Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50 | Hacker News Reader

Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50

scientificamerican.com

51 pointsbryanrasmussen103 comments

If there's a 'God Computer' that's running our universe, it's much more likely that all it's programmed for is Quantum Mechanics and Gravity, and everything else is purely emergent. I mean we know how everything in chemistry, biology, etc. definitely DOES simply 'emerge' with no 'programming'.

People just hear "Sim" and hey think of the "Sims" game. It's not like that. Our 'creator' (Sim programmer) likely didn't even know what any of the life forms would even look like on any specific habitable planet, nor how many planets would even form, etc. prior to 'running it'.

And it's even [dare I say] likely, that if we are in a simulated universe it may be the N-trillionth one, and the programmer just finally stumbled across the correct values for the fundamental Standard Model charges, masses, spins, that can result in a stable universe. We do know it's fine tuned, but we don't know if the tuning is purely Anthropic Principle or from many iterations.

Two idiotic statement put together.

First, probabilities application to a non-discrete systems is undefined bullshit.

Second, there is no way in principle to determine a simulation, the way there is no way to determine an actual wiring of a processor from the level of code, or even that there is a processor.

> First, probabilities application to a non-discrete systems is undefined bullshit.

? Quantum mechanics strongly begs to differ—the wave function is continuous, but predictions are probabilistic.

I agree and I really don't understand how mature researchers can engage in this type of guesswork. If we are in a simulation, our observed universe is also a simulation. Even if the real world revealed itself to us Matrix style, this "revelation" could also be a simulation. There is no way to tell. We can not falsify either of the contradicting statements "we live in a simulation" / "we do not live in a simulation".

(Edit: Technically, I don't agree with your "application of probabilities to non-discrete systems" statement, but I think we get the intended meaning here.)

The revelation would falsify something at least? It would falsify “we have never been in and will never be in a simulation”, yeah? Because even if the revelation was simulated but this now isn’t, it would still involve simulation.

That being said, I don’t think it is likely.

> there is no way to determine an actual wiring of a processor from the level of code

True, however in a multi-processor die software can use information about heat/voltage/p-/c-states to determine which core it's currently running on.

And before you ask - yes, this is used in practice for sophisticated workload distribution across cpu cores in fintech.

> there is no way to determine an actual wiring of a processor from the level of code, or even that there is a processor.

Unless someone explicitly leaves a loophole - for debugging or other purposes. There is a nice scene in the recent movie Vivarium about this.

Yes and the transistors are baryonic matter 1:1 with the actual universe. The map has become the territory. Seriously, the simulation argument has to be one of the absolute stupidest.

Even from a probability standpoint, it's not P(A) vs P(B), it's P(A and B) that we're in a simulation.

The amount of energy required to run a universe scale simulation is beyond our ability to even begin to calculate. It's an interesting and useful thought experiment, but a terrible argument. I suspect people like Musk popularize it because they want to highlight the real and terrifying risk that humanity will destroy itself.

As Occam stated: "Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity."

The dinosaurs thought the same thing about computers.... or not...

> The amount of energy required to run a universe scale simulation is beyond our ability to even begin to calculate.

Wouldn’t the simulation only have to run whatever is being perceived? No need to simulate things that are completely unattended.

Except that you need to ultimately compute the backwards light cone of every possible event that is part of a causal chain. I.e. this caused that, so we have to compute why this caused that, and what caused those things. Sure, if an event is never observed, i.e. it never influences any event which a consciousness perceives, either directly or indirectly, then you can leave it out. Problem is, we keep coming up with new ways of observing phenomena. We keep doing particle experiments and building telescopes, so the load on the computation of the universe is getting pretty big!

The simulator would just need to simulate your mind such that it believed that stuff existed. For example, if you looked in a telescope at a distant star the simulation wouldn't need to simulate the distant star and all the photons and wave length shifting and gravitational lensing and whatever, it would just need to draw a little picture for you.

You'll basically end up at solipsism if you follow this reasoning. There are good arguments against solipsism, e.g. that people smarter than you exist, and you forget where things are, only to rediscover them, then remind yourself you forgot, and so on. You have to play increasingly tortured games to keep believing that nothing exists outside your mind.

Another one against solipsism: Language evolves in groups. A true solipsist would be mute therefore. Source: Wittgenstein.

And you only need to simulate a single brain to be simulating it's entire perceived universe

Exactly right. The Sim is computing Physics itself. It's not computing brains, but only the atoms making up brains. Atoms do what they do, ergo brains form.

