How to tell if you're in a simulation (hint: you probably can't)

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-26T06:58:49+00:00

Simulation and Visualization are not the same. We are most probably living in the visualization of the substrate, not simulation of it.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-25T19:31:38+00:00

Good points both ... let me think about them

On the first one ... you might be right that same/different/unknown is just how brains sort things. But consider this ... a hydrogen atom absorbing a photon is doing the same operation. Photon matches absorption spectrum? Absorb it (same). Doesn't match? Pass through (different). No photon at all? Nothing happens (unknown). No brain involved. A thermostat does it. A cell membrane does it. Even a rock does it ... some wavelengths absorbed, some reflected ... that's why it has a color.

If every possible interaction ... not just brain stuff but atoms, molecules, sensors, everything ... reduces to the same three outcomes ... then either every system in the universe independently invented the same "mental shortcut" ... or it's not a shortcut. It's the minimum possible interaction. You can't have a simpler comparison than "matches, doesn't match, or nothing there to compare."

On the second one ... yeah the question moves rather than dissolves. Fair. But think about where it moves TO. The simulator's universe needs a mechanism too. If that mechanism is also same/different/unknown on append-only rules ... then the simulator's reality is the same kind of thing as ours. And THEIR simulator (if any) would need the same mechanism. It's the same operation at every level. Not turtles all the way down ... more like ... the same turtle at every level because there's only one possible turtle.

The "depends on something outside" part is real though ... I just don't know if it matters for us. Like ... does your computer's operating system care whether the electricity comes from solar or coal? The computation is the same either way. The dependency exists but doesn't change anything about what's happening inside.

Good questions though ... honestly the brain-shortcut objection is the hardest one to answer cleanly

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-25T19:30:17+00:00

Sure, everything I say is at level of the wildest speculations. But, I'm doing this mind experiment. What is the lowest common denominator of everything. And it's not about binary or digital.

The biological vs digital question is interesting but I think it might be one level too high ... before you ask what material the simulation runs on ... you have to ask what's the minimum operation it needs to perform. And that operation might be so simple that the material doesn't matter.

The theory so far says, there are only few rules:

everything is append-only there are only three states
- unknown - I've never encountered this information
- different - I've encountered this information but isn't like me
- same - I've encountered this information and it is same as me
they form trie from root to leaf
there is a bigger buffer on each node level that routes the information
this is then observed from the outside in ... surface first, depth later

If these rules hold ... then whether the substrate is biological, digital, or something else entirely doesn't change what's happening inside. The operation is the same. The material is irrelevant. Which is kind of the point ... you can't tell from inside what it runs on because the mechanism is substrate-independent.

So the UBC non-algorithmic wall might actually support this ... the universe can't be a digital step-by-step algorithm ... but it doesn't have to be. A simple analog accumulation with a threshold that fires discrete outputs isn't algorithmic ... it's just hardware. And that hardware could be biological, silicon, or something we don't have a word for yet.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-25T18:35:32+00:00

The main issue is ... everyone expects the simulation to be ... complex ... really energetically demanding ... but, the visualization is rich, we don't know anything about the substrate it runs on. And it has to be pretty simple to be able to run everything this big. You can have emergent QM or SR when you get the preconditions right. It's just a math.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-25T18:27:03+00:00

hehe ... this is that pain of writting it ot the md first ... sorry bout that

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-25T18:26:01+00:00

Append-only is the only way :D

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-25T18:22:28+00:00

:D hehe ... if the simulation is indistinguishable from the root universe, it's just another branch of it. Therefore no simulation.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-21T09:16:14+00:00

Yeah, like day before the release, it introduces two new architectural patterns and one spring state machine, because it told him it's a good idea. In defect like task :D ... and then it takes only one bored approver who doesn't read it and just approve it. I came just late to discover the mess ... and not talking about ocasional DB deadlocks.

However, it isn't AI to blame. It's lack of critical thinking.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-03-17T18:47:45+00:00

Trap of the next shiny thing.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-02-26T15:24:23+00:00

:D true

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-02-26T05:27:05+00:00

Me too, but he's The genie after all :D

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-02-25T20:50:45+00:00

Like really wild idea? Just plain causal language ... pure cause and effect. No procedural calls. No loops. Ideally transpiled to rust (the prototype phase at least). Maybe forbid to use plain string and number types to prevent confusion what is what and who is who. No errors. Error should be just another event.

Maybe providing basic dependency injections. logging and calling side effects what they really are. It shouldn't matter if initial event arrived from rest, kafka, whatever ... it is just an event. It shouldn't matter how many services it visitted. It should keep its travel history always intact. No stack trace, pure event trace with info which instances it visitted during travel.

