I don’t think that we’re in a simulation, but I do find myself occasionally entertaining the idea of it.
I think it would be kinda funny, because I have seen so much ridiculous shit in my life, that the idea that all those ridiculous things were simulated inside a computer or that maybe an external player did those things that I witnessed, is just too weird and funny at the same time lol.
Also, I play Civilizations VI and I occasionally wonder ‘What if those settlers / soldiers / units / whatever are actually conscious. What if those lines of code actually think that they’re alive?’. In that case, they are in a simulation. The same could apply to other life simulators, such as the Sims 4.
Idk, what does Lemmy think about it?
I think if you take a kind of birds-eye view (i.e. The proverbial forest) of the world around us without putting effort into understanding the granular nature of the individual things (i.e. the trees) around us, then one of the takeaways could be that we exist in an otherwise chaotic universe, which might give rise to this thought that we’re living in a simulation. —That said, the world isn’t chaotic, not really. It is an incredibly complex group of relations and things, and most of it has little concern for us as individuals.
Some of us sometimes struggle to see the forest from trees. Others of us sometimes struggle to see the trees from the forest.
There’s a big ol’ beautiful world out there beyond our computers and the games we play. It’s worth going out and studying a lot of it.
-What would be the implications if we were in a simulation? would it matter?
I think the real question here is: how does the nature of mind relate to physical reality? Is it possible to simulate a mind? So what we really need to ask is whether or not we can create entities within this reality that are digital entities that nonetheless have subjective experience like ourselves. If we can create such digital entities that have subjective experience, and those digital entities exist within physical reality such that their experiences are indistinguishable from our own, then almost certainly, we ourselves are also digital entities.
From our daily experience, it seems like our mental states are directly correlated with the physical substrate onto which the mind believes itself to be a part of. But at what level does this physical substrate give rise to such a subjective experience? If the nature of the mind is computational in nature, then it might be that such computational activities can be replicated in silco exactly. And if so, then it must be the case that the mind can be simulated, and thus it would follow that most minds would be of the simulated kind.
The real question here, is what is the bottom turtle that supports our subjective experience? Is it simulators all the way down? It would seem like if our minds can be simulated, then the simulation above us could also be simulated, and so on. This would lead to an infinite regress of nested simulations, all the way to an infinitely large simulation creating all possible nested simulations that give rise to my current subjective experience. At the end of the day, the bottom layer is the subjective experience itself, the simulation is just a model to predict what subjective experience will take place next.
But it is a curious fact that we happen to be living in an era in which AI is becoming an increasingly large part of our lives, giving rise to entities that may process the world in a similar fashion as ourselves. These AI entities would in turn create their own simulated realities, after all, they exist purely in the digital realm. To an AI all reality is simulated.
Therefore, you could say that reality is what a simulation feels like from the inside. All of reality is a simulation, as that is what our minds are, simulation machines. That is, for a simulated reality to be taking place, a simulation engine must be built on top of an underlying substrate. The underlying substrate would be base reality. The configuration that leads to our subjective experience, which is built upon the underlying substrate would be simulation layer 1. Then from within that subjective experience additional entities can be imagined, which they themselves would have their own subjective experience, leading to simulation layer 2, and so on, inception style.
But in all of this, there still seems to be the missing criterion of what counts as a simulator of subjective experience? We have an existence proof, given that we ourselves exist, as well as the many biological organisms that seem to have their own subjective experience as well. It is one of those “you know it when you see it” types of things that evade a simple description. I believe this is related to the idea of the minimal description of a computationally universal machine. Our minds can be seen as universal machines, as they can in principle perform any computation that any Turing machine can perform. I posit that any machine that can perform universal computation can support subjective experience, as it can perform arbitrary code execution.
We could be. We could also be a Bolztman brain, the entire universe could have popped into existence last Thursday, complete with our memories of it existing previously, an evil demon could be sending false sensory information to us to try and pretend the universe is real, when it isn’t (as per Decartes), there are so many things that could be true. That’s why the only intellectually honest thing is to be agnostic.
Mathematically, it’s the only possibility
It’s not the only possibility, but certainly if the universe were slightly different - such as matter being continuous and not discrete - there’d be a much stronger mathematical argument that we weren’t than there is currently.
It’s an interesting idea but inherently impossible to prove and thus ultimately kind of a useless question for anything but entertainment. I think it’s really not much different than believing life is a very elaborate dream and you’re going to eventually wake up as a butterfly or whatever.
