can also be described in terms of thermodynamics. It takes a certain amount of energy to measure and store a value.
No, in the limit it takes no energy to store a value. What takes energy is resetting a value for the next measurement (if you have finite storage/read capacity). An arbitrarily large Maxwell's Demon brain uses no energy; a finite-sized one must generate entropy upon resetting its "neurons".
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Perhaps one could arrange things so that the energy needed to story the value was the energy received in sensing the value. (I.e., don't be sure that the GP was wrong without checking carefully, which I haven't done.)
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Planck, the man's name was Planck. Planks generally do little more than act like boards, at least I've never observed them in any constants of nature.
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virtual particles are pooping in and out all around us.
So are we floating around in incalculable amounts of virtual excretive?
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What makes QM difficult is that so many consider classical mechanics the gold standard, instead of understanding the assumptions are false.
I posit that classical mechanics is a behavior that emerges as a result of quantum mechanics. This assumption allows quantum mechanics to follow it's own set of rules that do not conform to classical mechanics but ultimately producing the higher level behavior of classical mechanics.
It's kinda like the difference because C and Assembly. C can't do all the weird stuff that you can do in Assembly but Assembly is what is used to implement the behavior of C. Ergo, the universe is a C compiler. QED ;)
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God is currently rewriting the universe in Rust.
Come come now gentlemen.
(map (lambda (x)
(better (know x)
'already))
(all))
Ish. (Score:2)
The laws of thermodynamics are always statistical, and in QM the conservation laws are also. Quantum foam is several orders of magnitude larger than Planck lengths and Planck time, but the averages all work out correctly.
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For example, virtual particles are pooping in and out all around us.
Is that why life stinks sometimes?
Sabine Hossenfelder debunked this months ago (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Re:Sabine Hossenfelder debunked this months ago (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to listen to her until I realized she makes a living by "debunking" any speculation by demonstrating that there's no definitive proof for it.
The whole enterprise is based on the kind logical fallacy that would ensure that science never progresses.
What's the documented process by which one conceives radical new hypotheses, Sabine? Our very existence depends on a long train of insights and ideas that came as dreams (benzene), literal daytime visions (Tesla's AC motor), acid trips (Internet), "bolts of lightning", muses and miracles.
Not everything about science is neat nor tidy. Beating curiosity and wonder out of students is the Orthodoxy's aspie conception of sophistication.
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Not everything about science is neat nor tidy.
I think she would agree with you given her video about "beauty" in physics.
A relatively low number of insights from borderline crazy people doesn't make the huge number of bonkers ideas worth considering.
Curiosity & wonder are fantastic motivators but you still have to do the hard, boring, dirty work. Without that you can't progress beyond a collection of nifty ideas, most of which are wrong.
I think we have a more of a linguistic problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Other languages don't have that problem. In German, for instance, the word for reality is Wirklichkeit, which comes from "wirken", to have an effect. To the German speaker, reality thus is "the sum of all effects", and this is exactly how Quantum mechanics describes reality.
Yeah, right! And blackholes are empty (Score:3)
Observation is irrelevant. Shit happens just fine without having observed it.
We bloody well aren't in control! Nor should we expect to be.
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If a particle decays and nobody observes it, is it really gone?
And, more important, does anyone give a fuck?
Re:Yeah, right! And blackholes are empty (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, right! And blackholes are empty (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet, the universe seems fine tuned for us to be here right at this time in its evolution.
That's backwards reasoning.
Since we are the product of this reality it will always look like this reality is specifically made for us, no matter what it turns out to be.
You could say that this particular reality contains the possibility of evolving us (since we're here) , but you can't say that this reality exists for the purpose of evolving us.
Basically, what you're doing it taking the anthropic principle one step too far and into imagination land.
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Re:Yeah, right! And blackholes are empty (Score:4, Informative)
And yet, the universe seems fine tuned for us to be here right at this time in its evolution.
There doesn't need to be any fine tuning, If the only universe you can exist in is the one you find yourself in.
Imagine repeatedly tossing a fair coin to set up universes.
A universe to support your existence can only come about if there are X heads in a row.
Now you see the universe exists. So there must have been X heads in a row.
Wow Amazing, what are the chances, etc.
The thing is, you don't see all the others because you can't exist in them. It doesn't mean they didn't happen and don't also exist. No fine tuning was done.
We just exist where conditions allow it. If the conditions didn't allow it we wouldn't be here to think about it.
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And yet, the universe seems fine tuned for us to be here right at this time in its evolution.
