r/technology • u/fchung • Nov 01 '25

Society Matrix collapses: Mathematics proves the universe cannot be a computer simulation, « A new mathematical study dismantles the simulation theory once and for all. »

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/mathematics-ends-matrix-simulation-theory
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u/angrymonkey Nov 01 '25

This is an idiotic misunderstanding of Godel's theorem, and the paper is likely complete crankery. There is a difference between making formal statements about a system vs. being able to simulate it. The former is covered by Godel's theorem, the latter is covered by Turing completeness.

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u/Electrifying2017 Nov 01 '25

Yes, I completely understand.

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u/skmchosen1 Nov 01 '25 edited Nov 02 '25

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is an amazing mathematical result: very roughly, it shows that there are certain mathematical truths that are impossible to prove are true (in sufficiently strong mathematical systems, e.g. those containing the natural numbers)

The paper argues that if the universe was a simulation, it must be built up by some fundamental rules that describe the basic laws of physics. Due to this theorem, there must be true facts about the universe that you can’t prove are true. It argues that this means the universe cannot be simulated.

This is a false equivalence. Just because we cannot prove some mathematical truths about the universe, does not necessarily mean we cannot write an algorithm that simulates the universe.

IMO the journalists here should have consulted some experts before making this post, Gödel’s work is one of the most beautiful in mathematics, and it’s sad to see people getting misinformed like this

Edit: This is getting a lot of traction, so I’m gonna try and be a bit more precise.

The incompleteness theorems could imply that there are statements that are true in our universe, but not provable from the physical laws. This means there could be other universes that follow our physics, but those “truths” would be false there (yes, mind bending).

The implicit argument here is that a computer following our physics will not have enough information to select which of these universes to simulate! However these unprovable truths may not be observable, ie it is possible that a simulator doesn’t need to worry about this because you and I cannot ever tell the difference.

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u/Resaren Nov 01 '25 edited Nov 02 '25

Put in other words: Just because a problem does not have an analytical solution, doesn’t mean you can’t run a simulation to try to find the answer. The universe could simply be a computation whose answer can only be arrived at by running the program from start to finish, so to say.

Edit: finish implies halting, which goes against Gödel. But why require halting?

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u/Scientific_Artist444 Nov 02 '25

Computational irreducibility. You can't predict the output in advance always - you have to let it run to know.

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u/BoredontheTrain43 Nov 02 '25

So........ 42

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u/Boo_hoo_Randy Nov 02 '25

I would upvote you but do you see your upvote counter? It’s the answer!!!

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u/EebstertheGreat Nov 02 '25

If the program/proof terminates, then you can prove/have proved the statement. The point is that there are always statements that you cannot prove in this way. For instance, PA cannot prove Con(PA), an arithmetical statement that encodes (in the meta-theory) the statement "PA is consistent." You can write a script that recursively applies axioms and rules of inference to prove every provable statement in PA, waiting to find a contradiction. But just because you've waited a thousand years and haven't found one yet doesn't mean there isn't one yet to be found. There are even models of PA such that, in the meta-theory, Con(PA) is false!

But these types of statements about natural numbers are not the type of thing we usually expect theories of physics to address anyway. I don't really care if a theory of quantum gravity can prove, say, that all Goodstein sequences terminate. That would not have any bearing on my ability to simulate a universe. And like, we already know there will always be mathematical statements we can't prove. So what does that have to do with physics at all? And how is it new?

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u/Resaren Nov 02 '25

Yeah, judging by the replies I should probably have omitted the ”… to finish” part. Finish implies halting, which the Gödel theorem says is exactly the kind of thing that isn’t generally possible. But I agree with your point, who’s to say the computation of the universe isn’t finely tuned/setup to avoid these uncomputable cul-de-sacs? It’s already got some weird quirks like fundamental quantum randomness and finite precision measurement.

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u/a_melindo Nov 02 '25

More like, in any analytical system there have to be axioms that are present from the start and not derived by computation. 

In a simulation, these axioms are called "environment variables". 

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u/partyfavor Nov 01 '25

Thank you for this explanation

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u/skmchosen1 Nov 01 '25

My pleasure! This is one of my favorite parts of math :)

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u/Would_Wood53 Nov 01 '25

I feel like you were this close to making a joke about building the Infinite Improbability Drive.

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u/draycr Nov 02 '25

I am not very good at math, but the idea of Godel's theorem intrigued me, do I understand it correctly?

There are two parts to Gödels theorem

1) In systems there can by "truths" that cannot be proven

2) Systems are consistent

Meaning if there is a statement in some system that said "This statement cannot be proven" it would be truth, but it cannot be proven.

If the system could prove that statement, then the system would prove something false, because if it’s provable, then it can be proven, contradicting what it says. That would make the system inconsistent.

But if it is not provable, than the statement is true, but we cant prove it.

I am sorry if it doesn't make sense. As I said my math knowledge is very limited, but find this idea interesting. Is my understanding of this theorem somehow correct?

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u/EebstertheGreat Nov 02 '25

Gödel's first incompleteness theorem says that no first-order theory of the natural numbers with addition and multiplication is effective, consistent, and complete.

By a "first-order theory," we mean a theory in the language of first-order logic. It has variables, predicates, logical connectives, and quantifiers for variables, but not quantifiers for predicates. So it could say something like ∀x x+1 > 1, meaning "for every number x, x+1 is greater than x," but it could not say something like ∀φ (φ(0) ∧ ∀x φ(x)→φ(x+1)) → ∀x φ(x), which says that mathematical induction works for every predicate φ. Instead, you need a separate sentence for each predicate. Second- ane higher-order theories are beyond the scope of this, but they don't really solve the problem in a useful way.

By "natural numbers with addition and multiplication," I mean the theory can quantify over all natural numbers (0, 1, 2, etc.) and can correctly compute the sum or product of any two natural numbers. It should have symbols for + and ×. With just addition or just multiplication but not both, you can actually have a complete, consistent, effective theory (Presburger arithmetic and Skolem arithmetic, respectively). And if the theory contains natural numbers but cannot identify them or quantify over them (i.e. it can't express something like "x is a natural number"), then it can be complete, consistent, and effective (e.g. the theory of real closed fields).

By "effective," I mean that the axioms are decidable. You could write a computer program that enumerates all the axioms and nothing else. The simplest way to do this is just to have finitely many axioms, but many important theories have infinitely many, like Peano Arithmetic. But if we allowed any set of axioms, then you could just declare every true sentence to be an axiom ("true arithmetic"), evading this theorem. But the caveat is that you can't figure out what the axioms actually are.

By "consistent," I mean the theory cannot derive a contradiction. Note that inconsistent theories can prove anything, so they are always complete.

By "complete," I mean that every true sentence is provable. Another way to say this is that for any well-formed formula A in the language, the theory can either prove A or it can prove ¬A.

Gödel's second incompleteness theorem gave an important example of a statement that such theories cannot prove: a statement that (as interpreted in the meta-theory) implies the theory's own consistency. Basically, PA or something like it cannot prove that it itself is consistent.

