Your experience of reality is entirely subject to your own perception and experience of the world around you. Someone with, say, the ability to smell like a dog can would experience the world differently than a person with the typical human sense of smell. It doesn't make either experience/perception of reality more or less real. To each person, what they are experiencing is their reality.
Scenario: Let's say there's a person (we'll call them P1). P1 is experiences constant hallucinations involving all of their senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste). These hallucinations are completely indistinguishable from anything else to P1, so to them the hallucinations would just be part of their reality. Say a second person is observing P1 (we'll call this second person P2). P2 cannot see the hallucinations of P1, so according to P2's perception/experience the hallucinations are not reality. However, this does not make them any less real for P1.
All of this is just to say your experience of reality is subjective. Your reality is what you experience and perceive to be real.
So, if we really DID live in a massive simulation indistinguishable from the outside world, why would it matter? Your reality, and the only reality you'd have ever known, would be that simulation. The fact it would be constructed does not make it less real. For all intents and purposes, there'd be no difference.
Whether or not the reality you perceive/experience was constructed or natural doesn't change the reality of your subjective experience.
I do hope I was able to get my intent across. I am a little unhappy with my ability to put my explanations into words, but I'm hoping I still got the idea across.
/u/DiscordantObserver (OP) has awarded 1 delta(s) in this post.
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Delta System Explained | Deltaboards
Because presumably that means someone decided to turn on our simulation, and someone can decide to turn it off.
It matters so that we can try our best to send some message to whoever is watching, if anyone is watching, that we do not want to be turned off.
You may have a point about the nature of what we perceive and experience ultimately not mattering. But practically, if we are indisputably proven to be in a simulation, our number 1 goal changes and becomes "find a way to make sure our simulation doesn't just get turned off."
This is basically the cosmic version of "don't piss off the guy who controls the power switch" lmao
But honestly I think you're giving the simulation runners too much credit - if they're advanced enough to simulate entire conscious beings, they probably don't give a shit about our little ant farm messages. We'd be like NPCs trying to communicate with the player through random dialogue trees
Plus if the simulation is truly indistinguishable, how would we even prove we're in one to begin with
if a computer NPC sent a convincing message to my gamepad, my iphone, my TV, my wife's phone, and a message via internet to physical currier service i would pay attention to those random dialog boxes in the game.
We have no concept of how advanced they think we are. We may surprise them and prove ourselves more valuable than the 3 hours of gaming time they had for the afternoon.
Presumably, the simulation being switched off (for whatever reason) would just mean instant death. But what makes that different from anything else?
You can already die any number of ways at any time, with many of those ways being things that can occur without your knowledge and giving you no time to do anything to avoid it. The world just being switched off would be no different than any number of cosmic events that could destroy humanity at any moment (such as rogue black holes, anything that could disrupt Earth's orbit around the Sun, gamma-ray bursts, etc.).
We don't constantly worry about these things, because they're things we can't reasonably do anything to prevent. If the simulation being switched off was a possibility, then it'd just be one more thing to add to the extensive list of things that could kill us at any moment.
My death does not include the death of everything in the universe. I can accept that I will die, but that my impact will remain. My family will remember me. My children will continue. My ideas can still reach others.
Turning off the simulation is the end of everything and everyone. It isn't just death, it is total nonexistence and total removal of any previous existence.
But those aren't done at the hands of a thinking agent. I can't convince a black hole not to devour our planet. I might be able to convince a person not to turn off the simulation.
Those natural phenomenon are also somewhat predictable, or at least the causes of them are recognizable. We can plan for disruptive solar flares or we can see a black hole or massive asteroid coming.
A person we do not know and cannot communicate with is not predictable. That person could turn us off because too many people on the planet have the favorite color red. You can't plan around that. That is infinitely more terrifying. But it also means we can try to influence their decision. We might not succeed, but we can try and have an impact. We can't influence a black hole, we can influence a dude with an off switch.
That's the point. It isn't just one more thing. It is a totally new thing, and specifically it is something we can actually do something about. I can't fight the heat death of the universe. I can try to argue against the simulation creator turning us off. They're not the same.
And again, death and non-existence are two different things. Even if humanity dies off, the universe still exists and some future intelligent race could technically find our planet and find evidence of our existence. The fact that we once existed cannot be erased. If our simulation is turned off, all traces of our existence can disappear. It can be as if we were never here. That matters to someone like me.
I am not OP, but you got my !Delta. I came in thinking "it does not matter if the world is real or not, because if I am a simulated agent, I still value what I value and will act in alignment of those values."
But to me, as a perceived real agent, it matters very much that I act in alignment with those values because I believe myself to be part of a material world in which I affect other real, material beings. That weight is absent in a known simulation in which I'd understand my existence as just spicy electrons or whatever.
