Creators don’t have to be all-knowing. Also, because believing this reality is a simulation does not change the rules we live by, there is no difference between the life of a sim-denier and sim-believer. It’s not as if you’d be punished just for [redacted].
If we're living in a simulation, why would the simulation creators allow the sims to ponder and speculate whether or not they live in a simulation?
Submitted 4 months ago by qbert@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
randomdeadguy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Asafum@feddit.nl 4 months ago
Depends on the structure of the simulation. If it’s general enough then they didn’t specifically plan to have this capacity, it’s just the result of the inputs and constraints of the simulation.
VoterFrog@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If we’re in a simulation, it’s probably a massive universe-spanning one. We’re just a blip, both within the scale of the space of the universe and within the history of time of the universe. In that case, we’re not important enough for a simulation creator to even care to adjust our capabilities at all. They’re not watching us. We’re not the point of the simulation.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
It’s not like my Conway’s Game of Life creatures can ever escape their petri dish. I’m so zoomed out that I wouldn’t even notice if they were intelligent.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 4 months ago
So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of.
andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
I like this observation a lot. Because I was going to say that if we couldn’t conceive of a simulation, we’d probably just speculate about the closest thing we could imagine.
lath@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Replace simulation with book where only a framework is defined and and the plot is built within the set rules.
ogmios@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Like a limited ‘fake’ world edifice structured through legal fictions like money, which attempts to assert that it is significantly more pervasive than it actually is, through stories like The Matrix, to instill a sense of hopelessness upon anyone who even considers not submitting to it.
FunnyUsername@lemmy.world 4 months ago
My best guess: The thought processes required to ponder the possibility of a simulation are too important to the goal of the simulation itself to disable.
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because that’s what people outside of a simulation would do.
tfw_no_toiletpaper@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Why not? Not like they can break out or anything
canadaduane@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Because their creators allowed them to ponder and speculate about it.
pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 4 months ago
You’ve probably read about language model AIs basically being uncontrollable black boxes even to the very people who invented them.
When OpenAI wants to restrict ChatGPT from saying some stuff, they can fine tune the model to reduce the likelihood that it will output forbidden words or sentences, but this does not offer any guarantee that the model will actually stop saying forbidden things.
The only way of actually preventing such an agent from saying something is to check the output after it is generated, and not send it to the user if it triggers a content filter.
My point is that AI researchers found a way to simulate some kind of artificial brains, from which some “intelligence” emerges in a way that these same researchers are far from deeply understanding.
If we live in a simulation, my guess is that life was not manually designed by the simulation’s creators, but rather that it emerged from the simulation’s rules (what we Sims call physics), just like people studying the origins of life mostly hypothesize. If this is the case, the creators are probably as clueless about the inner details of our consciousness as we are about the inner details of LLMs
xavier666@lemm.ee 4 months ago
If I made a simulation, I would be interested in how the simulated agents interact with each other. I would only set some very basic restrictions on them (don’t fall out of bounds, maintain self-preservation). I would be very interested in what kinds of questions they come up with, what kind of structures they make using cooperation, overall behavior (assuming i’m interested in the agents in the first place).
Of course, if the simulation is not good enough, I’ll just close the simulation, change some parameters and restart the sim using an earlier snapshot.
Source: I worked with simulations.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
maintain self-preservation
The simulator running us clearly did not define this restriction.
xavier666@lemm.ee 4 months ago
It’s for the really dumb stuff. It’s more of “don’t fall from the edge of a tall building”, and not “don’t create a market scenario which will lead to the downfall of human civilization”
scarabic@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Just because we’re living in a simulation doesn’t mean we are simulated. So perhaps the architects of the simulation can’t simply program our questions away.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 4 months ago
Yes it does.
derek@infosec.pub 4 months ago
Not necessarily. You’re correct that we cannot account for intention. Neither cam we assert whether we ourselves are simulated or not. Even if we can prove this reality is simulated we cannot be sure if we are part of the simulation or inserted into it (a la The Matrix) from our current position.
NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com 4 months ago
Video game designers do something similar to this in hiding “Easter eggs” in their games and the code that makes the game that often break the 4th wall or just bypass it.
Maybe it’s fun? See who can figure it out and come as close as they can to the truth without actually getting to the truth?
xmunk@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
It’s probably a bug.
Fuck, if we’re in a simulation I’d be most amazed that nobody has managed to trigger a null pointer exception to crash the whole thing yet.
Oh, also, infinite recursion… and we got so close with youtu.be/xz6OGVCdov8
tonyn@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Maybe our types of thoughts are so primitive compared to them that they can’t even imagine that we’d have them.
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because everyone is always looking up.
Iamsqueegee@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Movie rights. Were something like bitcoin. Our ideas generate value to the creators. The more in-sim value that’s created, so it extends to the creators. Mirrors are to blame, you see. Whichever creator allows mirrors to exist in-sim nearly destroyed the sim the first time a “person” stood between two mirrors and saw their infinite reflection. The immediate fix was to allow the concept of infinite universes and sim life.
jBlight@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Life isn’t as fun if you have all the answers. You’ll lose the opportunity for growth.
theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Maybe that’s the entire point
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Maybe the devs were debating whether it’s possible for a simulated sentient intelligence to figure out it’s in a simulation. What if there was a bet, and the only way to prove other dev wrong was to actually build the simulation and let it run its course. I mean, it’s just a quick little experiment about a single universe in 3D space with linear time.
MissJinx@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Reality ia amazing but to value our blissful existence we have to go through a simulation of how horrible the exitance could be. I for exemple am incredibly happy in reality but Taylor swift is an 1 eye, no arms, Afgan orfan in reality… Or just reality Mcdonalds employeeq
KillingAndKindess@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
This comment reads like a person who keeps being pulled into previous lives, and started hallucinating they were some monkish writer.
Are you ok?