I regularly seek inspiration by taking long solo walks; and during my most recent such, considering what practical consequences (if any) there would be of the universe I know being a simulation - something flipped in my head, and I thought to myself, "Screw the simulators. If I'm the first copy of me, I should make it as hard as possible for any simulation of me to keep up with me - and if I'm a simulation, I'm going to try to do even better than my original did."
Ignoring the impracticality of trying to out-do myself, is there anything that someone living in an 'original' universe can do that would make it harder for a future simulator to reproduce them? And, mirror-wise, is there anything someone in a simulated universe could do to differentiate themselves from their original? And, if the answer to either question is 'yes'... would it be a good or bad idea to try?
(And is there any way to gather any actual data that might support the answers to such questions, instead of merely making guesses of a similar nature to classic college/stoner "Our whole universe could be, like, an /atom/, man" musings?)
(Note, just to make it explicit: I'm not really taking the whole simulation cluster of ideas serious. It's just that common simulation hypothesis assumptions about necessary complexity and low-level simulation seem quite implausible.)
Correct. Maybe not strictly non-reductionist, but for all practical purposes, yeah.
"Us"? Are you running a particle accelerator? All I know is that there exists somewhat-consistent literature to back up a certain vast, low-level interpretation of my actual experiences, and even then I have no idea how the (certainly plausible-seeming) ideas about physics get me to an explanation of minds or consciousness at all, so if they are all wrong or massively incomplete, I wouldn't know.
That might be because there is a vast, detailed universe that follows relatively simple and consistent laws. (I certainly favor that interpretation.)
It might also be because someone designed a plausible physicalist setting for a game and presented it to me in a convincing way. I don't think that's actually very hard to do.
For example, I regularly have lucid dreams that have a similar level of detail as my waking state (even though I know I'm dreaming). It looks the same, people act realistically, I can talk to them. I don't think my brain simulates any kind of detailed physics for that. The illusion doesn't last very long, sure, but scaling it up still seems simpler than getting a quantum physics implementation to work properly.
I'm not saying physics is a hoax, but it would certainly be much easier to bullshit me into believing that I'm living in a detailed physicalist universe than to actually simulate even just one planet of it. So if you want to complicate the simulation, you maybe shouldn't even assume that there actually is a quark layer or anything like that.
Of course I know this to be incorrect. but of course I would say that rite? :)
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