Getting your dander up

Fragment of a discussion from User talk:Armondikov
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Although demonstrating the non-correctness of any of the 7 points in the simulation argument would be an easier way to go about it. Personally, I think it ends at 4, as to simulate a universe you need to at least code for the existence and position of 10^90 particles at least. For this you would need a computer that can track each of them; that requires a unique ID, that would be 10^90 digits long, incidentally, and X, Y and Z positions, which would have to be accurate to within at least 35 significant figures (10^-35 being the region of the Planck length) in order to get sufficient spatial discrimination between particles. That's a lot of data just to encode for one of them. Multiply this up by 10^90 and the conclusion is that the simulating reality must be far larger and more complex than the simulated reality. That throws a lot of our assumptions in the shitter because this is then simply the comp-sci and transhumanist version of saying "no one can know the mind of God" on one hand and "but God is good and great and all powerful and thinks X, Y and Z" on the other.

While this proves it as absurd, the universe itself is absurd. Absurdity can only ever trump impossibility, simulation remains merely massively improbable.

Scarlet A.pngpostate08:14, 31 January 2012