Uncovering a Simulation

I long pondered on this last sentence of yours and i admit i got lost and heed help. What is an "external observer"? External to what? Our realm of existence? An observer that could see the quantum world? If so, why is it necessary that we isolate our world from all external interactions.
Or did you mean "other observers" when you said "external interactions"? If so, wouldn't the world behave in the same it does now, taking into account that there will in fact be at least one observer?

What are you talking about? Where in that sentence did i mention anything about a simulation???
That sentence was an answer to a question by onifre that had nothing to do with simulation. It's the same as me asking you:How is "...but then again, i watched the 2girls1cup video" proof that we are not living in a simulation. You don't make sense.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

I did not see the links you provided yesterday, but now i did. Sorry, i'll reply shortly.

OK i see your point although it takes quite a bit of knowledge in Decoherence till a short sentence like this starts to make sense to a non professional.

Modulous, i'll be frank, after reading those very detailed papers I don't feel comfortable to comment them. After reading it i get the idea that the enviroment is the states in which all observed objects can be at one point in time. This means something similar to MWI, although i get the feeling that the authors assert that all the states of the objects are within our world, but are unaccessible to us because we lack the sensory apparatus to take notice of them. Instead we only notice the final macro world states they occupy because... (and this is where my English starts to fail me):"Reduction of the state vector, c ’r, decreases the information available to
the observer about the composite system SD. The information loss is needed if
the outcomes are to become classical and thereby available as initial conditions to
predict the future. The effect of this loss is to increase the entropy H = -Tr lg
by an amount
H = H(r) - H(c) = - (||2 lg||2 + ||2 lg||2) . (12)
Entropy must increase because the initial state described by c was pure,
H(c) = 0, and the reduced state is mixed. Information gain”the objective of the
measurement”is accomplished only when the observer interacts and becomes
correlated with the detector in the already precollapsed state r."The only thing I could make out of this is that they are talking about pre-collapse, a sort of determinism that helps, together with the leaked info, in deciding the final state of the collapsed particles. Is that so?
What constitutes the information that is "leaked out" onto the "collapsed" environment? The states in which the other particles had collapsed?I am not qualified to decide which should be the clear winner between CI, Decoherence or Many Minds Interpretation in desribing the wave particle duality at the macro level, so i'll take caverdiver's word for it and let physicists do the battle. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

I don't have the time to reply to your whole post now but i suggest that you read up on what makes it possible that reality appears from the quantum fields.

How is that irrelevant? Explain, what are your arguments that the building blocks of our "reality" are irrelevant?
QM tells us reality is not what we think of it. Of course in our classical world reality is well defined and predictable, but under closer scrutiny, scientists are faced with a different reality. Decoherence says what you percieve as reality is just a very very small, tiny fragment of all there is, you just don't have the apparatus to see all the states of matter/particles.
Then, the theory that i'd like most(which seems scientists are running away from) says that we as observers become entangled with the object we are measuring. Just like when you take the temperature of a person you lower the temperature insignificantly of the measured body, so are our eyes and brain entangled with the object being measured by them.
There is a third theory - the many worlds interpretation - where there is one copy of you in an endless sequence of worlds.
Then there is a fourth theory - the Many Minds interpretation, and even then none of these 4 theory talks of the reality, the way you see it.
But don't worry, as long as you are sticking to the apparatus you've been given by nature for observing reality, your reality is as good as it can get.
One day people will possibly have portable quantum world viewers, it will be fun to watch their reactions to the underlying reality.If you do a search on the terms "entanglement" or "quantum mechanical entanglement" you will discover that there are experiments which support the proposition that entangled particles "know" each of the others is present even when the distance separating the two is further than light can travel in a given time. There is a lot to be discovered but if QM and scientists are telling us that reality is not what we think of it, why would you go head against the wall and claim they are not right?Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

The phone is there, the only way you could see that it's really not there is if you could transcend out of our classical world(our "reality"). While you are in our realm of existence, you couldn't not notice the presence of the phone. For more info on "reality", I suggest you a have a look at my last post on the previous page addressed to Legend.
PS. If you want to understand reality, you have throw common sense and layman logic out the window. The last 80 years of QM have confirmed that reality is much more complex that the human mind can imagine.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

I just said there is our reality and the other underlying reality that is not dependent upon our minds' perception and body apparatus. This is not a good example as whether you look at your hand with or without an x-ray, both cases are part of of the classical world(you are basically saying that our world is real because your hand is real). Could you re-phrase? There are 2 worlds, the quantum and the classical. They are not one and the same at all. They constitute one "combined" entity but they are very different. ...and what is that supposed to tell us? That our classical world is classic? The quantum world is not when you zoom in and out and change how big you see things. Your understanding of the underlying quantum world is very far from being true. This is plain wrong. Reality is what and how you perceive it. That's what QM tells us. Read about Decoherence, The Copenhagen Interpretation, the MWI, the MMI. QM is clearly telling us that there could be other realities(worlds) we are unaware of. I am not sure i understand what you are saying but it seems you are saying that our reality is real. It is, as long as you are in the realm of the classical world. What is an internal reality? A percepted reality? Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

