Some Thoughts About Simulism
From Simulism
Author: Maughaum
Contents |
[edit] Some Thoughts About Simulism
The following is a collection of ideas I’ve had about Simulism. These ideas may have been considered elsewhere and I’ve simply misplaced them as my own thoughts… I may continue to work on this collection and possibly turn it into a real essay.
[edit] The Real Question
I find Simulation related ideas quite compelling. The idea that I’m living in a simulation makes absolute sense to me and seems like a very logical reason for my own existence. However, I find that Simulism has only distracted me from the real questions that I have which are: why am I here? Why is anything here? Who created all of this? Or, in Simulism terms, why was the bottom world created, and by who? Those, I think, would be better questions to ponder.
I know many have put forward the answer “it just is”, but that is a worse answer than any put forward by religion: because we are conscious and asking the questions “it just is” is not the right answer to settle for. And, unless Simulism can help us understand the real questions, well….
[edit] Simulation or Experiment?
We must be living in either a simulation or an experiment. If the theory of evolution is correct, we are living in one of several parallel experimental threads of nature. Why? Don't know, but the design of nature seems to be that it creates experiment after experiment, with each experimental thread lasting just as long as it can find a way to last. Why? We don't know but it would seem that we are in a rather brutal experiment to generate the most efficient, adaptable creature within a particular dynamic environment that will advance the experiment to another level. Or, if certain religions are correct God created the universe. He may have even created others. Why? We don't know, but possibly to test us or teach us, or test, confirm, or deny, one of God's ideas. In any case, we are living in some sort of wrapper environment or virtual machine.
[edit] Why Simulate
I might attempt to create a simulation to see if my sims develop any creative ideas to various unsolved dilemmas in my own world. I might try to mine intellectual property developed by my sims for profit in my own world.
The universe may be hard wired to generate intelligence so that an answer to our/bottom world origin is mined. If I wanted to generate an answer to a very difficult problem requiring creativity I might create many, many simulated worlds such as our own to mine the solutions considered by the sims.
If I had the ability to in-vat someone ( temporarily remove or block all of their current memory, and then totally immerse them in a simulated life, that for all intents and purposes seemed to last a lifetime as we know it ) then return them to their original state with the full memory of the simulation, I might use simulation to prank my frat buddy. Say he goes to sleep on the couch after a full night of partying and carousing. I might slip a simulated life as a pope on him. When I let him out – what a hang over he is going to have!
Just as people today use open source techniques to develop complicated software and Ivo uses this Wiki to collaborate on subjects such as Simulism, perhaps in the future the best way to develop solutions to "hard" problems will be to create multiple simulations to see if the sims can develop a solution. Just as millions of insects will find a way to food, millions of simulations will find a solution.
What if we were to determine that approximately once every 400,000 generations, a Matrix-like Neo character, Christ figure, or "the one" was born. We might create numerous simulations to generate then analyze such an individual or process. Or, we might simulate to more closely observe an historical figure such as Christ.
What if we were to create numerous simulations to determine if a simulated society developed to capacity to communicate with us, and if so, we could then use those techniques to try and communicate with our outer simulator.
[edit] How to Contact
How could a cognizant SIM character get your attention and get you to signal him? He might go to a sim beach and write in very large letters “Am I in a Simulation?” And, how would you signal a SIM character back? If the sim creator's only abilities to interact with the sim were limited to creating characters and selecting speech blurbs from pull down options, you might expect characters sent from the creator in an attempt to communicate with the simulated to be very strange characters, behave quite erratically, and/or say stuff considered quite odd?
[edit] Occam’s Razor
How could anyone consider the idea that we are living in a simulation more complicated than the reality postulated by the fields of biology, chemistry, and quantum mechanics?
[edit] How We Might Determine That We Are Living in a Simulation
Perhaps we could coordinate with every human on earth to perform some computation intensive task, such as ?, in unison at an appointed time in an effort to detect some sort of obvious slow down or other indication.
Or,imagine a simulated man looking at an object I've placed in his sim world examining it for detail. What would it look like to him. It would look like whatever I preprogrammed the object to feed to his sensory processes. A sort of sim sensory interface. If he is given enough room to experiment and develop on his own, he might eventually develop his own tool objects - my executing code creating and executing its own code, code I might never have anticipated - and examining virtual objects I've pre-placed in his world. Most likely, the sim world is executing within a virtual machine, say a JVM. What could he possibly find that I don't want him to? His tool behaviour, executing code, would have to conform to the rules of the VM which would certainly block access to all hardware resources, bytes, or bits, to protect the system. In this simulation, all he could ever do to detect the simulation is devise tools and methods of manipulating sim world objects in ways that I had not anticipated or possibly miscoded, and possibly detect abnormal behavior as compared to "normal" sim world object behavior. There is only the smallest possiblity that he might find a VM security hole that would allow him to access system resources. However, if the sims knew that, they might pound at the VM interfaces for even the smallest of breach. Where the sim finds inconsistent object behaviour, say quantum mechanics, he may expect to have found at least a programming edge...
[edit] Control of Simulation Content
We sense that we are born into an environment free of context, save a desire to survive. Someone presented or taught us a particular context such as our family tree, our particular place in society, etc. Our context is further shaped by interactions with others. Others frequently conspire to alter our context to achieve some goal. For example, your parents told you that you were special, but now a drill sergeant is in your face telling you that you are slime. The drill sergeant needs to convince you that you indeed do want to fight for some particular reason – that you are in fact willing to die for a particular cause.
If you consider our situation, that we were placed in an environment free of context, free to create our own reality, and that our reality is hopelessly bound to the input and historical context provided to our senses by others, the very nature of our existence could be attacked by others or a group of others in conspiracy. For example, we might, as a population, conspire to change the historical context as presented to the generation born after 2010. We could create a sacred text, that we all conspired to celebrate, which presents us as gelatinized moon beams formed by twisted pipe cleaners and hand delivered by Santa Claus on April Fool’s Day. As an aside, perhaps our context for existence was readily apparent at some other time but our forefathers failed to properly note it, or poorly communicated it to subsequent generations. For example, the story of Adam and Eve, where Adam and Eve knew the context of our existence but it was lost unto subsequent generations due to poor communication. One pair of idiots and here we are…
Consider a school yard clique where a group of young people consciously or unconsciously conspire to present their view of a social hierarchy as the overall group “reality” view. Also, consider when nations align themselves (conspire) to present a unified front to a problem state. Or, consider when a individual is imprisoned – society is conspiring to alter the person’s view of reality. The words con, dupe, politic, scheme, connive, diplomacy, justice may be used. But if you consider that the context of our existence is totally dependent on the input provided to our senses, one person’s manipulation of another’s input should be considered as an attack on another’s reality. Perhaps the right to defend one’s reality should be as universal a right as defending one’s very life. If we are living in a simulation, our simulation context is defined and controlled by other creatures within the simulation.
