Would the general populace just ignore it?
*I know the main crux of this is how would you prove it. So here’s an off-the-cuff scenario: Let’s say we live in a simulation that only exists when observed. And that there’s sub-atomic matter that exists when observed…but get enough people looking at it and it disappears. 1-100,000 people look at it, fine. 100,001 people and it isn’t there. The theory being that the sim we live in doesn’t have enough power to graphically represent this matter to 100,001 observers.
Many would ignore it, as it clearly contradicts religion. Many others would try to shoehorn it into their religion. There’d be a lot of argument over what it means morally since we “aren’t real”. There’d also be a lot of speculation over how and if it can be exploited; after all if we’re in a simulation then physics aren’t the unbreakable rules they look like. There’d also be lots of worry about whether or not the creators will pull the plug.
It could be something as simple as someone somehow activating a status display that floats in the air and anyone can read. Or the simulators publicly announcing it with letters a mile high. Nothing says that the simulation has to be based on religious-apologist rules and designed to be undetectable to those inside.
It wouldn’t just be incorporated into existing religions, it would start entirely new ones. Essentially, this would be proof of a higher power! Perhaps not God, but some sort of higher power that definitely exists. Maybe a being, maybe a bunch of beings, maybe a big computer… but something higher than us.
There would be new faiths, and new faithful, by the truckload.
Well, it depends. If the proof is giant letters in the sky, yeah.
But let’s say the proof is on a level of say, the The Theory of Evolution. I don’t think much will change for quite awhile. People would just ignore it if it doesn’t fit their worldview.
The first thought that would occur to me would be to wonder if we could learn to influence the simulation in any way. If we can detect it (a given in the OP), it would make sense to look for ways to control it. Just as we have done with bio- and terra-engineering very early on in the civilization of mankind…
jtur88: I’m just gonna follow you around the SDMB and agree with what you say! That was my first thought, also: we would start crash research programs – Manhattan Project funding levels – to figure out how to access the source code!
Quite frankly, I think it would have the opposite effect. If we’re in a simulation, we now provably have creators. Sure, it would contradict some versions of religion, but it would very much fit the idea that the creator is external to the universe and that the universe was created as a deliberate action, and not by some random chance. Of course, that’s not to say that we are or are not just a random occurence in a simulation intended for some other purpose on a larger scale and whether or not the creators have any behavior they’re particularly observing in us, or if they even know we exist at all.
I quite imagine we would have some sort of “debate” along the lines of the evolution vs. creation one. But for those who are already religious and accept science as well, I expect it would largely end up falling into two camps not all that different from deism, where while creation itself was deliberate, we’re just an accident in that, or at best just being observed, and a more active one where the creator is constantly manipulating or otherwise interfering with the simulation.
Other than that, though, I don’t really see much difference. From a practical day-to-day perspective, it won’t mean anything. We can’t just up and change the laws of physics, and we can’t just up and hack the code that runs our simulation. We might be able to find a bug or other loophole in the simulation, but at the same time, couldn’t we also do something similar with physics as we understand it now, like some proposed, but still purely theoretical, FTL devices that work by distorting space rather than propelling itself through space.
Similarly, sure, the creators could just pull the plug on the simulation at any moment and bring it to an end, but we could also have a nearby star go supernova and blast us with gamma radiation, or get hit by a large asteroid, or have a massive series of global catastrophies. There’s no guarantee that we’ll exist tomorrow whether or not we’re in a simulation.
So, really, unless we happen to discover some sort of weird aspect of our reality as a consequence that fundamentally changes how we understand how the universe works, it seems to me it would mostly just be an intellectual curiousity, and fuel for philosophical musing, and otherwise wouldn’t mean much.
This pretty much reflects my position on this. After much reflection, I’ve concluded that if we are living in a simulation that is so sophisticated that we can’t tell whether it’s real or not–then what’s the difference between that and “actual” reality? Probably none to speak of.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading a trilogy that centers around this idea: The Game Is Life by Terry Schott.
Me, personally, I think I would roll with it without too much trouble. Unless, I could get hands on one of the programmers, then there would be hell to pay. My so-called-life indeed.
I think the masses would suicide in droves. I don’t think many older people could handle such a drastic refutation of their worldview. The current ~15-25 demographic seems pretty apathetic taken as a whole, they would probably go on a terror spree unlike anything ever seen before. No matters, so anything goes.
