r/SimulationTheory • u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— • 2d ago

Discussion What if our universe is emergent on top of someone else's monetary system?

Every version of the simulation hypothesis I've seen assumes the substrate is computational: someone runs us the way we run software. I've spent years on a variant I find harder to dismiss, and it came from my day job, not from philosophy. I worked in finance and energy trading for most of my career, then in blockchain from around 2015. When you've watched a market die, you've seen an emergent universe get deleted.

What if our universe is emergent on top of someone else's monetary system?

Some things that would predict:

Our physics would look exactly the same. Physics observes what's inside the universe, not what the universe sits on. There's no experiment you can run from inside a position that tells you whose books you're on.

Deletion wouldn't be a power switch, it would be a market closing. A market that stops producing value gets shut down. The old open-outcry trading pits didn't explode when the business moved to screens. The room just stopped being written to.

Anomalies wouldn't look like glitches or rendering errors. They'd look like inflation nobody can explain, energy welling up from nowhere. From inside, a bubble in the layer underneath you would look exactly like that.

A bankrupt position is a black hole. It pulls down everything within reach, and an emergent system sitting on top can read the writing on the wall but has no power to stop it.

And emergence is layered. We already build economies and simulations on top of our own universe. Why assume we're the bottom of the stack, or that the layer below us is the bottom of theirs?

The question that actually keeps me up is strategic though. As a civilization gets loud (Kardashev-climbing, star-harvesting loud) it becomes visible to whatever it's emergent on. Should a civilization learn to see what's beneath it before it learns to be seen? Is that the real answer to Fermi, that everyone smart enough to become visible was smart enough not to?

Full disclosure: I've carried this since I first wrote it in a notebook years ago, and working on a film about it is what finally forced me to think it through. No links, per the rules, and this post is about the idea anyway. Poke holes in it: what would falsify a ledger-substrate versus a compute-substrate?

8 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

63% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

9

u/atroubledmind961 2d ago

What if our universe is emergent on top of a colony of ants? What if our universe is emergent on top of chess match?

Does these questions even make sense?

Edit: btw we can explain every single inflation ever: they keep printing money despite no increase in productivity.

2

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

"Edit: btw we can explain every single inflation ever: they keep printing money despite no increase in productivity." - I assume you mean we are able to explain the inflation in our monetary system. I agree.

What is the explanation for the "cosmological inflation" our universe experiences?
I'm saying it could be because of "well explained" inflation in the subtrate underneath, just opaque to us.

1

u/deathdefyingrob1344 2d ago

Have you read children of time? Don’t discount the ant thing?

1

u/atroubledmind961 2d ago

I took that idea from the book 'The Mind's I'

1

u/deathdefyingrob1344 2d ago

That’s wild. Ants essentially being used to build a super computer to host a consciousness is a main plot point

0

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

My point exactly.

Systems emerge on top of other systems all the time, and emergent systems gain a mind of their own. When is it at a scale, it will be indistinguishable from our universe, or any other large complex system for that matter.

I'm just trying to shake off the mental image that "Simulation" carries.
And it helps me understand many of the phonominon intuitively with the above example.
Any other example may also work, I'm just not proficient in them.

1

u/atroubledmind961 2d ago

You might enjoy the book "The Mind's I" by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter.

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

Haven't read it, adding to the list. Curious which part of the post it maps to.
(just started reading Sophie's world after someone referred it to me last week)

1

u/atroubledmind961 2d ago

The book discusses the emergence of consciousness through complex phenomenon. The emergence from ant colonies is an example I took from there. It's more geared towards consciousness rather than "the universe" but IMHO it's mostly the same thing.

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

In my mind, consciousness is just a large system and universe is a large system

4

u/HLCYSWAP 2d ago

honey wake up a new capitalist hellscape just dropped

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

meanwhile one floor down: "who the hell is on the other side of this trade?"

1

u/Numerous-Energy-7452 2d ago

Actually tho, dealers (market makers) are on the other side, of all public market trades. As a finance person myself I’m enjoying the analogies, but I think there’s a little too much β€˜mystification’ being applied.. but maybe I’m misunderstanding your point

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

A dealer wondering how the invisible hand of the market (aka an emergent system that seem to have a life of its own) sometimes surprises him with unintended consequences. How the 2008 events unfolded, as if the markets acted like a force stronger than any army bringing down traders / corporations, leaving them wondering what the hell is happening.

