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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

> That makes me feel like we live in a simulation perhaps more than anything else I’ve heard

I'm never quite sure what this is meant to mean. Is it comparing to other simulations like computer games or physical simulations where you could change a seed or a data structure and have it manifest in reality? What is expected from a simulation to differ from reality? What does it even mean to make this distinction when we are observing inside the process we are trying to distinguish between real and simulated?

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Most people generally think that it means that there is a higher-level reality, and that there are beings within that higher-level reality engaged in creating our simulation. "Gods" for lack of a better word.

I prefer Greg Egan's interpretation in Permutation City, where simulations can become self-bootstrapping and that simulations need no "simulator" at all. No one's loaded universe.exe in some higher-lever reality, it runs itself.

That still won't stop me from attempting rowhammer attacks.

Adding to this, I think people naturally confuse / extrapolate a universe that appears to have discritized / computational laws with the discritized simulations and computations we use to approximate our (previously assumed continuous) reality.

As I put it, the older understanding of the universe working in mechanical ways does not imply the universe is actually a machine nor that it was built by someone or for some purpose similar to the way we build machines. Likewise, the newer understanding of the universe working in computational ways does not imply the universe is actually running on some computer nor that its code was written by someone or for some purpose similar to the way we run simulations.

It could also mean there is a lower-level, more fundamental reality, in which the building blocks of our reality emerge.

It could even be a very simple system, as long as it produces complex behavior.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY6Y4lE3LTo

Until we can download some else's consciousness from a different universe into this one, similar to what happens to Durham, this is just an interesting thought experiment. And even then, how could we distinguish an alien human consciousness from someone having a severe dissociation episode?

Guys, everyone has a Metaphysics (starting assumptions about the Universe) and the better explanation for me (after starting out as a dyed in the wool Materialist) is Idealism, Note this is NOT solipsism (only your mind exists) but that consciousness is Fundamental (ie below SpaceTime)

Metaphysically, I'm strongly opinionated on this now after many years of research on this topic. -see this video from a group of philosophers and idealism-minded thinkers - (also it is way more plausible to me than simulation theory)

https://youtu.be/m4DwQDaUANU?si=sL92PP-MSzjd0PiV

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