There are alternate explanations for that. These are far simpler. You may also want to look up "fine tuned", because it seems like this environment we are in here is only somewhat suitable for long-term human existence and comes with severe problems.
You are correct that there is no objective reality to a sentient observer (the only form of observer that matters). A sentient entity always has its own inner "state" and "processes" (for lack of better words) that are not part of any "objective" reality because
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What the frig does subjective mean then?
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And what does measure mean?
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That question lies at the crux of the matter
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So neutrinos are almost not things.
I don't think you've quite got the right angle, but I don't have a better one. You'll also need to handle "dark matter" and "dark energy". Nobody's been able to really handle the full thing yet. (Consider something the mass of a neutrino that only interacts via gravitational interactions. In what sense can you claim it exists? But it's possible that things like that constitute the overwhelming amount of stuff in the universe.)
In other words, the conspiracy nuts are right (Score:2)
Screw facts, what matters is how I feel is right.
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Well, that is certainly how most people operate. It is not completely wrong though, because you cannot put a "fact" in your mind. You always will attribute it with stuff and build a model around it and give it a context. The real question is how you do this and how well it works for predictions. Most people screw that one more and more the more long-term the predictions become. Most people also employ feedback loops to warp new information to fit into their existing models instead of adjusting the models wh
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I can. But then again, I'm not exactly what could be considered a normal human being.
Yes, I have it in writing.
I try to live my life rooted in this reality. To the utmost consequence. I admit, it's not what most people would probably want. Reality sucks. It's certainly far more pleasant to live in a fantasy world where you're always right and also the center of the universe.
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I can.
No, sorry, you cannot. There are several interface layers in between. After that, it is just an indirect reference, maybe with some indirect references as "explanation". The limit here is a fundamental information processing limit. Even text describing a "fact" is not a fact anymore. It is just text which requires interpretation.
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Ah, another one who knows my mind better than I do. Great.
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Ah, another one who knows my mind better than I do. Great.
Nope. But I do know a bit about information processing and knowledge representation. All experience humans have of physical reality is very, very indirect. And that directly means you cannot put any fact about physical reality in your mind. That is simply not possible. All you can do is put a _description_ of a fact in there and those _always_ need interpretation and hence are not absolutes and not facts ion themselves. You can put logical/mathematical facts in your mind (I can too), but these do not apply
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I'm fairly sure the experience of the fall of the iron curtain was a different for you than for me. I give you that. But the fact that it did is not up for discussion. It just is.
What is an observer? What is a sound? (Score:5, Insightful)
This post makes me cringe so much. I'm sure there's actually some interesting science if you did deep enough, but. . .
I really hate the word "observer" here. It makes it sound like a mind, a consciousness, is involved. In the quantum physics context, an observer is basically anything that interacts and is influenced by the particle. A block of wood can be an observer. An atom can be an observer. More broadly, the whole universe is an observer, with lines of cause-and-effect that tie everything together. But articles like this always spin it the exact opposite way, trying to imply that reality is some kind of collective fever dream dependent on human mental states.
And even the old "tree falling in the forest" thing irks me, partly because it has absolutely no connection with quantum mechanics, but also because it was dumb to begin with. So let me spell it out. . . It's a purely semantic conundrum based on your definition of "sound". If sound is vibrations in the air, then a tree falling in the woods makes a sound, end of story. Some people, however, define "sound" as the perception of those vibrations by some kind of being, human or animal. Which seems weird to me, but okay. . . If that's your definition, then if there is nobody to perceive the vibrations, then I guess you would consider there to be no sound. But that doesn't reveal any sort of deep meaning about reality, nor does it reveal anything whatsoever about quantum phenomena.
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Mod up, but I've forgotten how to do that.
Thanks for reminding us of the bogosity of the notion of conscious observer in physics.
The Relational quantum mechanics [wikipedia.org] interpretation seems to be addressing this point sensibly, but I may not have understood it properly.
Seems vastly oversold (Score:4, Insightful)
There are ultimately four possibilities (Score:4, Interesting)
1. There's no objective reality
2. As you approach the limit, the universe is objective but in a purely mathematical sense and not in a physical sense, the physical universe emerges from the mathematical objective reality
3. As you approach the limit, the universe is objective but in a different space - such as a stringy 11-dimensional space, where the physical universe is a 4D spacetime slice through this high-order universe
4. The laws are approximate and oversimplified, with more accurate laws in a granular 4D spacetime producing something that can be called an objective reality
There is currently no way to distinguish cases 1,2 and 4. (3) can be distinguished iff the upgrade to the LHC will be enough to show up sufficient versions of supersymmetry to effectively rule this in or out, or a larger collider is built that can do so. (You cannot rule out all versions of supersymmetry, but the probability of them existing drops sharply as you increase complexity. At some reasonable point, you can draw a line and say that in the absence of any additional information, there's nothing beyond that we can meaningfully look for*.)
