I don’t think that we’re in a simulation, but I do find myself occasionally entertaining the idea of it.
I think it would be kinda funny, because I have seen so much ridiculous shit in my life, that the idea that all those ridiculous things were simulated inside a computer or that maybe an external player did those things that I witnessed, is just too weird and funny at the same time lol.
Also, I play Civilizations VI and I occasionally wonder ‘What if those settlers / soldiers / units / whatever are actually conscious. What if those lines of code actually think that they’re alive?’. In that case, they are in a simulation. The same could apply to other life simulators, such as the Sims 4.
Idk, what does Lemmy think about it?
Before the AI boom I was on the fence. Like it’s not disprovable, so it doesn’t interest me.
But now we’re like… Running actual earth sims.
So yeah. Simulation confirmed. Nothing is real.
Yeah, the speed and direction of advancement of AI definitely further shifted my perspective on the topic as well.
For me the biggest application that raises an eyebrow are the continued and expanding efforts at using AI to resurrect dead people using the data they left behind or to create digital copies of people in virtual worlds.
Is there any reason to think that trend won’t continue? As a person who is part of a generation leaving behind unprecedented amounts of data, it seems like the kind of thing we should be thinking about more.
Well, no matter if we are in a simulation or not, we already have experimental evidence confirming nothing is (mathematically) real in our universe. Spacetime itself could be but as far as we know that’s impossible to determine because of the fundamental limits on measurement below the Plank length. But all matter in it definitely isn’t ‘real.’ Which is convenient for simulation theory, as a universe filled with mathematically real matter would be effectively impossible to be a simulated one if free will also exists in it.