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Comment by rland | Hacker News Reader

3 possibilities:

- We are not living in a simulation.

- We are living in a simulation, but it is a "perfect" simulation. There is no way to determine if we are in a simulation from within the simluation.

- We are living in a simulation, and it is not perfect. It could be exploited from within itself.

By far the most likely is 1 or 2, based on what we've observed, imho.

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3 explains magic, i.e. a hack from within the simulation to call some undocumented service of a simulation hypervisor. Well, maybe even 2 if it was intentional to have a hidden API, callable from inside (what if the author wants to spawn an avatar and play inside while granting themselves god mode?).

When was the last time you wrote perfect software? Personally never in my case. The possibility of complex, provably correct software is pretty unlikely I think due to fundamental logical reasons.

I think any ancestor researcher would have at least some bugs in their code.

Like one that prevents us from being able to write perfect code?

While 3 is unlikely, thanks for posting it. It’s the first reason I’ve ever heard that the simulation question could matter at all.

As a person who prefers high-variance outcomes, that could be cool

Then follow the white rabbit and look around, there are many exploits. Your consciousness influences wave collapse (with a weight tho), that's a huge attack vector. Von Neumann had a good theory on this one.

Do you also get that sci-fi arch with a portal and some computer controls in your room if you say "Arch" out loud?

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