this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
43 points (82.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43959 readers
969 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The idea is self-defeating. A simulation requires a higher reality for it to be contained within. Which in turn would by definition not be a simulation.
Another way to look at it is as any civilisation gets sufficient technology they begin simulating entire universes, to better understand their own.
That means we're either the OG universe and haven't figured out how to run simulations of that size yet (so no simulated universes exist yet), or there is some chain of universes above us who are likely also simulated until you get to the OG universe.
Considering everything in our universe seems to follow a set of base rules (speed of light, attraction between masses, etc), I'm partial to thinking of those as essentially input variables prior to our sim being run.
Explain that, please
Suppose I had a copy of the Sims. Inside the copy of the Sims, the characters are looking around and notice things that seem suspicious about their world. They come to the conclusion they're in a simulation, a video game. But nobody asks what they were made to simulate? Because it always implies there is something which, to them, is metaphysical, i.e. our world. And, if they were thinking about this, it would devalue the simulation theory itself, because if the basis is a higher world, that would be the point of reference of why things are the way they are anyways, thus saying "so-and-so is the way it is because we live in a simulation" would be a moot remark.
Not quite.
For example, in Minecraft it approximates aspects of this world, but because of processing capabilities isn't doing so at the same fidelity.
So people in Minecraft discussing why everything is made up of giant blocks would probably get great value out of the realization that they are in a simulation of a higher fidelity world that needed to be rendered at a lower fidelity for processing reasons. Scientists in Minecraft could further their understanding of the rules governing it likely much more successfully if they also understood the why directing the how.
A simulation is generally unlikely to be an exact replica of the universe simulating it, even if attempting to be a representative digital twin.
So a virtual machine is a lower reality version of a computer?
In a sense, either "sub reality" or "para reality". The latter is how I think.