Category Archives: Physical Constraints and Constants

Excess Mortality, COVID and Simulation Limits

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If we do live in a simulation, then presumably it is one of many, and therefore constraints will be involved.

There will be physical constraints:

  • Time – while our time could be sped up versus the time of those who run this, there will be limits to how much time can be sped up, and limits on how long the show-runners will want to wait and see the results
  • Size – even in a future where a realistic simulation is achievable, there will be limits on processing power and data storage

And there will be constraints around the purpose:

  • Time – when does the simulation start and finish in the years of the simulation? There must be an end-goal, and it there must be finite limits to how long it will run for
  • Staying on Target – if the simulation goes in an unintended direction, it will need to be adjusted or ended

Which got me thinking about to angles that relate to and might explain what we see happening in our world.

Wars are a feature of modern human civilisations, and we see them as sad, strange, but inevitable. Even when we progress in so many other ways, one mad-mad (Putin) upsets things with a war that only has negative outcomes for all except for one man and his dream of a legacy.

Wars have also been based on religious beliefs a lot, even when the sparring sides believe in the same god, but have differences of opinion around how to worship it/them.

So conceivably, when the world trends towards becoming too homogenous, in culture or belief, the show-runners interfere and create a war. Which suggests that they control our leaders. That might explain why many leaders are so ideologically nice until they actually get into power, and then their ideals fade away.

Pandemics or natural disasters, are often seen as acts of god. Perhaps they truly are? It is entirely possible that there is a limit to the number of players (humans) that our simulation can handle. So maybe we are reaching that hard limit and alongside lower birth rates, we have an engineered pandemic to reduce the global population.

Recently there is a puzzle as to why the excess mortality rates are substantially higher than those attributed to COVID. Quite likely they were simply undiagnosed, or were indirectly caused by the virus, adding to the woes of a body that was already sick, and killing them months after the illness.

Or, perhaps, our show-runners have turned up the mortality dial a bit. More people randomly getting cancer and heart disease, or it becoming more fatal than before.

They need to be careful because some of us in the game might notice that things are not adding up.

 

Crash the Simulation

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Computer programs can crash, and we might be inside a computer program.

So how do we crash it?

Over at Scientific American they argue that we can overload the system by creating our own simulations:

The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process. And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole. If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.

To me this fails because we have our own real world constraints of computing power and storage to deal with first. We would need unlimited computing power and storage here to stack overflow the system that runs our simulation.

My personal theory is that quantum mechanics, where we can only tell the status of a particle if we observe it, is an indicator of resolution limits of out simulation. Maybe if we observe enough quantum particles at once, we will either crash the system, or quantum mechanics will start acting differently, proving we are in a simulation.

Then there is the impossible to answer ethical question – is it wrong to crash the simulation? If we are not “real”, then no harm done. But if we experience life or even consciousness, despite not being real, should that be protected or even sacred?

Breaking the simulation would be like death, I expect. Once you achieve it, you’ll never know what comes next.

But if there is a restore point, would we as conscious individuals experience that reboot, or would be cease to exist?

Underlying Lattice of our Reality

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In an attempt to find a universal theory of everything, scientists look for underlying code and mathematical constants that can define our universe. But if we find such a simple answer to how our environment is constructed, then it suggests that the universe is designed, implying creation. Some might take that to mean divine creation, while others like myself see at as evidence for our world being part of a simulation.

Here’s the abstract for Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation:

Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice.

The authors point out that simulations already use this lattice in a computer environment, so all that is a building block in the direction of a full simulation:

With the current developments in HPC and in algorithms it is now possible to simulate Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental force in nature that gives rise to the strong nuclear force among protons and neutrons, and to nuclei and their interactions. These simulations are currently performed in femto-sized universes where the space-time continuum is replaced by a lattice, whose spatial and temporal sizes are of the order of several femto-meters or fermis (1 fm = 1015 m), and whose lattice spacings (discretization or pixelation) are fractions of fermis. This endeavor, generically referred to as lattice gauge theory, or more specifically lattice QCD, is currently leading to new insights into the nature of matter.

So, they have created a good theory. In the future, this specific lattice concept could be a feature of simulations. Which means there might be tests that prove we are in a simulation. The math is very complex, but for now all we need to know is that we don’t have the technology (although, presumably, one day we will…):

The spectrum of the highest energy cosmic rays provides the most stringent constraint that we have found on the lattice spacing of a universe simulation, but precision measurements, particularly the muon g 2, are within a few orders of magnitude of being sensitive to the chiral symmetry breaking aspects of a simulation employing the unimproved Wilson lattice action.