Tue 25 Mar 2008
There’s a well-trod (if not exactly widely accepted) argument for the idea that the world we live in now could be not the real world but a simulation being run by far-flung descendents of what we think of as the modern human race. (Nick Bostrum is probably the foremost figure in this debate; but then there’s this angle on it, too.)
Settling the “if” and assuming that yes, we are in fact running on some post-singularity desktop in the year 3008, what are the hints available to us as simulated denizens in a superbly but not perfectly modeled reality? Where did they goof up? What are the gaps and the glitches in this simulation that should leave us wondering exactly what is going on?
Posted by Josh Millard2 answers so far!
In an effort to save memory, certain pieces of information will be reused, leading to seeing dopplegangers of people you know, the occasional strange feeling that you’ve seen something before somewhere else and strange coincidences coming up more often than they should.
Speaking of which, I know that house in the photo on that simulation argument webpage.
Ed Fredkin argues that the reason we must be in a computer simulation is that the initial conditions (the Big Bang in our standard model of physics) is absurdly improbable. In fact, normal physics appears to break down as you go back in time to the initial event (the inflationary model).
Other hints: quantization (implies finite information; ie real numbers rounded to integers or fixed-point), and relativity (limit on information flow speed implies a network model, ie massively parallel computing with bandwidth considerations)
there’s more but chew on this first