In news that will come as a potentially crushing disappointment to those people who watched The Matrix and decided that reality must be a computer simulation because the Wachowski brothers made a bad movie about it, nuclear physicists at the University of Bonn in Germany have devised a test to prove whether or not reality is anything more than just boring old reality.
Remember, scientists know more about this stuff than two college dropouts who once attended an introductory Philosophy 101 lecture and had a profound (read: not profound) epiphany about the human condition.
The actual science stuff is complicated, but basically, a computer simulation is limited by predefined values, while the physical world is not. The test checks whether reality as we know it is constrained by the same processes of discretization.
The study’s conclusion is necessarily somewhat non-committal given that current science simply can’t support all the required…science, but finds that [SPOILERS] reality is probably not a computer simulation. At least for now.
Source: The Verge
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“Remember, scientists know more about this stuff than two college
dropouts who once attended an introductory Philosophy 101 lecture and
had a profound (read: not profound) epiphany about the human condition.”
After seeing what top scientists like Hawking and Krauss know about philosophy, I have to disagree. Scientists are terrible at philosophy and metaphysics and tend to commit terrible logic blunders and not question their underlying assumptions which are taken for granted, forgetting that for science to get off the ground, one needs a ton of philosophy, just ask Popper. It’s because a scientist is an amateur at it and should not comment on it.
BTW this study is only as good as its assumptions which are ummm metaphysical, namely a simulation has to be behave in such and such way while nature does not. And you do get the response at the end that in reality this experiment proves nothing and that heck, only appeals to future science – which is a fallacy – can hopefully illuminate this one day.
BTW to any onlookers, a good book for you to read is Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False”. Nagel is a real philosopher and an extremely well respected guy.