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?
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We could make a religion out of this!
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
Well I don’t know who it is but I could swear the universe has a sense of humor.
Like about a week ago I found a single left slipper. I sent a picture of it to a friend. She immediately sent a photo back of the exact same left slipper. Same size, same color, same brand, left. It just happened to be where she was when she received my message.
And I’ve got a bunch more experiences like that.
If we are in a simulation, I want access to my character modification screen, I have a few things to change…
Seriously though, untill we manage to manipulate the potential simulation we exist in, it makes zero difference if we are in a simulation or not.
You still gotta eat, pay bills, sleep, and other normal stuff.
I like to think all advents in science are simulation modifications. We managed to make rocks think and talk to us. That sounds like magic in a vacuum.
I don’t agree, we didn’t make rocks think, we discovered how to use special properties to make increadibly complex tools
I think the simulation idea is as credible as the stoner’s musing, “What if air makes you high, and pot makes you straight?”
Before the AI boom I was on the fence. Like it’s not disprovable, so it doesn’t interest me.
But now we’re like… Running actual earth sims.
So yeah. Simulation confirmed. Nothing is real.
This is a simulation and we are here on vacation.
Imagine a civilization so advanced there’s no more death. There’s no more wars. There’s no more dying of old age, sickness, or anything else. You just exist in a beautiful society day after day after perfect day.
After a couple thousand years, you might start to get bored. So you go into the simulation where you can starve to death, feel pain for the first time, fall in love, and when it’s all over, you wake up back in the advanced civilization with these great memories of what it was like to fear, to love, to be hungry…
This is the idea I run with. As a people, we have a natural attraction to simulated worlds. Stories, books, shows, movies, games, dreams, imagination. That’s our shit right there, and it makes sense that we’d hold onto that passion were we to go up a level.
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.
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
The idea is self-defeating. A simulation requires a higher reality for it to be contained within. Which in turn would by definition not be a simulation.
Yeah, but the problem is people take it literally when it’s just an update of the analogy for Plato’s cave…
You’re taking it even more literally and saying if it’s not a direct match, it’s not a simulation.
Madden is a football simulation, even though it’s not the same as real life football
It’s not that your thinking deeper than the analogy, it’s the analogy soaring over your head while you claim it doesn’t exist because you’re looking at the ground
So a virtual machine is a lower reality version of a computer?
Explain that, please
Suppose I had a copy of the Sims. Inside the copy of the Sims, the characters are looking around and notice things that seem suspicious about their world. They come to the conclusion they’re in a simulation, a video game. But nobody asks what they were made to simulate? Because it always implies there is something which, to them, is metaphysical, i.e. our world. And, if they were thinking about this, it would devalue the simulation theory itself, because if the basis is a higher world, that would be the point of reference of why things are the way they are anyways, thus saying “so-and-so is the way it is because we live in a simulation” would be a moot remark.
thus saying “so-and-so is the way it is because we live in a simulation” would be a moot remark.
Not quite.
For example, in Minecraft it approximates aspects of this world, but because of processing capabilities isn’t doing so at the same fidelity.
So people in Minecraft discussing why everything is made up of giant blocks would probably get great value out of the realization that they are in a simulation of a higher fidelity world that needed to be rendered at a lower fidelity for processing reasons. Scientists in Minecraft could further their understanding of the rules governing it likely much more successfully if they also understood the why directing the how.
A simulation is generally unlikely to be an exact replica of the universe simulating it, even if attempting to be a representative digital twin.
Another way to look at it is as any civilisation gets sufficient technology they begin simulating entire universes, to better understand their own.
That means we’re either the OG universe and haven’t figured out how to run simulations of that size yet (so no simulated universes exist yet), or there is some chain of universes above us who are likely also simulated until you get to the OG universe.
Considering everything in our universe seems to follow a set of base rules (speed of light, attraction between masses, etc), I’m partial to thinking of those as essentially input variables prior to our sim being run.
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.
I think it’s extremely likely.
First off, we unequivocally aren’t in a ‘real’ world, mathematically speaking. If we were in a world where matter was infinitely divisible and continuous, it would be extremely unlikely that we were in a simulation given the difficulty in simulating a world like that. It’s possible spacetime is continuous, but that’s literally impossible to know because of the Plank limit on measurement thresholds.
Instead, we’re in a world that appears to be continuous from a big picture view (things like general relativity are based on a continuous universe), and then in the details also appears continuous - until interacted with.
We do a very similar thing in video games today, specifically ones that use a technique called “procedural generation.” A game like No Man’s Sky can have billions of planets because they are generated with a continuous seed function. But then the games have to convert these continuous functions into discrete units in order to track the interactions free agents outside of the generation might make. If you (or an AI agent) move a mountain from point A to B, it’s effectively impossible to track if the geometry is continuous, so it converts to discrete units where state changes can be recorded.
If memory efficient, if you deleted the persistent information about a change back to the initial generation state, it shouldn’t need to stay converted to discrete units and can go back to being determined by the continuous function. Guess what our reality does when the information about interactions with discrete units is deleted? That’s right, it goes back to behaving as if continuous.
On top of all of this, a very common trope in the virtual worlds we are building today is sticking stuff that acknowledges it’s a virtual world inside the world lore - things like Outer Worlds having a heretical branch of the main world religion claiming things that you as a player know are the way the game actually works.
Again, guess what? Our world has a heretical branch of the world’s most famous religion that were claiming we are in a copy of an original world brought about by an intelligence the original humans brought forth. They were even talking about how the original could be continuously divided but the copy couldn’t and that if you could find an indivisible point within things that you were in the copy (which they said was a good thing as the original humans just straight up died and if you were the copy there was an alleged guaranteed and unconditional afterlife).
I have a really hard time seeing nature as coincidentally happening to model a continuous universe at macro scales and then a memory optimized state tracking of changes to that universe at micro scales, and then a little known heretical group claiming effectively simulation theory including discussions of continuous vs discrete matter in a tradition whose main document was only rediscovered the same week we turned on the first computer capable of simulating another computer on Dec 10th, 1945. That would be quite the coincidence.
It wouldn’t surprise me. I’m not sure it could possibly matter to us either way. Presumably we couldn’t break out of the simulation even if we knew about it conclusively. It would be interesting, but practically irrelevant.
