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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Mathematically, it’s the only possibility
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.
It’s trippy to think about. The only things we know about existence are through our own experience, so there’s basically nothing about our reality that we could say proves we’re not in a simulation.
By that logic it seems probable that we are in one that could be ran by any civilization only moderately further along the scale of time and technology than we are. I don’t think it would change whether I thought life was worth living or not, but it would certainly be weird to imagine somebody could be watching what you’re doing at any given time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Last time I did ski, long time ago,
Ive thought “exactly that”, and what the player would think of us ? Just going up and down like this. Not interesting to watch.
A simulation does not necessarily mean a playable videogame it could be like a complex game of life.
Lost the game BTW.
I imagine it being more academic. It would take an enormous amount of power to create a simulation like this so my guess is, the civilization running the simulation has a much better understanding of the universe and rather than experimenting in their own world they created one. I also like the idea of a future civilization discovering humans after we have gone extinct and having enough information to create a simulation to watch it happen.
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.
technosolipsism is still solipsism
It doesn’t matter in the end.
We could make a religion out of this!
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!
It’s just new religion
Simulation theory is just creationism rebranded using terms that are more familiar for a world where computers are so highly used. Someone would’ve had to have created the simulation, and ergo the entire universe, which does sound rather familiar
Exactly, it’s updating what “God” looks like from a bearded old white guy to a nerd
“We must obey the
godadmin!”All hail the mighty SUDO
It is incredibly unlikely.
I know, “if an ancestor simulation is possible than it is much more likely you’re in one than not in one.” That’s fallacious, unfalsifiable and everyone loves to leave out the word “ancestor” which is very important to the thought experiment.
In our universe, no system is entirely isolated from the rest of it. It is impossible to create a system that does not in some way interact with the outside universe. So if it is a simulation in a universe, and the universe it is running in also has this rule we would see information from that universe leak into ours in some way. How that would appear we don’t know, but it would be possible to figure it out. Maybe heat dissipates out, maybe bit flips happen in our universe due to the parent’s equivalent to cosmic rays, maybe the speed of light is a result of the clock speed of the simulator. We don’t know what it would be, but there would be something, and it would be theoretically discernible.
at least some of the laws of our universe are laws of the parent universe. So maybe that rule, no system exists in isolation, is also true above. Or maybe our speed of light is the same for them. Whatever it is, our cumulative constraints are more than that of the simulation.
All that, unless, in the parent universe, 1) systems can exist in isolation, or 2) it is an environment with no constraints. These two are functionally equivalent, so I’ll talk about them like they’re the same thing. In such a universe, there would be no causality, no form, nothing that makes it unified. It’s not a universe at all. It’s something like a universe post heat death. In such a scenario, running a simulation isn’t possible. If it were, to create an environment in which causality can be simulated, that environment wouldn’t be a simulation, it would be a bona fide universe.
So I think, the fact that we see no evidence that we are in a simulation means we are probably not in one. So that means, if we are in one it is falsifiable and we can prove or disprove it empirically. And it also means we can escape, or at the very least destroy it.
You presuppose that all the people in the world and scientists are actually people too. Sure the laws of the universe seem to be consistent in a Newtonian fashion as far as yourself have bothered to check. I don’t think you’ve done much personal quantum mechanics.
The problem is more Cartesian, in the first place, maybe Trumanian. The others might be bad faith actors. Are you able to trust your senses, if so the other people?
Information that we are in one would appear in weird ways? Like maybe side effects of simulating a continuous universe in a calculable way which would require quantization, but would leave the universe with a seemingly incompatible framework of continuous macro behavior (such as general relativity) and discrete behavior (such as quantum mechanics)?
Yeah, the apparent effect to us could be something really weird like incongruent physical laws or constants or things like that. I have no idea what it would be, only that it would be detectable.
Like sync errors?
Sure, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on there.
