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diff --git a/content/entry/ego-traps.md b/content/entry/ego-traps.md index 52e218c..ad44199 100644 --- a/content/entry/ego-traps.md +++ b/content/entry/ego-traps.md @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ Notice that I don't say it's inaccurate, just incomplete. You can never know exa ## Thought Experiment Let's say we want to build a computer system which perfectly simulates the universe. I mean the exact state and location of every atom, every gravitational wave, etc. We won't concern ourselves about practicalities like speed, power draw, the limits of physics, or how it gets the initial state of the universe. We are going to ignore quantum randomness and locality issues like quantum entanglement. I'm sure there are other quirks of physics I don't know about, but we are going to ignore all of those and assume the universe is far more Newtonian than it is. The point of this experiment doesn't depend on the actual universe being Newtonian. It's just to demonstrate a point. -Our computer system will be located on earth. Picture an imaginary sphere around our galaxy. Outside of this sphere is what our computer simulates. It ignores the inside. The simulation gets inaccurate over time because the part which it isn't simulating (our galaxy) propogates light out at the speed of light away from us, affecting the simulation. But, since we are good system designers, we account for this. We program it so that the imaginary sphere automatically expands at the speed of light (the fastest information can travel in our universe). This means that the system does not try to simulate the slowly, ever-expanding sphere (our galaxy) in which it resides. We now have a perfectly accurate simulation of the universe, minus a relatively small expanding sphere. +Our computer system will be located on earth. Picture an imaginary sphere around our galaxy. Outside of this sphere is what our computer simulates. It ignores the inside. The simulation gets inaccurate over time because the part which it isn't simulating (our galaxy) propagates light out at the speed of light away from us, affecting the simulation. But, since we are good system designers, we account for this. We program it so that the imaginary sphere automatically expands at the speed of light (the fastest information can travel in our universe). This means that the system does not try to simulate the slowly, ever-expanding sphere (our galaxy) in which it resides. We now have a perfectly accurate simulation of the universe, minus a relatively small expanding sphere. This is working fine, so let's upgrade the system. Now, it simulates the whole universe minus earth. We use the same solution as before, making an expanding sphere around the earth which it ignores. It will only take 8 minutes until that sphere touches the sun and we can no longer simulate the sun. Soon enough, we won't be able to simulate the solar system either, and it just gets worse from there. So, we upgrade the system again. Now, it simulates a sphere outside the building in which it sits. In no time flat, we already can't simulate the earth any more. |