No Stupid Questions

Every time I need to cross a seemingly empty street, suddenly cars appear. I can't help but imagine it's a render distance issue.

Simulation theory is more or less a kind of modern creation myth, and creation myths are based around its societies current level of understanding of the world. In ancient times people explained the worlds actions and existence through gods and imaginative myths. When the scientific revolution happened people explained the universe in terms of immutable laws and cosmic logic. Now we are in the computational revolution, thus some people explain the worlds existence through computers. All untestable and unfalsifiable explanations for the nature of reality are as good as any other, so pick your poison and enjoy!

According to some, assuming it's even possible to fully simulate a universe to the degree that life in it can't tell, then there should be multiple simulations running, so there would be more sim-universes than real ones, and odds would be high that any given universe you find yourself in would be a sim.

Personally I don't buy it, I think if we were in a sim the laws of physics would have to be easily computable (they aren't, see gluons) and I think it would take the computing power of an entire universe to simulate one of similar complexity at anywhere close to reasonable speed. (Note how emulators and virtual machines can only emulate a weaker system then the host system, at least at speeds comparable to native hardware)

• The render distance (observable universe)
• The pixel size (Planck units)
• And the update rate ('speed of light' = speed of information being updated)

The idea that it's theoretically possible that we would be able to simulate a universe of our own leads to the hypothesis that we could be living in a simulation ourselves.

It gives comfort for people who don't adhere to any of the major religions but still need to feel like there is a hidden meaning to existence and something bigger than the universe.

You cannot disprove this hypothesis and it's cool. Quite literally nothing can support it - if we live in a simulation, every part of the universe makes sense for us because we have no reference frame for "real" physics.

It's just something fun to think about but ultimately it doesn't matter, you have no way to find out.

At this point does it matter? If it turns out tomorrow we have proof we live in a simulation, it doesn’t make my life any less real. I still gotta go to working tomorrow lol.

For a slightly different take, a simulation and reality are not that fundamentally different given how both are perceived by senses in a similar way. Like how a VR headset uses the same sense that you use to see real objects.

They start to diverge in a way when you start encountering edge phenomenon that are beyond the scope of the simulation, like how a game would glitch. So far, however much we zoom in or zoom out, reality works consistently. So it is less likely that we're in a simulation.

I think it's a contemporary way of viewing the creation problem that religion has also been trying to address. Who created the universe, and who created the one who created the universe. What caused the Big bang. Etc.

The whole thing is irrelevant in my opinion. It doesn't matter, because whatever initialised existence is outside of our existence. That would be separated in dimensions, or even if we could interact with it, it would at least be in a completely different frame of time. The entire existence of our universe could be a blink of an eye in whatever is outside of it.

It seems like megalomania to me for humans to believe that they can ever figure this one out. Just like the microbes in our bodies can't interact with us, I don't have any hope for humans to ever understand how the entire universe interacts with it's creator, whether it's a simulation, a devine creation or the result of physics.

If it's a simulation and we are just variables in a sub-routine, then its futile to claim that we can ever figure out what is outside our loop. We can catch global variables from the main loop, like natural constants, but we'll never see the code that calls our sub.

The only reason to believe it is that we can also not prove that it isn't so. Someone claims that it's statistically unlikely that it's not a simulation but I'm not so sure about that argument. It's based on an extremely deterministic view, that everything can be simulated with enough computer power, which itself is a questionable view.

I'm a weak solipsist - I firmly believe that "I think therefore I am" is the only truth we can know. Everything else, we take on faith.

That said, it doesn't really matter. We live in the reality we perceive. There's no practical difference between living in reality and living in a simulation.

Because thinking that we are here for no specific reason is scary

What does it mean to "live in a simulation"? If I created a sentient computer program that has no contact with the outside world then you would say it's living in a simulation, but if you took that same exact program and connected it to a robot you'd say it's living in reality. But what's the line? If you add a tiny glimpse of reality but 99.9% of its experiences are stimulated is it living in a simulation or reality? It's not necessarily a black or white thing but more like a spectrum. In that sense you could say that our brains are creating a simulation of the outside world based on real inputs, but our perception of reality is not necessarily accurate. I would say our brains are on the spectrum of being a simulation of reality because not everything we experience is necessarily real.

The limits of physics could be a rendering limit on the simulation hardware.

Because Elon Musk believes in it, I know it’s probably wrong.

Once I learned about quantum field theory, the distinction between reality and simulation kind of went away for me. It says that all of reality is essentially number values for different fundamental fields. A particle exists when the value for this field is d and the value for that field is y. But the only fundamentally real things are the fields. Everything else are just a configuration of number values within them that together conform to mathematical logic.

This sounds a lot like software to me. Whether it’s running on quantum fields or a fucking Pentium 3 doesn’t seem super important.

So sweeping aside the technology as irrelevant, we have turn to the issue of whether the universe is contrived by programmers. The question becomes: did people create the universe? And my opinion of us just isn’t that high.

What's the difference?

Here’s Elon Musk’s argument (not saying I agree with it but here’s what he said about it):

Eventually we will be able to create entirely convincing simulations. Just look at video games. The graphics are getting pretty good.

So given that we will inevitably create such simulations, we have to ask whether it has perhaps already happened and this is one of them.

And since we will no doubt create many different simulations, millions of them, the odds are against this one being the prime reality. It’s just millions-to-one odds by the numbers.

Therefore this is almost certainly a simulation.

(Personally I think there are factual and logical problems at many steps in this)

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If you have the fundamental belief that if we know every single possible detail down to the atom, that we can predict what will happen every time, then you believe that free will does not exist. If you think of it that way, and think everything is calculated, then it could be theoretically be possible for some kind of super computer to generate everything since it knows all the information and can calculate what will happen next.

It's based on the idea that if we were, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

My life is “Murphy’s Law: the Movie”. Every time I try to reassure myself by saying “well, at least it can’t possibly get any worse than this”, it gets worse. There’s no way that there isn’t some asshole running a simulation where they just fuck with me.

Because everything can be expressed mathematically.