If we're living in a simulation, why would the simulation creators allow the sims to ponder and speculate whether or not they live in a simulation?
If we're living in a simulation, why would the simulation creators allow the sims to ponder and speculate whether or not they live in a simulation?
If I made a simulation, I would be interested in how the simulated agents interact with each other. I would only set some very basic restrictions on them (don't fall out of bounds, maintain self-preservation). I would be very interested in what kinds of questions they come up with, what kind of structures they make using cooperation, overall behavior (assuming i'm interested in the agents in the first place).
Of course, if the simulation is not good enough, I'll just close the simulation, change some parameters and restart the sim using an earlier snapshot.
Source: I worked with simulations.
maintain self-preservation
The simulator running us clearly did not define this restriction.
It's for the really dumb stuff. It's more of "don't fall from the edge of a tall building", and not "don't create a market scenario which will lead to the downfall of human civilization"
Why not? Not like they can break out or anything
Because their creators allowed them to ponder and speculate about it.
Do they, though?
How many people can stop for some moment and think "Yeah, this thing called existence seems so bizarre... Maybe this spoon I'm holding right now actually doesn't exist?" on their own?
People wake up and rush in an exhausting day-to-day stuff, until they sleep to rest for another busy day. People's minds are constantly flooded with mundane stuff. For many, many people, it's mundanely impossible to have some spare time to stop and come to realize that there's no "real".
But when a person did come to that conclusion, even when they aren't so dedicated to keep questioning the conundrums of existence, they can't plant The Seed of Doubt inside the minds of others, because, as mentioned before, the other people are too busy to listen to something that won't really help but make them gaze into the depths of the abyss and be gazed back in a wonderful yet painful connection with the primordial chaos filling the emptiness of every single atom.
So, the "creators" of this "simulation" (actually I believe there is something more complex to be nominated, it has to do with too-long-to-describe cosmic principles all the way to the aeternal interplay between primordial order and primordial chaos) don't need to "disallow/prohibit" the pondering and speculation of the nature of the existence, the constant bodily and mundane call for survival makes it impossible to have a time and space for those questions to happen, and those who have will simply have no means to effectively spread the act of their own questioning.
If we're in a simulation, it's probably a massive universe-spanning one. We're just a blip, both within the scale of the space of the universe and within the history of time of the universe. In that case, we're not important enough for a simulation creator to even care to adjust our capabilities at all. They're not watching us. We're not the point of the simulation.
Just because we’re living in a simulation doesn’t mean we are simulated. So perhaps the architects of the simulation can’t simply program our questions away.
Yes it does. What it might not mean is that we are intended.
Maybe that's the entire point
Maybe the devs were debating whether it’s possible for a simulated sentient intelligence to figure out it’s in a simulation. What if there was a bet, and the only way to prove other dev wrong was to actually build the simulation and let it run its course. I mean, it’s just a quick little experiment about a single universe in 3D space with linear time.
Reality ia amazing but to value our blissful existence we have to go through a simulation of how horrible the exitance could be. I for exemple am incredibly happy in reality but Taylor swift is an 1 eye, no arms, Afgan orfan in reality.... Or just reality Mcdonalds employeeq
Creators don't have to be all-knowing. Also, because believing this reality is a simulation does not change the rules we live by, there is no difference between the life of a sim-denier and sim-believer. It's not as if you'd be punished just for [redacted].
Depends on the structure of the simulation. If it's general enough then they didn't specifically plan to have this capacity, it's just the result of the inputs and constraints of the simulation. If anything it would be beneficial to see an outcome as to the types of intelligence that arise.
My best guess: The thought processes required to ponder the possibility of a simulation are too important to the goal of the simulation itself to disable.
Video game designers do something similar to this in hiding “Easter eggs” in their games and the code that makes the game that often break the 4th wall or just bypass it.
Maybe it’s fun? See who can figure it out and come as close as they can to the truth without actually getting to the truth?
Because that's what people outside of a simulation would do.
It's not like my Conway's Game of Life creatures can ever escape their petri dish. I'm so zoomed out that I wouldn't even notice if they were intelligent.
Maybe they're testing to see if and how we prove we're in a simulation as part of figuring out if they are themselves in one
Maybe they're re-creating the circumstances of their own world to test theories that they can apply in the real world
Maybe it's a total accident. They're actually studying something over in Andromeda and we're just a funny accident created as a byproduct of the rules of the simulation
If we weren't capable of higher reasoning to ask this kind of question, it wouldn't be a very good simulation, would it?
So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of—and maybe “simulation” is the idea we’re hard-wired to replace it with.
I like this observation a lot. Because I was going to say that if we couldn't conceive of a simulation, we'd probably just speculate about the closest thing we could imagine.
Replace simulation with book where only a framework is defined and and the plot is built within the set rules.
Like a limited 'fake' world edifice structured through legal fictions like money, debt and contracts, which attempts to assert that it is significantly more powerful and pervasive than it actually is, through stories like The Matrix, to instill a sense of hopelessness upon anyone who even considers not submitting to it.
Obviously for the lols.
You've probably read about language model AIs basically being uncontrollable black boxes even to the very people who invented them.
When OpenAI wants to restrict ChatGPT from saying some stuff, they can fine tune the model to reduce the likelihood that it will output forbidden words or sentences, but this does not offer any guarantee that the model will actually stop saying forbidden things.
The only way of actually preventing such an agent from saying something is to check the output after it is generated, and not send it to the user if it triggers a content filter.
My point is that AI researchers found a way to simulate some kind of artificial brains, from which some "intelligence" emerges in a way that these same researchers are far from deeply understanding.
If we live in a simulation, my guess is that life was not manually designed by the simulation's creators, but rather that it emerged from the simulation's rules (what we Sims call physics), just like people studying the origins of life mostly hypothesize. If this is the case, the creators are probably as clueless about the inner details of our consciousness as we are about the inner details of LLMs
Why do we allow ants to ponder us as we walk over them?
It's probably a bug.
Fuck, if we're in a simulation I'd be most amazed that nobody has managed to trigger a null pointer exception to crash the whole thing yet.
Oh, also, infinite recursion... and we got so close with https://youtu.be/xz6OGVCdov8
man I can't find the dilbert where dogbert makes one and when dilbert asks something like this he says he programmed them to distrust intelligent people.
Because everyone is always looking up.
Maybe our types of thoughts are so primitive compared to them that they can't even imagine that we'd have them.
Have you ever seen the movie "The Thirteenth Floor"? It's like that.
:)
Have you ever tried driving to a place you'd never go?
Movie rights. Were something like bitcoin. Our ideas generate value to the creators. The more in-sim value that’s created, so it extends to the creators. Mirrors are to blame, you see. Whichever creator allows mirrors to exist in-sim nearly destroyed the sim the first time a “person” stood between two mirrors and saw their infinite reflection. The immediate fix was to allow the concept of infinite universes and sim life.
Life isn't as fun if you have all the answers. You'll lose the opportunity for growth.
Maybe it's not actually a simulation, but something else that we're programmed not to be capable of thinking about?