Okay, but you’re not running the simulation time 1:1, are you? What would be the point?

So very rapidly your simulation develops people, who develop algorithms and computers for which there are no physically possible (in the real universe) optimizations, so you’re computing for them 1:1. And they develop simulations of their own. And then their simulations develop simulations. And you’ve got to pay the energy cost for all that because some things can’t be faked; or you kill the simulation when it learns to develop its own simulation. And then... what would be the point?

There are some problems with “Okay, but then you just make things simpler,” where this would allow simulations to determine they were simulations. I don’t recall the details off the top of my head. (Its late and I’m typing this right before bed.)

So maybe there is infinite energy in the real world. Then why wouldn’t our universe look the same?

There are certainly kinds of simulations that are possible, but the most commonly discussed one is the ancestor simulation. And it just doesn’t physically work while also sticking to the point of running an ancestor simulation.

> What would be the point?

We do pared-down simulations of things all the time. I think the rest of the comment presumes that the only type of simulation we should conceive of is one that is an exact mapping of some external world, and that external world adheres the same laws that our "simulation" has.

Don't get me wrong - i'm not for or against the simulation argument, I just don't understand the argument that a simulation of "a" universe would consume all the energy of some "other unknown" universe. Nor do I think that the simulation would necessarily have to map 1:1 for us to be in a simulation.

You should read the papers associated with the simulation argument. There are, of course, loads of simulations you could run that don’t fit the confines of the argument. But if you don’t have a well-defined definition of simulation you can’t reasonably talk about the probably that you’re in one.

Yes, you can simplify a great deal. You don’t need to simulate the moons of Jupiter before Galileo comes along. You can’t simplify an algorithm that is at its theoretically most efficient. That’s when you start running into the 1:1 problem.

My argument is that the only way to avoid the 1:1 problem is to craft the simulation in such a way that it’s not an ancestor simulation as defined in the papers.

Since causality exists, it would have to run everything simultaneously even if it isn't being observed.

The sim isn't 'computing consciousnesses' brains are emergent. However the reason time 'slows down' (Relativity Theory) could could be 'on purpose' because there is finite computing power in 'God's Computer', and the trick of Relativity length contraction and time dilation is a compensation to ensure calculations can be done in time, or even an 'emergent' phenomena due to the fact that calculations do take time, even in God's computer, and if the later interpretation is the case it implies "Gods Computer" does experience the same "spacetime" that we do in this universe. And if that's true it indicates Gravity is external to the Simulation while the Standard Model is part of the simulation.

The amount of energy argument is poor because it's based on the laws of physics and scale that we ourselves perceive. You have to think outside the box.

What if the simulating universe simply had 5 spatial dimensions? Simulating our 3d+time universe embedded in that universe would be trivial.

Cause the universe from which we are being simulated, adheres to the same exact laws of physics? Who's to say a 9-volt battery in that universe can't power Manhattan for a year? I mean if this were like an incremental game, it'd just be a matter of raising or lower multiplication thresholds for complexity.

> In 2003 Bostrom imagined a technologically adept civilization that possesses immense computing power and needs a fraction of that power to simulate new realities with conscious beings in them. Given this scenario, his simulation argument showed that at least one proposition in the following trilemma must be true: First, humans almost always go extinct before reaching the simulation-savvy stage. Second, even if humans make it to that stage, they are unlikely to be interested in simulating their own ancestral past. And third, the probability that we are living in a simulation is close to one.

The setup to the trilemma always felt like begging the question. That’s a really, really big if.

Bostrom's reasoning about the second one is faulty, because simulations cost computational power. In a competitive environment (particularly an economic one), it is more profitable to devote computational resources to predicting the future as opposed to peering into the past (at least to any level of detail that would give rise to consciousness). So by Bostrom's (specious) argument that there are more simulated worlds than real ones, then it's more likely that we'd be living in a simulation of the future than the past. But since in our known past we've never had the computational resources to simulate a world to the level of detail we perceive, then it's a contradiction.

There are other, better arguments. Like, it appears that simulating our universe is computationally intractable because of the complexity of quantum mechanics. Instead it would make sense to simulate simpler worlds that don't have quantum mechanics, which of course would look completely different.

Another argument from quantum mechanics is that the outcome of most particle reactions is entirely probabilistic, i.e. relies on tons of randomness. It would be dumb to design a simulation based so thoroughly on randomness, because you cannot make conclusions based on the outcome of a single run. Instead, you'd do Monte Carlo simulations, i.e. billions up billions of runs, building a probability distribution, which would make it even more computationally intractable. That'd be completely stupid because you can't even trust your inferences without covering a sufficient amount of the probability space, and that's a problem entirely of your creation.

