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Comment by 45h34jh53k4j | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. Why would you dedicate your life to proving this?

You will either find you cannot prove it, in which case you have wasted your entire life on falsehood, or you prove it true in which you undo your dilute your existence and everyone you have ever known and loved.

Kinda like religion I guess...

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though, if we are a simulation... maybe we can exploit bugs in it and give ourselves advantages! After all, the only bug-free program is one that was never started.

What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?

I'm trying to say that when the time comes, you won't have to!

let's just hope we don't find the bug that crashes our server

This is a really odd website for you to be on if you're questioning the appeal of intellectual curiosity.

burned! :-X

I guess my issue is not faulting intellectual curiosity in general, but directed curiosity at something with so many existentially negative results.

You could argue this about so many scientific endeavors: the heliocentric model, the search for extraterrestrial life, climate change, the theory of evolution, the big bang theory, etc. These all had serious existential effects on society but society has also benefited greatly in other ways. I don't see why clarifying the nature of reality with regards to simulations would be any different.

Response 1: because ignoring things with potentially existentially negative results is the functional equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting 'LA LA LA LA LA'. Response 2: many (most?) people have a tiny little voice in the back of their head that whispers "Jump! Jump!" whenever they're close to the edge of a roof, cliff top, etc.

This does indeed looks like a modern version of theosophic explanation of why the world exists. The only difference is, previously people were convinced that gods were everywhere and so there must have been one who created our world; and now we, surrounded by computers in all their shapes and forms, are getting suspicious as to what if... You know.

I dont understand why 1 more llayer of abstraction makes a difference. You are a software running on neurons interacting with simulation of outer world.

You don't want to show that it's true. You want to find out whether it's true or not.

It's not entirely clear what, exactly, it would mean for this to be true. It's also not clear that defining what we mean by "Is the universe a simulation?" has any value if it is not testable.

They are applying the scientific method to testing a hypothesis... isn't it more like religion to NOT do it?

It's like religion in that people like to anthropomorphize wildly. The Cosmological argument ("Define God to be the first cause") becomes "... and that's why God smote a fig tree."

Here, "Huh, the universe might have some funny symmetry" frequently seems to become "the Gods running the simulation we live in will turn you off if you ask the wrong questions", or some other similar wild leap.

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