In my opinion, psychologically speaking, the simulation hypothesis, which hypothesizes that we are all programs of some supercomputer is too "far-fetched" a hypothesis and/or requires too unrealistic an imagination. Arguments for or against the simulation hypothesis may or may not be spurious. Spurious correlations will remain spurious unless specifically refuted via scientific replication studies with appropriate statistical testing.

On the other hand, life, with all its pains and joys, appears very "concretely" real. So does imagination. Many hallucinated and deluded persons, whatever the content and form of their psychosis, appear very real. People deliberately simulating and/or malingering usually become readily exposed, sooner rather than later and/or, unable to maintain their charade, give themselves away.

Early South Africans, such as the !Xam, spoke of a dream that is dreaming us. The were referring to their experience of living in a dream world, for example, after a trance dance, where group healing occurred after intense drumming, dancing and typically, various healers taking turns in pulling out sickness or harmonizing group relationships. Observation of such dances affirms this "concrete" reality. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263698815_A_Psychology_of_Indigenous_Healing_in_Southern_Africa

We cannot distinguish between an external generated simulation and a self generating fractal (math).

A fractal is a set of rules and constants that are generated by a computer to create a sequence of 2D (3D) images. But the ultimate aim of physics (and philosophy, mathematics) is to describe "absolute" reality with the help of a set of rules and constants.

Thus the simulation hypothese is just a conceptual projection of the universe on a human experience we are familiar with nowadays: computer simulations.

A couple of centuries ago they compared the universe with the mechanism of a clockwork. So it isn't new at all.

With kind regards, Sydney

Thank you,

I'm asking this because I'm reading Rizwan Virk's book, which has been praised & roosed by people whose opinion I value (by Robert Moss, DW Pasulka, and a few others, also, rather surprisingly, people like Brinkley et al.), and I find the arguments so far (I'm not quite finished reading) not only unconvincing but, amongst other things, rather typical of spurious correlations - correlations such as the very tight correlation between the per capita consumption of cheese in the US and the awarded number of doctorates in engineering (etc., see above link.) It seems to me that Virk's argument rests upon non sequiturs, which, to the untrained eye, may look pregnant with meaning at first blush...

The Aborigines' dreamtime, parallel universes, Moss's dream landscapes, or variously Anton Bruckner and Hector Berlioz and Keith Richards 'dreaming in' their musical masterpieces, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreaming his masterwork Kubla Khan poem in whole (all of its 300 lines but remembering only 54, owing to a fluke event that gave rise to the once-famous phrase 'The person from Porlock'), Robert Louis Stevenson who dreamt all of his stories, Srinivasa Ramanujan dreaming his equations, etc. etc. - all this does not IMHO point at all to some computer simulation - but much rather to the existence of the subtler realms of existence of which we already knew they were there: The domain of uncollapsed wave functions, whereas coarser, denser matter is just the much smaller domain of collapsed functions.

Am I missing something?

Sydney,

I agree wholeheartedly with your take here -

What bothers me is the insistence by some that it's not a conceptual framework, but honest-to-god, fair dinkum real.... based on arguments that to me look like they're utterly spurious.

So far so good, but the folks who make these arguments should, given their backgrounds, know better?

Or is it a case that to a man with a hammer, everything appears as a nail, and to a man with a software engineering degree and a background in computer game design, everything is a computer game? Cognitive bias run wild?

Dear H Chris Ransford

What we physicists are doing is reverse engineering physical reality. We have termed our reverse engineering “the scientific method” but that is an exaggeration. It is just “the physics method”.

The advantage of the “physics method” is that we can freely fantasize. Because the judgement of our hypothesis is the measurement. However, the method was never meant to phantasize about concepts that cannot be verified by experiments. Unfortunately we have made speculations about physical reality at every scale size, inclusive the whole universe (big-bang hypothesis). So physicists are used to it. A nice example of speculative physics (related to particle physics) is explained by Sabine Hossenfelder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4mH3Hmw2o).

I was not surprised when I read for the first time about the simulation hypothesis. Actually I was a bit shocked that the people behind this idea seem to be unfamiliar with mathematical physics. Because in mathematical physics we build dynamical models that must be in line with physical reality as we observe/measure it. The challenge is to understand which properties and constants are elementary and are needed to compose the description of the units of the 3D structure that tessellates the universe.

With kind regards, Sydney

“About the Simulation Hypothesis, aren't many of the pro arguments simple spurious correlations, and the overall case rather weak?”

- the answer to the question above see, say, in reDzennn comments in https://phys.org/news/2023-10-law-physics-idea-simulation.html , and

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-simulation-matrix-law-physics-idea.html.

Cheers

Thanks,

Interesting papers, but that's exactly my point:

Quote

"This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimize power consumption. And as a result supports the idea that we're living in a simulation."

Unquote

That appears like both a total non sequitur to me and exactly a case of spurious correlation : the statement here is that it resembles a process, and hence it is that process????

Dear H Chris Ransford

Recently I found 2 “associations” that are involved in research at the frontier of theoretical physics and/or philosophy of physics.

These are:

The Quantum Information Structure of Spacetime (QISS: https://www.qiss.fr).

The philosophy of physics society (https://philosophyofphysics.org) with their own magazine: https://philosophyofphysics.lse.ac.uk.

I have scanned the titles of their papers but it doesn’t show up that the simulation hypothesis is at the top of their priorities.

With kind regards, Sydney

Sydney,

Thank you

Best,

Chris

I don't think it is really a hypothesis, since it cannot be falsified from "inside" the universe.

Actually Martin Savage had devised a test of the simulation hypothesis a few years back:

Article Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation