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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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I mean, you can go further back than that if you want. You've got Plato's Allegory of the Cave :)
Anyway, I don't think I can conclusively prove we're not in a simulation (although I don't think we are -- onus of proof lies with the positive existential proclamation). I can only prove -- and in many cases only provide limited evidence -- that we're not in certain classes of simulation.
I'm literally just using scrap parts salvaged out of other things. So I think it's quite challenging to do even that much :D
Although I plan to replace the lazy el-cheapo diode-breakdown entropy source with a particle-spectrometer-based quantum TRNG in a few months. I'll have to build it myself, but it will be neat to have a proper instrument not made from junk. I'll make a second one for my coffee machine, so I can make Schrödinger's Coffee -- simultaneously caffeinated and decaffeinated until you drink it.
Actually Plato was instrumental in the work I'm referring to. It was effectively using Plato's demiurge and concepts of eikon as a response to Epicurean naturalism and the commitment to the belief that death was final. Effectively arguing that even if the world came to be from natural causes and the soul initially depended on the body such that death was inescapable, that the eventual development of a creator of worlds would allow for a recreation in the image (eikon) of the original physical universe but without actually being tied to and dependent on physical form. Claiming that this had already happened and we just don't realize it, it emphasized that the better situation was to be in the non-physical copy than to be the original.
So indeed, Plato's thinking was instrumental - just in the opposite manner as he intended (Plato was very keen on originality and looked down upon the notion of images as representations of the original).
And I agree - narrowing down the classes of simulation is a worthwhile pursuit, and one with considerable potential for success. IIRC there's been some good papers already proving we can't be in a simulation running on classical computing architecture.
In any case, good luck with your future experiments!