I think observation/measurement of a quantum system means entangling with the system, so the quantum system becomes larger and includes the observer. Combine that with relativity, which is absolute in the universe, and you have an e plantation for that phenomenon.
That wouldn’t explain why the two results end up not agreeing sometimes.
I agree that it relates to how the observer entangles with the system, but you see this kind of error class occurring in net code all the time.
Player 1 shoots an enemy around the same time as player 2. Player 1 has a locally rendered resolution to the outcome of having killed the enemy and gets awarded the xp, and player 2 has the same result.
The server has to decide if it is going to let both local clients be correct or resolve in a way that reverses the outcome for one of the clients. For things that don’t really matter, it lets both be correct.
Here, each individual outcome is basically Bell’s paradox, where we know there needs to be consistent results no matter how each observer behaves. But in this case, when a second layer of abstraction is added, the results are capable of disagreeing.
It looks very similar to a sync error, and relativity doesn’t in any way explain it.
Why doesn’t relativity explain it? It looks like a classic case of relativity to me, what am I missing?
Relativity only relates to the relative shape of spacetime and movement through it.
So for example, things occurring faster for one inertial frame vs another, or something being closer to an observer moving quickly than for one stationary.
It’s exclusive to the combination of spacetime curvature and one’s momentum within it.
How do you think relativity does explain it?
There is no requirement for a subset of something to have the same properties as the superset. Just because everything in our universe is interconnected is no guarantee that the same applies to the hypothetical universe in which our simulation is run. This is ignoring that the idea is that we can’t see out of the simulation, i.e., there is no uncontrolled information being inserted into the simulation. This doesn’t preclude static from the outside impacting us in some measurable way…such as a background level of noise that is pervasive in the simulation, like the CMB.
I don’t know if we’re in a simulation, but a lot of people smarter than me and more knowledgeable in the field have come to the conclusion that this idea isn’t falsifiable, and I doubt your proposal is a new idea for them. This leads me to believe they probably had a good reason to dismiss it, better than my points listed above.
Just because everything in our universe is interconnected is no guarantee that the same applies to the hypothetical universe in which our simulation is run
I addressed this already.
Okay, but you’re glossing over the point, so let’s talk about black holes. They are part of our universe, information can go in past the event horizon, but no information can come out past the event horizon. Are they connected? Yes, absolutely. Can we collect any information from them, beyond a few basic physical measurements (gravity, momentum, rotation, mass-energy)? No, that whole event horizon again. So are you proposing that causality doesn’t exist in black holes, doesn’t exist in our universe, or that maybe we can have an interconnected system with a one-way transfer of information?
Again, I’m sure someone with a PhD could not only come up with better reasons for the flaw in your assessment, but has probably already articulated it somewhere. Perhaps you should search that up.
Information comes out of black holes. That’s the whole point of the Hawking radiation thing. And information enters, obviously. Also those few basic measurements are information. Black holes are falsifiable and detectable.
Causality inside black holes is not like causality out here, but it does exist. Once you enter, there’s only one direction you can go, no matter what you do. The outcome of everything was decided the moment you touched the event horizon. That outcome is that you will eventually evaporate as hawking radiation.
I’m not glossing over the point. I’ve already addressed the crux of it. An environment in which systems can be totally isolated cannot function in any conceivable way as a universe. Everything inside would not be able to interact at all. It would be more like a substrate on which universes exist, if an environment can be isolated that does not allow for anything inside it to be 100% isolated.
Energy is not information. You are misinformed.
Yes it is lol I love being called misinformed by misinformed people. You should look into hawking radiation and why it was theorized.
Well, after doing some reading, you may be right. I didn’t hear about the issues brought up, and Hawkings responses in 2004. It seems the consensus is that information is conveyed somehow, with some limits on practicality. That may still raise issues with determining whether you’re in a simulation, if the capability to determine if you are is beyond the reach of your technology. At that point though, the only way you can falsify the hypothesis is to increase your capabilities to the point where you can test that, and I don’t think we’re there now.
