We could make a religion out of this!
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Your mind is gonna conjure up anything it can to make sense of the world it lives in.
Think more dwarf fortress and you have the way I look at 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. βThat 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?
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.
Yeah, the speed and direction of advancement of AI definitely further shifted my perspective on the topic as well.
For me the biggest application that raises an eyebrow are the continued and expanding efforts at using AI to resurrect dead people using the data they left behind or to create digital copies of people in virtual worlds.
Is there any reason to think that trend won't continue? As a person who is part of a generation leaving behind unprecedented amounts of data, it seems like the kind of thing we should be thinking about more.
Nothing is real.
Well, no matter if we are in a simulation or not, we already have experimental evidence confirming nothing is (mathematically) real in our universe. Spacetime itself could be but as far as we know that's impossible to determine because of the fundamental limits on measurement below the Plank length. But all matter in it definitely isn't 'real.' Which is convenient for simulation theory, as a universe filled with mathematically real matter would be effectively impossible to be a simulated one if free will also exists in it.
You know, whenever this theory is discussed, everybody seems to assume that this simulation that we're allegedly living in is supposed to be an approximation of the parent universe, similar rules, but probably lower fidelity (basically the sims).
I think we should forget that assumption. It's human centric. Who's to say that the entity running the simulation even meant for it to be a simulation at all? Given our universe appears so much bigger than our pale blue dot from the inside, if our universe is a program running in a parent universe, I doubt that we - homo sapiens - are the point of it, or it'd be leaner, more focused. We'd be the center of the universe. But at every step of scientific discovery, we've found that that isn't true. We're just noise, sand on the beach, dust in the wind. If we live in a program, I doubt that the person running it is even aware of us specifically as a species, let alone as individuals. I doubt that they're specifically aware of any particularly galaxy, in the same way a neural network developer isn't aware of any specific weight in their model.
Granted, you could argue that that the rest observable universe is an illusion, a wilderness mural painted on the walls, designed by the simulation operator to make us think that we weren't in a zoo. But that sounds a lot like "God put those dinosaur bones there to trick us", so personally, I doubt that's it.
Life is not a game.