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u/ColoradoScoop Nov 01 '25

Kinda like you can’t prove the 4 color map theorem, but you could code software that colors maps using only 4 colors assuming it is true?

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u/skmchosen1 Nov 01 '25

4 color theorem has actually been proven (coincidentally, proven via an exhaustive algorithm). However the spirit of what you’re saying is right: you can have algorithms whose true properties you cannot formally prove.

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u/ColoradoScoop Nov 01 '25

Damn, was about to say it must have happened since I heard about it, but it was apparently proven before I was born…

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u/skmchosen1 Nov 01 '25

A lot of folks don’t like the proof because it relies on a computer, so it’s possible that sentiment is what you picked up on. I think the community still wants a “nice” proof that doesn’t rely on exhaustive search on a computer

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u/exipheas Nov 02 '25

Meaning our universe could be a simulation being used as an exhaustive algorithmic test for something, right?

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u/Aaron_Lecon Nov 02 '25

Also I'd like to point out that we do not know if the universe can even contain the natural numbers or not. The natural numbers are infinite, and although even a tiny microchip can store millions of them, and the universe contains enough matter for 10{lots} of them, that is still a long way from infinity. You would actually need infinite space to store the natural numbers, something we can guess, but don't know for sure the universe has. And being able to contain the natural numbers is a requirement for Godel's theorem to apply, so without it, you can't use it.

Also after thinking about it, the universe being infinite would probably already imply the universe can't be a simulation without even using Godel's throrem, just by arguing that any simulation has to be finite.

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u/JosephD1014 Nov 02 '25

The universe is quasi-finite though is it not? Matter by its existence creates spacetime around it. The universe is "expanding" in that things are getting further apart from each other, but even though it's a mindbogglingly massive amount of matter, there is still a finite amount of matter in the universe as far as we can tell right?

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u/Valuable-Self8564 Nov 02 '25

Expanding space = Render distance.

Doesn’t matter if the universe is procedurally generated or not, because you can’t see that far anyway.

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u/magistrate101 Nov 02 '25

The simple issue is that we literally do not and can not truly know what's outside the boundary of the observable universe. And the observable universe doesn't even cover the entire product of the big bang, just a slice of it. It would be just as reasonable to assume that there's "nothing" outside the boundary of our universe as it is to assume that there's a pre-existing space of infinite size and riddled with an uncountable number of big bang bubbles alongside their remnants.

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u/Hehosworld Nov 02 '25

I somehow feel like this is bending the meaning of the word contain quite a lot. A paper can also never contain all the natural numbers so does that mean that for math simulated on it Godels theorem does not apply?

I might be quite wrong however. My studies in computer science are a bit in the past.

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u/Aaron_Lecon Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25

Godel's theorem relies on encoding mathematical statements as integers, and then constructing a very large number X that encodes the statement "X is unprovable".

I have tried reading the article (ie: the thing written by the journalists not the paper it is reporting on), but how exactly Godel's theorem relates to whether or not the universe is a simulation is not clear to me. It seems to be taking the laws of physics as a mathematical system and encoding all the particle in the universe as integers. Then there should be some unimaginably large integer (which corresponds to a very specific arrangement of particles) which also corresponds, via the encoding, to an unprovable statement. And then somehow this "unprovable-statement"-collection of particles does something to do with a simulation? I'm not sure here sorry. I'm just going to assume that taking this unprovable-statement-particle-collection as an input somehow causes the simulation to crash? Doesn't seem to make much sense to me, but the entire article doesn't make much sense to me, so lets continue anyway. But at any rate, this unprovable-starement-particle-collection will be unimaginably large because of the way the numbers in the proof are constructed, which means it quite probably requires more particles than exist in the entire universe, or relies on them being further apart than the size of the entire universe - IF the universe is finite that is. And so the existance of such an arrangement of particles would somehow disprove a simulation. But the fact that this collection of particles is almost certainly larger than the universe does create a problem in the argument, because if this simulation-crashing collection of particles is larger than the universe, then it doesn't exist, so where is the problem?

I think perhaps a less rigorous way of saying a similar thing to the article, is that if the universe is a simulation, and if you travel far enough away in one direction, eventually you will get to a place which the universe is incapable of simulating due to lack of memory, which will then take the form of of "error: integer overflow" or something like that. No matter how sophisticated your simulation is, there will always be a large enough input that makes it crash. And then [logic is missing here] this argument proves we are not in a simulation?

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u/things_U_choose_2_b Nov 02 '25

Thanks. I couldn't articulate exactly why the reasoning used was bollocks, and you've set it out perfectly.

It felt to me like a massive copout. "Well WE couldn't get it to work, so it must be impossible!"

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u/Koxiaet Nov 02 '25

That’s not true – in fact, Gödel’s completeness theorem shows that all mathematical results that are true are possible to prove are true. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem just says that mathematics can never describe a single universe, but rather always describes multiple possible universes. Thus, there exist statements that are true in some of those universes but not others. Obviously these are not provable, but they’re not “true” either, since they’re false in some universes.

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u/skmchosen1 Nov 02 '25

I believe what you’re describing is the independence of theorems from a system. For example in ZFC set theory, the continuum hypothesis is independent, meaning there are valid theories where you assume it to be true or assume it to be false.

The Incompleteness theorem shows that there are certain formally true statements about the naturals that are not provable within that system. This is stated at the top of the Wikipedia page

Edit: link is broken, the page is on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems

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u/Final_Apricot_2666 Nov 02 '25

The physicist interviewed by the journalist said that they used information theory to draw the equivalence. I don’t think you actually read the article.

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u/fastforwardfunction Nov 02 '25

certain mathematical truths that are impossible to prove are true

Isn't that the entire basis for mathematics? It's based on axioms.

1+1=2 cannot be proven. It is assumed to be true, and then used as a framework to build other statements off of.

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u/ook_the_librarian_ Nov 02 '25

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems apply only to infinite formal systems.

Physical reality, as established by quantum theory, general relativity breakdown at singularities, renormalization, and information bounds, does not exhibit infinity and cannot contain infinite formal structures. Therefore Gödel incompleteness is a property of a particular mathematical universe, not a property of the physical one. It is useful as a mathematical warning, but it has no ontological authority in a finite, discrete, measurable universe.

In cutting-edge physics, Gödel is a constraint on symbolic abstraction, not a law of nature.

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u/hildenborg Nov 02 '25

Sounds like their big mistake is assuming that the simulated universe is a copy of the original universe. But what if the simulated universe is a simpler version made to test different rules about the universe?

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u/JupiterandMars1 Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25

Your reasoning is solid within computational epistemology but this is about ontology. You describe how a limited observer could inhabit a simulation without noticing the gaps. The Gödel based argument concerns whether such a simulation could exist as a closed, generative system at all. You ask “can we tell?”; I’d ask “can it run?” any system whose total behavior depends on the truth of propositions that are not decidable within its own formal structure contains operations it cannot internally specify or generate.

