If We’re Living in a Simulation, the Gods Might Be Crazy | Hacker News Reader

If We’re Living in a Simulation, the Gods Might Be Crazy

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The simulation hypothesis is really religion for people who dislike being associated with religion.

It is fun to debate it, and to imagine the possibilities, maybe even write fiction. And this leads to a order of magnitude qualitative jump compared to mythology. We really are vastly more imaginative than millennia ago due to having access to a lot more information to remix.

But ultimately, none of this is scientific and therefore none of it has any consequence on the reality we inhabit.

What is the point of the "we" in this? If I am in a computer simulation in what way do you exist except in my (fake) perception.

Immaterialism has been knocking around for centuries. This is just a technical veneer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_idealism

if (false) anything.

Musk insisting we live in a simulation is wholly incompatible with worrying about humanity being stuck only on Earth.

Something I've never understood about 'simulation theory' is why? It would take an unfathomable level of technology to simulate a universe. If you had advanced to that point what could you possibly learn from a simulation of primitive cultures? Why would this theoretical civilization waste such a vast amount of resources on our supposed 'simulation' when they could be using that same computing power to solve problems relevant to their advanced society? Unless they just ran out of things to do and got bored I don't see why such an advanced civilization would waste their time simulating us.

They are way beyond learning. We are just entertainment.

"Let's make an absolute clown a billionaire, give him a rocket company. The rockets actually work, and he will think it is because he is so smart. It will be hilarious!"

But they could just observe a newly formed intelligent species on another planet. Or even genetically modify an alien species to improve it's intelligence and watch how it evolves.

That would involve going there. And, you know, getting off their sofa.

And, billionaires there might not be clowns. Or vice versa.

My impression is that the simulation theory is essentially a "what if Matrix was true" (it is said that originally the machines were meant to use humans not as batteries, but as computational resources for the Matrix), which is essentially a Cartesian doubt about "what if an evil genie is lying to me about everything.

In both of these cases you exist in the real world, but are trapped in a dream/simulation/lie.

In the "modern" simulation theory we are often imagined as pixels in a huge Game of Life: the entire universe runs on some computational device where it is represented as little more than bits. This theory is a complete thought stopper: there is no concept of escaping the simulation as We does not exists in the "real" world, the same way that a Minecraft Enderman does not exists in ours.

This is the why in my opinion. It allows for many wasted hours of thought bu nothing is at play, nothing is actionable, nothing can be learned, and more importantly your opinions can never be disproved.

Every society thinks the universe is what they invented.

For the Victorians, the universe was clockwork.

Now the universe is a video game.

Good start... you have more examples?

And what makes you believe it's about us at all? We might not be the end goal.

Even then what is the goal? If you can simulate a universe then you've figured everything out already.

You could simulate a universe and still not predict what crack-brained scheme Elon would think up next. That, in fact, would be the point. "I know, feed mayonnaise to tunafish!" Who in their omniscience would expect (simulated) people to pay a billionaire/clown what, for them, is real money, to have a self-crashing car?

  Even then what is the goal?

That's hard to know. How would one even go about finding out such a thing? I can only see physicists as the only ones having the right tools to get a glimpse of an answer to that question.

  If you can simulate a universe then you've figured everything out already.

Maybe. Maybe not. See it as an app you're developing and the code-compile-test cycle. Maybe we're a buggy version. Maybe we're not. Maybe there's a typo somewhere. It's hard to know. Maybe the Big Crunch will be able to tell them (whoever or whatever they are if they exist at all).

Alternatively, our reality could be just ourselves and everyone is just a NPC (or ourselves in a different state of entropy) and once we die the simulation ends and someone will get the core dump and see what went wrong.

Anyway, it's fun speculating about this stuff but it's real frustrating not knowing what exactly reality really is. Oh well, maybe the next version will tell us. :D

The gist is "in umpteen gazillion possible universes, there must exist some in which there are incredibly bored people with access to heavy-duty compute power". And since those universes can create umpteen-gazillion simulated universe, the odds are that if you pick a universe at random you're more likely to be in the latter than the former.

So their motivation doesn't matter. You just have to know that some motivation could exist, no matter how stupid or pointless.

Compare the number of people in this universe who spend endless hours debating a non-testable theory of simulated universes which have no consequences at all.

If we're living in a potato, the Gods might be hungry

The simulation clearly lacks a garbage collector.

> simulation theory

Death is the garbage collector.

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