I agree it's interesting, but most of it seems to be "if <assumption about simulated reality>, then <consequences of that assumption>."

I don't find any of his assumptions especially plausible. In fact, I don't think it's possible to determine the "expected" nature of a simulated reality.

That you exist as a thinking thing does not mean you are not 'only' a data construction yourself, ie if you are in a simulation there is no way that I can see of knowing whether you have been placed in it, or are a construct of it. Even if you could somehow determine the former it does not mean you are the only sentient mind contained therein. In any event the problem of other minds exists whether it is a simulation or not, we ultimately only have observed behavior to go on.

Reality is a falsifiable hypothesis. (?)

Proceed.

I would treat life much like I treat GTA

We would have no idea if it would actually be any effort for the non-simulated world to create us. You would like to consider ourselves to be the crysis of the non-simulated world, but we might as well be the pong that was forgotten on by some poor kid living in the basement.

I am not accepting them or even giving them any probability, I am acknowlidging them as possibilities. If I was creating a simulation for you specifically I wouldn't bother actually simulating 1.3 billion chinese when I can just make you belive by creating a few minutes of tv news that there are 1.3 billion chinese (and clearly we do think there are 1.3 billion chinese). I dont see how this sort of scenario could apply to a non-simulated world by how I at least would define a non-simulated world (maybe it could, I dont know).

"Believed" definitely not, I would have to know for a fact. Then: Hell Yes. I have a long list of people I want to punch in the face, I'd start there lol

Why would I?

Convincing myself I am in a simulated reality is one thing, convincing myself that I am both in a simulated reality and that I created the simulated is something totally different. Amusing it even makes sense the latter is numerous orders of likelihood less believable than the former.

In fact I am not sure I could. The problem is believing I created the simulation, rather than just being in one. I am willing to accept that it is conceivable to get convincing evidence that we are in a simulation, but not that I created it!

So we are NPCs rather than PCs. Fine. So remind me how it is possible for me to make a simulation if I am only part of the simulation?

Load of nonsense if you ask me. So what has this got to do with simulations?

Argh! You appear to be saying that the Many Worlds Interpretation implies everything that could happened has/will. Hence there must be lots of simulations with me in created by me. Same way there are infinte Presidents of the USA who are also aardvarks. Because there are so may of them the odds are we are in one of them.

Complete nonsense. And your making it too complicated.

There is the much simpler arguments that if we (as a civilization, or even as part of a pooled collection of civilizations in our local group of galaxies) were ever to create an accurate civilization simulation then it follows that characters in that simulation would also create such a simulation. Leading to a nested set of simulations with only the one top level. Pick a character at random then the odds are that it is in a simulation.

We could be in a simulation. But until science comes up with any evidence to support the conjecture, I see no utility in assuming it.

Of course not. Thats the whole point, and why we can say that it is entirely possible that we ARE living in a simulation. Because its a hypothesis without teeth. It makes no difference. The hypothetical world in which it is true is indiscernible from the world in which it is false.

I dont think any of your assumptions about a simulated world are reasonable.

Say we ourselves create a simulation of 990 billion people each living in their own copy of Earth where other people except themselves are just npcs without feelings or internal experiences. Each simulated person is aware that there exist 990 billion simulated people, but do not know if they are themselves simulated. Say there are also 10 billion people living in the real world with the only difference to the simulated world that the other people have feelings and internal experiences. Every intelligent simulated and real people now should realize that there is a 99% chance that every person they know is just an npc and they are themselves simulated. Should everyone act as if other people are real or not real? Did the notion about the existence of simulation make a difference?

I do not think it is reasonable to suppose that this hypothetical has any relevance. We cannot know what a "world in which we are simulations" would be like, because we have no way of discriminating that from any other possible world. IOW, sure, it might be the way you describe, but it might be entirely different, and we have literally zero information about it.

P(real|simulation) = P(real|~simulation)

The fact that P(real|simulation, and 99% of people are not real) =/= P(real|~simulation) has no bearing on anything. (It's not something we can prove regardless - P(real|~simulation) could be 1%).

