Their findings, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, go beyond simply suggesting that we’re not living in a simulated world like The Matrix. They prove something far more profound: the universe is built on a type of understanding that exists beyond the reach of any algorithm.
We are not in a simulation. A particle is only able to hold exactly as much information as is necessary to describe it, and hence is irreducible.
Any incomplete simulation, even to a tiny degree, leads to wildly inconsistent, and eventually incoherent conclusions.
Either our universe is a simplified, and thus unreliable, simulation, destroying any long term usefulness to would-be simulators ; or it is simply not a simulation at all.
Yes, the simulation was programmed so they’d arrive at that conclusion.
Nice but … simulation of what?
The whole idea was just something Elon used to recruit imaginative minds to his companies.
Here’s a basic example using the statement, “This true statement is not provable.” If it were provable, it would be false, making logic inconsistent. If it’s not provable, then it’s true, but that makes any system trying to prove it incomplete. Either way, pure computation fails.
Am I the only one seing this as a misnomer? The statement is a composite of two statements: “This is a true statement” and “This is not a provable statement”.
The “This is a true statement” part asserts truth. And, given nothing else to go of, we can assume the part true. “It’s true that this is true”. There just isn’t any real statement being made. Taking the assumption is oerfectly valid, since we can disprove it at a later point.
The second statement, “This statement is not provable”, is very much provable, since it also asserts almost nothing, just like the previous one. Its assertion is “I’m not provable”, which is provably false.
Since the two sentences form a composite, we must compose the results of the previous two. We have a “true” and a “false”. From the composite sentence we can infer the logical operation used to connect them: AND.
Thus we have a TRUE AND FALSE boolean expression, which has a resounding answer of FALSE.
I have to say, my system didn’t prove it, but it evaluated it - unlike the authors, which claim to have proven the universe is forever ununderstandable to anyone and thus unable to be simulated.
That being said, my system seems to be perfectly consistent with itself, and, dare I say, quite grounded in reality.
You did not evaluate it. Composition of your statements does not equate to original one. “It is true” and “it is unprovable” correspond to the whole sentence, you cannot just divide it in two parts.
The whole concept in quantum mechanics of a particle’s wave function collapsing into a single point due to an observation event is just weird enough, and feels just enough like some otherworldly programmer’s hack to save tons of resources, that I am not sure I will ever be fully convinced that we are not in a simulation.
I’m not asserting that we’re in one, and I don’t know of any reasons to believe that we are in one, but I think I’ll always have that little suspicion.
If you really wanna stop sleeping at night, get this: the human brain’s memory system doesn’t work like we think. There is no recorded data like on a hard drive, every time you remember something you are basically running a simulation in your head of those experiences, and the conditions are managed as associations only. This is why memory is so unreliable.
I will leave it to you to toss and turn and work out what this means for your experience of the universe.
I had this thought ever since i first heard about that in quantum physics that, it must be for resource optimisation.
It’s like foveated rendering for the whole damn universe.
Then what would the real world look like, huh?
But if we do discover we are in a simulation, totally hacking that computer…
I’d point out that ‘an observation event’ is just hitting one thing with another thing, which is always going to have some kind of effect. And wave-particle duality is probably more of a spectrum than we give it credit for. Particles vibrate constantly and can be easily made to do wave-like things, like resonance. Collapsing a waveform into a particle may be less of a mode or type change and more like putting your finger on a resonating tuning fork.
That’s right about observation events. They are often called interactions instead.
But the wave-particle duality applies to literally everything at the quantum level, per the standard model and quantum field theory anyway. And that’s a model with an incredible track record.
Looking at a particle as a wave is usually in the context of that particle by itself moving in a straight line through a vacuum. There isn’t really vibration and temperature; there aren’t even atoms! You just have the particle’s energy in eV.
Whether we can subjectively compare the packets of energy in quantum fields with the waves of energy through matter, I have no idea. The math is solid though.
