Tenoke comments on Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation (link) - Less Wrong

4 Post author: D_Alex 17 April 2013 02:23AM

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Comment author: Tenoke 17 April 2013 12:07:22PM *  8 points [-]

[1] The level of simulation present in the Universe is sufficiently high that the only purpose of it would BE simulation, meaning that [2] our physical laws would necessarily be quite close to the laws of whatever universe overlies us.

[2] does not follow from [1]. The REAL real world might be sufficiently more complex than ours and it can be running thousand of simulations for a variety of reasons. I'm really not sure why you think that our level of simulation or physical laws are as complex as it gets but this is not a valid argument.

For a quick example of what I mean I would like you to think about us full-on simulating a 2 dimnesions(+time) environment.

Comment author: smk 23 April 2013 07:45:46AM 0 points [-]

In the absence of other evidence, could you not use some sort of complexity measure to estimate that, if our universe is being simulated, the simulating universe is more likely to have simpler laws than more complex ones? (And maybe even that having no simulating universe--meaning our universe is not a simulation--is even simpler, and therefore more likely?) But I have no idea what the actual difference in probabilities would be, if you could.