Did the Oscars just show we are living in simulation? | Hacker News Reader

Did the Oscars just show we are living in simulation?

newyorker.com

8 pointstsunamifury7 comments

Even though this is tongue in cheek, I always think elaborate theories like these and conspiracy theories are comforting to people because the truth: the world is chaotic and people are fallible, is so disturbing.

True, it's always comforting to have a cause for all that happens. It gives us a sense of control over our world.

Yes, I agree, the article is written with a bit of humor but watch how fast it becomes fact in some people's mind.

I suspect the thesis of the Chariots of the Gods book was a throw away comment at one time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods

As pointed out though the idea that we are more likely to be living in a simulation was always pretty sound.

That being said it's pretty much a non falsifiable theory and not a very useful approach in life or science.

Ooo. We've rediscovered both Anselm's Ontological Argument _and_ Gnosticism at the same time!

The demiurge will be pissed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Anselm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism#Main_features

I didn't read the article, nor watch the oscars, but think about it this way: the universe is billions of years old. In a couple hundred years or so, a human life could probably be simulated convincingly in a short time frame. (Especially if the rate of technology improvement accelerates greatly with the help of AI, which I can't see any reason it wouldn't). The odds that a human is born just before we have the technology to build a simulation that could conceivably fool us, and be computed in a relatively short time frame, seem fairly small.

Imagine how many more human lives could be simulated once such a singularity occurs than have previously existed in the realverse. Going into the future, if there is some reason to simulate human lives in great quantity, or just never-endingly (perhaps as some sort of living wikipedia entry), then simulated lives could outnumber 'real' (pre-singularity) human lives many times over.

So, given a machine / AI culture stretching on infinitely into the future, continuously simulating human lives for some reason, the chance that a person is born one of the 'real' unsimulated lives would be vanishingly small in these circumstances. So, whether or not one can find a 'glitch in the matrix,' which reveals whether or not we are actually in a simulation, it seems that one could imagine an infinite future of humans, with real humans (who may be completely unlike us) only occurring with vanishing measure. So in some (plausible?) futures we are almost certainly simulated...

Ah ok, went back and read the article. Similar sentiment.

The way I see it is that the simulation makes itself obvious with "errors" like this so that people who claim we're living in a simulation are written off as crackpots.

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