If we're in a sim...

AdeleneDawner

My father, who is home recovering from surgery, emailed the following web page to me and a few other members of my family, and expressed interest in reading interesting responses.

If We Are In A Computer Simulation

Is the universe just a big computer simulation running in another universe? Suppose it is. Then I've got some questions:

Are intelligent entities modeled as objects? In other words, are they instantiated and managed as distinct tracked pieces in the simulation? Or is the universe just modeled as huge numbers of subatomic particles and energy?

If intelligences aren't modeled as objects are they at least tracked or studied by whoever is running the sim? Or is the evolution of intelligence in the sim just seen as an uninteresting side effect and irrelevant to the sim's purposes?

Is The Big Bang the moment the sim started running? Or did it start long before that point? Or has it been started at a much later point with data loading in to make it look like it started earlier?

Do the creators of the sim intervene as it runs? Do they patch it?

What is the purpose of the sim? Entertainment? Political decision-making? Scientific research?

Were the physical laws of the universe designed to reduce the computational cost of the sim? If so, what aspects of the physical laws were designed to make computation cheaper?

Imagine the purpose of the sim is entertainment or decision-making. Either way, it could be that out-of-universe sentient beings actually enter this universe and interact with some of its intelligent entities. Interact with simulated people for fun. Or interact in order to try out different experiments of political development. In the latter case I would expect more rerunning of the same sim backed up to restart at the same point but with some alteration of what some people say or do.

So what's your (simulated) gut feeling? Are you in a sim? If so, what's it for?

Any thoughts?

My father, who is home recovering from surgery, emailed the following web page to me and a few other members of my family, and expressed interest in reading interesting responses.

If We Are In A Computer Simulation

Is the universe just a big computer simulation running in another universe? Suppose it is. Then I've got some questions:

Are intelligent entities modeled as objects? In other words, are they instantiated and managed as distinct tracked pieces in the simulation? Or is the universe just modeled as huge numbers of subatomic particles and energy?

If intelligences aren't modeled as objects are they at least tracked or studied by whoever is running the sim? Or is the evolution of intelligence in the sim just seen as an uninteresting side effect and irrelevant to the sim's purposes?

Is The Big Bang the moment the sim started running? Or did it start long before that point? Or has it been started at a much later point with data loading in to make it look like it started earlier?

Do the creators of the sim intervene as it runs? Do they patch it?

What is the purpose of the sim? Entertainment? Political decision-making? Scientific research?

Were the physical laws of the universe designed to reduce the computational cost of the sim? If so, what aspects of the physical laws were designed to make computation cheaper?

Imagine the purpose of the sim is entertainment or decision-making. Either way, it could be that out-of-universe sentient beings actually enter this universe and interact with some of its intelligent entities. Interact with simulated people for fun. Or interact in order to try out different experiments of political development. In the latter case I would expect more rerunning of the same sim backed up to restart at the same point but with some alteration of what some people say or do.

So what's your (simulated) gut feeling? Are you in a sim? If so, what's it for?

Any thoughts?

While I would expect these behaviors from any evolutionary evolved intelligence (excepting whales perhaps), they are so contradictory with other evolved traits, I think they must be transient. For example, many people don't enjoy such things at all and cockfighting is illegal where I live.

Sure, many people don't but how much of that is simply due to cultural norms? Many such activities are outlawed more because they are associated with lower classes or marginalized groups. Look at how in the United States hunting is in many areas a popular past-time, while in most of the US dogfighting is illegal. Why? Well, without delving too much into the mindkilling of politics, dogfighting is a sport historically popular with lower-income black people, while hunting is popular among a variety of different income groups among white people.

Among humans it does seem like the general trend among humans is towards more empathy and caring. But for another species, even if we think that such a trend will occur, there's no reason to think that that trend will outpace the growth of technology enough that they will not want to cause harm to their sims.

Oops, I just realized that in this last comment (the sibling to this one) I blurred two compartments of thought. I don't mind that I have different compartments, but I consider it a failure if I cannot remain in one throughout a thread. I guess what happened is that you convinced me there is reason to be cynical about human empathy, which became cynicism about human value, which inevitably leads to a set of grooves about value drift and my dissatisfaction with the lack of a framework of objective value ("FOOV"). So if you had the impression I sw... (read more)

0byrnema15y

It is probably entirely the evolution of cultural norms, but why dismiss that? The important question is whether there is a predetermined direction to the evolution of cultural norms, and it seems we agree that a general trend is towards more empathy and caring (with some reservations) but that this isn't necessarily reliable. I often think about whether or not humanity is 'good' and whether the cultural development of our empathy will outpace other factors, and I've settled on the conclusion that if our universe is not designed, it will probably not work out well but if it was designed by benevolent, caring entities it will somehow work out no matter how small the probability. In other words, without a designer, we're doomed anyway to a universe of random and arbitrary entities that won't conform to our (also) random and arbitrary moral preferences. With a designer, there is finally the possibility of a plan (and an imposed external set of moral preferences) and there is some probability (that I count as high) that we are part of the plan and thus we could trust that we would be happy with the outcome of that plan. Where 'we' doesn't necessarily mean us specifically, but future humans or another self-aware lineage or at least the designers themselves. Some set of conscious entities being happy with the universe seems like a good thing to me, better than a random flux of dissatisfied ones. So to answer your question a couple comments up, at the moment I don't believe that our universe looks like it was designed by a caring entity, or that humanity is necessarily good. In my mind the problem is that there is no designer. A designer after all would terrifically increase the chances of moral success (for someone’s point of view) compared to a random universe.

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