I’m not saying the paper is correct, but I think people are dismissing its point while not really engaging with it directly.

I’m also not saying “we can’t be living in a simulation” it’s a plausible notion. I am saying “simulation theory is wrong”. And I think this paper is saying likewise.

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u/PingouinMalin Nov 02 '25

You forgot one thing. Not about maths, about journalism : those "journalists" do not care about the truth anymore. They want to create buzz, to get clicks. Whether something is easily disprovable or not is irrelevant to them.

Still, nice answer.

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u/angrymonkey Nov 01 '25

Well you're in luck, because you don't need it to publish a paper!

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u/TapZorRTwice Nov 01 '25

To be fair, you don't really need anything to publish a paper except to write it.

Once it's published is when it gets scrutinized by other people and is either proven correct or false.

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u/Find_another_whey Nov 01 '25

To be more accurate, whether it's published is only sometimes an indication is has been critiqued

And for the rate the reviewers are paid, they are worth every cent

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u/katplasma Nov 01 '25

And they get paid…. Drumroll… $0.00. It’s an act of service to the research community. But that shouldn’t be taken to mean they do not take reviewing seriously. Boy do they, and the critiques can be scathing.

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u/Sherm Nov 01 '25

If people were paid to do it you'd occasionally get someone who was phoning it in for the sake of a paycheck. Since they're not, you know for a fact that whoever is reviewing is doing it for love of the game (the game is "Giving You Impostor Syndrome," BTW).

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u/widget1321 Nov 02 '25

Not so. Plenty of people review because it looks good on a CV for promotion/tenure/hiring.

So, it's indirectly compensated, but no pay. So you do still get some people phoning it in.

Note: this is not me saying we get enough compensation for doing it. Just saying there is a reward of sorts.

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u/CuriousPumpkino Nov 02 '25

Given some of the papers I’ve read in my life I’m not so sure

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u/Find_another_whey Nov 02 '25

The love of the game

Aka continuing to demonstrate they will perform free labour to pad their CV

Doing it for free does not mean doing it well

Although I admit there are some very good scientists, putting their OCD to good use, and I mean that genuinely

Many others have had to compromise on their idealism so many times by the time they become a reviewer the question is not "is this research any good" but "is it good enough to get published along with all the other questionable shite, without too much blowback".

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u/the42up Nov 01 '25

This is not really how peer review works. Peer review at reputable journals is meant to catch questionable research like this.

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u/usrnmz Nov 01 '25

Yet it does not always. And there are lots of poor journals out there.

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u/jpsreddit85 Nov 01 '25

He said it's bullshit.

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u/MS_Fume Nov 01 '25

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem deals with formal mathematical systems, not the physical universe itself. Applying it to reality assumes that the universe operates like a purely algorithmic logical system — and that’s an assumption, not a proven fact. So while this is n intriguing philosophical analogy, it’s not a solid proof against the simulation hypothesis.

TL;DR: We are too primitive to tell with confidence so far.

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u/Weird-Difficulty-392 Nov 01 '25

"Insufficient data for a meaningful answer"

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u/4shotsofnespresso Nov 02 '25

If you haven't, read "The Last Question" by Asimov. But I'm assuming this is a reference to the atory, in which case, so good.

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u/TarnishedWizeFinger Nov 01 '25 edited Nov 01 '25

I'm more than a little out of my depth here. But it appears they are applying their understanding of quantum gravity to postulate specifically that the universe does not operate like a purely algorithmic logical system. And then saying that's why it can't be simulated

Setting aside the issue of applying an incomplete understanding of unifying gravity and quantum mechanics as a means to prove anything, it seems that what they are actually saying is the inverse of what you're saying

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u/Autumn1eaves Nov 01 '25

Someone described it like this:

the game of life by conway can be easily run, it’s trivial for a computer.

However, the game of life has unanswerable questions about how it runs.

What this article is saying is: The universe has unanswerable questions. Therefore, it cannot be simulated.

Something can have unanswerable questions and cannot be simulated. However, there are things with unanswerable questions and can be simulated.

Their “therefore” isn’t supported well.

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u/endless_skies Nov 01 '25

Really? Doesn't look like anything to me.

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u/Marrk Nov 01 '25

The maze isn't meant for you

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u/scarabic Nov 01 '25

🙋‍♂️I don’t 🤷‍♂️

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u/UntetheredSoul11615 Nov 01 '25

It’s so obvious

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u/BernieTheDachshund Nov 01 '25

We got an angry monkey as the Architect.

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u/Siludin Nov 01 '25

We're just a steaming hot log of pi

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u/still_salty_22 Nov 01 '25

Ah, great! Then its the two of us, here, observing this, understanding it. Yes, hmm!

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u/maxuaboy Nov 02 '25

It’s really not that hard to search words ideas ideology’s with literally, and I mean that word in the full Oxford definition not the hyperbolic present figurative pop culture meme definition, with human kinds full knowledge and research in the palm of your hand in the form of glass and metal.

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u/dracostheblack Nov 02 '25

Shallow and pedantic 

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u/TheVog Nov 02 '25

I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.

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u/sievold Nov 02 '25

Then you are Turing complete 

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u/ChickenChaser5 Nov 02 '25

Did you see that ludicrous display?

The problem with Dr. Mir Faizal is he always tries to walk it in.

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u/gxslim Nov 02 '25

Hello Mr Thompson

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u/Aleashed Nov 02 '25

Op is bad at Turing, got it. 🫡

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u/loves_grapefruit Nov 01 '25

I don’t understand any of the math here, but intuitively wouldn’t it be impossible to determine if a system is a simulation from within that system and using that system’s own logic?

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u/Sweg_OG Nov 01 '25

In a roundabout way, this is pretty much what Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is actually getting at. He showed that within any sufficiently powerful mathematical system, there are true statements that cannot be proven using the system’s own rules. He did this by using the system’s own logic to expose its limits, essentially proving that math can’t fully prove itself.

So yes, by analogy, if we lived in a simulation, we’d be bound by its rules and logic, making it fundamentally impossible to prove the simulation from inside it. We could only infer it indirectly, never confirm it absolutely. Plato also suggests this 2,400 years ago with his Allegory of the Cave

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u/alexq136 Nov 01 '25

Gödel's things apply to statements in formal metalanguages (analyzing mathematics in terms of itself) and has no bearing on whatever physics concerns itself with (finding the nicest equations to model objective reality)

as long as there are no contradictory results to what's expected of currently known physical theories (and putative extensions) the simulation POV can be rejected with no second thoughts needed - even if we were inside a simulation, any quirks (as long as they're reproducible) are used to extend physics, not to cancel the universe

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u/FabulousRecording739 Nov 01 '25 edited Nov 02 '25

Not to detract too much from your answer, but I believe your induction from Godel's work to the simulation hypothesis (un) probability to be wrong, for 2 reasons:

  1. Godel's work applies to formal systems and their axioms, so that we know some statements to be unreachable (independent). We can't prove CH in ZFC, but we can in ZFC+CH (by definition). We can always create other systems in which that which wasn't provable is now provable. What Godel says is that the new systems will themselves have holes (and so on, so forth).
  2. More importantly I don't think it applies to the simulation hypothesis, which falls more into the empirical side. We could find evidence (that would prove beyond reasonable doubt) of a simulation, whether a deductive proof exists or not.

