I think this came up before but this might be new information now.

The reason for thinking this is because it appears, at least for now, that what we see is not actually part of reality until we observe it. Various experiments show this to happen but perhaps none of them until now were designed for this very purpose. Apparently now we have one.

The analogy is similar to a video game where we do not have to see the whole set where the action is taking place until we actually get there. A good example might be in a flight simulator where if we fly from New York to see (say) the Sphinx, we don't actually see it until we get there. Thus, it is not there until we actually observe it.
The idea in reality though, or should I say a premise, is that if we live in a simulation created by some higher being(s), then they would probably want to conserve energy so they would only show things once they are in view of another simulated object (like us ourselves as we would be simulated also). This also may tie in with what we refer to as conciseness.

This might be a big assumption though because if they are that advanced would they have to conserve energy, and also, if they are that advanced they probably have good feedback and can determine when we are trying to experiment to find out more about this issue, and change something to correct for that too. I would not know how they would go about that but we don't really know what their capabilities are if in fact they really exist in some place like we usually think of existence.

Another quite nasty thought is, if they find out we know we are living in a simulation, would they then want to end the simulation.

Anyway, here is the article and it's not that long so a fairly short read.
Physicists Are Conducting Five Experiments To Determine Whether We Are Really Living In A Simulation (msn.com)

 

The idea in reality though, or should I say a premise, is that if we live in a simulation created by some higher being(s), then they would probably want to conserve energy so they would only show things once they are in view of another simulated object...

So, that would make me the FPS, and everyone else NPCs.

I knew the world really did revolve around me! (Like, literally, when I scroll right.)

 

We all live in a simulation...the one created by our brain/mind.

 

We all live in our own reality, constructed in our own brains from the limited sensory input we have. Its only by convention we agree some commonality in our realities, eg the colour of the sky, of an orange, etc. As someone paralysed from C5 down with a complete spinal lesion I have no sensory input from (nor motor output to), say, my legs. Yet with my eyes closed (or even with them open) my brain constructs a whole reality for my legs including where they are positioned and what they are experiencing. Currently my right leg thinks its straight out in front of me and sitting in an ice bath (despite the air temperature in London at 8:30pm being 23°C) while my left is tucked under me and a large pile of rocks. Neither is true - these are neuropathic sensations and can be truely debilitating on bad days - and because they do not stem from the peripheral nerves no treatment with drugs is truely effective. I am living in my own Matrix lol.

 

Like Descartes, cogito, ergo sum,
I think, therefore I am. !

 

You are all figments of my imagination.

 

I think this came up before but this might be new information now.

The reason for thinking this is because it appears, at least for now, that what we see is not actually part of reality until we observe it. Various experiments show this to happen but perhaps none of them until now were designed for this very purpose. Apparently now we have one.

The analogy is similar to a video game where we do not have to see the whole set where the action is taking place until we actually get there. A good example might be in a flight simulator where if we fly from New York to see (say) the Sphinx, we don't actually see it until we get there. Thus, it is not there until we actually observe it.
The idea in reality though, or should I say a premise, is that if we live in a simulation created by some higher being(s), then they would probably want to conserve energy so they would only show things once they are in view of another simulated object (like us ourselves as we would be simulated also). This also may tie in with what we refer to as conciseness.

This might be a big assumption though because if they are that advanced would they have to conserve energy, and also, if they are that advanced they probably have good feedback and can determine when we are trying to experiment to find out more about this issue, and change something to correct for that too. I would not know how they would go about that but we don't really know what their capabilities are if in fact they really exist in some place like we usually think of existence.

Another quite nasty thought is, if they find out we know we are living in a simulation, would they then want to end the simulation.

Anyway, here is the article and it's not that long so a fairly short read.
Physicists Are Conducting Five Experiments To Determine Whether We Are Really Living In A Simulation (msn.com)

"we see is not actually part of reality until we observe it"
So while one is completely anesthetized, they can be dropped off a 100 story building and if they don't wake before hitting the ground, nothing will ever happen to them.

This is IMO all a BS extension of a interpretation of QM results. The 'Observer' in QM is not a person or consciousness. The 'Observer' is the universe of causality (a physical process).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(quantum_physics)

So yes, the universe exists without it being observed by humans.

