Sure - I didn’t mean gross in that sense.
Like the Singularity, it’s a religious belief in technological disguise. There’s no difference between thinking that we are just programs inside some superpowerful computer and thinking that we are products of the “mind of god.”
Although I must say that eliminating the supercomputer from the equation produces better literature:
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I’ve got a somewhat different take on this.
My fundamental ‘belief’ about the nature of reality is essentially like Greg Egan’s Dust Theory/Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe; all possible realities exist, basically.
What that means for us, and simulations, is that we don’t exist in a single reality. We exist within all realities that can contain us, be that boring old standard-model-like universes, Boltzmann Brains somewhere, or simulations.
So the answer is yes and no at the same time, to the extent that the question is essentially meaningless. We may find ourselves having gone down the trouser-legs of time and into states where simulation contexts predominate… and we also may not.
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I’ve always loved this quote from some famous guy who married his daughter: “God is an underachiever.” This implies that someone/something is operating this “reality” for some unknown ends and unknown reasons of their own, and that he/she/it has placed the mechanics of said reality beyond our immediate understanding. Why? This seems unnecessarily coy.
Hence the human need for an explanation for things; things like pain and suffering, for instance. C.S. Lewis wrote a book about this called, “The Problem of Pain,” a relevant quote from which might be, ‘We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.’
I have always resented this as a clumsy method of control or interaction, if you buy into any of this. Why is this necessary? Why not just be direct? Are we so deaf that we must be injured before we are willing to accept information?
All this leads to endless questions. The bizarre conflation of ineffable beauty and horrific ugliness characteristic of this “place,” makes me think it has to be an invention. The identity of the inventor can be assumed to be unknowable, given the arc of history of philosophy.
But I would posit that the inventor is insane.
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If you look at the dwarves-in-the-stable scene in Lewis’s “The Last Battle” (it’s a great scene if you haven’t read it) you’ll see that he follows the (fairly standard Christian) line that God does make himself plain but that we “suppress” that truth because we don’t want God to be our God. In other words, the problem isn’t so much that we are deaf or stupid but proud and eager to find excuses not to believe – the deafness is an attempt to reduce our cognitive dissonance.
[quote]
The bizarre conflation of ineffable beauty and horrific ugliness characteristic of this “place,” makes me think it has to be an invention. [/quote]
I think you’re on to something here. But I also wonder whether we know enough (or should expect to know enough) to be able to make the call that the inventor is insane. All manner of things from story plots to tapestry to orthodonture look bad halfway through, or at a certain scale, or from a lay perspective. An infant has trouble understanding that the doctor isn’t torturing her – and the difference between us and God is much greater than that between a child and a grownup.
I read that trilogy years ago. Very little of it is left in memory. May be time to re-read.
Thanks.
I’ve always been a devotee of the idea of the philosophers divining reality from the shadows on the cave wall, as the fire (actuality) burns behind them. Is anything truly knowable?
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I’m much less interested in this theory since I know Occam’s razor.
It’s fun in fiction but not that interesting to talk about and kind of pointless, like debating the sex of angels or how much god can deadlift.
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Every now and then I find that I move too fast, interpenetrate with a wall, and end up stuck there till the midnight reset happens.
So yeah, I guess so.
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If we are living in a simulation, does it have a Regulars’ Lounge…?
ducks
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Trick question, right?
It will have to come out. All the bits of it.
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I think we are at the stage where the player is bored with what they have built in SimCity, and they are now spamming the disasters to make things interesting.
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I can’t really say why I make this recommendation without getting into spoiler territory, but for an interesting take on this topic, I recommend The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod. It’s got a whiff of Neal Stephenson, but is a significantly shorter book than Stephenson tends to write.
I would argue at this stage that we all live in individual simulations of the universe that our brains compose out of all neural stimuli. It can be susceptible to false information, as well as bugs. Most of these, we call them “delusions” and “hallucinations” when they no longer match the actual, physical world. Our dreams are simulations. Heck, most of us actually run a quick sim when we see a ball to predict its trajectory so that we can catch it.
Yes, we live in several hundred simulations. And yet, the universe itself is not a simulation, it is mrely the target of what we are simulating all the time.
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I guess I’ll just parrot what a lot of folks over the millennia have said, when it comes to the question of how one can explore the nature of their own, and universal, consciousness:
Meditate! 
Indeed, who would intentionally design it this way?
A bored AI.
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That assumes that the AI in question has actual emotions and can get “bored.”
O_o
Someone mentioned Occam’s Razor upthread, and I tend to agree.
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Perhaps the best-designed “that’ll stop them looking further” subroutine ever invented. 
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“Look further” all you like; it’s not like any actual empirical evidence will ever be forthcoming.
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For sure, we are never finding out.
Personally, I’m in the “This is not a simulation, there is no God, YOU are responsible!” camp.
I suspect it is problems with the third statement that makes so many people search within the first two so much. I don’t mind as long as they aren’t dicks about it.
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