Assume we're in a simulation and know it. Should we be surprised by how flawless it seems? We (almost) never encounter situations where we feel like something's off (like "oh, what just happened is the kind of thing we should expect to happen in a simulation rather than in an original biological universe").[1] Or is there any good reason to assume that, in a simulation like the one we might be in, it is normal for us not to observe any obvious bug?
Of course, this is only one of the many considerations we should have in mind while assessing the likelihood that we are in a simulation. I just happen to wonder about this one, right now.
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Obviously, if we're in a simulation, we don't know what original biological worlds look like, but we can probably make some guesses regarding what generally differs between these and simulations. For example, say I enter an empty room, and objects "magically" appear in it as I walk through it. This has fierce simulation kinda vibes.
Suppose you were running a simulation, and it had some problems around object permanence, or colors not being quite constant (colors are surprisingly complicated to calculate since some of them depend on quantum effects), or other weird problems. What might you do to help that?
One answer might be to make the intelligences you are simulating ignore the types of errors that your system makes. And it turns out that we are blind to many changes around us!
Or conversely, if you are simulating an intelligence that happens to have change blindness, then you worry a lot less about fidelity in the areas that people mostly miss or ignore anyway.
The point is this: reality seems flawless because your brain assumes it is, and ignores cases where it isn't. Even when the changes are large, like a completely different person taking over halfway through a conversation, or numerous continuity errors in movies that almost all bounce right off of us. So I don't think that you can take amazing glitch free continuity as evidence that we're not in a simulation, since we may not see the bugs.
OK, wait, I think I get it. It's an anthropic thing. You happen to be human, and humans happen to be change-blind, so you take advantage of that to run your simulation, and we observe it because you wouldn't have run the simulation if you (and therefore we) weren't change-blind. Is that right?