Contemplating the Possibility of a Simulated Universe

[Gomar]

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/12/17/what-if-reality-were-really-just-im-universe/

"millions of virtual universes with billions of simulated brains in them."

Reminds me of the last scenes in 2001:A Space Odyssey. The white room is not real; it is
a sim of Dave's memories. Do zoo or nature preserve animals know they are in it? No.
Do goldfish know they are in an aquarium? No. Food comes from above, and they swim around, some creatures look at them, that's life.

 

[mfb]

Do goldfish know they are in an aquarium? No.

They could call their envionment "aquarium". Where is the problem?
They could see a correlation between the creatures looking at them and food coming from above (assuming they are fed manually). They could (given enough time) observe ageing of those creatures looking at them, and see the result of reproduction. With a human-scale intelligence, more fishs to work in science and the option to build special equipment, they could discover most of our modern physics, significant parts of biology and chemistry and evolution. They could study cells of the human skin falling into the aquarium, and even discover similarities between their DNA and ours.

I think it is very hard to run simulations so accurate that no deviation can be observed with current technology, unless the timescale of those simulations is very short (like hours or days of our time).

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

How can we know?

Another article on this issue:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-quantum-reality-analog-after-all

 

[Chronos]

A sophisticated sim would be indistinguishable from 'reality'. In fact, the 'computer' running that sim could also be a sim.

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

@Chronos," turtles, all the way down."

 

[jtbell]

This is not physics.