No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Quantum is weird. If we are in a simulation, that would explain a lot of that, because the quantum effects we see are actually just light simulations of much deeper mechanics.
As such, if we were simulating a universe, there's every chance that we may decide to only simulate down to individual atoms. So the people in the simulation would probably discover atoms, but then they would have to come up with their own version of quantum mechanics to describe the effects that we know come from quarks.
The point is that each layer may choose to simulate things slightly lighter to save on resources, and you would have no way of knowing.
Indeed and--interesting corrollary--if we accept the concept of reduced accuracy simulations as axiomatic, then it might be possible to figure out how close we are to the "bottom" of the simulation stack that's theoretically possible. There's only so many orders of magnitude after all; at some point you're only simulating one pixel wiggling around and that's not interesting enough to keep going down.
There is not, as far as I know, any way to estimate the length of the stack in the other direction, though.
I have never understood the argument that QM is evidence for a simulation because the universe is using less resources or something like that by not "rendering" things at that low of a level. The problem is that, yes, it's probabilistic, but it is not merely probabilistic. We have probability in classical mechanics already like when dealing with gasses in statistical mechanics and we can model that just fine. Modeling wave functions is far more computationally expensive because they do not even exist in traditional spacetime but in an abstract Hilbert space that can grows in complexity exponentially faster than classical systems. That's the whole reason for building quantum computers, it's so much more computationally expensive to simulate this that it is more efficient just to have a machine that can do it. The laws of physics at a fundamental level get far more complex and far more computationally expensive, and not the reverse.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that is is evidence, i merely arguing that it could be a result of how they chose to render our simulation. And just because it's more computationally expensive on our side does not necessarily mean it's more expensive on their side, because we don't know what the mechanics of the deeper layer may have been.
For example, it would be a lot less computationally expensive to render accuracy in a simulation for us down to cellular level than it would be down to atomic scale. From there, we could simply replicate the rules of how molecules work without actually rendering them, such as "cells seem to have a finite amount of energy based on food you consume, and we can model the mathematics of how that works, but we can't seem to find a physical structure that allows that to function"