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Comment by ro_bit | Hacker News Reader

Now I'm curious how the behavior of the people in the "first" universe, unencumbered by the idea of how affecting the machine's reality would affect their own reality, is different from the behavior of the people we see.

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I imagine that they couldn't be perfectly confident that they weren't just far enough away from the fixed point that their universe was the same as the one they observed.

A sort of a Roko's Basilisk, except with an omnipresent dread that they might be say, the 2nd or 3rd universe and the first just hadn't messed with them yet.

If they do anything that scares or abhors the people above, they could be turned off. Maybe they're not even sure if the people above them are waiting to see if they only benevolently observe the universe below them.

That makes sense. Anyone not living close to the "asymptote" of universe generations can't prove that they're in a simulation, but they can't prove they aren't either. Maybe each of those universes keeps trying to simulate an infinite number of slightly varied universes in the hopes of simulating their progenitors, making an infinite amount of uncertainty and suffering in their attempts.

> If they do anything that scares or abhors the people above, they could be turned off.

But maybe also if they are too boring. :(

Well, as the simulations run and are interfered with, the higher up simulations will diverge more and more from those lower down. An interesting direction this could go in would be if eventually a low-level universe created a person who was needed in a higher universe. Then we could have avatars being created in higher up universes to enable simulated beings to interact, perhaps even up to the top level...

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