If I made a simulation, I would be interested in how the simulated agents interact with each other. I would only set some very basic restrictions on them (don’t fall out of bounds, maintain self-preservation). I would be very interested in what kinds of questions they come up with, what kind of structures they make using cooperation, overall behavior (assuming i’m interested in the agents in the first place).
Of course, if the simulation is not good enough, I’ll just close the simulation, change some parameters and restart the sim using an earlier snapshot.
Source: I worked with simulations.
maintain self-preservation
The simulator running us clearly did not define this restriction.
It’s for the really dumb stuff. It’s more of “don’t fall from the edge of a tall building”, and not “don’t create a market scenario which will lead to the downfall of human civilization”
Why not? Not like they can break out or anything
Because their creators allowed them to ponder and speculate about it.
If we’re in a simulation, it’s probably a massive universe-spanning one. We’re just a blip, both within the scale of the space of the universe and within the history of time of the universe. In that case, we’re not important enough for a simulation creator to even care to adjust our capabilities at all. They’re not watching us. We’re not the point of the simulation.
Do they, though?
How many people can stop for some moment and think “Yeah, this thing called existence seems so bizarre… Maybe this spoon I’m holding right now actually doesn’t exist?” on their own?
People wake up and rush in an exhausting day-to-day stuff, until they sleep to rest for another busy day. People’s minds are constantly flooded with mundane stuff. For many, many people, it’s mundanely impossible to have some spare time to stop and come to realize that there’s no “real”.
But when a person did come to that conclusion, even when they aren’t so dedicated to keep questioning the conundrums of existence, they can’t plant The Seed of Doubt inside the minds of others, because, as mentioned before, the other people are too busy to listen to something that won’t really help but make them gaze into the depths of the abyss and be gazed back in a wonderful yet painful connection with the primordial chaos filling the emptiness of every single atom.
So, the “creators” of this “simulation” (actually I believe there is something more complex to be nominated, it has to do with too-long-to-describe cosmic principles all the way to the aeternal interplay between primordial order and primordial chaos) don’t need to “disallow/prohibit” the pondering and speculation of the nature of the existence, the constant bodily and mundane call for survival makes it impossible to have a time and space for those questions to happen, and those who have will simply have no means to effectively spread the act of their own questioning.
Just because we’re living in a simulation doesn’t mean we are simulated. So perhaps the architects of the simulation can’t simply program our questions away.
Yes it does. What it might not mean is that we are intended.
Not necessarily. You’re correct that we cannot account for intention. Neither can we assert whether we are simulated. Even if we can prove this reality is simulated we cannot be sure if we are part of the simulation or inserted into it (a la The Matrix) from our current position.
Exactly. For some people, maybe it’s part of the definition of a simulation that we are also simulated, but that’s not necessarily a part of the definition. We could be a part of it, or we could be an audience or consumers of it. Occupants. Whatever.
Maybe that’s the entire point
Maybe the devs were debating whether it’s possible for a simulated sentient intelligence to figure out it’s in a simulation. What if there was a bet, and the only way to prove other dev wrong was to actually build the simulation and let it run its course. I mean, it’s just a quick little experiment about a single universe in 3D space with linear time.
Reality ia amazing but to value our blissful existence we have to go through a simulation of how horrible the exitance could be. I for exemple am incredibly happy in reality but Taylor swift is an 1 eye, no arms, Afgan orfan in reality… Or just reality Mcdonalds employeeq
This comment reads like a person who keeps being pulled into previous lives, and started hallucinating they were some monkish writer.
Are you ok?
Are any of us?
There are happy people in the world. Just not on social media so much talking about how they feel. Because they are fine.
Creators don’t have to be all-knowing. Also, because believing this reality is a simulation does not change the rules we live by, there is no difference between the life of a sim-denier and sim-believer. It’s not as if you’d be punished just for [redacted].
Depends on the structure of the simulation. If it’s general enough then they didn’t specifically plan to have this capacity, it’s just the result of the inputs and constraints of the simulation. If anything it would be beneficial to see an outcome as to the types of intelligence that arise.
My best guess: The thought processes required to ponder the possibility of a simulation are too important to the goal of the simulation itself to disable.
Because that’s what people outside of a simulation would do.
Video game designers do something similar to this in hiding “Easter eggs” in their games and the code that makes the game that often break the 4th wall or just bypass it.
Maybe it’s fun? See who can figure it out and come as close as they can to the truth without actually getting to the truth?
It’s not like my Conway’s Game of Life creatures can ever escape their petri dish. I’m so zoomed out that I wouldn’t even notice if they were intelligent.
If we weren’t capable of higher reasoning to ask this kind of question, it wouldn’t be a very good simulation, would it?
Maybe they’re testing to see if and how we prove we’re in a simulation as part of figuring out if they are themselves in one
Maybe they’re re-creating the circumstances of their own world to test theories that they can apply in the real world, and since they can ponder whether or not they’re in a simulation then we have to be able to as well or we’d act too differently
Maybe it’s a total accident. They’re actually studying something over in Andromeda and we’re just a funny accident created as a byproduct of the rules of the simulation