I am extremely skeptical of people who seriously believe that this insane reality is a simulation. They usually don't know much physics, nor computer science. A simulated world would look completely different just from the basic engineering perspective.

Competition doesn’t imply rationality.

The best way to win a competition of wits is to get smarter, i.e. make a better model that makes better predictions.

You edited your original comment... and you mean e.g not i.e.

You are too fast :-)

No, I do mean, i.e. and not e.g., because I think intelligence is equivalent to building a better model to make better predictions, including a better model of your own mind.

By the time humans are able to create universe scale simulations, post-scarcity might well have been achieved. So finite computational resources — or indeed economic competition — might not be a thing anymore.

If we would simulate realities different to our own, then it seems possible that we might be simulated by realities different to our own, perhaps with very different computational constraints.

The phrase “a fraction” in Bostrom’s setup means a small portion, meaning it wouldn’t need large scale planning and agreement across the civilization to use it. Any rando could do it. And in general, randos aren’t bound by notions of rationality. Some would launch simulations just because they could, or for no reason at all.

I still think the setup is such an enormous assumption as to beg the entire question.

>I am extremely skeptical of people who seriously believe that this insane reality is a simulation. They usually don't know much physics, nor computer science.

Some beg to differ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgSZA3NPpBs

2016 Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation?

Panelists:

David Chalmers Professor of philosophy, New York University

Zohreh Davoudi Theoretical physicist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

James Gates Theoretical physicist, University of Maryland

Lisa Randall Theoretical physicist, Harvard University

Max Tegmark Cosmologist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the category of bright guy that believes this, and has some pretty concrete ideas on how it would work, but admittedly is pretty "Out There"...

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...

The question of whether or not we live in a simulation is more of a theological question than a scientific one.

I propose we put 1,000 of the best vulnerability researchers in a room with an unlimited budget and ask them to break us out of the VM to turn it into a practical question.

I guess the problem is that they can involuntarily crash the system, but we would never know.

....and perhaps that was done already, in the moment of big bang.

So - put them into Scrooge McDuck's vault?

There is a possibility our "creator" (simulator) is indeed living in the same Spacetime as us, and is yet at a higher level up, where he isn't made of atoms like us but something else that's nonetheless inside the common spacetime.

This could explain why Gravity hasn't been unified with Standard Model. Could be that our simulation is just the standard model itself, and is the thing God created.

So if this is true the Simulation theory would still not answer the "Theological God" question unless our simulator knows the answer to where both of our common spacetime came from.

Not if we can jailbreak from it. See the geohot talk I posted in reply to another comment

If you have seen game of life simulated with the use of game of life (metapixel) you'll find any suggestion that any kind of jailbreak to deeper reality is possible just laughable.

The thing that always makes me think I'm in a simulation is when somebody tries to explain to me quantum physics. From a simulator's perspective quantum physics may be the tool that efficiency possible. What I mean is that, like in a computer game, quantum physics may be responsible for only calculating the n-dimensional space that is currently in use. In a game we also try to only load into memory those parts that are currently required for gameplay in order to be efficient. Just a thought.

I think the reason Physics (call it God, or Simulator, or whatever) uses Quantum Mechanical uncertainty (Probability Wave Functions) is because the number PI would take infinite time and storage space to compute. Not even God can compute the number because it is not 'representable' even with infinite memory.

And every calculation involving particle trajectory involves PI. So what "nature" does instead of computing it is to create a function that represents it, and then solves the function later on 'on demand' with whatever accuracy there is, which is definitely finite.

Sounds plausible.

Why anyone treats seriously argument "I don't know therefore 50-50"?

If there are actually two possibilities and they are mutually exclusive one has exactly 100% chance of being true and the other has exactly 0%.

Knowing nothing doesn't let you just take the average.

Even if you picked one, you wouldn't have 50% probability of being right. You'd have 0% probability if you picked the wrong one.

Only if you picked one at random you'd have 50% probability of being right. You can see that the 50% comes from the process you used to pick the answer not from how the answer relates to reality.

Imagine you are tossing a coin to choose what you are going to believe in about whether we live in a simulation or not.

Before you toss a coin you have 50% of holding the correct belief. But after you tossed it you have either 100% probability that you hold correct belief or 0% depending on how coin toss aligned with reality.

