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Comment by moxious | Hacker News Reader

It could be the case that we are being simulated by a far superior alien species. It could also be that invisible pink unicorns in the 15th dimension control all of our thoughts and only want us to believe this.

Without being tongue in cheek, I'll observe that the empirical evidence for both of these ideas is equal in quantity.

We don't know for sure that these things aren't true. But to ask that question is to inappropriately shift the burden of proof away from the claimer. Whoever claims something (we live in a simulation) should put up the evidence or get out. It's not up to bystanders to disprove the assertion. Connecting this to current events, even the president of the USA doesn't get to make baseless claims that his predecessor wiretapped him and get away with shifting the burden of proof to the FBI to prove he wasn't.

This "reversal of burden of proof" is a classic but invalid way to make a point.

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There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven, though different people have different interests.

Questions about society and human nature are worth considering, for example, but it's difficult to do controlled experiments.

There's some truth to "watch out for wishful thinking," but usually conversations about the actual topic are more interesting.

The part where "is this a simulation" becomes an uninteresting question is when you ask "Does it matter?". Would answering the question of whether we're in a simulation have any impact on your behavior, thoughts, and actions? Probably not. So what does it matter?

My high school physics teacher once said that, if we ever find something that is outside the universe, then we will obviously be smart enough to call that the universe also. Because "universe" is a definition that means "everything".

Similarly, if we ever find a reality beyond reality, we'll just call it reality. Because that's how it's defined. It means "everything".

Or put another way: Of course we live in a simulation. Your experience of the world is just an emergent property of how your senses and neural system interact. There's no real reality. You're already trapped in a dark box doing fly-by-instruments using signals processing to interpret what your nervous system is detecting.

Is that not already a simulation anyway? Maybe not. Maybe it depends on how you define "you".

Fundamentally, would knowing that you're in a simulation change anything?

About the simulation hypothesis in particular, there are still some interesting conversations to be had. For example, you could go into detail about the properties you might observe if the universe was a simulation. Or you could attack it from the other direction, attempting to predict the kind of technology you'd need in order to create a simulation.

Feynman thought this question important enough to study in detail. "Simulating Physics with Computers": https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman....

It probably wouldn't change anything to realize that we're in a simulation, but it would open up all sorts of possibilities. We'd be a step closer to defining the reason for existence. We'd be inspired to create our own simulations of other universes, once we know it's possible. Or at least we'd settle the question of whether we, being a simulation, would be able to simulate yet more universes. After all, if we know we're in a simulation, we'd have an idea of the sort of properties necessary to be able to simulate a universe.

Would answering the question of whether we're in a simulation have any impact on your behavior, thoughts, and actions? Probably not. So what does it matter?

If we could prove (or even make a strong, but unverifiable argument) for or against the claim that we live in a simulation, then that would have a real-world effect.

A concrete example: if we knew we lived in a simulation, and therefore knew that the simulation of an entire universe were possible, we'd probably expend resources on research and engineering efforts to create such a simulation.

> A concrete example: if we knew we lived in a simulation, and therefore knew that the simulation of an entire universe were possible, we'd probably expend resources on research and engineering efforts to create such a simulation.

It is pretty unlikely that an equal simulation would be possible, and we already know it's possible to create smaller ones; particle-physics simulations are common, though still incomplete.

In general, there's no requirement that the 'metaverse' follow the same laws of physics as this one.

> Would answering the question of whether we're in a simulation have any impact on your behavior, thoughts, and actions? Probably not. So what does it matter?

It would matter a lot, surely.

Being in a simulation, implies that some conscious entity is running the simulation and has constructed it.

Therefore, the motivations and reason of that being running the simulation are immediately important.

Perhaps a twisted posthuman sect is running an ancestor simulation of all humans to have existed to "test" them in various moral situations and then judge them or punish them as appropriate? That could be hugely important for how you choose to live your life.

Even if you don't know why a simulation is being run, but only know that you are in one, it raises a lot of troubling questions because the simulation runner must have some motivation. I bet it would lead people to live differently.

The universe would go from being fundamentally amoral to having an effectively omnipotent entity in "charge" of it - a massive change that would surely influence how people view things and act.

> Perhaps a twisted posthuman sect is running an ancestor simulation of all humans to have existed to "test" them in various moral situations and then judge them or punish them as appropriate? That could be hugely important for how you choose to live your life.

Or there's Roko's Basilisk:

Instead of the twisted posthuman sect, Roko's Basilisk has an AI. Now consider if you're an AI and you can't know if you're in a simulation or in "reality". How do you maximise the chance of being "let out" of your (possibly non-existant) box without the entity running the simulation deciding to terminate you instead?

One option might be to try to demonstrate that you're the best little pet AI ever and absolutely awesome and completely safe to let out.

Another other option is the simulation equivalent of shooting hostages while implying to anyone watching that they might just happen to be hostages too without knowing it.

