[ExI] Which direction does the arrow of time point in Conway's Game of Life?

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 3:49 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>> The Earth was made with far fewer particles than a Black Hole but it's
>> vastly more complex, you'd need a hell of a lot more than 2 numbers or
>> even 3 to describe it.
>
>
>
> * > Yes, although depending on how big and precise the numbers are, a
> single number can be more complex than a set of multiple numbers. For
> example, a single 20-digit number is more complex than four 2-digit
> numbers.*
>

There are a lot of things you'd need to know to have even a rough
understanding of how the Earth works, and one number, no matter how
precise, can only describe one thing. Four numbers can describe four
things, still far to few for even an approximation but at least you're
heading in the right direction. And for some things 2 digits or even one
would be sufficient; for describing the number of spacial dimensions the
Earth has for example, or its net electrical charge.


> > If they're running out of processing power but the simulators still want
>> to fool us then the solution would be simple, just slow down the
>> simulation of the people you're trying to fool, then to us it would look
>> like the super complex processing hogging thing had sped up.
>
>
>
> * > But observers in gravity wells ARE slowed down such that they don't
> notice their own clocks running slow.*


If the clocks are running slow it's because that's the way the program was
written, and they DO notice when their clocks are running slow because when
they look at clocks outside their gravity well they see clocks running
faster than their own, it is after all how we figured out that gravity can
effect time.


> *> And if we are in a simulation, as Henrick pointed out, then why would
> the simulators try to fool us?  *


If we're a simulation then there must be something non-simulated that is
being simulated, and somebody is doing that to figure out how the
non-simulated things behave. The non-simulated things don't believe they
are simulated so to be accurate we, the simulated things, shouldn't either.
So they've got to fool us, and if they were doing their job properly we
wouldn't even be having this conversation right now because neither of us
would have even thought of the idea that we live in a simulation.

> *They could have done so without the extravagance of countless
> galaxies of billions of stars each separated by eons.*


Yes, it does seem like a, quite literal, astronomical waste of resources.
And that is a pretty good reason to think that we are probably not living
in a simulation.

John K Clark
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