[Slashdot] We're Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows

I disagree with the claim. I'm posting this link to foster discussion of what might be simulated and what might not.

I might agree with the technical claim - precisely simulating macroscopic results of quantum effects - if I were qualified which I am not. But I don't think that is necessary. If scientists can come up with measurable macroscopic effects (like the cited one), then a sufficiently sophisticated simulation can come up with observations matching these expectations.

Yeah, classical computers might need a lot of resources to simulate quantum mechanics. Quantum computers have no such limitation though, so it's probably not relevant to the simulation argument. Note that the paper doesn't mention the simulation argument, it was added by journalists working under evil incentives.

The strength of the claim being made by Slashdot and the lack of any examination of ways in which it could be false by whoever wrote Slashdot's summary both invite skepticism.

I'm of the opinion that we are in base reality regardless, though. The reason for this being is that the incentive for running a simulation is so that you can observe the behavior of the system being simulated. If you have some vertical stack of simulations all simulating intelligent agents in a virtual world, and most of these simulations are simulating basically the same thing, that makes simulation very costly because the 0th-level simulators won't learn anything from a simulation being run by the simulants that they won't learn from the "base-level" simulation. They would have an incentive to develop ways to starve non-useful simulant activity of computing resources.

Why would we need more research to work out that the simulation hypothesis is a bad idea? Computational universality implies that if we were being simulated on a computer, it would be impossible for us to know about the underlying hardware. Any hardware that implements a universal set of computational gates can support universal computation. There are lots of different kinds of universal gates, so you can't tell what gates are being used by looking at the results of a computation. So the simulation hypothesis does no work in explaining what we observe. The simulation hypothesis also implies we can't understand the real laws of physics, the physics of the simulator, since no experiment we conduct can tell us anything about the hardware. Another problem: the simulation might be programmed to change the laws of physics arbitrarily so it ruins all of our existing knowledge of the laws of physics and everything else.

There are no answers to these criticisms so the simulation hypothesis is false.

Abstract question here, but does this paper prove we're not living in a simulation, versus proving that at our current amount of knowledge, we can't prove if we're in one, or not?

The bigger question, of course, would be how many simulations deep we are at, and how long until we make our own.