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What do you think about the idea that we're in a simulation?

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?

theywilleatthestars ,

I mean, we might be, but if we are I don’t think it would matter that profoundly

bionicjoey , (edited )

Exactly. It literally makes no difference if we are or not. So why waste brainpower thinking about it?

theywilleatthestars ,

Fun

ChanchoManco ,

That’s exactly what some agent of the simulation would say.

mub ,

Unless this is a prison and the only way out is to die here.

IronKrill ,

Well we all die eventually. I’m happy to serve a longer sentence and find out a bit later.

kromem ,

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.

kromem ,

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.

NauticalNoodle , (edited )

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?

Melatonin ,

I think the simulation idea is as credible as the stoner’s musing, “What if air makes you high, and pot makes you straight?”

Sam_Bass ,

Your mind is gonna conjure up anything it can to make sense of the world it lives in.

jaykay ,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

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

Postmortal_Pop ,

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.

jaykay ,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

You want to write something interesting and it turns out that you have mental problems instead. Well TIL lol

Leg ,

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.

lemmylem ,

Exactly, it’s not crazy to think like that. I mean, the person who said that could be right, but still, let’s not immediately jump to conclusions by saying they have mental issues.

ani ,

No one knows. I just find this universe too imperfect. It’s nonsense. I just want it to end.

Leg ,

Perfection is stagnation. It’s the entropic nature of reality that provides the vehicle for change and will to manifest, allowing subjective experiences to exist. If anything, I’d see this as evidence of a simulated reality, as it’s suspiciously convenient that this is all here for us to experience the way we do. You wanting it all to end sounds like more of an internal battle than external to me, and yours is a scary worldview.

ani ,

There’s just too much suffering in this world. Why have a simulated reality with people torturing and killing one another, making living animals suffer so we can eat them, animals brutally killing one another. It’s just nonsense. I myself am constantly haunted by a traumatic experience, unable to be happy. My view is eflilism if you haven’t heard about it.

Leg ,

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that suicide of consciousness is the correct answer to resolving the problem of suffering. Suffering is but one element of our collective existence, and while I agree that it’s unpleasant (duh), extermination is far too extreme an answer to consider it just. The scope is simply too narrow and pessimistic, and if one were to act on this philosophy, I would consider them evil. Don’t kill your mates for being depressed or for hurting. Help them, however you can.

lost_faith ,

Back in my early 20s I did a lot of pot and acid. One night I broke my brain on a trip. The trip was going as usual, minor visual hallucinations like seeing faces in the air and such. Then, without warning I was in a gurney covered in a sheet and I heard voices then one said “He’s awake!” and the next instant I was back in my room tripping with my friends. For years I couldn’t shake that scene. Some people have said it was all just a trip but… maybe I broke the control for a moment. (ps this was before The Matrix and Cube 2 not that simulation theory is new) Good times

Leg ,

Hallucinogenics are wild, man. It feels like peaking behind the veil, and it can make you lose your grip on what you understand reality to be. I had a bad trip where I found myself face-to-face with what I’ve nicknamed as “the spectator”. Dunno if it was supposed to be my higher self, God, or some other entity. But it made me well aware it was always there, always watching, and existed outside of our perceived reality. I told my mates that, at the time, it felt like I found something real, and that our reality was the fabrication. I still don’t know what to make of it now.

doublejay1999 ,
@doublejay1999@lemmy.world avatar

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

Apytele ,

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/fbdcceb4-89bd-473e-8a8d-c3272d40d985.jpeg

doublejay1999 ,
@doublejay1999@lemmy.world avatar

Hahaha that’s perfect !!

Apytele ,

That meme has been in my gallery waiting for its moment for a long time now!

ani ,

Bro, now this is for real tho, the whole world is meme, God just want to joke around

Omega_Haxors ,

It’s just Pascal’s Wager with silicon valley tech dude bros standing in for the role of god. Really hard to unsee once you notice it.

keepcarrot ,

I feel like it’s secular metaphysics and ultimately doesn’t matter. Kinda black mirror if your RTS shotgun guys are conscious know that they will be deleted to free up memory.

jbrains ,

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.

JohnnyEnzyme ,

I agree it’s irrelevant in terms of living our lives, altho perhaps greatly relevant for those in relevant sciences.

I think there’s also a good argument that we already know we’re in a simulation. That is-- if we already know a lot about the tiny building blocks of the universe, how they interact, and what forces govern them across various levels, then we can conceive of framing the whole of observable reality in to a massive, but known & quantifiable set of calculations… or a simulation.

tamagotchicowboy ,
@tamagotchicowboy@hexbear.net avatar

It doesn’t matter in the end.

NoIWontPickAName ,

Think more dwarf fortress and you have the way I look at it

hexthismess ,
@hexthismess@hexbear.net avatar

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.

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