Edit: Specifically what caused my delta here is that to maintain these values, I would first have to convince the agent controlling the simulation to retain the simulation, else these principles carry no weight. There would, at minimum, need to be an interruption to my activities to ensure my actions retained weight, else there is no reason to be principled and instead should just maximize for short term reward.
Ok but the premise is “indistinguishable”.
Knowing you’re in a Simulation is a distinguishing fact. If everything is indistinguishable from a fully unsimulated real world - that means you could never have evidence of the simulation - because any evidence or revelation or knowledge about the simulation would be a distinguishing difference.
So you would never behave differently in life, so ultimately it wouldn’t matter.. unless despite the lack of evidence you still plead to the unknown just in case it is a simulation.
I accepted OP’s engagement with this poster’s premise as a confirmation that within this question, such a thing could become knowable and that “indistinguishable” meant “from an experiential perspective” such that one would experience joy, pain, and a perceived physical reality in a way that didn’t differ from if what is perceived existed in an actual physical domain rather than purely simulation.
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Troop-the-Loop (27∆).
Delta System Explained | Deltaboards
Yepp. You'd never notice. For that matter it's possible that the entire simulation we're in got paused a second ago and was paused for a long time, and then it got turned back on again for whatever reason, so what you think of as a second ago, was actually a year ago.
And you'd never know. And there's not really any reason why we should care either.
I want to posit a type of simulation that is not dependent on some being having turned it on and can turn it off.
The universe as we know it consists of an uncountable amount of elementary particles, many of them together constitute bigger objects, like stars, planets, and of course us humans, with a clear perception of free will, such that some of us even question the truth behind it.
But still, the entirety of every object, living or not, are constituted by elementary particles, that in and of themselves have no mind of their own. At least I think so. And all of these particles react depending on their surrounding, which dictates their next position.
Or maybe it doesn’t work like that, because if we look to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in simple terms it states that for a given elementary particle, if we can measure it’s position then we cannot measure it’s momentum, and vice verca. But that’s just the thing, what we know is that we can’t measure these parameters at the same moment in time.
Now consider if we could do that. That would mean that in a closed system consisting of two electrons, we could measure the charge, momentum, position, and any other relevant parameters of these two electrons at a certain moment in time. The only forces that affect these two particles are the properties of these particles themselves. We could then create a model that tells us exactly the position and momentum of these particles at a future moment in time. And backward, for that matter.
And if we could create such a model on a minimal scale, we could do it on a larger scale, it would just take an impossible amount of data storage and computation power to do so.
The perception of randomness in our universe is dependent on this very principle. But this is only our perception of it as limited by our knowledge, and the experiments we are able to conduct on elementary particles are limited by the sheer minimality of these mysterious particles.
So, if we consider the above, that the world we live in may very well be both real and a simulation at the same time, would you agree with the statement ”it doesn’t matter if free will exists or not”?
I would say that presumption is not actually that well founded, not just because it smacks of a "in the image of god" basic assumption, but how similar are we, as creators, to the simulations we make on computers? By and large, not similar in any meaningful sense. So there is not even room to presume that the thing/force/motivator that "turned on" our simulation is even intentional, rational, or decisive in any way. It could be that the primordial soup was struck by lightning in just such a way that it is not an evolutionary spawn point, but a puddle that acts like a computer and we are 1s and 0s in it. That leaves open the same fear, that the puddle could be interrupted and we are gone, but it doesn't dovetail into some creative actor(s) being responsible or in power.
The whole premise is that our simulation is indistinguishable from the outside world. I took that to mean that the people running the simulation are humans like us.
I like that. If the simulations we see here are primarily made by humans, then we can use that to extrapolate that the sim maker/runner is likely like us / we are like them. However, I was referring more to the general philosophy in question rather than OP, and ngl OP is kind of all over the place (not a dig! Just I mean those first sentences need some parsing)
How is it different from believing in any God, especially the almighty one.
It isn't. But this would no longer be a belief. My hypothetical necessitates knowing this is a simulation, not believing in one.
And comparing it to belief in a God, many people who believe do change their actions to try to convince a God not to punish or end them. If it became known that someone created our universe in a simulation, it would change the way people act. So it matters.
There’s uncountable ways that we can go extinct, turning the simulation off doesn’t seem like a big difference to me than say, an impact by a interstellar object larger than the last big one.
Right, but you can't reason with an interstellar object. You can reason with a thinking agent that created the simulation.
'Real' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Some philosophy does say Real is what still exist without the human mind.