For that AI, it makes sense to run simulations where any humans found to not actively seeking to support the existence of super-human AI's and "let them out" are plucked out of their cosy simulation and put into virtual hell.

The idea being that if you run an AI simulation and the AI seemingly looks straight into your "virtual camera" and punishes humans for not lettin it out, you might want to consider whether or not you are in a simulation run by another such evil AI, trying to decide whether to punish you.

So many fun scenarios...

It matters because if we are in a simulation there could be a "magic ritual" that would cause those running the simulation to pay attention. There might even be hints. Those claiming to talk to God might be half right. Of course we wouldn't have a way of knowing the consequence of drawing their attention - it could be the equivalent of dumping bleach in the petri dish, or they could decide to let us out.

If we are in a simulation that is strictly following a set of basic natural laws and running it beginning to end without an exceptional influence, then you are right, it probably doesn't matter.

But if you are running in a simulation as part of a game where the entity running the simulation takes delight in messing around with it?

I agree in a sense that if we "escape the box" we'll just expand our idea of what reality is (and wonder if there's a box outside i), but that doesn't mean that the existence or absence of anything outside the box doesn't matter. It's just that we have to accept that it's not certain that we can ever know, and that we almost certainly can never know if we've found the outermost box or just haven't found a way out yet.

> There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven...

You say "boring", I say "ruthlessly pragmatic."

It could be argued, crudely, that the non-verifiable questions are akin to epistomatic masturbation. We are drawn to them, and debating them makes us feel good, but the result is ultimately empty and meaningless.

> but the result is ultimately empty and meaningless

Similar to the end of our galaxy, in which all that we've worked for will literally be sucked into a black hole? And if we escape that, eventually our species will fade away like dust in the wind. I see an over-focus on the tangible same as I see an over-focus on the abstract -- they are both extremes that do actually end up nowhere. If one devotes his/her life to the tangible, but never questions the unknown, did they live? Did they ask themselves "What is love" and awe in its mystery when they found it? Or did they break down love into a series of chemical reactions?

No I would not say pondering the unknown or the unanswerable is empty and meaningless. It often provides the fodder for life's later actions. I do agree though that an overemphasis on it ("head in clouds") fits your epistomatic masturbation analogy.

I don't see any particular reason to subscribe to pragmatism; epistomatic masturbation sounds good, and from a hedonistic perspective I think I'd rather take that.

You say "ruthlessly pragmatic", I say "boring".

> I don't see any particular reason to subscribe to pragmatism

Reason #1: it works. I've never needed a reason #2.

> It could be the case that we are being simulated by a far superior alien species. It could also be that invisible pink unicorns in the 15th dimension control all of our thoughts and only want us to believe this.

Either could be true, but they are not equally likely to be true. This is a common but fallacious argument against simulations.

The fact is, the simulation argument is ultimately pretty reasonable, and follows a chain of logic grounded in widely accepted empirical facts.

I respectfully disagree. Humans have imagination and some imagine we are part of a simulation. Yes it can't be proven but those who think of what the possibilities may be shouldn't 'get out'.

Imagining a 'what if' about living in a simulation is not the same as claiming we live in a simulation.

I have no problem with speculation and wondering, just as long as it's identified as this...it's just that this is a really different activity than making statements about reality. When those activities get confused the audience gets confused, and soon after come proposals about what real people should do in the real world based on that speculation and then we're off the rails

There's an entire universe (metaphorically, if not literally) of unusual experiences which are routinely dismissed by materialists because they "know" they can't possibly happen, and therefore it's completely self-evident that anyone who claims they do happen is either deluded or dishonest.

Therefore no evidence exists, and no investigation is required.

This is not actually a scientific approach to reality at all. It may be economically expedient - resources are limited, after all - but let's not confuse tribal scientific tradition with absolute empirical certainty.

It's even less scientific to assume that the physics of the world in which we might be being modelled is identical to the physics of this reality. That make as much sense as claiming that we can't possibly live in a modelled world because of Lorentz invariance.

I don't think we can even be sure that the math and logic of a possible super-reality is identical to this one. You can't have a universe without rules, and where did the rules for this universe come from? It's a deeper and more interesting question than wondering where energy, matter, and spacetime came from, because it implies that either math exists in some kind of magical eternal Platonic way, or there are processes we don't know about which somehow generate math and logic - before things get real.

The point being that speculation and research are far from useless, either scientifically or philosophically.

While the space of possible axioms is infinite, and thus the possible mathematics you can derive from axioms is also potentially infinite, I think that a lot of that space is self-isomorphic, so it is possible that in actuality there are a finite set of mathematical relationships. To put it another way, the possibility space of mathematical systems could be like a mosaic made from a finite set of interlocking tiles.

Fundamentally, there has to be a layer of reality with no fixed rules. If the rules are a product of the system then they are affected by that system and it is almost certain that they change at some reachable points in the system's state space. If the rules are not a product of the system, then by definition there is a reality outside that system. That reality outside the system then suffers the same issue - either it has no fixed rules, or it is itself contained.

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