Checking for Bugs

[selenite0]

There's a hypothesis floating around that we may not be living in the "real world" but are part of a simulation. Setting aside the massive assumptions in that argument, how would we go about checking to see if we are in a sim instead of reality?

For a Warcraft character there's a lot of clues that they're in an arbitrary rule set. Horses vanishing when they go through a door . . . being able to hand someone an object but not set it on a table . . . not being able to drink milk without some lessons in the school of hard knocks . . . they're all clues. Then there's the random problems that come from errors in the code. Sometimes you can move across a flat surface . . . sometimes there's a little wrinkle and you're stuck. People or animals you've dealt with before act in bizarre ways or freeze. You can be moving down a ramp and suddenly fall through the solid ground. The bugs are a bigger giveaway than the deliberate design omissions.

So what bugs make it look like we're in a simulation? Well, there's light. Sometimes it's a particle. Sometimes it's a wave. Nobel prize winners wave their hands and gibber trying to resolve this. But that's exactly the kind of glitch you get when developers steal legacy code from two different applications. Verse A had light-waves, Verse B had photons, and our world behaves according to which one a particular piece of code came from.

Then there's the speed-of-light limit. Integral to physics? Or just a simple barrier the devs threw in to keep us from peeking at under construction areas? ("Nerf light!" celticdragonfly says to this.)

Biology is full of bugs, no pun intended for once. The boot process for life is hard to explain. Evolution keeps producing errors despite millions of iterations. And human psychology . . . well, is that a bug or a deliberate design feature?

I mean, if you have two possible explanations for how the human mind works:
1. A product of evolution intended to maximize healthy offspring
2. A scenario generator optimized to produce entertaining conflicts for spectators and role-players

. . . which one fits the observed data better?

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

What about all the times you'd have sworn you put something someplace and then it's not there? And then, sometimes it shows up where you know you looked.

If you examine matter carefully, you find that there's practically nothing there. And if you meditate, you discover that you're rather illusionary yourself. Not only is this universe a fake, it was done on the cheap.

Leaning toward 2, obviously

[jenna-thorn.livejournal.com]

Plus deja vu, we're there's been a reset either wholly or of a section, so that some individuals experince a repeat of a previously played section of the game, while others who are now present but weren't because of changed options in the replay, experience it for the first time.

Which also explains why I can explain something to an engineer, have him say "Oh! I get it!" and two days later have him ask the same damn question. Not that that's happened to me this week or anything (Three times. Since Monday. I need a little rum for my Dr Pepper this afternoon.)

yep ...

[btripp.livejournal.com]

While I don't exactly understand the mathematical arguments of the Multiverse school which posits that the vast majority of universes (or at least those amenable to consciousness) are actually "simulations" being run by the cultures (or computational successors to said cultures) of the rare successful multi-galactic race within a "real" universe, I find the concept fascinating.

It would certainly go to explain things like the other commentator noted, as well as various "psychic" phenomena which would be plausible as some sort of "leaking" within a program.

I spent the past two years working in Second Life, and if Moore's Law (etc.) continues to be predictive, it is certainly conceivable that "Matrix-like" VR would be possible within a generation or so ... leading one to at least admit the suggestion that the "whole shebang" is a simulation being run for purposes we're not likely to be privy to!


(http://btripp.ning.com)

psychic phenomena

[jenna-thorn.livejournal.com]

Hunh, that's true, a glitchy program could explain both prophetic dreams (rerunning the simulation) and "past life experiences" (reusing characters as templates for new characters).

Oh! and bending the spoon or telekenisis / telepathy, too, if a character can, because of a glitch, interact at a slightly off angle, the way a Sims character sometimes stops at the edge of a table just inside the table. Abnormal manuiplation of in-game objects.

Re: Leaning toward 2, obviously

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Putting an IF(RAND()) THEN LOSE function in the memory storage routine probably did wonders for increasing the interpersonal conflict stats.

Re: Leaning toward 2, obviously

[jenna-thorn.livejournal.com]

Can I hack in to reset it? Just the one guy, I promise! You can revoke my admin privileges immediately after that.

Re: Leaning toward 2, obviously

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I'm sure the NDA that goes with having superuser powers would keep me from writing posts like this.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

There's also the convenient behavior of water: expanding when hot AND when frozen. Has been compared to a last-minute fix to keep the oceans from freezing solid from the bottom up.

[ndrosen.livejournal.com]

"2. A scenario generator optimized to produce entertaining conflicts for spectators and role-players"

This raises the question of the psychology of the spectators and role-players, and what produced them. 8-)

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Oooh, that's a good one.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

And once you answer that you have to figure out where the producer came . . . "It's turtles all the way down!"