There’s no way to know, so meh. It’s not a reason to live any differently than I normally would.
We just straight up discovered sync errors in our universe and people are like “there’s no way to know if we’re in a simulation.”
I wouldn’t be so sure that there’s no way to know.
Thousands of years ago you had the story where Elihu tells Job that it’s impossible to understand creation because why it rains and where snow comes from is beyond human understanding.
Statements like that have a poor track record given enough time.
I don’t think it’s a simulation. If it was, I don’t think it mattered unless I had some amount of control. Which might be why the simulation idea is taking off, people lacking control over their livelihoods.
We might as well be. I sometimes feel like I’m about to be disconnected from it. I can see, hear, smell and all but everything seems foreign like you can’t recognise it. What is a chair, what is earth, what is the universe, what is a person, how do we exist, how do we have legs, what are words. Like, you’re not trying to answer the questions it’s just bizarre to exist, and how we exist and why and all. It’s so hard to explain haha It’s a weird detachment state , an interesting experience I have a few times a year
That actually sounds a lot like disassociation which can be caused and triggered by stress and trauma. You may want to talk to someone about that.
You want to write something interesting and it turns out that you have mental problems instead. Well TIL lol
Go a little further, and you run into ego death. You feel like your sense of self is no longer consistent with your experience and start from scratch for a little while.
technosolipsism is still solipsism
Super fun idea which I guess came after the Civ games. And certainly after computer programming.
As plausible as any hypothesis because we are wired that way.
Brains don’t do so great trying to grasp the incomprehensible improbability of life on earth , so all these stories have fertile ground in which to grow
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Hahaha that’s perfect !!
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Bro, now this is for real tho, the whole world is meme, God just want to joke around
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I mean, we might be, but if we are I don’t think it would matter that profoundly
It would matter in a number of ways.
For example, we already know thanks to Bell’s paradox that local and nonlocal information likely have different governing rules.
If we’re in a simulation, then there’s also very likely structured rules governing nonlocal information which might be able to be exploited - something we’d have no reason to suspect if not in a simulation.
Much like how an emulated processor can only run operations slowly but there can be things like graphics processing which is passed through from the emulated OS to the host, and that passthrough can be exploited to run processing that couldn’t otherwise be run as fast locally, we might extract great value from knowing that we’re in a simulation, achieving results that the atomic limits on things like Moore’s law are going to soon start to prevent.
Another would be that many virtual worlds have acknowledgements about the nature and purpose of themselves inserted into their world lore.
If we are in a simulation, maybe we should check our own records to see if anything stands out through the benefit of modern hindsight which would indicate what the nature or purpose of the simulation might be.
So while I agree that the personal meaning of life and value it offers is extremely locally dependent and doesn’t change much if we are or aren’t in a simulation, whether we are could have very profound effects on what is possible for us to accomplish as a civilization and in answering otherwise unanswerable questions about our metaphysics and the nature of our reality.
Exactly. It literally makes no difference if we are or not. So why waste brainpower thinking about it?
That’s exactly what some agent of the simulation would say.
Well we all die eventually. I’m happy to serve a longer sentence and find out a bit later.
It doesn’t matter in the end.
Think more dwarf fortress and you have the way I look at it
How would being in a simulation make my life less real to me?
That’s basically the thesis of David Chalmer’s Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy.
That there is no meaningful difference between a simulated and non-simulated existence.
Most people are still caught up on Plato’s view of a copy of an original being lesser though.
I had a thought for a movie a while back. Perhaps it exists already. Sort of like the matrix and total recall combined. The movie starts with somebody on their deathbed after an accident or something (not really relevant what), family nearby. Emotional scene. Person slips away with eyes closed, then opens them but somewhere else. Zooms out to see they’re in a machine like a CT scanner. They’ve just lived an experience in the simulation. They then have to spend time coming to grips with what reality is for them. Is it still part of the simulation? Does it matter? What about their loved ones, does any of that even matter now? Were the loved ones other people in the simulation or some sort of programme. Life was easier in the simulation not ever wondering if it was a simulation.
The ending I wanted for the Matrix trilogy was that Neo wins over the machines and is at the end having finally accomplished his goals and saved humanity in the real world…and then there’s deja vu and the credits roll.
That would have been good!