What's more, quantum entanglement and its faster than light travel of information that breaks the law of Einstein's Special Relativity that nothing can travel faster than light, is an indication that we need to re-consider what space and time(our reality) really mean. For QE means that travelling, or at the very least, transfer of information is possible from the present to the past. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Are you saying that no information is sent/communicated between the entangled particles?Here is a test from Switzerland that finds that "signals" could travel at least 10 000 times the speed of light(or maybe it's that they don't really "travel" through what we think they do?):http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,403382,00.html"New experiments with quantum entanglement suggest that reality might be overrated":New experiments with quantum entanglement suggest that reality might be overrated | Ars TechnicaEdited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Yep, the measurement problem cannot be avoided currently and information is impossible to be sent but still the entangled particles appear to conflict with the property of relativity that information cannot be transferred faster than the speed of light.Because the topic is "simulation" and i see you've raised concerns that this topic sounded "nutty" to you, do you really believe you could explain the weirdness of the quantum world with layman logic and general everyday common sense and intuition?
Which of the following scenarios does not seem "nutty" to you and would not make you angry and force you to "report" them as eccentric and why:1. Many(infinite) number of worlds
2. Eternal universe with infinite number of Big Bangs
3. The Universe sprang out of the uncreated.What makes any of the above 3 more likely and logical than a simulation and why?
How could you decide if we live in a simulation or not without delving into QM and what we know as "reality"? What exactly is so wrong with that?Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

No no, i am not saying it's possible to transmit information through quantum entanglement. I am saying that the 2 particles are exchanging information at FTL speeds when for instance one partcle's
spin changes. Something has to account for that "interconnection" and logically my mind tells me the particles are communicating information about the other particle's state through some means in a FTL fashion.Anyway, science seems currently unable to explain why the "spooky action at a distance" occurs.Back on topic, since i was the one who raised questions whether reality is what we think of it, let me delve further into another potential hot topic:Is there time between 2 Plank time units?
Is there reality between 2 Plank time units?If nothing exists between Plank time ticks, wouldn't it mean that we perceive the ticks as continuos, but that they are physically not and that we have a very incomplete(and possibly fake) picture of reality?Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of "physical" reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience?
“The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”Could our minds and what we experience as reality account for what we experience as time?I am sure people will misunderstand what i am posting but I am not here to raise scandals. My aim is to dig deeper into the controversy of the unknown and for that i am not sticking to common sense and human intuition. I've thrown them out the window the moment i heard that the Universe came from a walnut-size ball.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

You bring up good points onifre, i agree to all of them. I think i am an atheist creationist and i think this is the future religion of science. I don't believe 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms(8 billion billion billion) that make up a human body, combined with high precision completely by chance over the course of 600 mln. years, out of 10^7882 atoms that combined in a way that made the Universe and our existence possible. While still a possibilty, I don't believe in that 1:10^7882 chance, unless I assume your Loop Quantum Gravity and the eternal universe with infinite numbers of BBs.I don't believe we have free will, as we are not the authors of our bodies/ourselves. If we accept the No God scenario, then Nature is your owner as it created you the way you are and it created the environment you are in. You'd think you are something with free will, but a closer look will reveal that you are a product of something/someone and that you are not the author of yourself, thus you don't really possess your body and you have no free will(your body was given to you along with your brain). At the time you accept that you don't have free will, the obvious question arises - am I truly living? Or am i merely participting as a puppet on strings in a game?Reality doesn't make sense to me, it appears impossible without free will. And this is without me taking into account the fact that the sub-structure of the whole material Universe is made of energy, or the fact that time at its smallest scales doesn't make sense with regard to what we perceive as reality. I lack the skills to write eloquently like Einstein, so let me quote him one more time:"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one".While he's not really saying that we live in a simulation(simulation is not the right word but close), I believe he's telling us we are living a beautiful dream. I know he's right, evidence is mounting that this whole thing is a mind-game whether it's made by a god or a highly developed(alien?) civilisation or another cause.Here is my favourite quote of Einstein's:"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself." (this is subtle and i believe he means he wishes to look beyond the illusion)Albert Einstein:
Now he has departed from this strange world(dead?) a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.I'd definitely rather discuss this with you over a few drinks and some russian chicks, but that damn stupid ocean of dihydrogen monoxide is compelling. Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

That's truly a great thought(we are limited by being limited) but let me add something very subtle:"People do not grow old no matter how long we live. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we were born."-A.Einstein