For every action taken inside the simulation, there will be things that happen on the "hardware" outside of the simulation and since it's simulated, not real, the "hardware" won't respond in precisely the same way as it would if it were actually real in every possible circumstance.

The only simulation that would respond in exactly the same way as a "real" universe under all circumstances has to be a perfect 1:1 mapping in terms of "universe hardware", which is exactly the same as running on "real" bare metal.

In the scenario you mention, reality would be a program because it is still run on a computer in either case. If reality isn't a simulation, then we shouldn't be able to DDOS it, or overflow it, crash it, access a memory buffer, get root access, or execute timing attacks as those things are artifacts of computation.

Those seem like pretty unjustifiable assumptions. How can anyone possibly know how physics “should” work?

If you're on an emulated x86, and you know a lot about x86 architecture, you may detect that you're on an emulator. But if all you get is information on the one single instance you're running on right now, no references, no documentation, no comparison with bare metal... at that point what's the difference?

I can't find the specific paper now, because of all the pop-sci clickbait which comes up thanks to Musk musings.

AFAIK whether we are in a simulation is undecidable as long as the simulation rules are self consistent...

Philosophy had been dealing with similar problems for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism . The best they come up with is: "I think therefore I am."

The overarching point, is that I think it does not matter if we are in simulation as long as it is self-consistent. For the sake of argument, let's assume the world is deterministic. This will allow us to construct two scenarios. One is a real person living and dying in a 'real world'... the other one is a brain in a vat living the same simulated life. Both of their subjective experiences are identical, even if you randomly swapped them they would not notice.

Based on the above thought experiment, I think it does not really matter if we are in simulation.

Some counter arguments: * But the world is not deterministic! What if things are better in the 'real' world. Sure, but what if they are worse? There is already a wide disparity in this world. Some people live in post-scarcity society and others don't know if they will eat tomorrow. Even if we are in simulation, I would argue average external world experience would fall somewhere on the spectrum we have.

* But what if whoever runs the simulation decides to shut down the simulation. This is honestly one of the most benign rapid ending of the world I can imagine. Other events that could cause termination of human species would cause far more suffering. This would be global pandemic wiping out everyone, all out nuclear war, massive meteor or other white sky event... Just as well as shutting down the simulation beings that run it could choose to prevent one of other world ending event from happening. So I think this one is also a wash.

For which ones specifically? Generally any traditional scientific or layperson's explanation for a phenomenon is much better, namely the part that explains my observation of some entity by accepting that the observed entity exists. (Note that this doesn't imply that all observed entities exist. There are many cases where we have good explanations for why one would observe an entity that does not exist.)

> The overarching point, is that I think it does not matter if we are in simulation as long as it is self-consistent.

I suppose it might be okay to say that you believe that, as long as you're actually still generating new knowledge in order to solve problems. That's roughly the same as an astronomer saying "it doesn't matter whether Mars exists, as long as the entire Universe behaves consistently as if Mars exists." That astronomer can probably still help solve problems like figuring out how to land a rover on Mars, although I suspect that odd bit of epistemological gymnastics would introduce at least a small amount of difficulty compared to the astronomer whose epistemological stance is simply that Mars indeed exists.

Perhaps that's the difference in epistemology here: in your quest for knowledge, is your goal to solve problems, or to experience some feeling like "certainty" or "justification"?

I think you might struggle with the justification or certainty portion.

Otherwise, adverse feelings towards simulation tend to stem from elsewhere, namely the inability to ascertain what is real (the root of madness), an aversion to that greatest of promised simulations, heaven, or an innate desire to not be trapped in substandard eventualities - e.g. all man made simulations thus far suck hard donkey balls in a myriad of ways.

In light of solving the past three problems, sollipsism at least as I understand you to mean in this context, solves the problem of providing us a framework to tackle dealing with those issues, otherwise for the rest of us, we don't care.

I don't much care for the OPs article either, it's as much nonsense as calculating the size or speed of the universe using Genesis's 7 days of creation - that is to say it is hypothetical if not theoretical and ultimately conjectured.

Are we running in a simulation that has a specific FPS target cap, or is that the "hardware limit"? Maybe the universe will discretely lower the resolution of rocks on Mars to increase FPS for localized users on Earth that it knows are testing such theories.

If we are living in a simulation and the goal of the experiment is to study a living civilization it may be unecesary for the experiment to simulate other civilizations if travel between the two is impossible.

Their arguments, no matter how clever, would be absurd when looking in from the outside.

If there's a high probability that the simulation hypothesis is true, it seems clinically insane to believe that it doesn't matter.

Which view point is better -- one that believes in a flat earth or one that sees the world as spherical and all that this fact entails?

A flat Earther can't put a rover on Mars but someone who knows that the world is round can.

Imagine what a person who comes to understand that the world is a simulation could do.

I we were in a simulation where the creator(s) were hands off, just letting it run its course, then I don't think it really matters. If, on the other hand, they're pulling strings and manipulating outcomes for whatever reason, then it seems like it matters a lot more. At least that's my intuition.

Why? Undoubtedly the world outside our own has its own problems, all of which are possibly utterly alien to us.

> or finding out how far the turtles go from the developer's world.

To what end? Why is the top-most reality more valuable? If it is merely a matter of having more to explore, well, there's still plenty of this universe left.

> If it is a simulation, then I want to alter the damn rules to eliminate the scarcity we currently labor under.

Fair enough, but if there's a way to do that it hardly matters if we're in a simulation or not. Any exploit we pull off may as well just be some quirk of physics from our perspective.

Selfishly, I don't want our reality to be turned off.

All other motivations follow from that, as intermediate steps to figure out how to break out and become more permanent. Even if I'm a consciousness inside a Boltzmann Brain near the heat death of the reality-actual, a hundred Sol years passing for every "second" of simulation "tick", I want help in whatever way I can on a solution to beat entropy. Not going gentle and all that...