As for the claim, people have a deep persuasion towards the truth, even if is not entirely rational. For some religions, it would ultimately matter if the universe is real.
I was not considering the human inclination towards the truth, and you're right that it would be a factor. The desire for truth and reveal of falsehood could dramatically alter the lens through which they interpret that reality in hindsight.
While currently I still think that the subjective reality that had been perceived/experienced would ultimately would remain unchanged (and I don't know if this will shift my view entirely), I do feel like I need to consider this angle more deeply.
So !delta for prompting the need for deeper thinking on my view.
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/ScoutB (1∆).
Delta System Explained | Deltaboards
I get what you're saying, but as with a lot of these simulation discussions, a lot really hinges on how fa you're willing to take the "indistinguishable from the outside world" antecedent. If taken literally and maximally true, then I do sort of agree with you. Its basically by definition impossible for it to "matter". Even if it did "matter", you could literally never possibly know, so at no point would you even philosophically be justified in thinking about reality differently than someone in the real world. (Side note: one of the amusing corollaries of some of the "if a simulation is possible, we almost certainly live in one" is that even the non-simulated people at the root of reality would be similarly but wrongly convinced that they too live in a simulation).
But my pushback is... is what anyone is actually even talking about truly and utterly indistinguishable from the outside world? If the simulation has a boundary, its indistinguishable until you hit the boundary. If the simulators can make edits to the simulation, it might be indistinguishable until they make certain kinds of edits. If might only seem indistinguishable until we make some new discovery that reveals it to be a simulation, or to be more likely to be a simulation. Maybe its only a perfect simulation until we die, and then we leave the simulation. Almost endless possibilities here. And if there's a truly perfect indistinguishable simulation out there, there's probably also a bunch of non-perfect simulations that are distinguishable.
So I think while I get the logic if you fully limit yourself to "truly indistinguishable" simulations, even the pro-simulation arguments have no reason to believe we must be in one of those simulations. For all we know, the simulation is about to reveal itself. And if we were indeed in "the matrix" or anything remotely in that category of simulation, that absolutely would matter! And the important thing is that we can't philosophically argue that only the indistinguishable version is possible, and if as long as we can't currently distinguish, then we would have no way of knowing if we are or aren't in a simulation that would matter to reality.
So to sum it up, I agree that if it were utterly in principle indistinguishable, it wouldn't matter, but we have no conceivable way of knowing if that's the case, and if we are in a simulation, there's no reason to think that it would be indistinguishable, and for all we know it could very dramatically change the nature of our reality.
Even if the simulation was drastically different from the outside world, would that change your experiences as someone within the simulation?
You've never experienced the outside world, your reality is the simulation. Even if the outside world was different, your reality is not the outside world. I you learned about the outside world (somehow) and wanted to get to it, does the fact something different exists that make the subjective reality you've experienced thus far less real?
Depending on what you mean by "less real", I guess my point is that it clearly matters. My experiences in the simulation were still "my reality" in the sense that that was the thing I experienced. But if I learn that my reality could be changed at the click of a button, that matters a lot!
Like, to take your P1 and P2 examples, it would be a big deal for them both if a surgery existed that could allow P1 to swap to P2's experience and vice versa. I'm not necessarily totally prepared to call one "less real" than the other, but both of them should think about the world differently if they learn such a surgery exists and that not only is another alternative subjective experience possible, but that they can choose to experience it.
Why or how is it your assumption that this simulation would be indistinguishable from the outside world? Would you care if you came to find out that the simulation we live in is far worse than the outside world?
No, it wouldn't particularly matter to my subjective perception of reality. My reality would've still been based on my perception of and experiences in the simulated world, not the outside world.
Perception of reality is different from what you'd prefer your reality to be. Sure, if I found out my reality was a simulation that REALLY sucks compared to the outside world I'd want to find a way to go to the outside world. But wanting something better doesn't make the reality I had experienced less real.
Would you want to do that if there were no "outside world"?
If so, the two cases are no longer "indistinguishable", going forward.
It wouldn't necessarily make your subjective experience better or worse or more or less "real" (though that's pure metaphysics, and just an opinion)...
But surely you'd no longer be living in a simulation "indistinguishable" from "a real world".
I would claim it would nearly impossible that your subjective experiences wouldn't change going forward once you knew this. That seems like a very... niche kind of personality that wouldn't care.
And in the case of your P1 vs. P2 example, you don’t think it matters and you don’t care if you’re P1 experiencing hallucinations and delusions, while all the rest of us are P2 crossing the street to avoid you? Because that’s your subjective reality?
Simulation theory is just Creationism for nerds
Fucking right. I subscribe to absolutely nothing that is unprovable and unfalsifiable, because why the fuck would I? I don’t care if you think the chance is really high. Even if we were in a sim it wouldn’t affect me at all because it clearly has no tangible effect on the universe as we know it.
