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Is the Universe an Alien's Simulation?

I n the October 2010 issue of Scientific American magazine, the article 'The (Elusive) Theory of Everything' by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow tells us that ”If aliens did enforce consistent laws, we would have no way to tell that another reality stood behind the simulated one”. I wonder.



If a simulation were to be made from some computing-entity, (digital or not) then its components will ultimately be information-bearing 'yes/no' answer-makers of questions: the bit.



If the bit is to be at the basis of such simulation, eventually a point will be reached, such as when trying to magnify the essence of the minutest thing or “particle” of which a universe is constructed. These alien inventors must then instruct their computing machines to “display” just any available random Schröder-particle from their bucket of finite parts! That might be an example of aliens using “consistent laws”.



This is exactly what is observed when particle smashers magnify things!

Hawking jokingly alluded to a similar situation in his A brief History of Time, by recounting of the remark of the old lady who exclaimed from the back of the room, “You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it’s turtles all the way down”. Perhaps it’s turtles all the way down; but if this can’t be, it has to stop somewhere.



That somewhere is where the alien simulators would have to resort to make the building blocks of the universe from like materials, entities which necessarily have exactly alike properties (and few of them) such as the attributes of charge, spin, etc., which we observe of elementary particles. Every electron, quark is indistinguishable from any other. In the simulated world it’s so in principle.



When a human observer of the extreme depths of reality demands the appearance of a particle-part -- because he is looking there -- the aliens’ simulation of the bottom is obliged to supply a random particle apparition, ex nihilo, made of just some of those parts.



That’s because that’s all there is at the ultimate depth. And the inquiry of the observer demands that something be presented by the alien’s design! It’s gotta be random because at that bottom level anything will do to “cause” of the thing can’t be caused further. In order to make everything work, the Quantum must not be causal must not make sense. 1



Whatever be the stuff of which everything is made, these supposed aliens created some small number of necessarily finite, simple rules, based on the counting numbers, of which stuff is made. (Unlike Scott Adams’ excellent treatment of this in his book God’s Debris, this turtle-bottom stuff, his God-dust particles, must have qualities or parameters which are disparate -- qualities such as charge or mass… else his God-dust particles would act to make for a very boring uneventful universe. It would be no fun if CP were inviolable or if the number zero or the number one behaved exactly like the other numbers! There must be a few exceptions to enable things to happen.



I am not one to put much credence in this sort of thing, but I think it cannot be discounted that we are simulated by perhaps other-leveled simulated aliens, ad infinitum, into the eons, dust on a policeman’s jacket in another something-verse.



So, the evidence may be in favor of alien simulation.



Perhaps it’s turtles all the way down. If this is so, then as an atheist, I find this appealing also. That’s because there is then no need of a First Cause.



With googolplexes of infinity available, isn’t it reasonable that somebody would have invented a simulation of parts to make a simple Big Bang?

Evidence that our universe is simulated

Mathematics' success at describing physical laws -

Why should mathematics be so successful in describing what we observe? This is not an question which can easily be answered in the context of a real physical universe. Why is, say, f=ma mostly true and why is E=mc2 so devilishly accurate?

Mathematics is based in the counting numbers, 1,2,3... ( B. Russell & A. Whitehead ; K. Gödel ). So the reverse seems possible: to implement physical laws with numbers -- and by using the same parameters (or very nearly so) as those which we observe ( M. J. Rees, Just Six Numbers, 1999 ; BOOK ). An illustration of this is the fractal, Barnsley's fern , produced only by a recursive translation of the rectangle ! If we lived in Sim City, everything would seem real.

Self-similarity -

Self-similarity, the hallmark of fractals is ubiquitous in the universe: water swirling down the drain is similar to a hurricane and to the structure of a galaxy.

Waves: A water wave, an electromagnetic wave, a phonon, to an electron, etc. all have wave properties.

A Big Bang, viewed from the "outside", would seem to look very much like a black hole appears to us from inside of our universe (see L. Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos ).

Electrons -

Elementary particles are all the same! Every electron in the universe is (only by definition) identical to every other. How can that be in real life? Nothing else in nature is like that. No identical twins, leaves and snow flakes, it is said, are exactly alike. Only elementary particles are so -- as if there were only one of each kind; as if only a pattern of for the particles exists -- a declaration of parameters. An idea.

The self-similar "essence" of structure, of math-descriptive physics seems automatically to carry upwards, stating at the integer-based bottom level of the quantum.

Randomness -

Because a computing device which can simulate our universe must be finite (if it's not situated in an infinite someting-verse), it is necessary for the device to present something, on-the-fly, to observers, but only when they are observing. The fact that this seems to be so is the strongest evidence that we and everything else are simulations running on a sort of finite state machine. If our alien simulators had chosen to display nothing at all when we wish to magnify the Quantum, the game would have been over in Copenhagen in 1937 and we would have come to the bottom of this very clever deception nearly a century ago.2

Desire -

Currently, astrophysicists who want to understand how things we know about work, frequently set out to simulate the actions of weather, of the climate, of galaxies, the internal dynamic life of stars, of dark matter and of high energy particle interactions. Once it's possible to simulate at Big Bang energies in detail, all that's needed will be the will to do so.

Induction -

What can be said about a universe, a "place", outside of our own, in which we would only be a simulation? For one, it must be a bigger place in order to contain one or more devices which can simulate something which contains as much information as our universe. Because our reality feels real to us -- and if that's made only of information, of bits3 -- then of course it's only information that's need to make anything, including the putative alien simulators and their habitat.

--Harald Illig Thursday, October 7, 2010

1 Perhaps time itself must also be similarly alien-simulated in digital fashion or in discrete chunks. It might then occur for us “spaced” in tiny packets or in some fractal or recursive arrangement or foam at the bottom of these aliens’ simulation.

2 Random noise in apparatus is similar to Quantum fluctuations. Everything in the universe affects everything else because forces and "fields" seem to have infinite range and can on occasion coincide, bunch up enough to be noticeable in our instruments. That's what may cause outliers in sensitive experiments, which cannot be explained by other means, or eliminated.

3 Entropy (information theory) - Wikipedia - LINK