Psience Quest

Some interesting science fiction speculation, in the short article Could We Force the Universe Simulation to Crash : 

Quote:"Intriguingly, the simulation hypothesis might be testable, under certain assumptions.
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the neatest test of the hypothesis would be to crash the system that runs our simulation. Naturally, that sounds a bit ill-advised, but if we’re all virtual entities anyway does it really matter? Presumably a quick reboot and restore might bring us back online as if nothing had happened, but possibly we’d be able to tell, or at very least have a few microseconds of triumph just before it all shuts down.

The question is: how do you bring down a simulation of reality from inside it? The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process. And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole. If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.

You could argue that any species capable of simulating a reality (likely similar to its own) would surely anticipate this eventuality and build in some safeguards to prevent it happening. For instance, we might discover that it is strangely and inexplicably impossible to actually make simulated universes of our own, no matter how powerful our computational systems are—whether generalized quantum computers or otherwise. That in itself could be a sign that we already exist inside a simulation. Of course, the original programmers might have anticipated that scenario too and found some way to trick us, perhaps just streaming us information from other simulation runs rather than letting us run our own.
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Perhaps letting it all crash is simply the price to pay for the integrity of the results. Or perhaps they’re simply running the simulation containing us to find out whether they themselves are within a fake reality.

Sweet dreams."

There's an interesting hubris in this idea - if someone can simulate us or keep us in a simulation they can simply make sure we never have the necessary resources to build the level of complexity we find in our observed reality.

I wonder what is motivating this trend among the more materialist-leaning sorts into considering we are in a simulation and are just programs.

Of course the notion that we humans could be simulations ourselves is deeply flawed, for instance for the many reasons the Hard Problem has been so unsolvable. It is possible, however, that we could be (unbeknownst to our human selves) the users or participators in the world simulation. It that were the case then it is unlikely that forcing the world simulation computer to crash would destroy us - we would just "wake up" from the simulated experience, as our true selves. Since that would defeat whatever purposes the simulation had in the first place, it would seem likely that the simulation system would have safeguards already installed to prevent crashing due to internal manipulation by its users.

(2020-08-13, 05:42 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]Of course the notion that we humans could be simulations ourselves is deeply flawed, for instance for the many reasons the Hard Problem has been so unsolvable. It is possible, however, that we could be (unbeknownst to our human selves) the users or participators in the world simulation. It that were the case then it is unlikely that forcing the world simulation computer to crash would destroy us - we would just "wake up" from the simulated experience, as our true selves. Since that would defeat whatever purposes the simulation had in the first place, it would seem likely that the simulation system would have safeguards already installed to prevent crashing due to internal manipulation by its users.

This is along the lines of what I was thinking, but it is interesting to see people like Elon Musk and Neil Degrass Tyson openly discuss their belief that we're in a simulation.

It does feel like a winding path toward something more akin to a spiritual journey....or maybe something about mundane reality bores them and it's just a cool hypothetical...