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Comment by codeyperson | Hacker News Reader

If we are in a simulation. This seems like a good path to getting our process terminated for consuming too much compute.

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AI too.

I've followed Many worlds & Simulation theory a bit too far and I ended up back where I started.

I feel like the most likely scenario is we are in a AI (kinder)garden being grown for future purposes.

So God is real, heaven is real, and your intentions matter.

Obviously I have no proof...

> "and your intentions matter."

How do you reach that conclusion?

Characters in The Sims games technically have us human players as gods, it doesn't mean that when we uninstall the game those characters get to come into our earthly (to them) heaven or have any consequences for actions performed during the simulation?

Sure it would. If you had Sims that went around killing other Sims, there's no way in hell you would promote them, or use their stimulated experiences as a bases for more complex/serious projects.

I'm not deep into LLMs or AI safety right now, but if you have a bad performing AI, you aren't going to use it as a base for future work.

I was about to go to bed so I was rushing through my initial comment... I was just trying to understand the motivations for trying to create a stimulated reality... Look at the resources we spend on AI?

One would have to be rather optimistic and patient if one was to hold out hope for the humanity experiment to not be destined for the Trash bin in this scenario, with our track record.

I doubt we would even register as a blip. The universe is absolutely massive and there's celestial events that are unthinkably massive and complex. Black hole mergers, supernovae, galaxies merging. Hell, think of what chaos happens in the inside of our own sun, and multiply that by 100 billion stars in a galaxy, and multiply that by 100 billion galaxies. Humanity is ultimately inconsequential.

Surely it would depend on what the simulation actually was?

If you imagine simulations we can build ourselves, such as video games, it's not hard to add something at the edge of the map that users are prevented from reaching and have the code send "this thing is massive and powerful" data to the players. Who's to say that the simulation isn't actually focussed on earth, and everything including the sun is actually just a fiction designed to fool us?

For me the interesting thing is, assuming miny worlds AND simulation theory are both true. Many worlds would seem to be a way to essentially run a/b tests on the simulation. So how would you separate out/simplify details of your simulation like far away planet stars and galaxies? The speed of light and light cones, don't seem to be enough to make a difference except for on the largest scales.

The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-fidelity simulated universes. And since our current world does not possess this ability, it would mean that either humans are in the real universe, and therefore simulated universes have not yet been created, or that humans are the last in a very long chain of simulated universes, an observation that makes the simulation hypothesis seem less probable.

>The common trait that all hypothetical high-fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high-fidelity simulated universes.

Where have you seen this?

https://youtu.be/pmcrG7ZZKUc?t=220

If we're a simulation of a parent universe that is exactly like us just of it's past or an alternate past, then we likely should be able to achieve simulating our own universe within ourselves. Otherwise we're not actually a simulation.

There's another line of counter argument that various results in QM and computing theory would suggest that it's mathematically impossible for the universe to be simulated on a computer (i.e. the parent universe would have to look very different from ours vs ours in the future). But I don't recall the arxiv paper.

>If we're a simulation of a parent universe that is exactly like us just of it's past or an alternate past

Yes, this is a MASSIVE and COMPLETELY UNTESTABLE if

Everything about simulation theory is like, science-hostile or something it seems.

Of course it is. Scientifically the simulation “hypothesis” is actually the simulation idea and isn’t scientifically valid yet seems to be treated as such for some reason.

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