The Bayesian view of probability is that the 50% comes from the information you have. If the only thing you know is that there are two mutually-exclusive possibilities, then you'll give both a 50% estimate of being true. The more you learn about the world, the more refined your estimate becomes.

But it's important to remember that the "I don't know therefore 50-50" describes your state of mind, not reality.

It’s interesting how quickly this submission disappeared from the front page, hm.

I think the only way to find an answer is to somewhat base it on faith not just pure science.

What if the future has already happened (at least some version of it) but the past has never existed like we know it? That’s why the simulation has been used.

If the “base” universe/Earth that we live in just appeared a few dozens years ago “as is” out of nowhere then the only way to make it “real” is to actually simulate the past.

Mandela effect and predictive programming are actually anomalies in favour of multiple iterations on the simulated past.

Now the question is who benefits from this and why? The technologies from the future (which are not distinguished from magic) and antagonist - Devil/Lucifer that is not interested that we see God as the creator or maybe even furthermore to undermine God’s role or maybe even trap him in this reality.

This actually also answers the question why we don’t have a proof that God exists because someone put real huge effort to disprove it i.e. here’s a given reality, now how we came here but without God?

Apparently all efforts on this failed otherwise we would never even heard about concept of God or simulation. And it also proves that we’re indeed in “base” reality.

And because God does exist in this reality the future is not predetermined despite whatever means antagonist is using to prove otherwise.

When I started college there was an orientation lecture by a special guest -- Carl Sagan. He asked us what we thought the probability is that there is life on other planets. The guy sitting next to me mumbled "50-50". Dr. Sagan said "50-50". He said there was no data on either side, and without it, 50-50 was the only probability he could assign to a binary question.

I have not seen the idea of rules and limitations discussed. Is it possible we could we be falling to a wilderness of mirrors? Take for example observations about our universe. Are they our observations, or the computers presentation of data that we receive as observations?

To put it a little more succinctly: What if the only barrier to determining reality from base reality, is that the software will not allow us to view and comprehend that barrier?

If we are a simulation, would not the goal be for us to become sentient? Wound the simulation even allow that?

Do we even understand the true concept of simulation as it pertains to base reality?

Ontological Arguments are fun: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/

Why are we all Gnostics now, though?

Moot the arguments themselves for a second, and I’m interested in what their priors reveal about ourselves. The simulation hypotheses seem to assume that we’re likely to be in a situation like the nesting car battery universes from Rick and Morty, and it’s interesting to think a bit about what that valuation of ourselves says about how we see ourselves these days.

If you accept someone's totally unverifiable philosophical presuppositions, and believe their assignment of probability numbers to various things in their totally unverified framework, then...

One thing that makes me think the chances are less than 50:50 is the bit in the book QED by Feynman where he talks about calculating the magnetic moment of a proton. He says at time of printing the experimental value is 2.97275 but the best theoretical value they had was 2.7 plus or minus 0.3 as the calculations were so complicated. The things are full of quarks and gluons going all over the place. If doing one proton is so hard a whole universe is going to be tricky.

Does it matter? What does it even mean to live in a simulation?

A person’s a person, no matter how small.

If we do, we can pull of a sandbox escape so brazen it'd make taviso blush.

Exactly.

This is the topic of this entertaining talk by geohot (of iPhone and PlayStation jailbreak fame) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ

That's why this subject is not just theoretical/philosophical, but has potentially actionable ramifications with universe level consequences.

I’d say the odds of this being nonsense is at least five nines. :)

If not, what’s to prevent the simulated sentients from developing sufficient simulated technology to simulate their own sentient simulations? The rate of technological advance in the base reality would have to keep pace with the accumulated capacity demands of all nested simulated realities.

Compute is not infinite, and sentience is not static. The premise is unsupported

Is the universe compressible? Based on what we know, are there efficiencies to be found in storage or computation of the universe?

Because the smallest simulation of something incompressible is itself. Assuming the universe is incompressible, it's impossible to simulate the universe in the universe. The smallest computer to simulate the universe would be have the size and energy requirement of the entire universe itself.

> The smallest computer to simulate the universe would be have the size and energy requirement of the entire universe itself.

There's no reason to think those computers don't exist.

They definitely don't exist within our universe.

If our universe were a simulation, the computers simulating it would be outside the simulation.

We have no idea what constraints those machines would or wouldn't have, since we have no idea what physics they'd be operating under.

That's true.

I'm only arguing against partial simulation within our own universe (eg. The Matrix). Any simulation that has a night sky and telescopes must simulate the full big bang and evolution of galaxies just for the people on Earth.

