I 100% agree that a “perfect simulation” and a non-simulation are essentially the same, noting Lumifer’s comment that our programmer(s) are gods by another name in the case of simulation.
My comment is really about your second paragraph, how likely are we to see an imperfection? My reasoning about error propagation in an imperfect simulation would imply a fairly high probability of us seeing an error eventually. This is assuming that we are a near-perfect simulation of the universe “above” ours, with “perfect” simulation being done at small scales around conscious observers.
So I’m not really sure if you just didn’t understand what I’m getting at, because we seem to agree, and you just explained back to me what I was saying.
I guess where we disagree is in our view of how a simulation would be imperfect. You’re envisioning something much closer to a perfect simulation, where slightly incorrect boundary conditions would cause errors to propagate into the region that is perfectly simulated. I consider it more likely that if a simulation has any interference at all (such as rewinding to fix noticeable problems) it will be filled with approximations everywhere. In that case the boundary condition errors aren’t so relevant. Whether we see an error would depend mainly on whether there are any (which, like I said, is equivalent to asking whether we are “in” a simulation) and whether we have any mechanism by which to detect them.
Everyone has different ideas of what a “perfectly” or “near perfectly” simulated universe would look like, I was trying to go off of Douglas’s idea of it, where I think the boundary errors would have effect.
I still don’t see how rewinding would be interference; I imagine interference would be that some part of the “above ours” universe gets inside this one, say if you had some particle with quantum entanglement spanning across the universes (although it would really also just be in the “above ours” universe because it would have to be a superset of our universe, it’s just also a particle that we can observe).
I 100% agree that a “perfect simulation” and a non-simulation are essentially the same, noting Lumifer’s comment that our programmer(s) are gods by another name in the case of simulation.
My comment is really about your second paragraph, how likely are we to see an imperfection? My reasoning about error propagation in an imperfect simulation would imply a fairly high probability of us seeing an error eventually. This is assuming that we are a near-perfect simulation of the universe “above” ours, with “perfect” simulation being done at small scales around conscious observers.
So I’m not really sure if you just didn’t understand what I’m getting at, because we seem to agree, and you just explained back to me what I was saying.
I guess where we disagree is in our view of how a simulation would be imperfect. You’re envisioning something much closer to a perfect simulation, where slightly incorrect boundary conditions would cause errors to propagate into the region that is perfectly simulated. I consider it more likely that if a simulation has any interference at all (such as rewinding to fix noticeable problems) it will be filled with approximations everywhere. In that case the boundary condition errors aren’t so relevant. Whether we see an error would depend mainly on whether there are any (which, like I said, is equivalent to asking whether we are “in” a simulation) and whether we have any mechanism by which to detect them.
Everyone has different ideas of what a “perfectly” or “near perfectly” simulated universe would look like, I was trying to go off of Douglas’s idea of it, where I think the boundary errors would have effect.
I still don’t see how rewinding would be interference; I imagine interference would be that some part of the “above ours” universe gets inside this one, say if you had some particle with quantum entanglement spanning across the universes (although it would really also just be in the “above ours” universe because it would have to be a superset of our universe, it’s just also a particle that we can observe).