I really don’t buy this. It’s the same sort of bullshit logic of robots exploding when they read contradictory logical statements. I don’t really believe we’re in a simulation but I see no reason why, given infinite storage, time, and processing power, some higher reality could be simulating what we live in.
Okay, I hate to be “that guy” but the over use of “—” in the writing next to certain phrases like “not X, but something more, something deeper, it’s Y”. Makes this article look 100% AI written to me. Like, I’m more than reasonable certain it is just copy pasted AI. Someone will need to prove to me that it isn’t at this point.
My guy, the reason AI uses so many em dashes is because it was trained on proper writing that properly uses appropriate punctuation. Those of us who know how to write have been using em dashes, semicolons, parenthetical statements and more for decades longer than AI has been around. You could very well be reading the work of a journalist who actually knows how to write rather than stringing together Twitter posts into an article.
We know, this is not an attack on em dashes.
It’s still ai slop.
I use em dashes all the time myself, I also make this critique and people always respond with a defence of em dashes.
Its the use patterns on how and when they are used combined with other patterns that makes it evident that it is AI. Its just the most easily recognisable tell. When you see over use of em dashes in a an article online, you check for those other tells.
Well the images are already dumb AI slop. I don’t know who the article is for but the images scream “don’t think about me!”. For me it’s hard to take it seriously at that point.
The notion of a simulated universe is a bit of a misnomer IMO. It doesn’t mean the nature of our reality is unphysical as in order to exist as a simulation all of it must be represented physically in whatever the “top level” universe is. It just means that what we experience is built and described in a way that is not inline with our subjective reality, which is true in any case.
Another fun opinion is that it would be easier for a technological civilization to discover it is in a simulation than it would be to develop interstellar travel. Upon discovery of the fact that it is simulated a civilization would either abuse that fact or change it’s behavior both of which ruin the validity of the simulation’s outcome. The natural response to this by whoever is running the experiment would be to cull that part of the data to preserve the fidelity of the result. Thus the Fermi paradox is explained.
When you use the word simulated do you mean to imply intent? Or are you speaking to something that is computational in nature?
Well this is starting to sound religious. I guess in this case these concepts are inseparable? The technology or methods used to produce such a simulated universe could be advanced enough to where we wouldn’t be able to understand as computationally derived and my first point is it may not be an accurate label. For instance I have no great idea of how we could tell being a part of a quantum computation based universe apart from existing in “real” quantum defined reality as the behavior of a qbit is essentially just a controlled bit of actual quantum reality designed to produce a usable outcome. I would guess our simulation would run on something at least as advanced is quantum computing. The original notion of a simulated universe came up when computers were iterative, deterministic and digital, which is no long necessarily the case which may alter what can be meant by our universe being simulated. I guess the key aspect of the simulation hypothesis would then have to boil down to a universal which was intentionally fabricated by some means within another universe.
As for intent. I would guess that if a civilization went through the trouble of making a simulated universe it would do so with an intent in mind. However that intent could be completely mundane and our existence could and likely would be fully accidental within it. Likewise , usually a key component of any good simulation is that it is a rule based random process as you only simulate if you do not want or do not have foreknowledge of the end results. Otherwise you would calculate. Though this is a guess based on experience.
Gotta tell you, this sounds like bullshit. Godel’s incompleteness theorems prove that there are some questions that cannot be proven by axiom (or consequently, by algorithm). But that in no way rules out simulating our reality. Cuz I got news for you, Godel’s incompleteness theorems hold true here inthis universe too, my guys. And yet we still have a functioning universe.
Godels proof only applies to mathematical abstracts like the nature of natural numbers. It shows that we will never have a complete, self consistent, provable description of things like natural numbers. But we still use them all the damn time, particularly in computation. And things that aren’t abstract? Things that can be observed, and described? That can all be simulated.