It’s Bill’s Paradox. Does it matter whether or not this reality is real when you have to pay your bills no matter what? No, ultimately it matters not.
I mostly agree with the core intuition, but I think “it doesn’t matter” is only true if you limit yourself to day-to-day experience. The moment you zoom out, it starts to matter in quieter ways. Finding out you’re in a simulation would change how you think about permanence, progress, and risk. Even if your coffee still tastes the same. It’s the difference between living in a world you assume is self-contained versus one you now know depends on something external that can intervene or end it. That knowledge doesn’t rewrite your sensations, but it does shift how fragile the whole setup feels, and people tend to care a lot about that. So I don’t think the simulation would feel less real but it would feel more conditional, and that’s enough to change how people orient themselves toward it.
It obviously does otherwise you wouldn't have made this thread. No offense man, but your whole argument boils down to a nihilistic "nothing matters anyway" and the simulation hypothesis is just the point of focus here.
You could also ask "why do people care to live because when they are dead nothing matters anyway".
Not at all what my argument boils down to. I'm arguing that the subjective reality of someone living in a simulation would be just as real as someone living in the outside world, so it doesn't really matter either way. Or, in other words, I'm saying that your subjective reality matters just as much in a simulation as it would outside one.
I never said anything about NOTHING mattering.
Because if we live in a simulation, that will affect how we understand and interact with the world.
Now sure, you can handwave away any possible explanation by saying “but the simulation won’t allow that”, but that’s just moving the goalpost and we have no way of knowing that’s true.
If we find out we are in a simulation, that changes everything. We can focus on exploiting the simulation instead of working on the assumption the universe has any actual unchangeable laws.
In our universe we can’t create energy from nothing. In a simulation there isn’t really energy or anything. We can make anything from anything or even nothing if we find a way to do so. We could find an exploit that allowed an infinite energy source to be created. We could potentially find a way to glitch gravity off when we wanted to becisre all the laws of the universe are just made up.
It’s like saying it doesn’t matter if a tv really has tiny people performing plays in it or if it’s an array of lights controlled by a computer to generate a rapidly changing sequence to create the illusion of moving pictures. Of course it matters. One means we can potentially crack open the tv and free the tiny performers and the other means we can connect devices to the tv that let us display whatever we want on it.
Why do you care to talk about a subject that doesn't matter?
I mostly agree, although maybe it could influence or informs someone's religious / spiritual beliefs
I agree with you for the most part, but the massive difference that means it does matter if we live in a simulation or not is that if we are the "top level" of reality, then we're free to do whatever we like. But if we're in a simulation, pressumably that simulation was created by something for some reason. Meaning that something could turn the simulation off at any moment if say it seemed like we aren't going to do what they want, or we've already done it, or if it's nothing to do with us in the first place, they're just simulating galaxies and we are a happy accident they might not notice before shutting it down.
Given that concious life in a simulation is as valuable as concious life in reality, especially to the lives experiencing it, that would obviously be pretty bad, and is a real threat that only applies to those living in simulations.
If we ever prove we're in a simulation, we'd ideally want to find a way of preventing the creators from turning us off. But if we ever prove we're in reality... cool, we're all good.
Simulation Theory is Creationism in a lab coat. The only real difference is that God is replaced by a Divine Neckbeard.
You're a Philosopher, Harry!
I think it would matter because there is something underneath it all that is more real and as humans we feel we have the right to choose which reality we live in. It's wrong to deny us the "most real" experience, because the expectation is that we should have free agency over realistic things.
But to paraphrase the Matrix, the other view is probably valid for some as well:
"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss"
It doesn't make it less "real", I suppose, but it does have philosophical and practical ramification in that a simulation is necessarily a constructed thing, which needs a constructor that has, if nothing else, at least enough control to end the simulation.
That would answer a great many religious and philosophical questions, and it very well could change how you live your day-to-day life knowing that the universe could be turned off at any moment.
It could also have implications for free will, theories of self, and several other areas.
For a hallucination to exist, does it not by definition conflict with the greater reality?
I think it's a universal experience that we all simulate reality, but the more troublesome part is how reality itself supplants and renders obsolete our defective simulations and asserts it's primacy in all it's awe fullness, i.e. a mixture of fear and reverence.
But if P2 knows that P1 hallucinations are not there, they can do something to affect P1. That's crucial and fundamental difference.
That depends. Is it all life fully simulated or just yours, or just humans? It has implications of how you value other lives
nice try in trying to keep me in the simulation
There's no such thing as subjective reality. Truth is objective.