It’s a plot device beloved by science fiction: our entire universe might be a simulation running on some advanced civilization’s supercomputer. But new research from UBC Okanagan has mathematically proven this isn’t just unlikely—it’s impossible.
Dr. Mir Faizal, Adjunct Professor with UBC Okanagan’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, and his international colleagues, Drs. Lawrence M. Krauss, Arshid Shabir and Francesco Marino have shown that the fundamental nature of reality operates in a way that no computer could ever simulate.
Their findings, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, go beyond simply suggesting that we’re not living in a simulated world like The Matrix. They prove something far more profound: the universe is built on a type of understanding that exists beyond the reach of any algorithm.
“It has been suggested that the universe could be simulated. If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation. This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that our universe is the original one, rather than a simulation nested within another simulation,” says Dr. Faizal. “This idea was once thought to lie beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. However, our recent research has demonstrated that it can, in fact, be scientifically addressed.”
There’s a certain understanding of what is and isn’t decidable by means of Computation (capital C), and it’s fundamental to the formalized systems of logic that define computers.
From what I can glean, they show that some modern theories in physics display logical properties that we know cannot arise from a formalized computational system.
To be fair, I feel like that only means the universe can’t be described by internal computation, not that some hyper-logical model of computation couldn’t exist to drive it all from “above”… It’s fundamental, so not like a higher spatial dimension, but a sort of “conceptual” one we can’t re-articulate? 50% confused and 50% talking out of my ass tbh
The formalized computational systems are an incomplete subset of the capabilities of an actual computation system. Their logic is that such a system would be able to simulate itself, and thus we should see simulations as good as current reality.
That’s a strong supposition they are doing and even then, idk what makes them think that such a simulation won’t ever exist in the history of humanity. They are challenging science fiction, so I can go crazy pills fiction with my theories too.
I think the point is that the “incomplete subset of capabilities” is inherent to our model of mathematics, and the framework indeed cannot possibly simulate the fundamental processes of reality