Socks lost in the dryer…
It’s a moot point as there is no way to determine whether we are in some sort of ‘simulation’. It’s an interesting stoner-nerd philosophical debate, however from a scientific standpoint, we can only theorize about what we can actually observe (directly or indirectly).
A ‘singularity’, OTOH is an actual debatable topic as we have observed similar periods in history where technology has restructured society on a massive scale (i.e. the Industrial Revolution).
by your own argument though, it’s therefore more likely that we inhabit one of those in-development versions than the final, bug-free one.
I simply can’t let a good Futurama quote go unnoticed!
“Behold! While I digest you with my system of internal ORGANS!!”
Another thing - if it’s incredibly probable that we’re in a simulation, doesn’t the same hold true for the designers too? Isn’t it also incredibly probable that they’re in a simulation too? And turtles all the way up?
Yes, it is very probable. I think it’s probable that if it is possible to create a simulation in the real universe, it should be possible in a detailed enough simulation of the real universe.
Yes, it could be crashing and having bug problems all the time, but if the administrators are reverting it to a state before the bug/crash and then running it from there, we would not experience any of it.
So. Let’s be generous and call this a hypothesis. How can we test it?
Yes and no. It may be likely that they are in a simulation too, but it’s incredibly unlikely that it’s turtles all the way up. If the probability that any given universe is a simulation is p, then the probability of n nested simulations is p[sup]n[/sup], which will eventually get as small as you want it.
I once heard someone express the interesting idea of quantum mechanics as evidence that we’re in a computer simulation. For example, most of the time you don’t need particle-level precision, so you economize on work and use the simpler wave approximation. Or if two particles interact and as a result you know that they must have the same momentum, so why bother saving it twice? Just save it once and call on that variable any time you need it. Thus you get quantum entanglement.
So the test would be: if we can write a computer program that accurately recreates quantum phenomena based on best programming practices then we may just be in a simulation. Not that I strongly believe that we’re in a simulation, but it would be an interesting exercise.
The idea that we’re in a simulation seems to depend on the premise that intelligence is necessarily a good thing in evolutionary terms. In my opinion, the evidence of our planet argues against that. Dinosaurs lived for millions of years without any need for or progress toward increased intelligence. Human existence is a blip so far, and our technology seems to pose a constant threat to self destruction. If we’re an evolutionary red herring, an interesting but short and ultimately untenable branch on the larger tree of life, then it may be reasonable to expect that wherever life has arisen in the universe it’s found that intelligence beyond the lizard/fish/bird level doesn’t serve any adaptive purpose.
There’s no way to know if we’ll survive or not, but it seems optimistic and anthropomorphic to assume we will and that life will trend in a similar fashion everywhere it occurs.
Certainly quantum indeterminacy is spooky like that, as are a few other things such as the delayed choice experiment, but spooky and counterintuitive doesn’t necessarily mean artificial.
I don’t see how that would represent any kind of rigorous test - we can simulate lots of things - our ability to duplicate something with a simulation does not, as far as I can see, indicate that the thing being duplicated is itself a simulation.