Their argument seems to come down to the idea that you need a non-algorithmic higher order logic to have a universe. Insert whatever mystical unknowable source you want in there. Cool. We would still have that in a simulated universe, sourced from the universe doing the simulation. You dont have to recreate the nature of mathematics in this new universe to simulated it. The math already exists, and you apply it to the simulations. Godel’s theorems hold true, and observable physical nature is simulated without issue. The only thing that is actually difficult to simulate algorithmically is true randomness, but there are already plenty of ways to generate random numbers from measurements of our own physical world’s randomness, so this too can arise from the higher order world too.
I’m not saying that I think we are actually in a simulation, I’m just saying that the aspects of this “proof” that they mention in the article seems very weak.
From skimming through the actual paper, it seems that quantum gravity is a theory of physics, more general than general relativity, where spacetime itself is something that’s generated by a formal system of a formal language, a finite or small infinite set of axioms (fundamental physical laws) and rules for the creation of algorithms. What’s seemingly proved in the paper is that there are theorems in this system which cannot be proven, because they are too complex. But theorems in this sense mean states of spacetime or energy or whatever, meaning that ultra-complex states cannot be modelled with this model. And allegedly these kinds of ultra-complex states occur in high-energy situations.
I’m not saying it’s gospel but the article isn’t as absurd as it first seems. Still I doubt this actually proves us not living in asimulation.
We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity …
Okay, but isn’t that just evidence that the theory of quantum gravity doesn’t actually describe our universe?
I’m getting real Principal Skinner vibes from this. “Is our theory so out of touch? No, it’s reality that is wrong.”
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Nothing says that our computers can’t eventually operate on the same principles as the universe.
Also nothing that says the computers running the simulation have to behave the same as ours, or even that the laws of physics in the simulating universe have to be the same as ours.
All they proved is that we currently aren’t capable of simulating our universe. Congrats guys, great science thanks for the contribution to human knowledge.
This was my exact thought as well. There’s really no reason why sufficiently advanced computers couldn’t eventually simulate anything and everything. I’m going to go a bit off-topic but there’s a theory about the simulation in The Matrix operating from a different set of laws from the real world. Hence the reason why humans can actually work as human batteries very efficiently compared to other forms of energy.
So, there’s the possibility that if we are in a simulation then the “real world” might be operating by a different set of laws and physics to what we know in here. If that’s the case then I really don’t know where the limit actually is or how we could tell from inside here.
Yeah it seems more than likely that we will be able to make a universe in a computer and plug ourselves in one day. Which for me proves that it’s possible that we already live in a simulated universe. Not likely or unlikely, but not impossible.
If we ever develop a computer that is capable is simulating every aspect of the universe that we have ever observed, and we then make a simulation of our exact universe and run that simulation up the the point that ourselves in the simulation make the simulation of their own universe, the likelihood that we are in a simulation created by a higher order of ourselves as well is nearly 100%. And nearly 100% chance that they too are simulations. The depths of thess nested simulations would be potentially infinite, and only one could ever be the “real” world. So there is almost almost no chance that any of an infinite set is the “real” one.
It does seem like the eventual destination of any civilization to plug themselves into a simulation. Seeing that the universe expands at the speed of light, with our current understanding of physics and tech, we just simply wouldn’t be able to expand as quickly as the universe did. So, we’d always be trapped in this bubble and unable to reach any further.
Why bother with all that trouble when you can be essentially gods in your own virtual reality simulation? You can have any life that you could possibly want in there if it was advanced enough.
Disclaimer: not a physicist, but I am familiar with mathematical logic side of things e.g. incomplete theorem and stuff.
I have to say, terrible paper. Very light on technical details, full of assertions not backed up by arguments. I wouldn’t really take this too seriously. But this is just a letter, maybe the full paper, if they ever publish one, will have more substance? We will see.
I doubt the idea this can be proven at all. It makes the assumption that a simulation would have to function in a particular way. Why would that have to be the case? Anything you find could just be a quirk of the simulation. Hell, the simulation could be made in a universe with entirely different rules and logic, so you can’t make assumptions about anything. It’s really not something that I think could be disproven or proven.
