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Comment by mcculley | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

I see a lot of speculation about the possibility that our universe is a simulation. But our experience with inadvertently building Turing-complete systems makes me wonder if our universe is running on something that is just a side-effect of some other computation and not something deliberately constructed.

Someone in the enclosing universe could fix a bug and suspend or destroy our universe.

Or the computational substrate on which our universe executes is just some natural process in the enclosing universe, like sea foam or solar flares.

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I've recently had this really bizarre intuitive insight telling me I'm just living out the actions that were either pre-recorded as a movie or are computed along the way, and I'm just perceiving it as my actions and my will, like my own volition is just another type of experience or an illusion and not a real phenomenon. Hard to explain, it's very elusive. Another insight was that my internal observer is a separate entity, one that might survive death and isn't really related to my intelligence or personality, but is limited by them (like driving a slow car).

you have probably read some vedanta book or snippet from the book

ha, how weird it'd be if we're just a bug and not the feature. Totally throws the idea of a god out, I mean sure a programmer launched our instance but we were created totally by accident.

"just some random test deployment"

I wonder what the automated tests will look like to us...

Our universe is actually just a poorly written flaky integration test that failed to return early on error and is gonna keep running until the entire test finishes

We are those tests, observing the code from inside :)

Sounds like the "Dark" TV show on Netflix.

> Someone in the enclosing universe could fix a bug and suspend or destroy our universe.

It is not as simple. See Permutation City.

TL;DR; from a perspective of a person living in Game of Life, your time doesn't rewind when the computer running it rewinds the state.

I did not say that the state was reversible. If you are trying to say that non-reversibility implies that state cannot be destroyed, we would need more than your TLDR.

The hoop from TL;DR; is that what happens with the simulation hardware has no bearing on the universe defined by the laws of the simulation. Reversibility is just an example. By changing simulation you just choose a different universe to look at.

This would provide comfort to residents of a simulation who still think the self is something other than an illusion.

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