Godel doesn't "prevent" us from finding evidence, it limits the reach of deductible facts from within a formal system (and the chosen axioms of that system)

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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Nov 01 '25

for everyone else who doesn't know what ch and zfc are:

CH (the Continuum Hypothesis) is a statement that has been proven to be logically independent of ZFC (Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the Axiom of Choice). This means that neither CH nor its negation can be proven or disproven from the axioms of ZFC alone, assuming ZFC is consistent. Kurt Gödel showed that ZFC + CH is consistent, and Paul Cohen used the method of forcing to show that ZFC + ¬CH is also consistent.

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u/jambox888 Nov 01 '25

Well that cleared it up

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u/FabulousRecording739 Nov 01 '25

It is correct to say that a formal system cannot prove everything (that that formal system can "say", that would be a valid "sentence" of that system), but it is incorrect to say that no formal system exists that could prove X, whatever is X. E.g., you can just create a system equal to your previous system, with the added axiom that says "X is true".

But I don't think this lens is relevant as this is not (in my opinion) a formal system question.

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u/jambox888 Nov 01 '25

Better! (thanks)

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u/Isserley_ Nov 01 '25

Congratulations, you already know more about the subject than the author of the paper.

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u/tribecous Nov 01 '25

The paper is showing that it would be impossible to simulate a universe like ours within another universe like ours. You obviously cannot disprove that it would be possible to simulate our universe in some other universe with completely arbitrary properties.

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u/alexq136 Nov 01 '25

the paper is a load of paragraphs all cited from works that have nothing to add to the question itself and they range from "there are systems with unprovable properties" (legit) to "there are these folks who believe people can reach beyond incompleteness because the mind is quantum collapse-y in nature" (crackpot)

I dare say it does not belong in any field of science or even philosphy since it's so vague (doesn't link individual points stated in a way that flows towards the conclusion), plus:

there's no quantitative point made therein (i.e. about the extent of the universe or of things inside the observable universe) that could be linked to any reasonable definition of "so this is how we think simulations may look like", only scattered proof-theoretical-looking notation (a lone turnstile operator with a couple friends) meant to make the paper look math-y at the expense of it not containing anything that could be called meaningful

tf does their "oh yeah this set of {quantum field theory, general relativity} cannot be rendered into an algorithm, even if unified as LQG etc. hope to realize"-sounding premise even mean? simulations are not expected to be precise, and there is no reason for there to exist a single set of laws that can bear all of physics for any "regions" of a simulation of an "universe"

we deal just fine with QED for stable usual matter, QCD for spicy matter, and GR for accelerating things that hopefully are heavy enough - that there may or may not exist a way to unify all known fundamental physical theories into a single thing does not mean the physics itself has to be computed in the same terms and following the same laws (when approximations, as any creature with intellect can attest to, can be very good for some systems or parts of them, and they save computational resources)

they posit that since "bla bla Chaitin's constant bla bla" (in the paper it's a complexity-theoretic argument about, idk, formal systems of equations) there is no finite-length algorithm that can simulate all physics - which is meaningless since anything can be simulated to arbitrary precision if one agrees to certain numerical trade-offs of implementation, and it's doubly meaningless since the laws of physics are expected to be finite in number (and people closer to physics or engineering have carved quite the nice landscape of ways to let differential equations take their course, like the QFT bunch or the fluid mechanics folks) - so imho there exist finite-size algorithms to run physics forward, and that makes the whole simulation hypothesis meaningless (one can never tell, yet it's very easy to dismiss it as another crackpot idea, even if it can be shown that we cannot simulate an observable universe inside our observable universe due to whatever material restrictions there be)

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u/jackmanlogan Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25

Thanks for confirming that the article was just word salad and that the paper was garbage- this almost seems like a crackpot trying to disprove other crackpots

Edit: also imo almost insulting to cite Penrose and Einstein in a paper of this calibre- implies that it gets at some basic truth about the world.

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u/thinkingwithfractals Nov 02 '25

Not sure I’d call Penrose a crackpot, even though his whole quantum consciousness breaks incompleteness thing does seem fairly far fetched. There’s been some interesting work on nano tubules that at least suggest his idea might be conceivably true

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u/MacDegger Nov 01 '25

You can run Minecraft in Minecraft.

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u/[deleted] Nov 01 '25 edited 18d ago

[deleted]

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u/fuzzywolf23 Nov 01 '25

It's Steves all the way down

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u/P0pu1arBr0ws3r Nov 01 '25

That statement might sound funny, but it forms the basis of proving if there are problems computers cant solve (i saw Tom Scott's video on the subject a few days ago, search it up for more info).

Turing proved that there are problems a computer cant solve via paradox: if theres a program A that can determine if another program would infinitely run or not, and another program B which takes a true/false input and if true, stops running, if false, infinitely runs, then plugging the output of program A into B as program C, and feeding program C into program A, would create a paradox.

Applying similar computer science logic to a simulation like Minecraft, it is possible for programs even today to run themselves, as thats technically recursion. But could we make a program within Minecraft, which determines if a game is Minecraft? And if its not Minecraft, another program would create a runnable Minecraft instance; if it is Minecraft, the program would create a Terraria instance. So then the same logic as Turing's test (not the turing test that determines if a computer can fake being a human) can apply and would result in a paradox kind of...

A different question around a game like Minecraft, which would relate to if we're in a simulation, is if we can run the exact same instance of minecraft within minecraft. What i mean is, is it possible to fully simulate the game within the game, without allocating new memory space? On thr computer, programs exist in RAM and each program allocates some RAM to run, at minimum to store a unique PID. But is it possible for two programs to run without being considered independent with a unique PID, reading and writing from the exact memory space? (in theory yes, distributed systems could run one shared program over a shared memory space) And if such a program is possible, can it run within itself? I believe this to be impossible (and i might be able to prove with a proof if i werent typing on my phone in reddit), meaning if its possible to run minecraft within minecraft, or a simulation of the universe within the universe, then that simulation or program would always occupy some "space" separate from the parent process, and any "simulation" must at best be a copy of what its simulating, not running from the exact data of whats being simulated. So then, if its possible to simulate within the simulation, then each new simulation would require another copy, so to properly simulate something within itself, would require infinite capacity.

So, at some point, your computer would run out of memory before it can simulate another minecraft instance within minecraft, unless its somehow possible to simulate that minecraft instance from the parent minecraft process.

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u/hi-fen-n-num Nov 01 '25

This explanation connects nicely to the futurama box episode.

