It's a plot device beloved by science fiction: our entire universe might be a simulation running on some advanced civilization's supercomputer. But new research from UBC Okanagan has mathematically proven this isn't just unlikely—it's impossible.

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.

  • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago
    • The start and end of a simulation don’t need the start and end of the universe. If I fire up a game of Sims, it doesn’t start with the big bang and it doesn’t end with the heat death.
    • The rules we know about our universe might just hold true for our simulation and have no bearing on what happens around the simulation. For example, water works very differently in e.g. Minecraft than it does in real life. For a being living in Minecraft, having a perfect understanding of in-game physics will not help that being to understand how real-life physics work.
    • rollin@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      You’re mixing up nightmares now lol

      Yes it’s true that everything we perceive could be fake, when I turn my head to the left, the world that I was looking at before could disappear. That’s not a new paranoia, it’s been around for literally hundreds if not thousands of years.

      The simulacrum hypothesis is a little different in that it tries to bring it up to date, and use statistical principles to show that our universe is very unlikely to be real.

      The idea is that at some point, a life form will create machines so powerful that they can simulate the entire universe in a way that is indistinguishable from the real universe. There is a real universe in this vision, and it functions very much like the universe which we ourselves inhabit. We are not special in our simulated universe, just like the beings that do live in the real universe are not special. That is, every part of the universe exists in every simulation just as it does in the one real universe. By saying no beings are special, I mean that there are no shortcuts to fool one being (or group of beings) into thinking the universe is more complete than it really is - the entire universe is fully simulated.