
Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/opinion/sunday/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation-lets-not-find-out.html
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caymanjim
It's quite a leap to assume that our simulation would end just because we
discovered it were a simulation. That presumes that something is monitoring
the thoughts of individuals, or our species as a whole. It presumes that the
simulation is so small in scale that only humans are being simulated (vs say
an entire universe or some other large-scale experiment that involves more
than human sentience). It presumes that any simulation-runner wouldn't be
curious to see how the discovery altered our behavior.

I like the simulation hypothesis as a mind game, and I even have some
semblence of religious attraction to the idea as an origin story that I could
accept on faith, but I don't buy the "ancestor simulation" at all. Why
ancestors? Who cares about simulating ancestors? If we're in a simulation, I'd
find it easier to believe that we're being simulated by an intelligence vastly
different from ourselves, and the complete evolutionary history is all part of
the simulation. The idea that in a few thousand years humans will build some
elaborate recreation of this narrow point in time and simulate their own
history is about as absurd as The Matrix.

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ksaj
If its true, then I would generally believe the way you describe it.

But in our quaint little petri dish, all of our practical AI and Alife
technology studies have been in the direction of making technology appear and
act more human, or at least like what we know of in nature in our particular
time and cultural frame. So it isn't such a big leap to think that if we are
indeed part of a simulation, we're not all that different from our creators.
We'd probably be damn near exactly like them once we've been "mastered" and
well out of the beta version we must surely be in right now.

Think about adversarial networks. Who's to say that all the bad in the world
isn't simply one of those? Maybe "they" were or still are trying to solve it,
and we're the hoped method of discovering a solution?

We build off of what we know. So would "they."

*Note: I feel I should point out in case it isn't clear - I don't believe any of this. But if it were true and we are all part of a simulation, I think it would be a lot like how we handle exactly the same subject in technology right now.