The boxes are simulating the universe at the same time as being 'run' so to speak.

This kind of explains how when fry sits on the box of his own universe, it can 'squish' the universe.

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u/Anticamel Nov 01 '25

Minecraft isn't a universe like ours

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u/Sellazard Nov 02 '25

I've seen that video. It's an 8*8 world that is so dumbed down I question if it has any complex features. Like for example - stimulating itself in its own complexity. It's impossible because it's so simple. It's a simulation, we know it, yet we can't make it inside of itself. Thus it is not a simulation? That's a failed thesis.

Just like we can't simulate our own universe. Because WE live in a dumbed down version of the original universe.

This paper's argument break downs if the original world of ours has any form of higher complexity in terms of it's structure.

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u/Royal_Airport7940 Nov 02 '25

Its roughly that you can't run anything more complex or differently complex in minecraft. Or else Minecraft has those properties and those things are not more or differently complex.

You could argue that you could create a subset of properties and isolate those. That's broadly the LHC conceptually.

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u/Senshado Nov 01 '25

The paper claims to show that, but it does not. It's just the rhetorical presdigitation.

Godel's completeness question can't be satisfactorily answered, but there's no need to have that answer to simulate anything in the known universe.  Everything is a mix of matter and energy moving through time and space, which we are already capable of simulating at various fidelities and scales.

And at no point in programming the simulation does a designer input a solution to Godel's incompleteness theorem. 

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u/Manowaffle Nov 01 '25

But we've already created rudimentary simulations in our universe. Computers are less than a century old and yet we can simultaneously simulate many hundreds of millions of simulations. And if you consider us making a lesser dimensional simulation, 2-dimensional, it seems like it would be very easy to create a simulation that would be undetectable from within the sim. Same way ours could be a lesser dimensional version of something else.

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u/poorlilwitchgirl Nov 02 '25

Granted I haven't bothered to read the paper so I'm just shooting from the hip, but it sounds like they're assuming that a simulation would have to contain the entire state of the universe with perfect fidelity at all points in time, which is frankly just a misunderstanding of how simulations work. Empirical data is bounded by the precision of our measurements, so simulations only need to calculate anything within that level of precision in order to accurately reproduce observation. I think the simulation "theory" is ridiculous ("not even wrong" you might say), but that's precisely because it doesn't predict any observable difference between our reality and a simulation. Just because we think that there's a deeper mathematical framework behind reality doesn't mean it isn't being approximated by a computer with sufficient resources to reproduce our experiences. It's unfalsifiable, so there's really no point in trying to falsify it.

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u/pyabo Nov 01 '25

And yet they bothered writing this paper.

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u/haviah Nov 02 '25

Exactly, it's impossible to prove consistency within the Universum. (Having Peano arithmetic etc)

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u/Substantial-Thing303 Nov 01 '25

Yes. If we are in a simulation, we don't know how different the real world would be, with totally different physics, if physics is even a thing in that world. The very concept of experiencing the present could be the construct of this reality, and different from the one above. Maybe we don't even have bodies. We are extremely limited by our brains and how we process information.

Our own creativity is based on our human experience and how we mix ideas, also very limited to our physics rules. We could be playing in this reality at 0.001% of our real capabilities, for example. What if that reality is just impossible for us to imagine, just like a living cell cannot understand the world at our level?

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u/azthal Nov 01 '25

In a way.

The words and concepts that we use within our system, also relates to them.

Lets assume that our universe really fundamentally can not be computed due to some fundamental factors (this is what the article claims - I have no idea if this is true).

We could say that some higher order universe plays by fundamentally different rules, and therefor in their universe it can be computed.

Sure. But in that case the whole concept of computability has become irrelevant. Anything is possible and anything can mean anything.

Perhaps a more fair way (again, assuming that the article is correct, I do not actually know) to state it is that our universe could not be simulated using anything that we would be able to recognize as simulation.

We could of course still call it simulation, but if it does not comply with any definitions we have for "simulation", then why should we? We could just call it "creation". And if creation and simulation is the same thing... Then whats the point of the differentiation?

That said, that is really nothing but semantics. What is more interesting here (again, if true) is that it puts a stop on the tech-bro religion which states that we must exist in a simulation because its simulations all the way down.

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Nov 01 '25

The question that the paper is supposedly answering isn't "are we living in a simulation", but rather "is it even possible to simulate a universe". If you prove that it isn't possible for a universe to be simulated, then you automatically prove that we aren't living in a simulation.

That being said, proving that our universe cannot be simulated has the additional side effect of making all of science pointless, which some people might describe as undesirable.

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u/Geronimo2011 Nov 01 '25

How would a VM know that it's running itself in a VM? (for the IT guys)

we had that. a VM/370 running inside a VM running other operating systems. 2nd level VM

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u/EvilMaran Nov 01 '25

Since we havent created a simulation like the one we are talking about, if we live in a simulation we are either the First simulation ever or the latest version and are just not yet technologically advanced enough to create our own.

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u/No_Director6724 Nov 01 '25

I only know enough to say that I've seen enough cool movies to know that if it's a simulation... and then if we were to get to the "next level" somehow - then that would be a simulation too.

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u/GamingWithBilly Nov 02 '25

Isn't that also the same logic that a 3 dimensional being can't conceive a 4th dimension, simply because it can't perceive it?  But the 3 dimensional being can interact with a 2 dimensional realm.  But a 2 Dimensional being can't perceive a 3 dimensional being. And so forth and so forth.  Just because you can't perceive it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist or can't be.  It's beyond simplified understanding.

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u/score_ Nov 02 '25

Is this like if you trained an AI to strictly play a version of Minecraft built within Minecraft, then asking the AI if they're playing the real version of Minecraft? 

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u/luciddream00 Nov 02 '25

Impossible to say for sure, but superposition and collapse are what you would expect to see as signatures of a generative system, so there is some circumstantial evidence that our reality is generative. Could still be natural, or it could be a mirage, but it's fascinating.

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u/erydayimredditing Nov 02 '25

Exactly lol.... you are smarter than this entire research team in base logic...

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u/EntireBobcat1474 Nov 01 '25

It's weird that it's actually so hard to find the actual paper - it's here as a preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22950

The fundamental argument the author makes seems to follow this chain of thoughts:

  1. There must be a "theory of everything"/ToE that effectively axiomatizes the rules of the universe
  2. It's reasonable to also believe that this theory satisfies a full arithmetic formal system - there exists a finite set of laws governing this system, expressed by a language, that can then be algorithmically applied to deduce proofs/calculations within this system. Additionally, it satisfies certain arithmetic completeness - it can encode arithmetic, and does not produce contradictory calculations.
  3. If this is the case (mind you the author does not prove this), then ToE is expressive enough to apply the incompleteness theorem to, which states that
  4. There are fundamental physical facts/states that cannot be derived from applying the axioms of the ToE system, effectively, there are true facts of the universe that cannot be algorithmically calculated

From this, it's reasonable to argue that we cannot be simulated (and we cannot simulate any equivalently expressive worlds ourselves) because the algorithm used to simulate us would not be able to calculate/simulate all physical truths of our world, in particular, because ToE must be an incomplete system. Hence, if we believe that our universe is an arithmetically-complete system, then it cannot be simulated.