*Using the cosmos itself as an accelerator is fine, we can create targets and see what spawns as a result of collisions. This is far higher energy that we could build on Earth, we just won't know what the energy was. But if supersymmetric particles arose, you'd at least know that there existed an energy where they did so.
Slowing our frame rate down (Score:2)
I don't know this waveform nonsense could just be the universe simulations way of saving CPU Cycles by trying to not do work that nobody can observe.
If we keep sending out more detailed observations devices then effectively we will just be slowing down our own simulations frame rate because there is more work to do per tick now.
The proof will be when we can do magic (Score:2)
i.e. seriously change reality because of these effects. Otherwise they will tend to remain unevidenced speculations that keep vast amounts of money flowing to the LHC and its ilk.
OTOH given that parapsychology has long since observed effects that achieve levels of significance far above those required for publishing in the fields of medicine and biology, perhaps the parapsychologists need to be taken more seriously.
Am I joking? I don't know...
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> parapsychologists
You can't do that with the high-school version of the Scientific Method.
Something that has a high-water mark of 25% reproducibility with a 40% accuracy among the best subjects cannot be handled by those who insist "it must be consistently reproducible across the experimental arm".
Most people calling themselves scientists don't understand statistical results. Most of them don't even do the stats for their own studies.
That doesn't stop them from openly mocking you for the equivalent of t
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OTOH given that parapsychology has long since observed effects that achieve levels of significance far above those required for publishing in the fields of medicine and biology, perhaps the parapsychologists need to be taken more seriously.
Am I joking? I don't know...
Please see "Cold Fusion".
Tree in a forest (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I joking? I don't know...
Your joke isn't funny until someone thinks it is. ;)
Whether reality exists or not⦠(Score:2)
Independently Observable Reproducable Experiments (Score:2)
Independently observable and reproducible experiments at a distance calls bullshit.
So if there's no reality... (Score:2)
...we don't have to RTFA?
Objective reality is a social construct. (Score:2)
So let's just redistribute it according to hardship reasons!
So I can view frustum cull... (Score:2)
Re:when they say observer they mean an interaction (Score:5, Interesting)
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If we are unaware of much of nature, it pragmatically does not exist.
It depends. It does not need to exist from the point of view of the person being unaware. However, that also means that person will perceive things to happen seemingly without reason because the whole behaves as if it existed (does not matter whether real, simulated, "catches up" when observed, etc.). Those observations then open the door for a whole lot of nonsense and superstition, from the ether to all the bullshit religion tries (often successfully) to sell people on.
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Re:when they say observer they mean an interaction (Score:4, Interesting)
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Ok, in that case my apologies.
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Naa. Also note that you are projecting. I _asked_, I did not "lock" onto anything.
I just observed the bullshit that this google machine recently produced which had a lot of people believing they had found the chosen one. I did detect some possible similarities. If the person is however indeed 96 years old, it is probably just a bit of a communication problem. Also, somebody that age will have seen several mainstream scientific models fall and established "truths" to go put the window. A statement that scien
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Einstein changed all that and changed the nature of space's existence.
I propose that Einstein did no such thing.
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and unappreciative of logic
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Only way to find out is to do the cat experiment on Einstein. Bring on the poison. Problem is, that would only give us half the truth.
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If we are unaware of much of nature, it pragmatically does not exist.
Not really.
If we are unaware of much of nature, we pragmatically are unaware of much of nature. And that says nothing about the state of existence of this unobserved part of reality.
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> I can manage quite well on the presumption that it does not exist.
You may use it that way. On one definition, possibly yours, things we are unaware off are defined as not existing. On some other definition of exist we can say that what we are aware of are things that exist, while what we are not aware of has neither the definition of existing or not existing.
I think the comment was just saying we don't need to add the idea of things existing or not. We get what we mean by "we are unaware of much of nat
Not really (Score:2)
Newton simplified. His numbers didn't quite fit observations, but he ignored that for the purpose of keeping things simple. That's not the same as sensitivity, that's being deliberately unobservant. In his case, he simply didn't have the maths needed. He'd have needed matrix algebra in order to produce a formulation that could handle what was inside the realms of observation. So he did what any self-respecting physicist would do, which is to stipulate the upper and lower bounds for his physics. Anything out
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If we are unaware of much of nature, it pragmatically does not exist.
