A fair point - but I'm sure some future AI system could dream up a simulation of a simulation where all this - our 'existence' - is provided as 'entertainment' for participants in a game. The challenge for those participants would be to dream up new 'challenges' for the hapless participants (us) in the game. The overarching question will be: when will those participants realise what is going on? Future versions of Paddy power will take bets on the episode in which we come to understand the nature of our 'reality'.
So, who came up with the simulation? – did everything they created for our universe exist in their world or did they imagine up things like trees, TVs, carbon credits and teaspoons? If everything in our simulation already exists/existed in the reality outside the simulation, what exactly is the argument that implies we are in a simulation? The suggestion has never really struck me as just a bit of harmless fun, because I think it is harmful: it’s another stupid example of humans doing anything they can to avoid facing the actual reality we live in, while at the same time being another opportunity for us to choose simplicity over complexity – “Our world is so preposterously effed that it can’t possibly be real - it simply must be all a game or simulation, etc…”
Ah lads!
Sadly pure wishful thinking!
No mine could think up the bizarreness of world we live in … thus it must be real!
A fair point - but I'm sure some future AI system could dream up a simulation of a simulation where all this - our 'existence' - is provided as 'entertainment' for participants in a game. The challenge for those participants would be to dream up new 'challenges' for the hapless participants (us) in the game. The overarching question will be: when will those participants realise what is going on? Future versions of Paddy power will take bets on the episode in which we come to understand the nature of our 'reality'.
So, who came up with the simulation? – did everything they created for our universe exist in their world or did they imagine up things like trees, TVs, carbon credits and teaspoons? If everything in our simulation already exists/existed in the reality outside the simulation, what exactly is the argument that implies we are in a simulation? The suggestion has never really struck me as just a bit of harmless fun, because I think it is harmful: it’s another stupid example of humans doing anything they can to avoid facing the actual reality we live in, while at the same time being another opportunity for us to choose simplicity over complexity – “Our world is so preposterously effed that it can’t possibly be real - it simply must be all a game or simulation, etc…”