That question is really indistinguishable from this one: “If I convinced you with certainty that I could arrange it so that the next time you go to sleep you will never wake up, would you accept?”.
In both cases, the answer is unrelated to any knowledge of “base reality” or belief in an afterlife, and is just a measure of the degree of our contentment with the present reality.
i mean there’s a big difference between ceasing to exist and continuing to exist but having the nature of existence completely change, so i disagree that they’re equivalent questions for at least that reason
No, there absolutely is not. If you think so, it’s because you’re making unwarranted anthropocentric assumptions about this hypothetical “base reality”.
You really think so? So even if the only difference between base reality and your current existence was minor, you’d say dying in your sleep is no different than waking up that alternate reality? That’s hard to believe
Now you’re moving the goalposts. Your original statement was “You don’t know anything about base reality other than you’d still be alive in it.” That includes a possible reality in which you have no senses whatsoever. Experiments in isolation chambers have shown that complete absence of stimulation quickly leads to madness. I’d rather be dead. Again, you’re making anthropocentric assumptions about “base reality” being a world much like ours, only with aliens who have better computers and serve better hamburgers. I’m answering your question as it was asked.
I need to know more about the simulation. There were times in my life when I’d have been glad to jump to any different existence, sight unseen. Am I content in the simulation?
I have no direct access to the base layer of the universe. Rather, the world I live in is made from inputs to my senses and the subjective impressions they give rise to. That’s the layer where things matter—where we think, hope, dream, love, plan, and so on. That’s really what’s real, and whether the base layer is bits and bytes or quantum fields or strings or something entirely different doesn’t really make any difference—these are not the things we ultimately derive value from. So being told that base layer ‘really’ consists of some computer hardware isn’t any different from being told it ‘really’ consists of spin foam.
Before that background, you’re asking me to exchange my life for a completely unknown different one. But that would entail giving up everything that I value, parting with everyone that I love, losing everything that I’ve built. So no, I see no scenario in which that would be appealing. So the outcome of you convincing me that I lived in a situation would simply be me learning that several of my philosophical beliefs must turn out wrong—a highly interesting development that I think would greatly enrich my life in the here and now.
No, I’m too busy at the moment.
Even if the next layer up is a paradise (never imagine you have reached the final layer - it’s simulations all the way up), I’ve got things to do here, people to see, places to go.
Well, I don’t know. If my only two choices were ‘get yanked out of the simulation’ and ‘don’t wake up tomorrow’, I’d certainly pick the former—there, I at least have a chance at some sort of fulfilling life, even though the loss of my current one would certainly be tragic.
Also, I imagine it’s a lot easier to convince someone that they’ll not wake up in the morning, and quite a bit more sinister.
The idea of us being in a simulation, and being drawn up into some unfathomable higher level that created the simulation, in my view is not only analogous but literally the same as life and death:
Where did we, as individual beings, come from? We can say that we – each one of us – came from some reactions of organic chemistry in which the DNA information of each partner contributed to the creation of a new being. Or, IOW, we came from nothing, from a state of non-existence to a state of existence due to a happy confluence of chemical factors.
And where do we go in the final state of eternal sleep? That same unknowable place from whence we came, of course, which we call nothingness, but which could equally well be ascribed to the next level of the Simulation. The Simulation that created all these organic interactions that produced us.
So it seems unconvincingly trite to think that an ostensibly simulated entity such as ourselves, elevated to that level, could experience in any remote sense the world as we know it here, any more than we could expect even the most advanced AI to step out of the computer screen and enjoy dinner and a movie with us. Indeed, in what sense could such an entity from the Simulation even exist at all at the higher level?
It’s at least possible that the reality of the simulators isn’t too different to that of the simulation. If you believe the simulation argument (not that you should), then the bulk of simulations are supposedly ‘ancestor simulations’, which recreate ordinary life some amount of time ago. Indeed, most of what people simulate today is at least broadly similar to life as we know it, mostly since that’s what’s interesting to us, and we wouldn’t really know how to simulate something fundamentally different anyway. So it’s at the very least not guaranteed that the world of the simulators is ‘unfathomably’ different from ours, meaning there’s a nonzero chance that the transition would be something like, perhaps, being drugged and waking up in a new country, or on another planet, or in some fantasy realm.
On the other hand, not waking up is certain nothingness. So the only rational way to bet would be to be woken up in the simulator’s reality.
I question the premise. I don’t think that anyone could convince me that this world is a simulation, without telling me a significant amount about what the next layer up is like.
Oh, and since the simulation argument (the notion that reality is more likely to be a simulation than not, since if simulations are possible, simulated worlds would far outnumber the real one) has come up, I’ll just say that it’s total bunk. There might be a larger number of simulated worlds, but each simulated world, and indeed even the sum total of all simulated worlds, must be smaller than the original. Not necessarily in physical extent, to the extent that’s even meaningful (after all, a single Minecraft server has far more “surface area” than the Earth), but in the number of interesting phenomena (such as people) that it can simulate.
No I won’t. You said that I must make my decision knowing nothing about “base reality”, and it’s a one-way trip. This entirely negates your ability to convince me with certainty that I’m in a simulation. In fact it mainly sounds like you’re selling me a cover story of why I should let you kill me.
I don’t think this hypothetical is worth debating until you figure out how one would produce a convincing proof that we’re in a simulation, without somehow also leaking details of “base reality”.