Actions have consequences. The flip side of that is that consequences come from actions, and therefore there has to be an actor, so things can't just happen for no reason.
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"When they say observer what they mean is that an interaction took place."
Sure, but I really don't see how a few photons reflected from something and getting caught with an eye or a camera or not is making a difference.
Article does not justify the headline (Score:3)
...because the correct headline would be boring: "Yet another experiment verifies quantum mechanics works, just like all the others."
Nothing about the experiment suggests "objective reality does not exist.
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Yellow journalism is dishonest. But it gets clicks, so natural selection keeps it in the upper strata.
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Whether it means that or not depends on what you think "objective reality" means. But it does seem to confirm all previous predictions & studies in the field. I wonder what this means for "Wigner's Friend" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
When you consider the friends of Wigner's friend, then it starts to seem a reasonable claim that "Objective reality doesn't exist".
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When they say observer what they mean is that an interaction took place.
Not so simple. The photon 'interacts' with the double slit, but that is not an observation.
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Yes they do. Though in noting this I think people often forget that the reality observed by a macro observer involves countless such interactions. That definitely does not prove macro reality is 'in the eye of the observer' but it is good enough for entertaining discussing about the possibility around the bong. lol
Ever since discovering diverging memories of events and perspectives I've wondered is the issue is not so much decaying memory but rather that we are each in fragments of parallel dimensions that
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[q]Many of us believe that there is a high likelihood that, what we perceive as reality, is just a simulation. What is described in the latest research if just another indication that this is probably true.[/q]
What nonsense.
The lack of infinite divisibility does not make it 'probably true' that we live in a simulation.
You could not make the point that a proper real reality cannot have a limit to its scale or that it is unlikely for it to have one.
In other words, you can't prove that this limit we encounter
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Dogs devote a similar percentage of brain power to smell as humans do to sight/ Do you honestly believe that they perceive the same reality that we do?
There may in fact be an objective reality somewhere underneath of all of the possible descriptions, but I think that neither humans n
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There may in fact be an objective reality somewhere underneath of all of the possible descriptions, but I think that neither humans nor human science is ever going to experience it or define it.
But we are already doing this!
You don't see infrared, but we have instruments that will tell you how reality looks at those frequencies.
We have tunneling force microscopes that scan the freaking outlines of atoms. Atoms are things we have never evolved to see, yet we have shown they exist and we can manipulate them, not with our evolved bodies but with instruments that 'feel' reality in ways we can't experience directly.
How can you state that this is not already an 'objective reality somewhere underneath' ?
Re:This is how a simulation has to work (Score:4, Insightful)
Many of us believe that there is a high likelihood that, what we perceive as reality, is just a simulation.
Many? Nope. It is clearly one of the more deranged quasi-religious beliefs. Like all religion, it uses arguments that seem good and believable (!) when you do not fully understand the subject area, but that become pretty much contrived and bizarre when you do. This quasi-religion is careful to not claim it is absolutely true (like religion usually does), but that is really just a part of its camouflage by attempting to look scientific. In effect, it just replaces "absolutely" true with "almost certainly" true and the believers fall for that.
Essentially it is (like physicalism for example as well) an attempt to find a religion surrogate by those believing in technology that can nonetheless not deal with the actual scientific state-of-the-art where the question is open and unanswered. Hence they look at their surroundings and elevate something they believe to be powerful (here: computers) to quasi-"god" status. At this time this is not (yet) an organized religion AFAIK, but give it time and it will create power-structures, waste your time ("prayer"), ask for money and tell you how to live and what to think.
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You're not wrong about what it is, but it's arguably better supported from what we know about reality than any religion. My favorite is how things seem to behave so differently at very high or low energy states.
I have long wondered if the reason for apparent weirdness in physics is that we are only experiencing things affected by whatever is really underlying, which we cannot or have not yet learned to even detect or measure. All of reality as we know it might be our perception of something deeper, so thing
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You're not wrong about what it is, but it's arguably better supported from what we know about reality than any religion.
I do not see that. It uses more "modern" fantasies taken from current tech, but that does not make it any "better supported". Not even the motivation behind it is different: Ye old mindless search for "higher authority", which is apparently very human, but by all established facts bullshit. In fact we see that people with high levels of authority seem to be routinely not very smart and (if we are lucky) handle that authority incompetently or (if we are unlucky) nefariously. There is no reason to believe tha
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One of the core principles of creating simulations is KISS.
Another one of the core principles of creating simulations is that they have to execute on a useful time scale. That's why games use simplified models rather than implementing the whole game world as one big unified general purpose physics simulation. Driving is handled by one set of rules, flying by another set of rules, and so on. Even though vehicles have aerodynamics, you don't need as complex an aerodynamics model as you use for a plane to get essentially realistic results.
