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> If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world. There's nothing to st

> If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world. There's nothing to stop our creators from doing that anyway. Simulations are often stopped, tweaked, restarted, and eventually abandoned. Personally, I think there's value to determining if we live in a simulation. If we do live in one, we could potentially learn how to "hack" the simulation from the inside in order to improve our lives in it.

deleted 7y ago
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mlb_hn 7y ago
Or the flip side, if the goal of the simulation is to see how simulations react when they figure out they're in a simulation and if we decide to never try to figure out whether we're in a simulation they'll reset the simulation, that means we need to prove that we live in a simulation.
- bitL 7y ago
  They could just snapshot at important junctions of history and spawn parallel branches, one when a certain decision was made, the other where not. Or where a certain fraction won a decisive battle, or the other one etc. Even ancient philosophers played with that idea, treating time as a series of "pictures" and leaving to gods to decide if they add/remove somebody to/from a picture at a given moment. Pretty much primitive simulation stuff.
timwis 7y ago
Having just rewatched the matrix, I am totally down for this. Where's my red pill?
- kromem 7y ago
  Keep in mind you may well be in a beneficial tutorial simulation for newly constructed consciousnesses. Might not be wise to try and skip this level. One idea is that if we are AIs capable of manifesting anything we imagine as reality, that could go WAY out of control for most of us (try dropping too much of a psychedelic). So starting us off in an environment controlled by a 3rd party would help us get our "infinite consciousness" legs before continuing on to the next level. We can't CHANGE our reality, but we can totally change how we feel/think about that reality. Kind of like Episode IV Jedi vs later. In Ep IV, they never actually change the physical reality around them. Just change how other people think about that reality, and how they think about themselves (Luke mentions he hit targets that size all the time, just not under pressure - all he really ends up doing is believing he can hit it and then achieving that). So probably not lifting spaceships this life. But maybe believing in ourselves a bit more and collectively using what we know if our shared reality to help shape it.

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mlb_hn 7y ago

Or the flip side, if the goal of the simulation is to see how simulations react when they figure out they're in a simulation and if we decide to never try to figure out whether we're in a simulation they'll reset the simulation, that means we need to prove that we live in a simulation.

bitL 7y ago
They could just snapshot at important junctions of history and spawn parallel branches, one when a certain decision was made, the other where not. Or where a certain fraction won a decisive battle, or the other one etc. Even ancient philosophers played with that idea, treating time as a series of "pictures" and leaving to gods to decide if they add/remove somebody to/from a picture at a given moment. Pretty much primitive simulation stuff.

timwis 7y ago

Having just rewatched the matrix, I am totally down for this. Where's my red pill?

kromem 7y ago
Keep in mind you may well be in a beneficial tutorial simulation for newly constructed consciousnesses. Might not be wise to try and skip this level. One idea is that if we are AIs capable of manifesting anything we imagine as reality, that could go WAY out of control for most of us (try dropping too much of a psychedelic). So starting us off in an environment controlled by a 3rd party would help us get our "infinite consciousness" legs before continuing on to the next level. We can't CHANGE our reality, but we can totally change how we feel/think about that reality. Kind of like Episode IV Jedi vs later. In Ep IV, they never actually change the physical reality around them. Just change how other people think about that reality, and how they think about themselves (Luke mentions he hit targets that size all the time, just not under pressure - all he really ends up doing is believing he can hit it and then achieving that). So probably not lifting spaceships this life. But maybe believing in ourselves a bit more and collectively using what we know if our shared reality to help shape it.