Anyhow, P(real|simulation, and 99% of people are not real) = P(real|~simulation, and 99% of people are not real)

The question of whether it's a simulation is irrelevant, your added assumption that 99% of people are not real is doing all the heavy lifting.

With respect to this question, you're not just adding that assumption, you are also adding the assumption that the first assumption is common knowledge, which takes this waaaay outside the scope of the original question.

Sure but the premise of the thread is that we know or are very convinced that the world is a simulation. If there is absolutely nothing that should make us think there is a decent chance we live in a simulation then yes obviously it would be really dumb to live differently. The very knowledge that we live in a simulated reality should however change quite a lot: we for example would gain the knowledge that reality was created by some outside source, we would know that reality is discrete, know the origin of laws of physics and so on.

In the hypothetical the real world is completely the same as it was before and the simulations are subjectively indiscernible from the real world, and yet the simulations have a huge bearing on the behaviour of all people.

This is an interesting post. Can you please elaborate on what you mean?

Yeah.

lolno

nope

doubt it

What's clear is that if we all knew we lived in a simulation, that would change plenty, because people have so many silly preconceptions about what a simulation entails.

Everything depends on the detail. Maybe read some Scientific American article about it. Perhaps I will be able to understand some of detail.

Okay maybe we are being run by a hypercomputer. I think it’s very reasonable to think nature is digital, if we know we live in a simulation, but I guess that might depend on how define simulation. Would a world run by some sort of supernatural god be a simulation?
Sure we would. It's software.
We would know consciousness is computable or at least hypercomputable.

It would change your assumptions about the world and I would further claim that it would change the set of possibilities in the world.

Take for example the notion of intelligent design. In a state of ignorance we have at least two possibilities: the world was designed or it wasn't, in a simulated world (that we know is simulated) we have one possibility. In a state of uncertainty it is possible that you live in a simulation and it is possible that in the simulation only you have internal experiences, when knowing we live in a simulated world we obviously assign higher possibility (possibility!=probability) that we live in simulation where only you have internal experiences than in a state of uncertainty. Knowing we live in a simulation would exclude many theories about the origin of the universe, nature of life and so on.

If it's a world within a world, then I would say yes. But it doesn't matter all that much. If nature isn't digital, then we can almost certainly construct computers that aren't digital. It can certainly be done in theory.

If it's impossible to determine whether nature is digital, then it would be hard to justify the position that it definitely is, and we certainly have no basis for speculating about what happens outside the simulation.

If nature is digital, and we can discover that, it tells us that our simulation is digital - but that's a tautology. And it still doesn't tell us whether whatever is "outside" the simulation is digital, or whether there are other simulations, or whether those other simulations are digital.

You're talking about the nature of physics, not the origins. But I think saying "physics is software" is pretty vacuous. "Software" in this sense is extremely broad, certainly the software used to simulate our reality may not resemble the software we use within our reality in any meaningful way. It may not even be possible in principle for us to create software resembling that used in the "greater reality," in which case there's nothing we can say about it.

No, we would know that it's possible to route sensory stimuli to existing consciousness. We don't know whether this is a "brains in vats" simulation, a "pure software" simulation, something in-between, or something altogether different. Only in a pure software case would we know that consciousness is computable.

Only if you define "simulation" in such a way as to restrict those possibilities. In which case we're still just speaking of tautologies.

Not at all. Even real simulations aren't always intelligently designed. I suppose you could say some intelligence is present at their inception, but if this reality is a simulation, that opens up cosmologies in which simulations arise randomly. (Actually, there are such cosmologies already, even if we assume our reality isn't a simulation - the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics could result in an infinite "number" of completely random simulations developing, on the same cardinality as the "number" of intentional simulations - which would mean the "likelihood" of one can't be considered greater than that of the other.)

Not obvious at all. Based on egregious logical fallacy I'm guessing, or arbitrary assumptions (certainly assumptions that go well beyond "we live in a simulation").

