I was watching a gameplay walkthrough of Green Lantern last night and the graphics is fantastic - it was, for me, an immersive experience in an alien world with enough detail in the simulation to give me an impression of actual reality.

However, one particular aspect of the simulated universe caught my attention: there's a stage in the game, quite early on, where Green Lantern has to destroy some flying robots and every time he dispatches one of them, the graphics of the destruction, the way in which the robots "die", repeats i.e. you see the robots falling apart in exactly the same way - the same parts fly apart in the same direction, in the same speed, with the same sound effects.

I take it that given limited processing power of game platforms and maybe even memory, the game coders had to cut corners so to speak and so developed a generic destruction sequence for the flying robots which necessarily repeats itself every time a flying robot is destroyed.

It's probably the case then that if our world or even the universe is a simulation then one indication that it is would be the presence of generic phenomena like the flying robot destruction sequence in the Green Lantern game. After all, a finite processor and memory will force coders to build such a feature in the simulation.

Has anyone noticed such generic phenomena in the universe? In a way I'm saying that if the universe is NOT a simulation then there should be adequate variety in observable phenomena: in terms of causality, effects should show some variation depending on variations in the causes (No matter how the Green Lantern attacks the flying robots, the robots blow up in exactly the same way).

At first glance then it appears that there is enough variety in phenomena (effects vary with variation in the causes) in our universe to conclude that the universe being a simulation is "highly unlikely" for to code at that level of detail would require what to me is unimaginable, ergo unlikely to exist, computing power.

On the flip side...

It is basically a question of possibility vs actuality. A finite simulation process would have limited possibilities and hence we'll observe what I described as generic phenomena (effects being fixed despite variation in the causes). In that case it would be impossible to simulate a universe of infinite possibilities within a finite simulation process. Since our universe is finite, it follows that it can very well be a simulation.

A very mundane and probably "stupid" example of a generic phenomenon in our universe is it doesn't matter whether a man or woman punches you; so long as the force of the punch remains the same and the blow is delivered at the same spot, the pain you experience will be the same. It can be said that the sex of an attacker is not part of the causality of pain and that might very well be true BUT there is a difference, a man is quite clearly not a woman, and that difference is not represented in the effect and that fulfills the condition of generic phenomena.

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