I see stuff like this and then ponder whether I'm living in someone's weekend project... it'd be pretty interesting to discover the universe is a simulation, but it'd also kinda suck.
Even if the universe /is/ simulated, it wouldn't have an affect on anything mundane. We all still need to eat. Suffering is as real as anything else, and the alleviation of pain is still a good thing.
It also means that there is the potential to exploit the simulation, and take advantages of the corner cases - which may also get us shut down, but we would likely never know it happened, so it's almost without penalty.
I sometimes wonder if humanity thought of the world as if it is a simulation (visualize it as a video game), perhaps we could better realize that we have the ability to change how the future unfolds, and that the actions we take will only be successful if they are in accordance with the actual behavior of the simulation (how it actually is versus how we think it is).
It would actually have consequences, for instance we would likely not be able to do interstellar travel. Ok, not really mundane, but still. See https://osf.io/ca8se (disclaimer, I'm the author).
Bostrom's original paper (which proposed the "simulation hypothesis") doesn't define it properly that I can see.
It's a very late C20 / early C21 computer technology phrase - because we make models and simulations, and nest things in our computers, we think it is a meaningful concept about our universe.
How would we know our reality is a simulation, vs. e.g. an "alternate dimension"? Or something much subtler that we have no understanding of?
It won't be a "computer" simulation, and I doubt it'll be running on top of a turing machine. There'll be something more interesting and complex going on - perhaps metaphorically analogous to a simulation, but a richer, more alien thing than that.
Any complex computational machine is still equivalent to a laptop machine in terms of what it can compute, so it can always reproduced as a regular physics simulation.
Something different could be a machine able to do hypercomputation.
Technically, due to the manner in which the mind renders reality based on crude sensory input, reality as we perceive it is a simulation, of sorts - it just doesn't seem like it because it's kind of our only frame of reference.
All the world's a simulation,
and all the men and women merely objects.
They have destructors and constructors;
And each one in its run morphs poly times
Our observable universe is just a zany snowglobe knick-knack picked up as a last minute gift for a spoiled little shit in a universe of higher order than ours that's simply imperceivable to us. All of what we know as mass in our universe was suspended in a tiny bowl centered in the globe, the kid gave it one shake, ala the big bang, then sat it on a shelf forever to collect dust as we near unmeasurably slowly eject towards the edges of the globe. Maybe one day he'll pick us back up...
That doesn't accord with what we observe in the universe - not expansion outward from a central point, but expansion everywhere as everything moves away from everything else.
No Mans Sky does it pretty well. Who knows? Maybe when we get up to PlayStation 10 or 20 it'll actually be simulating the cognitive/sentient elements of the universe too.
Doing something "pretty well" compared to the task and doing something complete, is not really the same, when we are talking about a possible infinite universe to simulate. Because in this case, even just correctly simulating the leave of an tree, would take infinite comouters.
You could simply alter the consciousness of simulated beings to believe that the tree is complex and exists fully. This sort of dynamic pruning/altering of conscious reality would dramatically cut down on what needs to be simulated.
We could all be staring at placeholders (if even that) while believing we are interacting with a complex, fully defined world - in the meantime, the simulation modifies our consciousness(es) to smooth over any gaps in what could actually be a crudely defined generative world.
> You could simply alter the consciousness of simulated beings to believe that the tree is complex and exists fully. This sort of dynamic pruning/altering of conscious reality would dramatically cut down on what needs to be simulated.
I don't know why everyone insists on No Mans Sky. Having a space engineers MMO with thousands of players would be way more interesting. If every player builds 5 autonomous vehicles then the game would have simulate 5000 vehicles 24/7.
Sometimes when I play No Man’s Sky, I hope I’ll come across a single planet that has culture/cities. A quirk in the simulation that gave rise to it. Much like our lonely little blue planet. Or maybe I just smoke too much.
You might enjoy the Magic 2.0 book series. A bunch of programmers independently discover that the world is a simulation so they give them selves magic powers and time travel to medieval England to be wizards.