 

smoke always comes from old trees...:-"

 

If we are in a simulation created by advanced aliens are the advanced aliens also in a simulation created by even more advanced aliens?

The idea that the universe is a giant simulation is an interesting concept, but once "aliens" are introduced it starts to sound like some ramblings from a certain group of weirdos.

" So while one is completely anesthetized, they can be dropped off a 100 story building and if they don't wake before hitting the ground, nothing will ever happen to them. "

Only if no conscious being observes the event.

 

Like Descartes, cogito, ergo sum,

And Kant said, I am, therefore, I think.
And Sinatra said, Do Be, Do Be, Do

I am the only reality and you only exist because I do...

 

If we are in a simulation created by advanced aliens are the advanced aliens also in a simulation created by even more advanced aliens?

The idea that the universe is a giant simulation is an interesting concept, but once "aliens" are introduced it starts to sound like some ramblings from a certain group of weirdos.

" So while one is completely anesthetized, they can be dropped off a 100 story building and if they don't wake before hitting the ground, nothing will ever happen to them. "

Only if no conscious being observes the event.

That's exactly why conscious observers is such a non-scientific requirement. For QM, there is no conscious being requirement. The conscious observer requirement is philosophical or religious that has no basis in actual science. IMO it's a cop-out for just saying, I have faith in GOD. If you do or don't then great but don't try to layer that cake with Simulation Magic to make it 'sound' scientific.

 

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View attachment 329245​

Exactly, philosophical or religious but zero science. Simulation simply means, we don't know the scientific answer, yet.

 

We all live in a simulation...the one created by our brain/mind.

That would be a different kind of simulation though.

 

Like Descartes, cogito, ergo sum,
I think, therefore I am. !

Let's update that very old phrase to reflect the point of view of this thread and the article:

"Cogito ergo esse",
"I think therefore they are!"

Alternate: "I think therefore He is".

 

And Kant said, I am, therefore, I think.
And Sinatra said, Do Be, Do Be, Do

I am the only reality and you only exist because I do...

This brings up some interesting ideas.

Do any of us exist to the other members?
If there are say 80 billion people in the world, does that mean the simulation only has to have 80 billion simulations going at the same time. Maybe that is why people do not 'live' forever because if they did there would have to be a lot more simulations going.

 

If we are in a simulation created by advanced aliens are the advanced aliens also in a simulation created by even more advanced aliens?

The idea that the universe is a giant simulation is an interesting concept, but once "aliens" are introduced it starts to sound like some ramblings from a certain group of weirdos.

" So while one is completely anesthetized, they can be dropped off a 100 story building and if they don't wake before hitting the ground, nothing will ever happen to them. "

Only if no conscious being observes the event.

Well, we do not have to answer that first question we only have to answer one level up.

Lots of scientists believe there *could* be more advanced civilizations so that would not be anything new.

The second statement is the proverbial tree falling in the woods. If the tree is standing on day 1 and on day 2 we see it has fallen, we believe it happened in a sequence of events where the tree gradually tipped over, no matter how slow or fast. If that's just part of the simulation then, well, that's just part of the simulation.
"So while one is completely anesthetized..."
That's true, almost, but you included the phrase "nothing will ever happen" or in other words, "never happen", which is not necessarily true. Before being observed, his state of existence simply does not matter. Once observed, he's observed to be dead or at least badly injured. So we can't say "Nothing will ever happen to him". We believe that if he falls something must happen to him, but if we can't see him fall, then there is no proof that he even fell. If we see him fall for the first 10 feet but the other remaining distance is blocked off by some building structure, we only see him start to fall, and thus we don't know if it got hurt or now. If we see him fall for the first 100 feet but not for the remaining 10 feet, we might believe he hit the ground with a large impact, but we have no proof of that until we either see it or hear it. Someone else may have proof but they'd have to tell us.

Some people would say that if you make a movie of it with a camera set up beforehand and nobody is around, you only have to view the footage to see that he really did fall. Unfortunately, that doesn't pan out either because the footage may not exist until someone actually observes it.

This gets complicated that's why they made a special experiment, which may or may not work either. Read about that experiment and then see what you think.

