The World as a Simulation - What type would it be and why?

[Secret Asshole]

So I've been thinking about the world as a simulation, partly because of the NPC meme, partly because of the absurdity of our current reality.

I don't actually think the world is a simulation, fyi, its just fun to think about. My current favorite theory, if the world was a simulation, its been simulated since the beginning of time to allow for an organic history.

The world basically just functions as one big MMO for a Kardashev type III civilization who can basically harness the power of black holes and achieved immortality. But it isn't for fun.

Thanks to their domination of an entire galaxy/universe, they live forever, have every comfort taken care of, and know no pain. The problem is without pain, they begin to loose sight of things and the overall things that made them, lets say, human.

In order to stave off a natural entropy and apathy, they created this world. Earth acts as a reminder to what they once were. They forget who they are and slip into lives. Some quick and brutish, some long lived. Once they come out of it, they forget their past lives (to prevent them from going insane) but the emotions remain. When ennui sets in, they hook themselves back into the simulation. Pain, pleasure, loss, fear, violence.

That's why evil exists, its why pain exists. To remember.

 

[eldri]

Part of me believes reality is a simulation but from an experimental perspective.

A highly advanced species strives to determine the meaning of life and, to do this, thousands of simulations of reality are conducted to converge to an answer. However, in each simulation, a highly advanced species comes about and does the same thing, effectively, creating a recursive experiment to determine the meaning of life that will never end.

 

[BoingBoingBoi]

it's really a non-negligible possibility.

https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf

 

[To Infinity And Beyond]

We're all living in the sims, i say!

 

[Purple Stuff]

we're god's forgotten sims game

 

[Autopsy]

In science you tend to see divergent theories with roughly equal implications, and typically the various factions throw about

• contradictory predictions
• alternative mechanisms

and argue that their mechanisms are easier to use or that their predictions are more supported. Most often you see "Theories That Are Really Easy To Work With For Chemistry" vs "The Exact Same Thing But For Physics" floated around with both being approximately as accurate within the standard model but nearly impossible to reconcile with each-other. In the end, overly and increasingly complex math is always the winner.
Unfortunately, as the core tenant of the Simulation speculation is that "the simulation is all-encompassing, inescapable, and only errs in a totally unpredictable manner (or errs in a 100% predictable manner that we are already are aware of and treat as a law of reality)" it doesn't really make any predictions you could compare, and using it to explain seen phenomenon may be mentally satisfying but it's also more taxing than just saying "fuck it, I have no idea why, let's just move on."
In an absolute worst case scenario, serious mechanisms with bizarre implications could be dismissed as a literal 'glitch in the matrix' and never pursued.

Many things are fun to think about, but some are far more worth your time than others.

If you want a brain teaser, here are a few of the more outlandish theories that are all still somewhat feasible:
Are all particles fake and gay 1D invaders pretending to be real? (makes predictions)
Are all particles bonded to an eternal soul-mate that we've never even seen? (makes predictions + math way simpler)
Are we in a vacuum bubble waiting to "pop" in what is effectively one single chemical reaction on the universe-scale? (prediction + actual existential threat for good measure)
Is literally everything we do influenced in some way by the threat of death or is it all a clash between the world in our head and this amorphous thing around us? (cognitive dissonance revolutionized psychology and TMT is presently threatening to do it again- but this time in tandem with practical changes in psychiatry as well)
Have fun.

 

[Khayyam]

We're all living in the sims, i say!

We don't need to worry until diving boards and fireplaces start appearing in the middle of our lawns.

 

[Diabeetus]

People often take this possibility for granted as some normie meme (i.e "We're obviously living in a simulation, after all, Donald Trump is the President!!"). It could be a thing, but all potential discussion's ruined by it because people think they're funny. It sucks.

 

[Vorhtbame]

Sorry, believing that the universe was created or designed in any way is anti-science. The truly enlightened believe in a long chain of improbable events that result in what appears to be order and purpose to backwards people.

Spoiler: In other words

Inb4

Of course it's a parody. I wouldn't shit on speculation about the nature of the universe or its purpose.

 

[Regu]

if the world is a simulation, then whoever runs it has it out for my country

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

For the world to be a simulation means there must be another world in which it is simulated.

That means, no matter what, there is a real world. No simulation could exist otherwise.

So, we could look at it as increasingly unlikely to inhabit each layer of simulation:

Layer 0 - This exists, and is the real world. If any simulated worlds exist, they are contained in this layer. This layer has 100% probability of existing.
Layer 1 - This would be the first layer of simulation. If any simulated worlds exist, this one does. This layer has less than 100% chance of existing, because for it to exist someone has to simulate a universe.
Layer 2 - This is the simulation within the first layer of simulation. This layer and all layers after should keep decreasing in probability because each layer has less than 100% chance of containing another simulation.

So by this method, we could say without any further information, the most likely possibility is that we live in the real world, which is guaranteed to exist.

Our world contains 0 simulations of our world, at least that we know of. So that's another point in favor of 'Not Simulation'. Otherwise we must be the last layer, and what are the odds of that?

Now all that is predicated on a few assumptions. Assumption 1 is that a "simulation" is considered to mean a simulation of the world it is contained in. This means a game of sim city is not a simulation of reality. This also means if we're in a simulation then we're assuming we're a simulation of the "real" world.
Assumption 2 is that all the "People" in the simulation are all the same, rather than one "Real Person" with everyone else just being bots.

Those assumptions are important, because without those assumptions the whole idea is completely untestable, although obviously the "test" would have to be thought experiments, there shouldn't be an empirical way to determine you're in a simulation, otherwise it's not the same as the "real" world.

Without the first assumption, anything is a simulation of anything. The movement of electrons around an atom could be called a "simulation" of planetary motion, but aren't considered as such here. Otherwise the definition of simulation is too slippery to make any kind of statement on.

The second assumption is what differentiates this from good old fashioned solipsism. "The world only exists in my mind". This is unprovable and unfalsifiable, and thus not useful.

With those two assumptions, a simulation of a universe is actually impossible, because that simulator would have to contain all the information the universe contains. So the universe would have to have a whole universe in it, plus an entire simulation of a universe. That's too much stuff. Essentially at this point you'd be saying the universe is a simulation of itself, which is a pretty meaningless, if technically true.

But even without just straight ruling out the existence of a simulation that way, you run into the first problem, that of decreasing probability. The highest probability answer is that we live in the real universe, because that's the only one that's guaranteed to exist. The popular internet arguments "Proving" we live in a simulation are based on very shaky assumptions. The 2 most shaky assumptions being every universe would eventually contain at least one "intelligent" species, and that eventually every intelligent species would simulate the universe they live in.

Since we only know of one universe, we don't have a very good sample size to determine if life is actually inevitable.
In the one universe we do know of, there are no simulations of the universe. So why would we assume every intelligent species would create one? What makes us think that's even possible?