I'm not saying I believe in a
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I'm not saying I don't think it's more tempting for nerds and gamers to believe in a simulation model... I do. All I'm saying is that there's some kind of logic behind this idea that conforms to observed principles. There's none at all behind most religious ideas.
Ok, let me preface this with that I am agnostic and that I think that religion is probably the worst enabler, amplifier and instigator of unethical behavior ever (i.e. the biggest "evil" ever in religious terms). That said, it is not true that there is no logic in religious ideas and principles. Especially Christians often have complex and, in themselves, valid, logical arguments for a lot of things. The problem is not the logic. One problem is the base assumptions (axioms) they start from which basically i
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"Many of us believe that there is a high likelihood that, what we perceive as reality, is just a simulation."
Not this bullshit again. The notion of "simulation" for reality is merely a mathematical transformation between the mathematics of the bulk and the mathematics of the boundary. And if you want to get all dualistic about it, the other side is that the boundary is merely a reflection of the bulk.
Mathematics is not physical reality. There are a shitload of mathematical theories of reality that we now kn
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The notion of living of in a simulation is what philosophers consider a brittle notion. Assume for the moment you are correct, then your belief in the simulation is indeed simulated and not real. Now go back and take some logic and philosophy courses.
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...your belief in the simulation is indeed simulated and not real.
Go ask the philosophers why a simulated belief isn't real. I mean, the information that is concerned with this belief needs to be accounted for in some way and thus can be said to be real.
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Many of us believe that there is a high likelihood that, what we perceive as reality, is just a simulation.
Not so much a simulation as just a really shitty video game.
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. In a simulation, you cannot possibly store the entire universe, in all its detail.
In either a quantum or classical universe you cannot possibly store the entire universe, in all its detail. You’d need a vastly larger universe or vastly different rate of time to do so. Whatever you do, you cannot but hope to capture a fleeting essence and still have it be a real thing. It’s like trying to simulate a device, on that device, with zero slowdown.
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Many of us believe that there is a high likelihood that, what we perceive as reality, is just a simulation.
Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly, in a digital jar.
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A finite simulation does have to be discrete. But the uncertainty priniciple isn't a requirement, it would be fine for positions and momentums to be absolutely known.
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Obviously, reality is completely subjective and also obviously subjective reality does not only depend on sensory perceptions. You may be stupid or deranged enough to not actually understand that you have individual existence, but that does not extent to most people.
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I think you're right about everyone experiencing the same reality, but differently. It's still an open question as to whether things happen when nobody is looking, though. Just because one can suggest that statistically doesn't mean it's what's actually happening. There can be another explanation which we don't know enough to form yet. On the other hand, if it's actually true, then it offers perhaps the best evidence that reality as we know it is "a simulation" — whether it's a mass hallucination or l
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Why should I trust you on anything I know is wrong and can easily be demonstrated to be wrong? This is not a religious discussion. Or maybe you mean "physical reality"? That one is rather limited in how far it shapes individual experience of existence. People spend a lot of time in their own minds.
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Except that physics would disagree with you on that. The question isn't, in my way of thinking, who gets to shout bigger, but why there's a difference in the first place.
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Depends on exactly what you mean. The macro scale is generally highly reliable, but on the quantum scale what you see depends on how you look. (Well, actually that works on the macro scale, too. You filter out what you consider "noise", and the filters you apply determine the signals that you receive...or at lease limit the possibilities. The difference is that on the macro scale the sensing doesn't usually destroy the state of the thing being sensed.)
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Scientific American had an article awhile back on gender dysphoria and the genetic issues that cause it to arise. People who claim the issue is black and white have never had a good look at biology, genes, interaction with the environment, etc. All these contribute to how you feel about yourself...male, female, or any of myriad shades of gray in between. And sexuality is not necessarily a constant over one's lifetime. It can change depending upon hormones and other factors. So stop being a dualist freak of
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Kinda like all the stupid fucksticks out there claiming that if they chop their dicks off, they're now girls of indeterminate age with myriad made up genders?
When that happens, they're no longer fucksticks then, are they? And are you trying to say that age and gender cannot be measured together, but stupidity is a constant?
QM or Hegeian Dialectic? All I know for sure is that I myself am intact and have not been Hermeneutered.
Fluitans impropria est, sed sexus et mens integra sunt, ergo sum; Mathematicam et philosophiam facit cogitas hominem "cum"
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Well they don't have any fucksticks anymore so maybe they improved then?