Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

theabominablewonder t1_ixc89lm wrote

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

What do you mean by the wave function? There’s not a need to calculate at that level of depth is there? they can go up a level or two of abstraction.

4

Cryptizard t1_ixc8hcu wrote

I mean that we know for a fact (the Nobel prize was just given for this) that when you aren’t looking at something it behaves in a diffuse manner described by a probability distribution, and effectively follows multiple paths and interacts in multiple different ways. This is more complicated to calculate than if you are looking at it, in which case it collapses to a single path.

This is the reason that we can’t simulate quantum mechanics with computers, it is exponentially more complicated than macro scale classical physics.

14

theabominablewonder t1_ixc8s1e wrote

hmm okay, interesting.

But then we have billions of stars which are effectively unobserved so the computational power would be massively high for things that aren’t important? That would not be efficient design.

8

AsheyDS t1_ixd9i6h wrote

Observation doesn't mean a person (or anything) viewing a thing. It basically means that one particle interacts with another particle, affecting it in some way. And so that particle has been 'observed'. It doesn't mean something only exists if we see it. If you want to use your eyes as an example, imagine a photon careening through space just to stop inside your eyeball. You just observed it, altering it's trajectory. You don't even need to be conscious for it to have been observed, the particles that make up your eye did that for you. I'm probably not making that very clear, but I suggest learning more about observation in the quantum mechanical sense. It's not what you think.

12

MyceliumRising t1_ixdeuvw wrote

Ok, but is efficient design a requisite to successfully simulating a universe? Does efficiency matter as much when the efficacy of the simulation meets the design goal?

3

theabominablewonder t1_ixdldqv wrote

If the speed of light is something that is constrained by the processing power and the processing power could be dropped significantly then maybe it is important.

2