Here's my own hopefully amusing version of this: Some years ago when they were popular my wife and I enjoyed playing the "Myst" type of computer adventure game, where you go around in a beautifully rendered world looking for clues to solve puzzles. What are the criteria for a good game? From our experience, the puzzles need to be organic to the game (a chess puzzle is intrusive in a game that has nothing to do with chess), and, as with good pedagogical practice, the puzzles need to be at just the right level of challenge. If the puzzle is too easy, it's not interesting, and if the puzzle is too hard, it's just too frustrating.
If we're in a good game/simulation, we should be encountering puzzles that are organic to our world, and which are at the right level of challenge. It struck me as suggestive that we humans were able to discover that the identity of neutrinos emitted by the Sun fluctuates sinusoidally on their way to Earth between electron-type neutrinos and muon-type neutrinos, with a wavelength of the oscillation determined by the extremely small mass difference between these two kinds of neutrinos. If the mass difference were much smaller, the oscillation wavelength would be too long for us to notice the effect, and if the mass difference were much larger we would have noticed the effect much more easily (too easily?). Perhaps that mass difference has been carefully chosen by the gamemaster to represent an interesting challenge for us humans. We might try to catalog how many such puzzles have been constructed with just the right level of challenge. If there are a lot of them, maybe we're in a game. Bruce On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Robert J. Cordingley <[email protected] > wrote: > This article showed up on my Google News today: > > http://www.foxnews.com/tech/**2012/12/17/what-if-reality-** > were-really-just-im-universe/<http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/12/17/what-if-reality-were-really-just-im-universe/> > > that I thought raised interesting tho' philosophical questions. Why would > anyone write a simulation that questioned it's own existence? Is it > possible for a simulation to run an experiment that interacted with > anything outside it's own simulated environment? > > Robert C
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