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perturbation comments on Evidence For Simulation - Less Wrong Discussion

14 Post author: TruePath 27 January 2012 11:07PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 29 January 2012 06:13:21AM 0 points [-]

As with 3 we would expect a simulation to bottom out and not provide arbitrarily fine grained structure but in simulations precision issues also bring with them questions of stability. If the law's of physics turn out to be relatively unaffected by tiny computational errors that would push in the direction of simulation but if they are chaotic and quickly spiral out of control in response to these errors it would push against simulation.

We can expect the laws of physics to be relatively stable, simulation or no, due to anthropic reasoning. If we lived in a universe where the laws of physics were not stable (on a timescale short enough for us to notice), it would be very difficult for intelligent life to form.

Comment author: TruePath 29 January 2012 11:12:12PM 0 points [-]

Here stability refers to numerical stability, i.e., whether or not minor errors in computation accumulate over time and cause the results to go wildly astray or do small random errors cancel out or at least not blow up.