The universe is humongous.
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The hard drive space is practically limited to the Big Bang on one end and the heat death of the universe on the other, but it contains all of the data for everything that exists. That’s massive.
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The RAM is massive because it’s handling all the variables and changes of the present.
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The cache is much smaller as established by the study that found the universe is not locally real. Things only happen once they are observed, but it happens almost instantaneously. Still, the cache is massive because it is handling everything that is being observed at the same time. That’s a lot of things.
All of the above are massive extremes. However,
- The processing speed is limited at the speed of light. In comparison to the others, the speed of light is soooooo ridiculously slow, causing a bottle neck.
PS - Massive because it’s mass I’ve observed. Not really tho, you silly goat. Big bang while I swig Tang and watch a twig hang.
the study that found the universe is not locally real. Things only happen once they are observed
This is only true if you operate under a very specific and strict criterion of “realism” known as metaphysical realism. Einstein put forward a criterion of what he thought this philosophy implied for a physical theory, and his criterion is sometimes called scientific realism.
Metaphysical realism is a very complex philosophy. One of its premises is that there exists an “absolute” reality where all objects are made up of properties that are independent of perspective. Everything we perceive is wholly dependent upon perspective, so metaphysical realism claims that what we perceive is not “true” reality but sort of an illusion created by the brain. “True” reality is then treated as the absolute spacetime filled with particles captured in the mathematics of Newton’s theory.
The reason it relies on this premise is because by assigning objects perspective invariant properties, then they can continue to exist even if no other object is interacting with them, or, more specifically, they continue to exist even if “no one is looking at them.” For example, if you fire a cannonball from point A to point B, and you only observe it leaving point A and arriving at point B, Newtonian mechanics allows you to “track” its path between these two points even if you did not observe it.
The problem is that you cannot do this in quantum mechanics. If you fire a photon from point A to point B, the theory simply disallows you from unambiguously filling in the “gaps” between the two points. People then declare that “realism is dead,” but this is a bit misleading because this is really only a problem for metaphysical/scientific realism. There are many other kinds of realism in literature.
For example, the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist’s contextual realism argues that the exact opposite. The mathematical theory is not “true reality” but is instead a description of reality. A description of reality is not the same as reality. Would a description of the Eiffel Tower substitute actually seeing it in reality? Of course not, they’re not the same. Contextual realism instead argues that what is real is not the mathematical description but is precisely what we perceive. The reason we perceive reality in a way that depends upon perspective is because reality is just relative (or “contextual”). There is no “absolute” reality but only a contextual reality and that contextual reality we perceive directly as it really is.
Thus for contextual realism, there is no issue with the fact that we cannot “track” things unambiguously, because it has no attachment to treating particles as if they persist as autonomous entities. It is perfectly fine with just treating it as if the particle hops from point A to point B according to some predictable laws and relative to the context in which the observer occupies. That is just how objective reality works. Observation isn’t important, and indeed, not even measurement, because whatever you observe in the experimental setting is just what reality is like in that context. The only thing that “arises” is your identification.
ive heard of a shower beer… but this seems more like the result of a shower joint
I dont do weed 🚭 cause gives me panic for first 15 mins
Glad to hear I’m not alone! I like weed, but the potential for panic attacks is too scary.
My aunt gave me an edible for Thanksgiving last year and I felt nothing for the first few hours. Cue random panic attack on the ride home that lasted until 4 am
Yup, had a massive panic attack from gummies. Went to the hospital because I thought I was having a stroke. Got pumped full of lorazepam and slept for 26 hours. Full day of my life gone.
Yep, you’re not alone! We’re connected rn 💞
Spooky action at a distance.
The variable C stands for cookie, not light speed.
yum!! 😮😋
Good enough for me. 🤷♂️
There is a disparity between the Earth’s, Life’s, and the Universe’s clock speeds.
Light speed is an irrelevant convention to the speed of causality.
We are like electrons that exist in a time delay circuit for an irrelevant blip, while the hardware chugs along, and we imagine ourselves the PC Master Race.
This is it! Thank you 😉👍
This is a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics.
