Wednesday, October 17, 2012

No man or woman is perfect, no brain infallible.

It would appear that scientists have conjured up a new method to find out how to test whether we are living in a computer simulation or in the real world: build a simulation (that would be able to simulate our known Universe) and test different scenarios, events, and see which fail. Those that fail must be the fault of the simulation, if it works in real life. If everything works as in real life, then real life must be a simulation, because currently nobody can build a perfect simulation. Now, one might think that if there is no perfect simulation, then any mistakes that are caused by the imperfections of our synthetic simulation might be fixable. Knowing modern coders, it will take only a few patches to start messing up normal stuff. Each patch eliminates a small bug, but creates a larger ripple that will have to be patched. Sure, it could be possible to create a simulation that is easy to manage with small code churn per update. Unfortunately this is more likely to happen if the simulation was created by specialists of physics, but the coding has to be the responsibility of computer scientists. Thus there is a issue with people. It is quite impossible to convey a large amount of detailed information that does not only have to be memorized but also understood in a reasonable amount of time. The elements of human communication and imagination limit this proposed simulation to the extent that it no longer indicates our status. The fact that something doesn’t work as it should could mean that the simulation is just not good enough. After all, we cannot assume we are as smart as or smarter than whoever created the simulation we are currently in – we have yet to create a simulation so complex, yet perfectly functional.

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