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I have written previously on what I consider to be the extremely dumb "simulation argument," the contention that the universe we live in could be some sort of computer simulation akin to the world of the film The Matrix. The argument itself, originally formalized by philosopher Nick Bostrum suffers from a basic mathematical flaw that for some reason never gets brought up - classic "gambler's fallacy." Bostrum's argument is essentially that if it is possible to build a true simulated reality, it is likely that a huge number of them would be created. Since that huge number is bigger than one, the number of "real realities," it is more likely than not that we live in a simulated universe.
This is pretty much the same thing as saying that if you do a hundred coin flips and get sixty heads and forty tails, it is more likely that the next flip will be heads. But this can easily be shown to be false with a simple experiment. Each flip is independent, just like each member of the collection of different realities would be. If this were not true, you could use something like Bostrum's math to, say, win a bunch of money at a roulette wheel. If anybody out there can experimentally show this is possible, I'll listen to what they have to say. Otherwise I completely fail to understand how anyone can fall for "the simulation" if they know anything at all about probability.
But according to this article, the probabilitic issues are not even the worst of it. According to a new mathematical proof, it is actually impossible to simulate the physical universe by computational means. It shows that the answer to the first question in Bostrum's argument, whether or not it is possible to create a simulated universe inside a computer, is no. The laws of physics cannot simply be generated by a computer algorithm, no matter how complex that algorithm is.
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.
