If we, within our universe, cannot predict anything in atomic detail, then they, running this universe, do not need to. Such fine details will only exist when we look at them, and there will be no fact of the matter about where particles are when we are not observing them.
Familiar indeed and I agree with that, but in order to predict the future state of this universe, they will arguably need to compute it beyond what we could see ourselves: I mean, to reliably determine the state of the universe in the future, they would need to take into account parts of the system that nobody is aware of, because it is still part of the the causal system that will eventually lead to this future state we want predictions about, right?
They just have to choose a future state that can plausibly (to us and them) result from the current state, since we won’t be able to tell. Now and then some glitch might surface like the cold fusion flap some years ago, but they patched that out pretty quickly.
Oh, what is this cold fusion flap thing? I didn’t knw about it, and can’t really find information about it.
I agree, however what I had in mind was that they probably don’t just want to make simulations in which individuals can’t say wheter they are simulated or not. They may want to run these simulations in accurate and precise way, that gives them predictions. For example they might wonder what would happen if they apply such and such initial conditions to the system, and want to know how it will behave? In that case, they don’t want buge either, even though individuals in the simulation won’t be able to tell the difference.
I was joking that Fleischmann and Pons had stumbled on a bug in the simulation and were getting energy out of nowhere.
I assume that a few basic principles (e.g. non-decreasing entropy, P≠NP, Church-Turing thesis, and of course all of mathematics) hold in the simulators’ universe, which need not otherwise look anything like ours. This rules out god-like hypercomputation. In that case, one way to get accurate enough predictions is to make multiple runs with different random seeds and observe the distributions of the futures. Then they can pick one. (Collapse of the wave function!)
If we, within our universe, cannot predict anything in atomic detail, then they, running this universe, do not need to. Such fine details will only exist when we look at them, and there will be no fact of the matter about where particles are when we are not observing them.
Sound familiar?
Familiar indeed and I agree with that, but in order to predict the future state of this universe, they will arguably need to compute it beyond what we could see ourselves: I mean, to reliably determine the state of the universe in the future, they would need to take into account parts of the system that nobody is aware of, because it is still part of the the causal system that will eventually lead to this future state we want predictions about, right?
They just have to choose a future state that can plausibly (to us and them) result from the current state, since we won’t be able to tell. Now and then some glitch might surface like the cold fusion flap some years ago, but they patched that out pretty quickly.
Oh, what is this cold fusion flap thing? I didn’t knw about it, and can’t really find information about it.
I agree, however what I had in mind was that they probably don’t just want to make simulations in which individuals can’t say wheter they are simulated or not. They may want to run these simulations in accurate and precise way, that gives them predictions. For example they might wonder what would happen if they apply such and such initial conditions to the system, and want to know how it will behave? In that case, they don’t want buge either, even though individuals in the simulation won’t be able to tell the difference.
This type of cold fusion.
I was joking that Fleischmann and Pons had stumbled on a bug in the simulation and were getting energy out of nowhere.
I assume that a few basic principles (e.g. non-decreasing entropy, P≠NP, Church-Turing thesis, and of course all of mathematics) hold in the simulators’ universe, which need not otherwise look anything like ours. This rules out god-like hypercomputation. In that case, one way to get accurate enough predictions is to make multiple runs with different random seeds and observe the distributions of the futures. Then they can pick one. (Collapse of the wave function!)