Unless you mean "possibility" as a psychological phenomenon. In which case, the majority of people may view the "possibility" as higher, sure. They may even be correct in doing so, from a psychological standpoint. But they're wrong.

No, it wouldn't. It would simply imply that those theories discuss a different level of abstraction than we had previously anticipated. There is no such theory that wouldn't be perfectly legitimate in the simulation if it's perfectly legitimate outside the simulation.

If we accept induction, for example, then we more or less have to conclude that the big bang happened in our universe. Whether "our universe" happens to be a simulation is irrelevant to our conclusion that the big bang happened there.

If you think the fact of our living in a simulation makes induction questionable, then all you're doing is raising the problem of induction within the context of our little scenario. But really, the problem of induction applies just as well if we aren't living in a simulation - people like to handwave it away, but that doesn't make it any less of a problem. Solutions such as instrumentalism solve that problem just as well for a simulated reality as for a "real" reality.

In a non-simulated world, the tree is green, the sky is blue, the mountain is high, and we humans use our best bets, i.e. reasoning, measurement and observation (science) and psychological introspection (meditation), to understand the nature of things and ourselves.

In a simulated world, the tree is green, the sky is blue, the mountain is high, and we humans use our best bets, i.e. reasoning, measurement and observation (science) and psychological introspection (meditation), to understand the nature of things and ourselves.

Cheers

I thought majority of people already claim they believe in a simulated reality.

How do you define world within a world? Surely the world is bigger than your perception of it anyway. I guess our definitions are somewhat different. I assumed the premise of the thread was about computed reality, but whatever.
No
Analog computers don’t quite imply real computation. If real computation is possible that would have quite crazy implications. Not that this matters.

Would you agree that we can currently (not knowing the world is a simulation) speculate if the world is digital or not? Would you claim that knowing the world is a simulation should have no effect on that speculation?

I don’t care about "outside" or other simulations.

It implies they are programmed and run by a computer, not calculated on a platonic heaven or spontaneously by magic or whatever. It also implies that the laws of physics might not be impermeable and are not fundamental. I don’t really care about the "greater reality", I care what sense of the world we see can we make with what we have.

If we don’t define simulation in any way we are not speaking about anything.


I would call it intelligently designed even if it involves some kind of random generator as long as it was initially designed and if it wasn't, I wouldn't call it a simulation. Would you for example agree that knowing the world is a simulation has religious implications?


What odds would you need to bet on getting heads twice in a row? What odds would you need to bet on getting heads once? My example however had nothing to do whet ever it is actually more likely that other people are pzombies or npcs in a simulation or a nonsimulation, just what kind of things can we consider to be possible and how many conditions are needed for something to be possible.

I am not comparing the simulation to the world outside of the simulation. I am comparing it to what I thought about the world before I knew it was a simulation. Considering this is what it is asked in the thread I thought this should be very simply to get, but apparently it isn't.

If I for example believed that the universe has existed for eternity, then that would not be possible by the very definition of a simulation.

I am not really doing that at all. The reason why Darwin came up with theory of evolution was not because he made some new empirical discovery, but because he had reasoning that explained empirical data that had been available forever. Knowing the world is a simulation limits our reasoning and the explanations what we can make up for what we can see.

edit: okay not so sure about the p=np thing.

The basic idea is:

relativity: A computer has finite processing power so the simulation has a limit to how fast it can process information and so needs a speed limit. Also a bounded universe is easier to simulate and its a natural idea to start from simple initial conditions and let the thing develop by some rules that keep it bounded.

lazy evaluation: So many particles with so many properties most of which we simply dont need to know, far easier to not keep track and just determine properties when they make a difference that does matter using a RNG in the simulator. I can imagine anyone doing a imulation of anything much not using this technique to some extent and the result to an observe inside the simualtuion would be pretty much like many quantum phenomena. We could go further quantization in itself is a natural way to simulate things.

I'm not claiming any of this is profound with regards to the OP.

I dont know about this. While it might make programming easier to simulate a entire universe from simple conditions, it certainly would require a lot of memory.

also processing power unless the creators dont mind a low FPS.