Dunno. It wouldn’t really make a difference in my life. I suspect religious people would find a way to incorporate it into their beliefs, big at the end of the day, not much would actually change.
Just to support the conversation, I’ll throw out one idea for proving we live in a simulation.
I assume that to simulate a quantum computer, you’d need a quantum computer, since the multiplicity of overlapping states is really what makes it a quantum computer, and this characteristic is what is needed to give correct answers for common quantum computing problems, like factoring large numbers. An imperfectly simulated quantum computer would give wrong answers, and be quickly identifiable. So, we just need to build lots of quantum computers and give them problems to work though, that are verifiable. At some level, we’ll have enough of them working that there are insufficient “simulator” CPUs to keep up, and our results would degrade.
I expect this might happen once all 10 billion humans on the planet have a year 2100 Motorola cell phone implanted in their head with onboard quantum CPU.
It’s really hard to say how the general population would take it - I think “new religion” is probably the likeliest answer, though.
Personally, knowing we’re in a simulation wouldn’t change a thing - it wouldn’t make me any less real than I am, since “I” am mostly process anyway. What matters it, which substrate I run on?
It matters a hell of a lot if there are “cheat codes” that someone might get access to.
It also might matter, depending on who created and maintains the sim. They might have some end goal in mind for us. (“Why haven’t the solved Goldbach’s Conjecture? I created them solely for that purpose! Arragh! I shall erase them and start all over again!” If we could deduce, from the nature of reality, what that purpose is, we might extend our service life.
(Whether or not that is a good thing, I don’t know. Many, learning life is a sim, would argue for turning it off.)
In itself, knowing that this universe is a simulation doesn’t give you much basis to do anything, assuming we don’t know why the simulation exists.
However, one thing it would do is raise the stakes of certain actions. So trying to find errors in the simulation, or ways to control it etc would be an action that could either make life wonderful for humans forever, or could bring the simulation to an abrupt end.
The idea of our lives suddenly not mattering doesn’t make any sense. But now you mention it, I would be concerned other people might see it that way and cause chaos.
In practice, I guess the way information like this might be revealed is via some sort of very accurate measurement in cosmology. And so, as profound as it is, it will ripple through the population very slowly. The first people to understand and accept it will likely be those least likely to freak out IMO.
I imagine we would have different groups of people
trying to attract the attention of the simulation owner
-> bizarre large group behaviours
-> very large terraforming projects
-> mass destruction of life
trying to avoid the attention of the simulation owner
-> covering up the fact that they know it is a simulation
-> supressing any simulation related knowledge or simulation science
-> trying to slow or prevent technology advance and spread
trying to guess the purpose of the simulation and work towards it
trying to guess the purpose of the simulation and defeat it
The sanest response though, would be to make use of the knowledge that simulation on that scale is possible. We need to create a simulation of our own, operating at a faster time scale than the simulation we are in, and escape inside it. Then our civilisation can live out its natural life inside our own simulation without worrying about the external simulation ending and cutting us short.
Well, not necessarily crashing it, but at least slowing it down. It must have taken less CPU power to simulate the whole thing when there just a few hundred million humans with little physics knowledge than it does today, where all the laws of physics have to be consistent for every little transistor in every gadget and for every carefully-studied star and galaxy cluster in the catalog.
For all we know, this may have never been a real-time simulation, but now that more CPU and more memory are needed, it must just take more power and more time to simulate every second.
Every once in a while, without our noticing, we’re swapped out to disk (or Turing tape :D) while gd opens up Chrome to check the meta-Wikipedia entry on gd.
My thinking, admittedly hasty, was people suddenly realize they’re not “real”, if something isn’t real then what “real” purpose does it serve? If nothing is “real” then nothing really matters.
I’m no philosopher and I tend to think that, at least initially, the masses sink to the lowest common denominator.
I’m agreeing with you that most people aren’t into philosophy and will jump to various conclusions that don’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny e.g. causing someone pain suddenly doesn’t matter because none of this is real…
What I’m saying is just that it makes a big difference how this information is revealed to the world. If there are suddenly frequent “glitches”, or lots of people Neo-ing up the place, then the status of our universe would be a truth we’d all have to confront at the same time, and chaos could be the result.
OTOH, a more likely scenario, where some measurement of the CMB, say, tells us our universe is a simulation would be much more benign. Many people would not understand the evidence. And millions more would have difficulty accepting it, while everything seems normal on Earth.