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2Punx2Furious t1_ixc5qqb wrote

Reply to comment by Mortal-Region in Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program by garden_frog

Everything that there is, regardless of its size, is by definition "the entire universe".

Whether it's bigger or smaller than the "base"/"parent" universe, doesn't really matter.

You might think that it needs to be smaller, because a bigger universe might take more energy to compute, for the parent universe. But that's not necessarily the case, it might be that the parent universe is a lot more complex than ours, and simulating ours for them is trivial, or that their laws of physics are different from ours.

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Samothrace_ t1_ixd4kce wrote

Like a 3d simulation inside a 4d computer.
But, assuming thermodynamics is a thing outside our universe, there does always need to be some form of simplification, whether it be size, run-time, complexity, etc, which would severely limit the number of possible nested simulations.

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2Punx2Furious t1_ixd8nus wrote

> assuming thermodynamics is a thing outside our universe

Yes, assuming that, which might, or might not be correct.

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Samothrace_ t1_ixdck7f wrote

The ever increasing speed of expansion makes me think somewhere, somehow it’s not. At least not how we know it.

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2Punx2Furious t1_ixdhuc7 wrote

No way to tell. Maybe to them it's equivalent of us of expanding a 2d jpg picture by 1x1px every minute, for a day. For us it might seem like a lot, because it's all there is, but for them it might be trivial, with the end result being a 1440x1440px picture.

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Artanthos t1_ixedy5g wrote

What if that’s just data being fed to our instruments.

The data would only need to be produced at the resolution our instruments could handle and only for the areas we are actively looking at while we are looking.

Or maybe the scientists are part of the simulation, philosophical zombies, and the only data simulated is what you as a lay person are physically looking at/listening to.

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KSRandom195 t1_ixfiesa wrote

Yep, the easiest way to do this is probably the brain in the vat hypothesis.

We know that our eyes and brains lie to us and play tricks to explain or even “fix” our perception of the world through our bodies senses. So if the simulated input messes up for a few frames we are already programmed to just kind of ignore and correct it.

For instance, there are stories that when European ships first landed in the Americas that the natives just… couldn’t see them. It’s not that their eyes didn’t process the information, it was that their brains decided it was not possible, and so just didn’t register that the ships existed.

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