Cups of coffee cool, buildings crumble and stars fizzle out, physicists say, because of a quantum effect called “entanglement.”
Quantum informational science... there's something you can't throw enough money at. Within a century or two, we'll have tech you literally cannot dream of today. That said, we seem to be living in a suspiciously well-defined set of parameters. Even the uncertainty of a system is computable.
I have always wondered -- in the event that reality is a simulation by a machine or a higher sentience or what have you, the one thing that seems somewhat unexplainable is our ability to imagine that we may be living in a simulated reality. It's either cruel, dangerous or a massive oversight, depending on how you look at it.
I imagine they'd be so highly evolved as to treat a virtual instance of self-aware intelligence (read: us) neutrally, and let it play out with no intervention. It's like a hyper-sophisticated ant farm.
I have such a hard time wrapping my head around that. Going to be going deep down the Wikipedia rabbit hole to learn about all the terms being thrown around in that article. Maybe I played a bit too much Final Fantasy X as a kid but there's always been the thought of reality being simulated - though not as a computer simulation, but as the result of some sort of universal sentience.
I have a pretty strong argument against it, actually. The problem is that my argument is constrained both to human knowledge and our observable universe. So... Our universe, if it was an artificially constructed computer, seems to be computing on the Planck scale, both temporally and spatially; that is to say, with the resolution of Planck time and Planck length. Let's say we humans (in our universe) could build a perfect, lossless, ideal quantum computer. How big would it need to be to simulate something as complex as our universe? Greater than or equal to the size of our universe! Counter-arguments: it wouldn't necessarily need to run in real-time, and it could be constructed in a universe with considerably smaller "Planck units" (perhaps infinitely small). I could debate this all day between myself and information on the internet, but it gets to resemble masterbation on unknowable questions. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just don't get paid to do it. :)
Please keep in mind that I don't truly believe the universe is a simulation. Why does it have to be an inherently perfect and lossless computer? Perhaps a bit of lossy could go a long ways to producing such phenomena as deja vu, jamais vu, doppelgangers, prerecognition, etc. Planck length seems interesting, I hope that one day we will have the tools to physically measure the astoundingly small.
Absolutely fascinating, thank you very much. EDIT:According to the scientists, our ability to remember the past but not the future, another historically confounding manifestation of time’s arrow, can also be understood as a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. When you read a message on a piece of paper, your brain becomes correlated with it through the photons that reach your eyes. Only from that moment on will you be capable of remembering what the message says. As Lloyd put it: “The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.”