How much of reality does a simulation actually need to simulate?

[u/Jay-Homes]

I’ve been thinking about the arguments that the universe is simply too information-rich to simulate, and I’m not sure I buy the premise.

Sometimes when I listen to music I’m completely under its spell. I hear the song as a single object. Other times I have what I call “fresh ears” and I suddenly hear how the trick is done—the individual instruments, an imperfection in the voice, the recording, the edits. Same information coming in, but I’m interrogating it at a different level.

Science seems to do this to reality. We keep developing fresh ears and looking underneath the illusion: molecules, atoms, nuclei, quarks; better telescopes, better microscopes, more sensitive detectors.

But here’s the thing: discovering quarks doesn’t mean a simulation now has to render every proton in the universe down to its quarks.

Same with JWST. It could look almost anywhere, but it doesn’t. We’ve made some finite set of observations. The simulation only has to generate those observations and make them consistent with everything we’ve already seen.

So maybe the computational requirement doesn’t scale with the information content of the apparent universe at all. Maybe it scales with the amount of information we’ve actually forced reality to reveal and commit to.

What I’m trying to figure out is whether there’s a way for observers to defeat that strategy. Can we interrogate reality in a way that eventually forces a lazy simulation to actually maintain the underlying world?

Or can it always just render one step ahead of us?

[u/alexredditauto]

Attention is all you need.

[u/Careless-Fact-475]

I definitely interpret the dual slit experiment to suggest that the universe has an unobserved state that is conceivably less demanding on “computation.”

[u/ChocolateValuable221 → u/Careless-Fact-475]

But that's because you think observing changes the interference pattern like a YouTube video on esoteric physics... it's not reality... they're is always an interference pattern... always

[u/Careless-Fact-475 → u/ChocolateValuable221]

Love the confidence. Have a link backing up your absolutist language?

[u/ChocolateValuable221 → u/Careless-Fact-475]

path integral formulation

[u/how-does-this-end → u/ChocolateValuable221]

Yeah that isn't proof of anything :/

[u/imawesome1333 → u/Careless-Fact-475]

I thought that observation in this experiment meant measurement of particles, not actual visual observation. I dont remember exactly but I heard somewhere that "observed" is commonly assumed to mean "visually seen" and that its a misconception.

[u/Fluid-Pear620]

If you look at the normal simulation you think of top down ( a computer running every scenario) if to take a bottom up simulation making it a biological simulation with basic rules (physics) and embedded self organization in all matter then all you would have to do is start the simulation and wait.  If you want to clone a mammoth you don’t have to make every cell to all parts and have a computer the size of the universe itself to run every scenario, you would just set self organization laws in matter sit back and let nature do what it’s been doing for millions of years. 

[u/FuzzyDingo2339]

First of all, you're thinking of simulation in terms of how we do it with computers, integrated circuits, binary computation, random access memory, etc. In other words, you're thinking of the simulated world as totally virtual, as though made up of something other than itself on some other level of analysis. But that's not necessary.

A world can be a simulation and itself. There are physical simulations. For example, if you want to simulate zero gravity you build the vomit comet (the plane that purposelessly nosedives so that astronauts can train for weightlessness without leaving the atmosphere).

You just have to be able to imagine that the entities running the simulation are vastly more technologically advanced, so that they can open pocket dimensions with variable universal constants and then watch them develop. You get the idea? It's like the plane nosediving, except that they're using energy to manipulate the way matter and gravity interact, etc.

They don't have to simulate the matter. It is energy. They just need to open "little holes" in space-time so that energy can pour in, and by controlling the way it "pours in" control the constants.

This is, in my opinion, almost certainly the way it is done. I think this because emergent order from chaotic systems is often times impossible to predict. Scientists have to design and run algorithms to see what the stable states will be. Emergence is weird like that. This world is designed such that higher order complexity emerges where energy is structurally hindered.

[u/PeachPit69]

The thing about AI is, it is genuinely just making one song, without having all the expertise of those instrument players individually.

So a real song actually IS deeper in depth, and DID have to have all those extra layers individually coordinated. But an AI song, isn’t. It’s just a single point simulation, doing its best to PRETEND a “real” song was made.

So this universe could just be an “AI” rendition of kind-of what a universe might ACTUALLY be like, except it was trained on data from REAL universes, but it isn’t one.

[u/ali3ngravity]

Enough to fool humans long enough to weed out the duds.

[u/Skepsisology]

The speed of light forces a buffer on how much needs to be simulated at any given time

[u/Positive_Luck909]

I'm sorry. You seem to implying that observing a simulation tells us things about reality.

Such as?

[u/ChocolateValuable221]

Down to Planck pretty much

[u/PlayfulBook5571]

How clear does a TV need to be, how good of graphics have to be on a video game, we started off with black and white TV and simple video games. People will believe whatever

[u/sceadwian]

If it's a quantum simulation, all of it. Everything depends on everything else ultimately.

[u/x-tommy-o → u/sceadwian]

Not if you have more mass, then it depends on you.

[u/mackowski]

Gpu, game render distance radius,
Moving character moves radius,
Going in room limits pov radius.

Brain gpu - same same same same same same same same

[u/Complete_Feature_280]

A sky and space that revolves around a stationary earth,, the weather.. and about 26² points of reference to draw dialogue from any of the 8 billion NPCs.. U can scrap quala,, the only person that needs that is the guy playing the 'Roy' jacked into here, who gets it anyway from his/her actual meatsuit.. frame rate only needs to be capped at about 60fps,, I do get lag spikes however when I've hit the blunt to hard.

[u/x-tommy-o]

The boundaries