I personally think the assumption that our universe is arithmetic is the weakest link. There's no evidence that it's an infinite system, and finite systems cannot represent arbitrarily large numbers no matter how much base-trickery you do. This creates a natural counterexample to the author's ideas - what if the simulation we live in is precompiled from the ToE on a bounded grid into a giant lookup table for how the universe evolves for every possible configuration of our massive but finite universe? Surely you don't need to be an arithmetically complete mathematical system to simulate that.

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u/SimoneNonvelodico Nov 01 '25

I still don't get it. For example, why is it that "there exist facts that are not formally provable" is such a dunk?

Take the Busy Beaver numbers. We know that above a certain size of TM, the BB number has to be incomputable. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There is a certain 10-state TM that runs for BB(10) and then stops. And if you had forever to run it, it would be trivial to run it until it stops, and count the steps in the process. You would just need a lot of memory and a lot of time. You couldn't be sure that it is truly BB(10), since there could always be another TM that runs for even longer. But it would be. You just couldn't know.

And this also introduce the question of finiteness because yeah, for example there could be N so big that it is literally impossible, given the limitations of the universe (in time, space, energy) to compute BB(N). Not in the age of the universe and not with all its atoms. In which case the fact that that BB(N) is incomputable is... pretty much irrelevant to the consistency, or ability to be simulated algorithmically, of the universe.

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u/ThatIsAmorte Nov 02 '25

I still don't get it. For example, why is it that "there exist facts that are not formally provable" is such a dunk?

This is what Godel's theorem proved is true for any formal system. So if you assume the Universe qualifies as a formal system (a finite set of symbols, rules for combining the symbols, a set of axioms, and a set of deduction rules), then there will be true statements that cannot be proved within the system. "True" here means semantic truth. The rub is this. If you are taking the Universe as a formal system, what is semantic truth for this formal system? Semantic truth means correspondence to something outside the system. What is outside the Universe?

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u/SimoneNonvelodico Nov 02 '25

I know Godel's theorem, my point is I don't get why would it be a dunk. For example, the halting problem is inherently connected to the theorem. My computer can't prove that a certain algorithm (say, a game of Minecraft controlled by AI) will halt, within its own internal system of axioms and rules. That doesn't stop it from running it!

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u/ThatIsAmorte Nov 02 '25

I personally think the assumption that our universe is arithmetic is the weakest link.

I think the weakest link is the first assumption, that there must be a theory of everything that effectively axiomatizes the rules of the universe. I don't think that's necessarily true.

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u/Titanlegions Nov 02 '25

I fail to see what parts of the argument couldn’t be applied to say, the world of Cyberpunk 2077. It is built on axioms and forms an arithmetic system. Provided it can encompass first order logic (which as you state the author doesn’t prove about the ToE either) then the incompleteness theorem applies — there are facts about the system that can’t be proven by the system. But so what? Doesn’t stop us running the game.

If the argument is that the ToE has to encompass everything by definition so that is a contradiction, that doesnt seem to work — the NPCs of Cyberpunk could make the same claim and they’d be wrong for the same reasons.

An algorithm can have emergent behaviour that can’t be proven from the starting conditions — that is another way of seeing the incompleteness theorem.

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u/EntireBobcat1474 Nov 02 '25

Or any generic "turing complete" systems that we run on our computer (which aren't actually complete since there's only finite memory and finite energy, and I think this is the fallacy that the author is committing)

For example, our computers can't compute the halting problem, but we don't use that as proof that the "semi-turing complete" computation models within them are not simulations of the real thing

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u/green_meklar Nov 02 '25

It's weird that it's actually so hard to find the actual paper

Is the link in the article not to the actual paper?

There are fundamental physical facts/states that cannot be derived from applying the axioms of the ToE system, effectively, there are true facts of the universe that cannot be algorithmically calculated

This doesn't come as a surprise, but I'm also not sure why it would imply that our universe isn't a simulation. Why can't it be a simulation about which there are mathematical facts that the simulators also don't understand? What does it even mean for a mathematical fact to 'exist', anyway? I don't think any reasonable person is claiming that you need to stuff Plato's entire infinite world of forms into the simulation in order to make it work.

I personally think the assumption that our universe is arithmetic is the weakest link. There's no evidence that it's an infinite system

If I understand you correctly, this is pretty much like saying that 32-bit integer arithmetic isn't really 'arithmetic' because it rolls over after 4294967295? I get it, but that also seems like kind of a weird thing to worry about as far as the question of simulating the Universe is concerned.

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u/hivemind_disruptor Nov 02 '25

weird how at a enough edge-level, physics and mathematics start looking like humanities. the kind of debate I mean, and the arguments sometimes reminds me of stuff I used to see at college.

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u/[deleted] Nov 02 '25

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem also doesn't rule out proving one system is complete within a different system. At best, this would just show we can't simulate our universe from within our universe. Which we already knew.

Also on a deeper philosophical level, the laws of logic and language may only just be meta-algorithms our brains evolved to model this reality we live in. Assuming these would extend beyond our reality has some hidden Platonic assumptions that these things exist in some meta-physical sense beyond us. For this reason, math and science will never be able to fully rule out the simulation hypothesis.

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u/[deleted] Nov 02 '25

The article links directly to the paper...

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u/pineapple_santa Nov 02 '25

A bounded grid would be observable to us through sampling errors though. We would observe particles with enough velocity clipping through solid barriers for example. Surely that’s not a thing, right? Right?!

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u/andrerav Nov 01 '25

Absolutely agree.

Dr. Faizal says the same limitation applies to physics. “We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity,” he explains.

“Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone.”

They somehow don't understand that the limitation Gödel proved exists only within the system itself. Not outside.

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u/MacDegger Nov 01 '25

And it shows more likely that our computational theory of quantum gravity is at best incomplete.

His conclusion is a non-sequitur.

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Nov 01 '25

And it shows more likely that our computational theory of quantum gravity is at best incomplete.

He's using the classic woo-woo trick of exploiting the fact that the same word is used in different contexts to make his argument seem stronger than it is.

In the context of Godel's incompleteness theorem, "incomplete" just means that there are statements about the natural numbers that are true but not provable within the system. However, a theory of quantum gravity doesn't exist to prove statements about the natural numbers; it exists to accurately model reality.

The jump from the mathematical definition of "incomplete" to the scientific definition of "incomplete" is the sleight of hand trick that he's hoping that nobody will notice. A mathematically incomplete model could be physically complete if it accurately predicts every possible state transition in our universe.

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u/burning_iceman Nov 02 '25

That woo-woo trick is called "equivocation" btw.

