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Comment by snakeyjake | Hacker News Reader

Simulation hypothesis is silly.

The odds of this perceivable reality being a simulation and the odds that the reality in which this simulation is being ran IS ITSELF also a simulation are the same. There's no other way around this.

If this is true and it must be, then the odds of this perceivable reality being a simulation and it also being just one in an infinitely large nested stack of simulations are the same. The chance that each layer in the infinite chain of simulations having an infinite number of simulations, each being the top of an infinitely deep well of nested simulations each containing infinite simulations forming a soupy haze of simulations simulating simulation is very high-- if not certain.

It's silly.

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> There's no other way around this.

What if the universe which simulates ours is so inconceivably different to ours that we simply cannot conceive how it works, and something in how it works makes it fundamentally unsimulatable? Or is simulationability somehow an inter-universal constant?

>Or is simulationability somehow an inter-universal constant?

That's my thought but then it's silly to call it a simulation-- it's just reality.

I believe whatever universe "contains" us or simulates us has to be inconceivably different to ours. For us, only the physics of this universe makes sense and it seems pretty straightforward to imagine that we cannot conceive of any rules that the outside world follows.

The insimulatable fesature, if it existed at all, could be at any link of the upper universe chain. It would be extremely unlikely for it to exist exactly above ours; it changes little the initial proposition.

Are you sure that the probability that reality being a simulation is identical to the probability that the parent reality is itself a simulation? For us to be in a simulation, we cannot exist in the top-level reality, so let's arbitrarily say 10^100-1/10^100 chance. For our parent reality to also be a simulation, we cannot be in the top reality or the children of the top reality, which should be a slightly less likely scenario. So it seems like the probabilities are not equal.

It is true the chances are not equal.

But it's close enough to ∞-1/∞ to not merit further analysis so I chose to round.

Edit: wait, I think that the chance that WE'RE the top level host of quadrillions upon quadrillions of simulations being run in this universe by intelligences beyond our comprehension in trillions of galaxies and the chance that we're a simulation being run in a top level reality are the same. How can they not be?

Sure but I think infinite here is doing some conceptual heavy lifting and is making a fundamental assumption about how many universes a universe can simulate and to what fidelity. So if we replace infinity with 'a very large number', I think certainty turns into improbability, which feels to be a much weaker "argument".

Without enough knowledge they definitely are equal. How do you know THIS isn't top-level reality?

You can't say this isnt the top-level reality because of your belief of escape.

Only if you can confirm this is a simulation then the chances of getting to top-level reality do become higher the more you escape.

But then you'd also have to know if you're moving outward or inward in order to verifiably raise the chances of getting to top-level reality.

"Without enough knowledge they definitely are equal." Wouldn't it be, "Without enough knowledge, they could be equal."? Since we do not know if we are in a simulation, why would we assume we are not or that we are?

That's a cool comment, but I don't think the idea of nested simulations makes anything silly. It just means we have a lot of levels to climb and therefore a lot of potentially beautiful things to explore.

One can imagine even a more crazy scenario than a stack of sumulated worlds: a strange loop simulation that would involve a cycle -- our universe simulating one of its parents.

Simulations are orders of magnitude simpler than their hosts, they wouldn't have the resources to simulate their hosts. It's like asking an emulated SNES to emulate the same gaming PC it's running on.

Good point, yet a universe could in principle be infinite, so it's still a theoretical possibility, however crazy.

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