The idea that the universe is “not locally real” suggests that particles don’t have definite properties until they are measured, with their states potentially correlated over distances through quantum entanglement. This doesn’t mean that only observed things exist; rather, it indicates that certain properties are simply indeterminate until measurement (or “observation”)
In quantum mechanics, “observation” refers to the interaction that causes a system’s wave function to collapse from multiple potential states into one actual state. This process affects the state of the system but does not imply that reality is created solely by observation, nor does it require a sentient observer
Edit: sorry to be a party pooper! I did enjoy reading your post
Why did physicists start using the word “real” and “realism”? It’s a philosophical term, not a physical one, and it leads to a lot of confusion. “Local” has a clear physical meaning, “realism” gets confusing. I have seen some papers that use “realism” in a way that has a clear physical definition, such as one I came across defined it in terms of a hidden variable theory. Yet, I also saw a paper coauthored by the great Anton Zeilinger that speaks of “local realism,” but very explicitly uses “realism” with its philosophical meaning, that there is an objective reality independent of the observer, which to me it is absurd to pretend that physics in any way calls this into account.
If you read John Bell’s original paper “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox,” he never once use the term “realism.” The only time I have seen “real” used at all in this early discourse is in the original EPR paper, but this was merely a “criterion” (meaning a minimum but not sufficient condition) for what would constitute a theory that is a complete description of reality. Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen in no way presented this as a definition of “reality” or a kind of “realism.”
Indeed, even using the term “realism” on its own is ambiguous, as there are many kinds of “realisms” in the literature. The phrase “local realism” on its own is bound to lead to confusion, and it does, because I pointed out, even in the published literature physicists do not always use “realism” consistently. If you are going to talk about “realism,” you need to preface it to be clear what kind of realism you are specifically talking about.
If the reason physicists started to talk about “realism” is because they specifically are referring to something that includes the EPR criterion, then they should call it “EPR realism” or something like that. Just saying “realism” is so absurdly ridiculous it is almost as if they are intentionally trying to cause confusion. I don’t really blame anyone who gets confused on this because like I said if you even read the literature there is not even consistent usage in the peer-reviewed papers.
The phrase “observer-dependence” is also very popular in the published literature. So, while I am not disagreeing with you that “observation” is just an interaction, this is actually a rather uncommon position known as relational quantum mechanics.
Yep! The probability code is put within the quantum systems so that things are mostly predictable, but there’s still enough “randomness” to prevent a deterministic system. The cache is basically figuring out all these probabilities when interacted with plus processing the more deterministic calculations of the macro world.
This works out. I asked Ephen Stephen, and they gave me the 👍👍
Non-Youtube link: https://www.pbs.org/video/pbs-space-time-speed-light-not-about-light/
If the universe is indeed a simulation, those would be reasonable assumptions to govern how we react to it. However, the former is still unfalsifiable.
Hard drive space might be bottlenecked by the holographic principle.
Oof, that’s going to take me a while to understand. Thank you tho!
I’ve often had the thought that the universe is a simulation.
Like, why are there hard physical limitations on things like the speed of light? That doesn’t make a lot of sense for a natural system. Also what kind of bullshit is it that if you move super fast time goes slower?
The universe is a simulation, but it’s not very well put together.
why doesnt it make sense for a natural system? What do you expect a natural system to look like? As far as I can imagine, a universe that can be observed must display some consistent sent of mathematical rules (because any universe that did not, would be too chaotic to allow an ordered system like life to exist within it, and therefore all observers will find themselves existing within the limited ones), and a simulation is itself just executing a bunch of mathematical rules, and so any universe you can exist in will appear indistinguishable from a simulated one from the inside (unless the simulators do something specifically to reveal it).
Do you think of life as being an ordered system? It seems pretty chaotic to me.
Anyway, if I relate my concept of a ‘natural system’ to biology, then I’d point out that there isn’t really an upper limit to how fast animals go. I mean, sure, they’re limited by their size or aerodynamics, but a cheetah doesn’t have a ‘top speed’ that it bottoms out at, it could push harder or be induced to move faster.
If I think of it as a force of nature, I’d think about how water flows. The speed of a river isn’t constant, and it could be manipulated or induced to move faster.
So from that lens, it just seems odd that there are universal constants, like the speed of light. You’d think some lights would move faster or slower than others based on their composition, because that’s the behaviour we seem to experience in nature.
This isn’t a serious debate or belief of mine. I accept the laws of science because they’re testable, demonstrable, and repeatable. But when you contemplate the unknowable (what does God look like, anyway?), it’s a fun diversion.
Also we’re such an infinitesimally small part of the universe that I’m inclined to believe that if we are in a simulation, we’re the bug that crawled into the computer.
I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.
It needs more processing to simulate the events when you move super fast, thus it reduces your fps, but the simulation is frame based and not time based, so time slows.
You are bottlenecked at memory speed on von Neumann machines.
