My 5th grade teacher broke protocol and told the class, "The Bible explains 'why,' science explains 'how.'" I'm not co-signing on this article, it's just an interesting concept. ________________________ Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation We must never doubt Elon Musk again By Fouad Khan on April 1, 2021 Credit: Sean Gladwell Getty Images Ever since the philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed in the Philosophical Quarterly that the universe and everything in it might be a simulation, there has been intense public speculation and debate about the nature of reality. Such public intellectuals as Tesla leader and prolific Twitter gadfly Elon Musk have opined about the statistical inevitability of our world being little more than cascading green code. Recent papers have built on the original hypothesis to further refine the statistical bounds of the hypothesis, arguing that the chance that we live in a simulation may be 50–50. The claims have been afforded some credence by repetition by luminaries no less esteemed than Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of Hayden Planetarium and America’s favorite science popularizer. Yet there have been skeptics. Physicist Frank Wilczek has argued that there’s too much wasted complexity in our universe for it to be simulated. Building complexity requires energy and time. Why would a conscious, intelligent designer of realities waste so many resources into making our world more complex than it needs to be? It's a hypothetical question, but still may be needed.: Others, such as physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder, have argued that the question is not scientific anyway. Since the simulation hypothesis does not arrive at a falsifiable prediction, we can’t really test or disprove it, and hence it’s not worth seriously investigating. However, all these discussions and studies of the simulation hypothesis have, I believe, missed a key element of scientific inquiry: plain old empirical assessment and data collection. To understand if we live in a simulation we need to start by looking at the fact that we already have computers running all kinds of simulations for lower level “intelligences” or algorithms. For easy visualization, we can imagine these intelligences as any nonperson characters in any video game that we play, but in essence any algorithm operating on any computing machine would qualify for our thought experiment. We don’t need the intelligence to be conscious, and we don’t need it to even be very complex, because the evidence we are looking for is “experienced” by all computer programs, simple or complex, running on all machines, slow or fast. All computing hardware leaves an artifact of its existence within the world of the simulation it is running. This artifact is the processor speed. If for a moment we imagine that we are a software program running on a computing machine, the only and inevitable artifact of the hardware supporting us, within our world, would be the processor speed. All other laws we would experience would be the laws of the simulation or the software we are a part of. If we were a Sim or a Grand Theft Auto character these would be the laws of the game. But anything we do would also be constrained by the processor speed no matter the laws of the game. No matter how complete the simulation is, the processor speed would intervene in the operations of the simulation. In computing systems, of course, this intervention of the processing speed into the world of the algorithm being executed happens even at the most fundamental level. Even at the most fundamental level of simple operations such as addition or subtraction, the processing speed dictates a physical reality onto the operation that is detached from the simulated reality of the operation itself. Here’s a simple example. A 64-bit processor ... More: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-we-live-in-a-simulation/#
Here is the prior article: Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50 Gauging whether or not we dwell inside someone else’s computer may come down to advanced AI research—or measurements at the frontiers of cosmology By Anil Ananthaswamy on October 13, 2020 Credit: Getty Images It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk.The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. “Maybe that’s why we can’t travel faster than the speed of light, because if we could, we’d be able to get to another galaxy,” said Nice, the show’s co-host, prompting Tyson to gleefully interrupt. “Before they can program it,” the astrophysicist said,delighting at the thought. “So the programmer put in that limit.” More: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/
From main stream media: https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/scienc...iverse-here-s-what-scientists-say-ncna1026916
yeah but Who's fooling who ... how would advanced AI research—or measurements at the frontiers of cosmology, gauge whether or not we dwell inside someone else’s computer, if it was already programmed to give the result? If the universe was a simulation created a by higher intelligence, there is no way the higher intelligence could know if they weren't also sims, programmed too to act like a higher intelligence. No longer turtles, but ever more intelligent programmers - all the way down As a concept, just another self-refuting philosophical argument for infinite regress.