Related papers: Do we live in a [quantum] simulation? Constraints,…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
We consider problems in which robots conspire to present a view of the world that differs from reality. The inquiry is motivated by the problem of validating robot behavior physically despite there being a discrepancy between the robots we…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
In recent years there has been a strong development of the concept of virtual reality (VR) which from the first video games developed in the 60s has reached the current immersive systems. VR and the consequent deception of perception pose…
Envisioned by Richard Feynman in the early 1980s, quantum simulation has received dramatic impetus thanks to the development of a variety of plateforms able to emulate a wide class of quantum Hamiltonians. During the past decade, most of…
Feynman gave in 1982 a keynote speech \textit{Simulating Physics with Computers} (Int. J. Theor. Phys. {\bf 21}, 467 (1982)) in which he talked ``...about the possibility...that the computer will do exactly the same as nature". The…
The Simulation Argument posed by Bostrom (2003) suggests that we may be living inside a sophisticated computer simulation. If post-human civilizations eventually have both the capability and desire to generate such Bostrom-like simulations,…
Various fundamental phenomena of strongly-correlated quantum systems such as high-$T_c$ superconductivity, the fractional quantum-Hall effect, and quark confinement are still awaiting a universally accepted explanation. The main obstacle is…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Our notions of what is physically 'real' have long been based on the idea that the real is what is immediately apprehended, that is the local or observable, the physically tangible, though there has always been an alternative philosophical…
Quantum information science explores the frontier of highly complex quantum states, the "entanglement frontier." This study is motivated by the observation (widely believed but unproven) that classical systems cannot simulate highly…
We assess how physically realistic the ''simulation hypothesis'' for this Universe is, based on physical constraints arising from the link between information and energy, and on known astrophysical constraints. We investigate three cases:…
Can the theory that reality is a simulation be tested? We investigate this question based on the assumption that if the system performing the simulation is finite (i.e. has limited resources), then to achieve low computational complexity,…
The Simulation Argument has gained significant traction in the public arena. It has offered a hypothesis based on probabilistic analysis of its assumptions that we are likely to exist within a computer simulation. This has been derived from…
According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…
Simulating quantum mechanics is known to be a difficult computational problem, especially when dealing with large systems. However, this difficulty may be overcome by using some controllable quantum system to study another less controllable…
Issues related to a materialist philosophy are explored as concerns the implied equivalence of computers running software and human observers. One issue explored concerns the measurement process in quantum mechanics. Another issue explored…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
Realism about quantum theory naturally leads to realism about the quantum state of the universe. It leaves open whether it is a pure state represented by a wave function, or an impure (mixed) one represented by a density matrix. I…