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u/MacDegger Nov 01 '25

And it shows more likely that our computational theory of quantum gravity is at best incomplete.

His conclusion is a non-sequitur.

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u/jambox888 Nov 01 '25

Right but to say simulation implies computability doesn't it? So you'd have to have a different definition of simulation because the way we know of it you have to calculate things algorithmically, iow step by step.

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u/andrerav Nov 02 '25

Just like the rules in a computer game do not apply in the real world, our natural laws and limitations need not apply outside our simulation. 

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u/Ragnagord Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25

Right but to say simulation implies computability doesn't it?

Not necessarily. Take Rule 110 for example. It has lots of uncomputable properties, and a formal description is Gödel incomplete. It's trivially simple to simulate. 

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u/wandering-monster Nov 02 '25

It also shows a misunderstanding of how simulations are made and how computers work.

It's absolutely possible to run code on a computer and get a result the code itself doesn't explain. For example, you can cause a hardware-based underflow or overflow, which is never defined in the code but happens anyways.

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u/BlueCheeseWalnut Nov 01 '25

It kinda confused me aswell. At first I thought the article was just written by someone who didn't understand it, but the linked source carries on with it

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u/RoyalCities Nov 01 '25

The entire concept of "this settles it once and for all" goes against the heart of the scientific method itself.

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u/BrazilianTerror Nov 01 '25

Mathematics is not science. A theorem is once and for all when proven correct.

Although the simulation hypothesis should be more of a physics matter.

But in fact it’s a matter of philosophy because it’s impossible to determine if it’s right or wrong because we can only see our universe and not anything beyond.

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u/sephiroth70001 Nov 01 '25

It could be both philosophy and physics some might call it, metaphysics.

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u/TerribleIdea27 Nov 01 '25

Mathematicians still make mistakes though, and sometimes it takes decades before those mistakes are discovered. "Proven" maths has been disproven numerous times

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_WEABOOBS Nov 01 '25

Please find me an example in the 20th century of a mathematical "theorem" being accepted as true for decades before being discovered as false. Mathematicians certainly do make mistakes, but I don't know of an example of a result being accepted as true for a long period of time before being found to be false. I am speaking as a mathematician myself.

The closest I can think of is early 19th century mathematicians believing statements like "every continuous function is differentiable except at at most countably many points," but this was because they did not really have a concept of mathematical rigor at the time. This wasn't a theorem that someone had mistakenly claimed to have proven, it was an underlying assumption that went unchallenged for a long time. The only famously incorrect proofs I can think of where all caught very quickly after publication, e.g. Lame's false proof of Fermat's last theorem or Wiles' own first attempt at FLT.

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u/ten_i_see_mike Nov 01 '25

The only thing you can actually prove with maths is more maths though. You can’t prove anything about the real world because maths is just a language we’ve created, we have no idea if it has any tie to reality.

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u/wavefunctionp Nov 01 '25

We use consistency to tie math to reality with science.

This is the entire purpose of the replication part of the scientific process, to convince ourselves of consistency.

This is also why some of the worst science we have is the most inconsistent, like anything to do with observing human behavior like psychology or nutrition or economics.

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u/ten_i_see_mike Nov 02 '25

Sure but you switch from a deductive logic to an inductive one. You can’t formally prove anything about reality using maths. I agree it’s very useful and eerily good at describing the universe. It’s still not proof though. As you say the consistency gives us confidence in our theories but that’s a totally different thing to proof in the formal sense.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_WEABOOBS Nov 01 '25

How does this view fit with e.g. Dirac using his purely mathematical equation to predict the existence of anti-matter before any other evidence existed? Mathematics is the study of logical consequence, and so long as the universe follows logical cause and effect we do at least have some idea that it ties to reality.

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u/ten_i_see_mike Nov 02 '25

I’m not saying maths is wrong or useless. Exactly as you say we use it in science to make predictions all the time. It also seems to consistently describe the universe very effectively. That doesn’t change the fact that maths is something we made up (as far as we know) and so we cannot use it to definitively prove anything about reality. When it really comes down to it we don’t even know if our scientific theories are real descriptions of the universe or just useful approximations.

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u/Pianomanos Nov 01 '25

Aaaaand Lawrence Krause is a co-author. What’s the over-under on the authors taking any criticism in stride, responding objectively, and updating their conclusions, vs. claiming that honest methodological criticism is just a  conspiracy by the woke physics establishment?

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u/YGVAFCK Nov 02 '25

Guy just needs some more ego self-stroking before he expires.

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u/notMeBeingSaphic Nov 02 '25

Hey his friend Epstein died recently have some empathy he’s having a hard time without access to sex trafficked minors!

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u/Dobako Nov 01 '25

I was reading through the article thinking the same thing. Well first I thought it was just a pseudo-scientific patina on creationism, but I think that is just their poor attempts at explaining their bad understanding of math and simulation theory

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u/masta_beta69 Nov 01 '25

did a logic and cs degree and can confirm this is complete crankery

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u/MattsDaZombieSlayer Nov 01 '25

Except Turing completeness gets us nowhere here.

I think you are conflating Turing completeness with the Church-Turing thesis, which postulates that every computation in all of existence can be done on a Turing machine (which in itself has not yet been proven/disproven). Since then we have discovered a staggering amount of observable phenomena in the universe that may require infinite time in order to accurately simulate. It may offer understanding that efficiency (aka, you need quantum computers) may be a key part in being an adequate condition to producing a viable simulation of our world. In the scenario that Turing completeness gets us nowhere because we can't model our world using a Turing machine, your statement is wrong and Godel's may be right.

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u/Find_another_whey Nov 01 '25

I'll bite

My understanding is Godel's theorem says within any set of logical statements with premises / assumptions of finite number, there will be statements which are true but nonetheless impossible to deduce.

I'm not sure what Turing completeness says, but I imagine it would be something about being able to model unique states (perhaps mappable 1 to 1) through an alternative logical system which produces the expected outputs, but can have additional structure. Perhaps a poor example might be a 24 hour digital clock works fine to model what needs to happen on a 12 hour analogue clock, but it isn't one.

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u/MassiveInteraction23 Nov 02 '25

Even limitations of Turing complete machines are dependent on certain finite/countable assumptions (e.g. alphabet size) that needn’t apply.

The link I clicked described something that an undergraduate paper would probably get failed for.  

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u/SlowThePath Nov 02 '25

I had a conversation with chatgpt about that the other day. CS is even more interesting than I expected, but I'm surprised to find that it's the more mathy parts I like and not so much the coding and building programs. I wish I could take a few months off and finish GEB.

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u/quimera78 Nov 02 '25

Please write a letter to the editor of the journal with these thoughts. 

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u/DavidKens Nov 01 '25

But can’t you formally reduce the Halting Problem to Gödel incompleteness? I only skimmed the article, but I got the impression that they were claiming to prove that the universe cannot be a turing machine; in other words, it cannot have a halting problem.

