this is something i thought when i was with strawberry tree.

there’s an idea that we’re certainly living in a simulation, because if there were a world that had advanced enough technology to create world simulations, it would make lots of them, and the simulated worlds would outnumber the real worlds by an arbitrarily large factor. i think this makes sense.

the world that’s simulating ours likely has finite computing power. whatever their goals for this simulation are, they’d likely want to be efficient and not waste resources simulating individual water molecules in the sea that no one can see, and instead might use models of a higher order, like fluid dynamics equations. if they actually wanted to better understand low level physics, they could just make a small physics simulation and not bother with all the humans and such. of course, in this world people have actually experimented with tiny physics, but in these rare cases the simulator could detect that we’re looking and actually work out the correct result to show us. the fidelity of the simulation might vary depending on who’s watching, human or animal or other.

this makes me wonder how much of our experiences are actually happening. maybe it’s only quantum mechanics that’s simplified away. maybe the line is drawn at life. maybe nothing is simulated except your mind and your sensory inputs, which are generated to suggest to you a coherent world. this would make sense if they were trying to study psychology, i guess.

and more generally if their goal is to learn something about minds, the absolute minimum they’d have to simulate is your state of mind at some point in time, which is made of

  • your current sensory inputs
  • your memory both of which can be pretty spotty or fake. i’ve heard of studies that say that people can easily be gaslit into believing in childhood memories that they never had. and people often hallucinate sensory input. so the simulator does not have to get these things 100% consistent.

if they wanted to see a person’s life through time, they wouldn’t need to simulate the entire process. they could just create a series of snapshots, with each one informing the memories of the later ones. so if you spent a week of your life playing a computer game that has no impact on the rest of your life, they might just not simulate that at all, and that week did not actually happen for you. neither did any of the meals you ate, or the showers you took. you probably dont even remember those at all, so they don’t even have to think about putting them in the next snapshot. this is sort of a motivator. if i don’t do anything interesting with my time, that time will not exist. if i am not unique in some way, i will not exist.

if the simulator wants to understand psychology, they might use thousands or millions of time steps per person. but what if it’s something higher order, like sociology or economics? then the day to day thoughts of people probably don’t matter as much, and they might use twenty steps per person. what if it’s cosmology? then maybe they don’t even simulate individual minds at all. if our planet ends up blown up because we got beaten in some sort of race, maybe our planet never existed, or only has a few bits of information describing it.

but then you wouldn’t be feeling consciousness. i think, therefore they simulated at least one instant for me.