This echoes the notion, popular for a while (is it still?) in cosmology that our universe might actually be a 2-D “film” on the surface of the cosmos, and what we perceive as three dimensions aren’t really. It’s all a kind of projection.
Okay…but so what? I can still tie a knot in a piece of string. Our perception of three dimensions is simply not going to go away.
It would be fascinating, and wonderful, and mind-boggling…and yet would make almost zero difference in our lives.
I can’t say what the crazies (aka, the majority) would do, but at a science level, I imagine that this would lead to our attempting to signal the makers to our existence and, hopefully, establish a line of communication.
Any life capable of creating a simulation of this quality would, necessarily, realize that the random creation of life is entirely possible. So we can assume that either:
In the first case, it’s like discovering an alien species, without all the hassle of FTL travel. Granted, it’s an alien species that could destroy us at a whim, but since our only value to them is as test subjects - and we have no power to influence their world - there’s no particular reason for them to do that. So it’s all just free knowledge to trade back and forth.
In the latter case, we’ll just never know whether this is the case, or we simply haven’t found one another yet. But we can assume that they’ll be conducting their tests ethically, which means that they’ll either let the simulation play out until the heat death of the system or simply stop the process, so that (from our perspective), time has simply ended. We’ll never experience the destruction of the universe. There just will never be a moment after this one.
Surely it would imply exactly the opposite, if this is a simulated reality then there very well might be a ‘next level’ after this life (scenario?) finishes, one that might be determined by our actions in this life.
Except that, most in that demo don’t appear to think past graduating college. If that far and consequences don’t seem to be considered at all. Obviously, this doesn’t go for ALL young people.
Based on the theory of evolution, our universe would appear to be more like GFDL CM2.X than World of Warcraft. If you expressly wanted to create a fun and interesting universe, there’s no obvious need for all the complex physics, empty space, Big Bang, etc. to support it.
If you can purposely create self-conscious AI and a world for that AI to exist in, why go through the hassle of burying dinosaur bones and sprinkling the right amount of radioactive isotopes on them to seem billions of years old?
It’s far more likely that life came about naturally, based on evolutionary forces assering themselves under complex chemical interactions happening randomly, over a long period of time. As such, we’re not more an entity than any other batch of chemicals, in the universe.
That’s one possibility, but what if the simulation is designed to create emergent life and the creator/s are interested in the social/religious/political etc factors that result on large and small scales? And if they’re powerful enough to simulate an entire universe its not a big stretch to imagine they’re also capable of monitoring every single lifeform that appears in that simulated universe.
Well, they don’t go on a mass rampage at the moment so they obviously have some foresight, surely?
Would living in a simulation make an after life more or less likely do you think? I’ve always considered an afterlife pretty unlikely, but for some reason that I can’t formulate if we are in a simulation, it seems somewhat likely.
My point was that reincarnation and an afterlife aren’t in the cards. An emergent life simulator would be unlikely to contain the following technologies:
If the goal of the simulation was to dynamically generate different systems for conscience thought, technology #1 might exist. But #2 would be something they develop after they’re done with this system, and it’s not obvious why they would go through the hassle of doing #3.
If you’re using human concepts of cost and benefit analyses etc I agree that that sounds reasonable, but when dealing with an unknowably powerful entity with unknown motivations, capabilities and goals then I for one would play it safe. If it has the capability of fully simulating one level of reality then it can easily simulate another, and especially as the simulated creatures have mythologies around an afterlife then, in this scenario, its possible that those mythologies exist because there really is an afterlife.
Math and reason are theoretically true, independent of humanity. It’s unlikely that we would be unable to understand their motivations for creating a complex, scientific simulation of a universe. So just as it’s unlikely that they hid dinosaur bones to make it seem like the Earth is older than it really is, it’s also unlikely that they embedded superstition in us, when there’s more down-to-Earth reasons. Okham’s razor would make it a safer bet that the human brain finds patterns where there are none (which has been proven to be the case), to believe things known to be false and to be able to create false memories (e.g. witness testimony), to be impressionable at young ages (a side effect of our need to learn quickly), and to fantasize. Let’s also note that the mythologies of the world are mutually exclusive of one another, mutually exclusive of their own past incarnations (e.g. archaeology does not show any preference for particular philosophies, gods, etc.), and run the gammut of ideas one could come up with.
Are gods:
A) Mountains
B) Celestial objects
C) People
D) Animals
E) Animal-people
F) Aliens
G) Ineffable entities
H) Permeating everything
Is the afterlife:
A) Good
B) Bad
C) Mediocre
D) The same as the current world
E) Completely different
F) Eternal
G) Limited
And so on. Each of these is supported by some mythology, philosophy, or religion and the number of options will surely continue to grow as we reach the potential to envision more (e.g. the addition of “aliens” as a religious target in recent decades). If there was something behind all of this, bleeding through, we would expect to see some sort of underlying consistency. Instead, we see a scattershot of everything one could think of, and the only lines of consistency seem to follow political or technological change (e.g. gods being changed from a group of humans who live on top of mountains, to a group of humans who live on clouds, to a group of humans who live in some ethereal plane, to ineffable beings existing outside the universe).
That’s not to say that any one of them is wrong, nor that it’s impossible that Those who Run the Simulation haven’t set up Valhalla for our fallen warriors, but it’s not where I would put my money.
The simulation could be that they want to see how people would behave in a specific religion’s afterlife and that they need to also simulate our corporeal lives on Earth to produce souls to populate and qualify for the afterlife simulation. Therefore you never know, it might pay to be a good Christian/Muslim/Jew even in a simulation.
It might also pay to be a good Scientologist or confirmed atheist. Minus evidence for any particular belief system, your safest bet is to hedge your bets, live your life, and let other people live theirs. If sacrificing wallabees to Odin makes you feel good, and it’s legal, go ahead and do it, but the odds are against you, the more specific your belief system gets.
It would finally give a mechanism for the grand incomprehensible theory as proposed by Douglas Adams:
“There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
God, that’s haunting!
And to think I was impressed when the gang at MIT made a computer (Turing complete!) out of Tinkertoys!
Wow.
I’ll never look at those people who build hard drives in Minecraft in the same way again…