Could we not be living in a more advanced version of this same project?
(The argument then of course continues that if we would, our world's inhabitants would some day too, ad infinitum. Given such a stack, the chance that we're actually still in the top layer is very small.)
I just don't see why would an intelligent being (especially if they're a human descendant) choose to simulate our world the way it is right now.
I'm reminded of the Culture novel Surface Detail, which basically revolves around d the ethics surrounding simulating consciousness. There is a society in the book which runs afterlife simulations, including a pretty horrible hell. Conflict over whether this should be allowed to continue is one of the main drivers of the plot.
Could it be possible that they've just rented an RTX 40,090 and are simulating the entirety of our Universe to learn about how their (our?) species developed? Or how certain things would change if variables were altered? Perhaps there is a "multiverse" of infinite selves, but the multiverse is just a all the previous simulations that were tweaked slightly differently and had a different result.
Maybe changing the starting position of 1 atom in the beginning of the Universe has a butterfly effect that would entirely evade our assumptions. If we had the compute, why not simulate every possible reality? Perhaps there is 1 simulation that's occurred where everything was perfect, without anything cruel or unethical! And if we're gonna go as sci-fi as simulation theory, I don't think it's a far assumption that we could build things like fusion reactors or Dyson Spheres. We could learn so much, especially if the agents behaved naturally and had no idea that they themselves were simulated.
I don't actively believe we live in a simulation, but I think actively believing that we don't just doesn't make mathematical sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes%27s_theory_of_the_uni...
> Averroes argues, as put by the historian of philosophy Peter Adamson, that "there is only one, single human capacity for human knowledge".[3] He calls it—using contemporary terminology—the "material intellect", which is one and the same for all human beings.[4] The intellect is eternal and continuously thinking about all that can be thought.[5] It uses faculties (e.g. the brain) of individual humans as a basis for its thinking process.[5] The process that happens in the human brain is called fikr by Averroes (known as cogitatio in Latin, often translated to "cogitation" in English), a process which contains not universal knowledge but "active consideration of particular things" that the person has encountered.[5] This use of human faculty explains why thinking can be an individual experience: if at one point the universal intellect is using one's brain to think about an object of thought, then that person is also experiencing the thinking.[5]
edit: I'm going to elaborate on this. In particular it's interesting to consider two kinds of knowledge -- the knowledge stored in ChatGPT's neural network, which is broad and "universal" and "timeless", and the knowledge of the individual agent's context, which is particular and local in both place and time. The "intellect" can't really do anything without being provided with a particular context in which to act.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The Bible begins in Genesis with a one week period of entropy reduction. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", a summary of the following three or four chapters.
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (2 Peter 3)