(Because it can’t be disproven or proven, and it doesn’t change anything either way, you should live as if it isn’t real probably. It’s a fun thought experiment, but you probably shouldn’t hold an active belief in it, because it seems like something that could mess with your mental health.)
Yeah, it seems all talk and no real substance.
Stupid rebuttals for stupid ideas tbh. Simulation hypothesis should never have been taken seriously
It could be a good sci-fi idea though. (Wachowskis et al. 1999)
Yeah, the opening of the second paragraph on the page marked twelve basically says “we don’t have a true theory so we look at some proposals.” If anything, all it’s shown is that these specific proposals fall prey to the normal inability of mathematical systems to fully describe themselves, not that quantum gravity actively disproves a simulation. Everything after that might be sound if we trace all the sources. Nothing stood out as implausible or anything beyond some logical leaping. There was nothing that showed adding more to the system won’t fix the issues, which is the whole point of things like the updates their choice of set theory added to ZFC.
I am also not a physicist nor a logician, just interested in the subject matter.
full of assertions not backed up by arguments
Can you provide some examples from the paper of assertions that aren’t being backed up by arguments so I might try and look further into it? Thanks!
The central assertion of this paper:
Any viable F_QG must meet four intertwined criteria:
I’d argue is only partly justified. An argument for “Effective axiomatizability” is given, “Arithmetic expressiveness” is more or less self-evident, but the other two I’d say is given without justification.
Also the core concept of F_QG is defined in a very hand-wavy way. I’d like to see a concrete example of an existing theory formalized in the way they proposed in the paper. It’s unclear to me how mathematical derivability from the formal system correspond to how laws of physics apply. Specifically mathematical logic is a discrete process, yet the world described by physics is generally contiguous. (Yes, there are ways for this to make sense, but they didn’t provide anything for me to know how they intended for this to make sense.)
Any viable F_QG must meet four intertwined criteria:
This statement is simply defining the fundamental structure of how a full theory of everything would be composed. A consistent and complete theory must meet all four criteria.
Also the core concept of F_QG is defined in a very hand-wavy way. I’d like to see a concrete example of an existing theory formalized in the way they proposed in the paper.
The above four criteria are how F_QG is defined. The author, in presenting these four criteria, provides two very specific, concrete examples of theories (String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity) while introducing the premise of his argument. He clearly affirms that these theories do meet three of these four criteria but fail on the fourth. If there were an example of a theory that meets all four criteria than that theory would be the theory of everything and the whole issue would be resolved.
It’s unclear to me how mathematical derivability from the formal system correspond to how laws of physics apply. Specifically mathematical logic is a discrete process, yet the world described by physics is generally contiguous.
The rest of the paper explains exactly this. Mainly that the only way to satisfy all four criteria is to include non-algorithmic components that bridge the discreteness of math with the observable continuity of physics. The author goes on to describe several examples where this process can apply in modern physics theory.
I do agree that the author is making a dramatic and bold statement regarding a proof of a theory of everything (that being that the theory of everything can never be computational) which requires heavy scrutiny. However, I am in no way an expert in these fields and so I have accept that the journal that published the proof can provide that scrutiny. It is easy to check on the reliability of that journal as a lay person, and in doing so doesn’t seem to raise any flags about the validity of the arguments the author is presenting.
It is easy to check on the reliability of that journal as a lay person
Is it, really? How does one check if a journal is one of those rigorous ones, without being an expert in the field? Some journals change from legit to predatory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_ranking
It isn’t a perfect system, but it is a place to start.
There are some journals which are high in the ranking and are suspicious, also even good journals accept faulty papers time to time.
Also, https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=21101250473&tip=sid doesn’t seem that great of a journal.
I should’ve known you weren’t genuinely asking a question… You were just baiting me.
