3 ms·

I think that if we found out tomorrow that we are living inside a simulation, it would be interesting for about 5 minutes and then we would carry with our life

I think that if we found out tomorrow that we are living inside a simulation, it would be interesting for about 5 minutes and then we would carry with our life exactly as before. It would not have any sort of bearing on our lives, we couldn't break it or transcend it. Our feelings and our lives would feel just as real as before.

nlh 7y ago
Agree with everything you say except one bit: “we couldn’t break it or trancend it” The same thing has been said about many man-made electronic systems, and we know how that’s gone so far ;) So I think for 95% of people, nothing would change, but for the folks on the forefront of experimental / particle physics, quite a bit would change because we’d be looking for a whole new class of exploits/vulnerabilities/ways to affect change in the simulation.
- RealityVoid 7y ago
  I'm willing to cede this argument to you, except 5% seems like a far far too great of a number for people "on the forefront of experimental / particle physics" by several orders of magnitude.
  - nlh 7y ago
    Heh you’re definitely right here. Maybe .005% is more like it :)
cryptonector 7y ago
It's the same with Free Will. Whether the universe has only deterministic laws, or a mix of deterministic and non-deterministic laws, Free Will doesn't follow: one way everything is predestined, while the other you don't truly have control of your actions, so neither way do you have full control of your actions. We already understand this now, and yet we carry on and pretend we have Free Will -- we have no real, appealing alternative. It would be the same with proving that we live in a simulation, or that there is a god or gods, except as others have pointed out, we'd probably seek sandbox escapes. Also, not every proof of being a simulation would necessarily be that. Any proof that our universe is a 4D projection of another with different dimensions might not include a proof of the direction of projection -- ours might be the true reality, and the other a projection of ours.

nlh 7y ago

Agree with everything you say except one bit: “we couldn’t break it or trancend it” The same thing has been said about many man-made electronic systems, and we know how that’s gone so far ;) So I think for 95% of people, nothing would change, but for the folks on the forefront of experimental / particle physics, quite a bit would change because we’d be looking for a whole new class of exploits/vulnerabilities/ways to affect change in the simulation.

RealityVoid 7y ago
I'm willing to cede this argument to you, except 5% seems like a far far too great of a number for people "on the forefront of experimental / particle physics" by several orders of magnitude.
- nlh 7y ago
  Heh you’re definitely right here. Maybe .005% is more like it :)

cryptonector 7y ago

It's the same with Free Will. Whether the universe has only deterministic laws, or a mix of deterministic and non-deterministic laws, Free Will doesn't follow: one way everything is predestined, while the other you don't truly have control of your actions, so neither way do you have full control of your actions. We already understand this now, and yet we carry on and pretend we have Free Will -- we have no real, appealing alternative. It would be the same with proving that we live in a simulation, or that there is a god or gods, except as others have pointed out, we'd probably seek sandbox escapes. Also, not every proof of being a simulation would necessarily be that. Any proof that our universe is a 4D projection of another with different dimensions might not include a proof of the direction of projection -- ours might be the true reality, and the other a projection of ours.