Reality: a computer simulation?
Dec. 13th, 2025 07:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ionelvWays in which reality could be mapped to a computer simulation:
0. Decide whether to start REALITY program, how many times, how often, at what pace and if program is allowed to communicate with other concurrent programs.
1. Big Bang: REALITY program (re)starts
2. Star/galaxy formation: memory allocators are spun
3. Planet formation: small chunks of memory are allocated and formatted (with an expiration timestamp)
4. Life formation: TSRs/worms/fibers proliferate
5. Life ends: either proliferation exhausts all memory and causes cascading memory corruption/crashes or the memory allocator collects/recalls the previously allocated memory upon expiry
6. Black hole: thread ends and memory is freed/zeroed-out (with some memory leaks: Hawking radiation).
7. All black holes merge into one black hole: all threads end and consequently program ends
8. Go back to step 0.
Notes:
* If our reality is simulated, what would it look like outside the sim?
* Quantum physics is either a really silly/inefficient way to simulate a world and/or our grasp of our own reality is very limited and awfully incomplete, maybe even misguided. Some puzzling quantum effects could be more easily explained if we were a sim (e.g. QFT, quasiparticles, quantum tunnelling, quantum entanglement and superluminal phenomena are simply bugs, memory corruption or custom sim coroutines).
0. Decide whether to start REALITY program, how many times, how often, at what pace and if program is allowed to communicate with other concurrent programs.
1. Big Bang: REALITY program (re)starts
2. Star/galaxy formation: memory allocators are spun
3. Planet formation: small chunks of memory are allocated and formatted (with an expiration timestamp)
4. Life formation: TSRs/worms/fibers proliferate
5. Life ends: either proliferation exhausts all memory and causes cascading memory corruption/crashes or the memory allocator collects/recalls the previously allocated memory upon expiry
6. Black hole: thread ends and memory is freed/zeroed-out (with some memory leaks: Hawking radiation).
7. All black holes merge into one black hole: all threads end and consequently program ends
8. Go back to step 0.
Notes:
* If our reality is simulated, what would it look like outside the sim?
* Quantum physics is either a really silly/inefficient way to simulate a world and/or our grasp of our own reality is very limited and awfully incomplete, maybe even misguided. Some puzzling quantum effects could be more easily explained if we were a sim (e.g. QFT, quasiparticles, quantum tunnelling, quantum entanglement and superluminal phenomena are simply bugs, memory corruption or custom sim coroutines).