A consistent and complete theory must meet all four criteria.
You are doing what the authors are doing, this itself is an assertion you aren’t backing up.
The above four criteria are how F_QG is defined.
No, these are four criteria the authors assertion F_QG must satisfy. For theories that don’t satisfy all four criteria, you should still be able to at least formalize them into F_QG as proposed by the authors. Yet they didn’t give a concrete example of how a theory may be so formalized.
The rest of the paper explains exactly this.
Uh, what, not? “The rest of the paper” is after they have already reached the point of claiming the Universe can’t be simulated. My objection is way before that, which is pointing out how poorly F_QG is defined.
It is easy to check on the reliability of that journal as a lay person, and in doing so doesn’t seem to raise any flags about the validity of the arguments the author is presenting.
Sure, but knowing what I know I can give this paper a bit more scrutiny than a lay person can (ha ha, look at me, I am very smart /s), and this paper doesn’t convince me in the slightest.
I genuinely was not intending to ‘bait’ you. You presented an argument saying your knowledge of the subject is more robust than the experts who refereed the paper. Since I am not an expert in the subject and am curious about learning more, I was asking you to guide me in that process with your experience.
I felt that your arguments suggesting that the author is presenting an inconsistent logical proof were not well defended and so I asked for clarification on the points you raised. I am still unclear what you are saying in this statement:
No, these are four criteria the authors assertion F_QG must satisfy.
These are the four criteria that establish how a computational theory is logically defined as a formal system, not an argument. The author makes this clear in addressing the notation being used:
For clarity of notation: ΣQG is the computable axiom set; Ralg comprises the stan- dard, effective inference rules; Rnonalg is the non-effective external truth predicate rule that certifies T -truths; FQG = {LQG, ΣQG, Ralg} denotes the computational core; and MToE = {LQG ∪ {T }, ΣQG ∪ ΣT , Ralg ∪ Rnonalg} denotes the full meta-theory that weds algorithmic deduction to an external truth predicate.
After that paragraph the author uses several very specific examples in modern physics theory describing how the findings apply starting with the paragraph:
Crucially, the appearance of undecidable phenomena in physics already offers empirical backing for MToE. Whenever an experiment or exact model realises a property whose truth value provably eludes every recursive procedure, that property functions as a concrete wit- ness to the truth predicate T (x) operating within the fabric of the universe itself. Far from being a purely philosophical embellishment, MToE thus emerges as a structural necessity forced upon us by the physics of undecidable observables. Working at the deepest layer of description, MToE fuses algorithmic and non-algorithmic modes of reasoning into a sin- gle coherent architecture, providing the semantic closure that a purely formal system FQG cannot reach on its own.
Again, I am trying to approach the authors bold claims with skepticism and scrutiny, not argue with you. But you have to be a little more humble, the paper wasn’t published in order to convince you. Just because you weren’t convinced doesn’t mean that the proof is invalid.
No it doesn’t
If they got it right, then at least the bio-chemical computers producing their minds seem to able to handle ‘non-algorithmic’ understanding.
All I read is “The computer simulation we’re living in fooled some mathematicians”
This.
The models we have of reality are based on observations and forming theories that attempt to describe the observations.
Our models are, by definition, models and not the reality itself.
Since the paper is only based on the models and not on reality itself (which it can’t be since we don’t have access to the real inner workings of reality, so to say the “source code of reality”), the paper cannot actually say anything about reality, only about our understanding of it.
And pretty much any physicist worth their salt will freely admit that our models and our understanding of reality are flawed and imperfect. They are good and good enough to be used for a ton of real-world applications, but they are far from perfect and physics is far from solved.
Wow, this just made me realize. If we really live in a simulation the simulation or some parameter of it could be changed anytime.
Why did you thing the 2nd coming of Trump happened?
This information exists in what physicists call a Platonic realm
Friend-zoned by the universe. That’s gotta sting.