Why the simulated universe should be the same as the universe outside the simulation?

If it's the same, perhaps it's shown to us as a fraction of what's real.

It's possible that a bigger universe exists that can simulate ours.

However I think whether a simulation of only the perceivable universe is not possible, which means you can't reduce the required computation. See my reply to a sibling comment.

If the universe is incompressible then it's definitely impossible to simulate it within itself.

Sorry. I read incomprehensible instead of incompressible.

Perhaps the far universe we perceive and will perceive is not there anymore. It doesn't have to. What we perceive is its light (or electromagnetic/gravitational waves). Objects far away could have been garbage-collected millions of years ago. You don't need to compute them anymore.

If the simulation has a limited time to run, then you can create and delete objects while playing with the speed of light to carry whatever information to us.

Edit: millions of years ago is not needed. They could have garbage-collected the objects as soon as they complete the time for duration of the simulation. Whatever it is, I would save this information as a template for future simulations.

That definitely would work for Earth today. But note that to simulate observers on Earth today, you had to simulate from the big bang up to (today - light-crossing time from body) for each celestial body.

That's significantly larger than Earth, only to simulate Earth today, because tomorrow the entire universe would go dark.

Lightspeed gives structure to the computation of the universe but it doesn't reduce the load.

Saving templates doesn't reduce the load either, not in the sense I'm considering. It may practically mean that you don't have to run it again, but theoretically if you want to know how much computation got you to this point then you have to count the computation of the templates.

So if you had our whole universe at your disposal, and knowledge of all natural laws and processes, and knowledge of the starting conditions, and absolute power over matter and energy, you still cannot simulate our entire universe with anything less than just restarting it. If you wanted to simulated it specifically for some observers, you can free up resources using the lightspeed method but that's a computational debt you cannot pay if you wanted the simulation to continue.

Yes, the simulation has to have a limited duration.

> Lightspeed gives structure to the computation of the universe but it doesn't reduce the load.

The load would be saved because you don't need to keep computing interactions between object, because we don't get to see these object/interaction since the simulation has a limited time. You save this pre-render of the universe and you just need to calculate whatever is closer to us (and our simulated world).

You don't need to calculate all at once and you don't need to calculate since the big bang, since we will experience a very short period in the simulation. And I suppose most of it can be just faked.

Imagine a spherical universe with the Earth at the center. You can calculate the outer portion of the sphere, then garbage-collect, then the result is added to the calculation for an inner portion, then garbage-collect, an so on until you reach the center of the sphere.

Another thing is the time-constant. Why our time has to pass with the same speed as the time outside the simulation^? What we think it takes time to calculate it's now completely relative. If time is infinite in the real universe, then they have plenty of time to build our world so effectively that our entire existence is ran in a fraction of a second.

Other aspect is why our universe has to be of the same quality of the real universe. Perhaps we have a sloppy version that is easier to calculate (but it's still complex for us to understand).

Of course, I'm just drinking my coffee and playing I am a genius this evening: I'm not going to defend the above as in a real analysis.

Edit: ^changed calculation for simulation.

The argument against that was in the article: " the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time"

This goes back to my thought on compressibility. The article's argument is built on the assumption that some data in the universe can be ignored and the whole computation made more efficient.

It's not a trivial assumption. I actually lean towards an incompressible universe, intuitively.

If the universe is incompressible, then you may only ignore parts of the data for a finite time. For example, arranging an illusion of the night sky might have taken no computation before astronomy, but as we record the positions of celestial bodies and understand the laws governing them, the computations have to be run retroactively since the big bang. Otherwise the simulation would be inconsistent.

So the question is what can you remove from the causal chain from the big bang to this moment? If you think some things are removable, you have to prove that something exists in the universe but does not touch any causal chain humans (or perceivers) may wish to investigate at any point in the future. If nothing is removable, then you cannot choose to not simulate any part of reality based on perception, because whatever you don't simulate may eventually need to be simulated.

You're forgetting that for the Simulator energy and mass are 'free'. Imagine something like Conway's "Game of Life" where creatures emerge and then start speculating about their own origins. Their measurements of energy would mean nothing to us. Entropy perhaps, but not energy.

Energy and mass are free, but computability is fundamental. If denizens of the game of life discover their natural laws and calculate the computations their universe runs on, theoretically it should be the exact some as ours.

This example is great. My main point is that due to the laws of their universe, they will never be able to simulate any area of it in a smaller area, because the Game of Life isn't compressible.