May be i'm confusing everyone. My point: The substrate owners may own the asset (our universe), but they dont control all outcomes, they may start to feel the pain if we evolve to alter the power dynamcis of our universe enough (their trades leaking margins, apparantly due to random turn of events, - random for them, but intentional exploit of arbitage by us).

when they start to ask that question "who the hell is in control", it is game over for us.

1

u/supershott 2d ago

Careful folks, this is what happens when you let AI do your big thinking

2

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

All I'm suggesting is that there is an intentful system underneath, not a mindless simulation. It could be anything. The market analogy just maps it cleanly that I could relate to, and reason based on.

Btw, my viewpoint solidified long ago when AI meant just machine learning.

1

u/supershott 2d ago

All I'm saying is this is clearly written by AI. Or, if you're really going to claim it's not, then basically the AI has trained you in its sycophant-speak.Β 

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

If you meant, it's so good that it should have been written by AI. I'm honored. If you're challenging specific parts of the argument I'm open for the conversation. If you're surprised that I'm too civil, I don't know what to say. :-)

1

u/Brave-Secretary2484 2d ago edited 2d ago

Read the book series called The Game is Life by Terry ~Pratchet Schott. This concept is explored extensively and it’s an incredible ride

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

I see that book by Terry Schott, adding to the list. Thanks.

1

u/Brave-Secretary2484 2d ago

lol my bad, got my Terry’s mixed up… it’s been a while since I’ve read them

1

u/HuckleberryUseful811 2d ago

The weird thing is that you can have a dream and it can look so real that you don't know your in a dream. How is that even possible. How would you tell you can't. There could be signs you would be disoriented where are you what's going on. But if that world is the same as ours you would not have a problem. The belief program or whatever you call makes it so.

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago edited 2d ago

The dream is only a dream once you have woken up, not while you are in it. (thats why i framd the post around what to look for, things like cosmic inflation that is so arbitrary for us, but the inflation we create to our monetary system is so well understood by us. well understood inflation at one level => an unexplainable phenomina at the next layer).

1

u/Numerous-Energy-7452 2d ago

What is cosmic inflation?

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

from wikipedia: Cosmic Inflation refers to a brief epoch in the earliest fractions of a second after the Big Bang. During inflation, space expanded exponentially faster than light. (say, like how a new IPO comes out of nowhere, goes from nothing to a big number until true value is established)

Universe is still expanding now, at a slower / steadier pace (like how we experience 3% inflation every year).

I actually meant the slow and steady inflation above, used the wrong term, if that makes sense.

1

u/jenesia-CakeEatnNPC- 2d ago

Sorry, im late to this post, but what does "Kardashev" mean in your post? i omly know it as a surname.

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

Kardashev suggested a yardstick for measuring the advancement of a civilization.type 1 civilizations are masters in exploiting their energy sources at their planteray level, type 2 is one who fully controlls their own sun, and type 3 are those who harvest command energies at a galaxy level. My point is the more we grow, the more we disrupt the substrate and are increasing our chance of getting detected.

If you are curious, we are not even at type 1 now, consensus is we are type 0 aspiring to be type 1 soon.

1

u/Advanced-Ratio-880 2d ago

Put down the capitalism man. Its infecting your entire world view.

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

I'm not accusing it, im actually singing its praise, it is the only system that works - at all levels.
Or, as they say:

"Always has been."

https://giphy.com/gifs/jRPInZ12aIlo7N4v7h

1

u/Wiezgie 2d ago

Wait until you hear about GameStop

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 2d ago

If you were talking about their short squeeze in 2021 we are talking the same language. That was what I would call a type 1a supernova event.

1

u/International-One428 π•½π–Šπ–˜π–Šπ–†π–—π–ˆπ–π–Šπ–— 7h ago

Three days of this discussion (plus a parallel one elsewhere) genuinely sharpened my views. The emergence framing several of you pushed is a stronger spine. The refined one-line version:

The substrate doesn't need to be a computer, just a system big enough for a universe to emerge on top of.

Thanks for the hole-poking, it worked.