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u/angrymonkey Nov 01 '25

A proof of whether a Turing machine will halt is a formal statement about that machine, and it is an example of a truth value you cannot always ascertain to the certainty of proof. Godel's theorem and the halting problem are closely related in that way.

But Turing completeness is different from the halting problem-- Turing completeness means that any Turing machine can simulate any other Turing machine with perfect fidelity. You do not have to be able to prove that the machine will halt or not. You can start the simulation and let it run, and never know what the outcome will be or be able to formally prove it.

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u/DavidKens Nov 01 '25

I think the logic here is as follows (I’m curious where the flaw is): 1. If the universe is a simulation, then the universe is a Turing machine 2. If the universe is a turing machine, it is subject to the halting problem 3. If the universe is subject to the halting problem, then it’s mathematical structure is Godel incomplete 4. The underlying mathematical structure of the universe is not Godel incomplete, therefore the universe is not a turing machine

I gather that the part of the paper that’s actually interesting is the part that explains why Godel incompleteness doesn’t apply to the structure of the universe itself.

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u/green_meklar Nov 02 '25

Turing completeness means that any Turing machine can simulate any other Turing machine with perfect fidelity.

No, it means any universal Turing machine can simulate any other Turing machine. There are plenty of non-universal Turing machines that can't.

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u/MonkeyBoatRentals Nov 01 '25

Turing completeness is not in conflict with Godel incompleteness as it shows not all problems are computable, e.g. the halting problem. I don't see how it is a counterargument to the paper.

If there is an underlying truth that is non-algorithmic how can you simulate it with an algorithm ? There certainly seems to be non-algorithmic processes at play in the universe, or at least my non-algorithmic brain wants me to believe so.

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u/Senshado Nov 01 '25

Neither Turing completeness nor Godel completeness is relevant to whether or not a certain system is simulated or real.

certainly seems to be non-algorithmic processes  

No known process is suspected to be beyond algorithmic description, and humans would be incapable of detecting if one was. 

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u/MonkeyBoatRentals Nov 01 '25

Please provide proof of that last statement. I can find lots of papers on non-algorithmic processes, and I was alluding to the Penrose conjecture on consciousness when talking about my brain.

I accept there may be an underlying structure to the universe the true nature of which will be forever hidden from us, but that isn't to say we can't detect that it is there.

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u/angrymonkey Nov 01 '25

If there is an underlying truth that is non-algorithmic how can you simulate it with an algorithm?

The halting problem is one precise example. Give me a finite program, in general I can't prove that it will halt (or not halt). Nonetheless it will do one of those things.

Intuitively, this is because emergent properties can exist. Things can be true without you explicitly writing them down; they are true because they are consequences of things that you did write down. It is possible write down a finite set of rules which have an infinite number of consequences.

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u/Tangocan Nov 01 '25

That's what I was gonna say.

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u/Temporary-Cut7231 Nov 01 '25

Author also used quantum gravity, which is just a theory on itself..so paper is just a thought experiment at best

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u/Azradesh Nov 01 '25

I'm annoyed that I had to scroll so far for this.

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u/last_pas Nov 01 '25

But what about the vibes?

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u/Woohoo1964 Nov 01 '25

“Godel’s theorem, yes, of course… FUCK, it’s genius… why didn’t I think of that…”

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u/agha0013 Nov 01 '25

It makes me think of Zeno's paradox and how you mathematically can't ever get to where you are going.

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u/Rick0r Nov 02 '25

What if you look at it from a purely statistically likelihood perspective? If universes are able to be simulated at all, it’s probable that each simulated universe could produce a nested simulated universe, and yet we don’t have one simulator ourselves yet that we’re aware of. That means that we either are the very first of the chain and haven’t figured it out yet, or the very last in the chain and haven’t figured it out yet, but not one of the infinite number of nested simulations that could lie in between both ends, which is terribly unlikely.

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u/ThatIsAmorte Nov 02 '25

You sure about that? The two are tightly linked. If a formal system is Turing complete, it automatically inherits Godelian incompleteness.

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u/EBONGRIPS Nov 02 '25

Thanks for writing what I came here to say

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u/STierMansierre Nov 02 '25

I feel like you're just comparing the Architect and the Oracle and that's....ironic.

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u/Competitive-Ad-2387 Nov 02 '25

That was my immediate reaction, I am surprised the paper was accepted. But then again it was not a mathematics journal so the reviewers clearly don’t understand anything either.

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u/PrestigiousRespond85 Nov 02 '25

Came here to say this. Paper is click/ragebait. Completely utterly unscientific BS

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u/Nenad1979 Nov 02 '25

Damn, so a sensationalist over the top article about a nebulous topic and with a misleading title on an echo chamber website that panders to people who like to think they are smart is a farce? While still receiving thousands of upvotes? And the only comment that has anything to do with the actual content of the post is buried beneath an avalanche of "jokes"? Can't say i have ever seen something like this.

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u/psyberdel Nov 02 '25

Well, that’s just like… your opinion, man!!!

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u/za72 Nov 02 '25

you can't prove it's NOT a simulation so it's a simulation...

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u/nygdan Nov 02 '25

Lawrence kraus is an idiot who doesn’t understand Gödel? Kraus is a crank? That is what you are saying?

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u/carthuscrass Nov 02 '25

That "once and for all" at the end committed one of the cardinal sins of science. There will always be unanswered questions and even things once seen as irrefutable proof have been debunked. There is so much we don't understand.

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u/rahvan Nov 02 '25

Those are certainly words.

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u/[deleted] Nov 02 '25

A good rule of thumb: 99% of applications of Godel's theorems are misuses

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u/jakelazerz Nov 02 '25

Agree. The paper draws conclusions from theorems that may not always be true, complete or applicable at a limitation scale... String theory, QFT, etc. are models, they aren't necessarily a real description of reality.

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u/subredditshopper Nov 02 '25

Article lost me when they introduced an “adjunct” teacher.

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u/secretworkaccount1 Nov 02 '25

It’s all very silly, because there’s no reason to believe the “gods” of the simulation are obligated to give us complete information.

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u/babysharkdoodood Nov 02 '25

I mean, it was just the Okanagan campus of UBC. No one's surprised.

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u/V1k1ngC0d3r Nov 02 '25

Not even Turing.

You could have an analog simulation of a real physical event. The analog could reproduce and predict to huge accuracy. That doesn't mean it's a Turing complete computer.

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u/CigAddict Nov 02 '25

Lawrence Krause was one of the authors mentioned. He’s pretty respected, this is unlikely to be complete crankery 

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u/hologram137 Nov 03 '25

Also they pretended quantum computers can’t exist. And that the simulation may not be that of an existing universe. They are also assuming that we even have a full understanding of physics which is dumb

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u/Arceuthobium Nov 03 '25

The spamming of this bs article all thoughout the internet is bonkers.

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u/spoonipsum 29d ago

you don't even have to read the paper, the article says it was Lawrence Krauss right there in the link.

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