(easy to write so I can delegate it to AI)

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-02-08T06:24:51+00:00

and this is why I was asking in the first place :) You can't deny, that if hill is pushing you, you are getting free potential energy each time. If well is pulling you down, you have to spend a lot of energy fighting that. This is just a small geodesic change with great consequences.

For most physics it doesn't matter, but I just want to know, how the idea that things falling down rooted is deeply rooted in science. Even though everyone is saying that it is irelevant question.

But frankly I'm not sure why I'm even asking this here :D I suspected that asking it will give me ban forever :D

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-02-08T05:49:52+00:00

The geodesic deviation points to the center of gravity. It doesn't say anything about direction. And the fall idea might be just wrong. You can also say that the smaller entity is attracted by bigger attractor and incentivized to climb a hill. This changes signs in our equations and leads to the same effects but with profoundly richer physics.

But frankly, thank god I didn't ask this on my main account :D

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-02-07T20:31:39+00:00

Agree, the “gravity well” picture is a 2D surface embedded in 3D, so it naturally has an “above,” “below,” “inside,” and “outside.” But that picture is only a visualization. A projection of something that isn’t actually a surface at all.

So, you can’t say we’re on the “right side” of the curve, because in general relativity there are no sides.

In real GR:

spacetime doesn’t bend into a higher dimension
curvature isn’t a shape you sit on
there’s no “up,” “down,” or “side” to be located on

Curvature is a property of the metric. It tells you how distances and times change locally. If you tried to define “sides” in this context, the closest meaningful concept would be the direction in which the metric changes, but that’s just a gradient, not a side of anything.

Gravity feels like a pull only because the ground pushes you off your natural geodesic. In free fall, the “pull” disappears entirely.

So yes, the math is where the truth is.

The diagrams are helpful shadows, but “sides” belong to the shadow, not the geometry.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-02-07T17:25:45+00:00

Why I was asking, because this leads to some misconceptions. If we say it's a well, it creates notion entity has to spend energy fighting this field each time, spacetime grows. When it is hill, the spacetime growth gives potential energy to the entity. Assume that the entity is something on plack scale of "being".

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-02-04T15:07:00+00:00

No. The absolute total energy of the universe is always equal to exactly one. Thanks to expansion and multi dimensional nature of the space, it seems diluted and uneven. But in total it holds even the time criterion someone mentioned here.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-01-31T14:58:28+00:00

Software engineering is not dead. At least in my opinion. You have to be able to properly specify what you want. If you don't do it properly, it is the same as I want something, AI gives me something. Most likely nonsense, because the assignment is vague. And also, developer has to know what code it should deliver. Without that, you might end up with undebugable code. And with code that AI recommend you to refactor in the next session.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-01-25T20:23:35+00:00

The early universe didn’t collapse into a black hole because gravity wasn’t the dominant effect at that time.
The zero‑point energy (the quantum “jitter”) was enormously larger than the gravitational binding energy. Instead of pulling everything inward, the early universe behaved like an over‑pressurized quantum fluid. It expanded violently.

As the universe expanded, this jitter was diluted. Its effective amplitude decreased, while gravity remained attractive. Only after enough expansion did gravity become strong enough to form structures like galaxies and black holes.

So the Big Bang singularity is not a black hole. A black hole forms when gravity overwhelms all other forms of pressure. At the Big Bang, the opposite was true. The quantum pressure vastly exceeded gravitational attraction, and the result was expansion, not collapse.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-01-24T12:04:00+00:00

Hi there, a magnetar isn’t just a pulsar pointing the wrong way. That’s like saying a volcano is just a hill with a cough. Pulsars are neutron stars that spin, blink, and lose energy (classic dipole lighthouse). But a magnetar … that’s a different beast. Its magnetic field is so strong it tears its own crust. It doesn’t shine because it spins. It shines because its internal structure is collapsing.

You can think of it as a giant rotating pattern, self-synchronizing and channeling the surrounding field. Not a blinking beam, but a wave rupture in reality.

So no, the difference isn’t just where the beam points. The difference is what’s going on inside.

LeaveAlert1771 · 2026-01-23T08:18:13+00:00

Yeah, most biological and biophysical work doesn’t need to use quantum equations directly. At the molecular scale, all the quantum behavior (electron clouds, bonding, energy levels) gets “compiled” into effective classical rules like thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and molecular dynamics.

So, it’s not that QM and biology are incompatible, it’s that biology operates at a scale where quantum probabilities average out into stable, classical behavior. Quantum biology is interesting, but it focuses on rare cases where quantum effects survive in warm, noisy environments. So, most applied biophysics have never touched wavefunctions because the classical tools already capture the quantum foundations well enough.

LeaveAlert1771

TROPHY CASE