 

We all live in our own reality, constructed in our own brains from the limited sensory input we have. Its only by convention we agree some commonality in our realities, eg the colour of the sky, of an orange, etc. As someone paralysed from C5 down with a complete spinal lesion I have no sensory input from (nor motor output to), say, my legs. Yet with my eyes closed (or even with them open) my brain constructs a whole reality for my legs including where they are positioned and what they are experiencing. Currently my right leg thinks its straight out in front of me and sitting in an ice bath (despite the air temperature in London at 8:30pm being 23°C) while my left is tucked under me and a large pile of rocks. Neither is true - these are neuropathic sensations and can be truely debilitating on bad days - and because they do not stem from the peripheral nerves no treatment with drugs is truely effective. I am living in my own Matrix lol.

We all seem to agree that if we see something that we have seen before even though we did not see the entire progression, that it must have been the same as the similar progressions we did see before. We believe in time evolution of everything in the universe. Is that really true though. It's true for us only by implication.

Like the person falling off the roof or mountain. If we see them start to fall, we believe they will get hurt when they hit the bottom. That's because we've seen other people get hurt in that way. If we are in a simulation than it could be that they are only hurt to themselves until we actually see them (or hear them) too.

The experiment devised in that article is pretty interesting and tries to address problems like this.

 

Well, we do not have to answer that first question we only have to answer one level up.

Lots of scientists believe there *could* be more advanced civilizations so that would not be anything new.

The second statement is the proverbial tree falling in the woods. If the tree is standing on day 1 and on day 2 we see it has fallen, we believe it happened in a sequence of events where the tree gradually tipped over, no matter how slow or fast. If that's just part of the simulation then, well, that's just part of the simulation.
"So while one is completely anesthetized..."
That's true, almost, but you included the phrase "nothing will ever happen" or in other words, "never happen", which is not necessarily true. Before being observed, his state of existence simply does not matter. Once observed, he's observed to be dead or at least badly injured. So we can't say "Nothing will ever happen to him". We believe that if he falls something must happen to him, but if we can't see him fall, then there is no proof that he even fell. If we see him fall for the first 10 feet but the other remaining distance is blocked off by some building structure, we only see him start to fall, and thus we don't know if it got hurt or now. If we see him fall for the first 100 feet but not for the remaining 10 feet, we might believe he hit the ground with a large impact, but we have no proof of that until we either see it or hear it. Someone else may have proof but they'd have to tell us.

Some people would say that if you make a movie of it with a camera set up beforehand and nobody is around, you only have to view the footage to see that he really did fall. Unfortunately, that doesn't pan out either because the footage may not exist until someone actually observes it.

This gets complicated that's why they made a special experiment, which may or may not work either. Read about that experiment and then see what you think.

Observation in this context is NOT a person seeing. Scientific observation as per these experiments are measurements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_in_quantum_mechanics

"Observables" as self-adjoint operators

In quantum mechanics, each physical system is associated with a Hilbert space, each element of which represents a possible state of the physical system. The approach codified by John von Neumann represents a measurement upon a physical system by a self-adjoint operator on that Hilbert space termed an "observable".[1]: 17  These observables play the role of measurable quantities familiar from classical physics: position, momentum, energy, angular momentum and so on. The dimension of the Hilbert space may be infinite, as it is for the space of square-integrable functions on a line, which is used to define the quantum physics of a continuous degree of freedom. Alternatively, the Hilbert space may be finite-dimensional, as occurs for spin degrees of freedom.

These measurements can be by any atom or subatomic particle in the universe using the normal physical laws for physics. Nobody, as a person or thing currently on earth observed the 'birth' of the sun yet we can measure the past effects from observations of energy from that sun from the distant past when none of us existed. That evolution of the 'Sun' must have happened in a specific set of physical processes that happened without intelligent observations across the universe.

The people that do the experiments know the scientific meaning of observed, the ones that write about the experiments IMO chose (sometimes with a little help from the experimenters) to use the popular meaning for more page clicks from a POPSCI article headline.

IMO what we see in these experiments is the principle of least action. Conservation of action that kicks in when something changes due to a measurement that mandates some qualia of observation be recorded by a human or device.
The universe is lazy (Conservation) until it's poked by something that changes the path.

 

This gets complicated that's why they made a special experiment, which may or may not work either.

A problem with the proposed experiments is that the proposers and experimenters could themselves be the results of a simulation; or not. So how could the experimental results be conclusive?