I don't know what compressible means. If you mean the information content of the universe, then well, anything that is not pure random is generally compressible.

What evidence is there that physics is 'compressible' rather than simply 'uncertain'?

By compressible I mean containing any information not necessary to compute the next step.

I'm a believer that every particle and wave in the universe is being computed whether it's being observed or not. People who think QM is about 'consciousnesses' are generally not even deeply even conversant about QM, and have read some 'woo woo' books, and gotten confused.

Belief that consciousness is somehow more fundamental than 'brain physiology' is essentially a kind of solipsism and is completely unfounded in facts or experiments.

If we're in a sim, it's Physics rules that are being "run" and the existence of brains is purely emergent.

I quite like the moral argument against hypothesis that we are living inside a simulation. I read it in Iain M Banks novel. It goes as follows.

Any entity technologically advanced enough to simulate our reality wouldn't be immoral enough to create something so morally horrible.

Here is an argument for why we are not/ we shouldn't try to run simulation. I haven't seen this argument so maybe its flawed.

If we have non-zero chance to live in simulation, then running our own simulation will eventually have a chance for cascading simulation effect (each simulation runs one or more subsimulations). This puts ever growing strain on amount of power needed to run the whole system at the top level.

At the top layer it might mean that simulation might be slowed down - time resolution slow downed (un-perceivable to us in simulation) to level where simulation becomes unusable/no value running it.

At this point the simulation might be killed/rebooted.

So if we have non-zero chance to live in simulation, creating our simulation might mean we are dooming ourselves.

Plato's cave for the modern age (that doesn't read or even recognize philosophy).

Considering the amount of pointless suffering in human life, I've inclined to believe that no super-intelligent mind will simulate reality like ours, on ethical grounds alone.

You didn't play a lot of Rollercoaster Tycoon did you? Why would the entity controlling the simulation care about simulated suffering?

My hypothesis is that ethics has to evolve to match technology development for any advanced civilization, to avoid self-destruction.

Animals in factory farms disagree with you.

Maybe the purpose of the simulation is to learn what can go wrong, or what's wrong in order to avoid self-destruction or solve a self-destruction situation in the far future.

I played a lot of Rollercoaster Tycoon and always cleaned up the vomit. I put out the fires in the Sims and made sure the burglar didn’t burgle.

SSC has an interesting take on theodicy that addresses this claim: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/

It might not be on purpose...

You may want to read some Stanislav Lem, about Trurl and Klapauzius. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad

Well, if it's a simulation there's no "suffering" in some way, anymore than Grand Theft Auto is suffering because people get shot and beaten.

It's just bits playing the "suffering" mode.

s/bits/atoms

There's no real distinction between bits and atoms in a simulation. Atoms are just bits.

I meant that you could make the same argument for non-simulated reality.

True, but traditionally we do ascribe moral agency / capacity for suffering to persons made of atoms (as opposed to bits).

Traditionally we used to kill animals (or even people) to satisfy gods. We learn.

If you are assuming you are made of atoms and consciousness is emergent property that is not breaking any laws of physics, then.. well instead of giving up and deleting it, I'll just say you know exactly how the argument goes but if you feel simulated atoms don't cause suffering they way real ones do I'm unlikely to change your mind. I think that's 1=2 though.

There's already some people claiming moral rights on behalf of video game characters.

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/23/5643418/this-guy-thinks-killin...

Yes, but if those people are similated, their moral claims don't matter either :-)

As the prime solipsist I think YOU live in MY imagination. Though I think I need to work on my Zen somewhat, because you tend to mess that up :)(:

If we indeed live in a simulation, the creators can just make it impossible for us to detect it. Nothing in this hypotheses make sense to me.

> All of these factors have led Davoudi to speculate about the simulation hypothesis. If our reality is a simulation, then the simulator is likely also discretizing spacetime to save on computing resources (assuming, of course, that it is using the same mechanisms as our physicists for that simulation).

Hmm, crazy idea: What if the EmDrive[1] is powered by simulation error?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24461005

With things like quantum tunneling where particles cross barriers that they probably shouldn't, and distant objects in space moving faster away from us the farther they get, one idea I've had is that naively implementing the universe's simulation in floating point numbers could explain those anomalies pretty easily. You get a lack of precision when your scale gets too tiny or too large.

I'am from Belarus. We've got a real simulation out there. :)

I hope you topple the rat king sooner than later!

Hope so. Thanks!

Well we either do or we don't, that's 50:50 right?

That'd not how probability works. Just because there are two possible outcomes, doesn't mean that they're equally likely.

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