No Man’s Sky: A Simulation Inside a Simulation?
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
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Are we living inside a simulation??
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No Man’s Sky is ... gigantic. Players traverse an entire, simulated universe exploring procedurally generated planets; there is practically no limit to what you can see. No Man Sky’s creator Sean Murray estimates that players will see maybe 1% of what the game is capable of generating. On top of that, much of the appearance and behavior of things in that universe-planets, plants, creatures, light itself-is emergent. The creators didn’t decide how stuff looks or behaves on a planet by planet basis. They made systems and rules that generate stuff and decide what happens when various stuffs mingle. Appearances and outcomes aren’t designed; they emerge. No Man’s Sky is lush and naturalistic. It’s detailed and even occasionally… life like. So this begs the question: if we’re able to simulate a universes of massive, life-like complexity-like that of No Man’s Sky-within our universe… should we wonder, or worry, that our own massive… life-like universe is itself… simulated? Today on Idea Channel we discuss No Man Sky and the Simulation Argument! Let us know what you think in the comments below!
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We are just some scientist's car battery.
Wubalubadubdub!
That wouldn´t make too much sense since a Car Battery doesn´t really require a Computer.
I´d maybe say we are just a Scientist little Program World where he can change everything as he sees fit.
Hmmm....
its society, we work off each other
@Emperor The thing about the car battery is a reference to the show "Rick and Morty", where Rick literally makes a smaller universe and uses it as a car battery.
EmperorMartin|Nr.1 Mass Effect Fan BrickOfDarkness Yep, to add on, Rick doesn't use a computer to simulate a universe or use a universe as a computer. He uses an entire micro universe as a slave to power his car.
Reality: The Game
Graphics are amazing but the tutorial stage takes 18 years and it has a brutal perma-death feature
Yup. Tutorial is boring to the point that some people.decide to skip it after several years. Devs really need to fix it.
But how _long_ is 18 years to the player? If our players live for 20,000 years then that's quite quick. Though, actually, the first 18 years is the fun part. It's all _grinding_ after that. Though, you do get to stop the grind an help level some noobs if you take the parent / teacher path. ;)
The CEO raids pretty boring and the PvP is nails. ^_^
Don't forget the infinitely deep gameplay!
"Disclaimer: DLC not included and monthly subscription required." fml
Goosh Speedruns require a linear game with a single win condition. Life is an open endeded, open-world game with multiple side quests which open and close throughout the game. If you could speedrun Skyrim, you'd aim to get burned at the steak by the dragon in the tutorial session. ;)
Equally, if life was a linear game, with speedrun potential, everyone would get the same grade at school, enter the exact same job, have exactly the same number of children at the same age in their lives etc. etc.
If it was like a Telltale game, you can speedrun a particular ending, but since no two endings are the same, it's more like Civilization or The Sims.
I've been thinking of it like WoW or Skyrim, but those games really only end when you stop paying the subscription, or delete your last save file. XD
Who would've guessed God is just a video game developer?
+Russell Wong Maybe we will:Ed Fredkin,James Gates,Sandra Postel,Tom Campbell Bruce Lipton interview,Robert Lanza,Pam Grout,Edgar Cayce,Louise Hay,Bob Monroe...
Hi me!
+
Hello Game are God?
Not just a video game developer, but a CONSCIOUS video game developer !
My first question: if we live in a simulation, can we hack it?
one, are you sure you'd want to? every action has consequences Two: I don't think the "maintenance team" would let you
Yes.
I'm still looking for the "Save" button... :(
***** no it really isn't.
^^vvba
...
...
dam it didn't work =/
Maybe Déja vu is the result of said reset switch?!
:0000000
How come some people don't get deja vu?
+WetBadger because maybe they're an NPC and not a player.
Huh well then I'm not a NPC cool
No, it's believed to be a brain issue.
"Some researchers describe it as a 'glitch' in the brain -- when the neurons for recognition and familiarity fire -- allowing the brain to mistake the present for the past."
source: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413113530.htm
A simulation of water IS wet, to things within the simulation. And maybe those animals walking around in No Man's Sky 'feel' pretty bored with their 'lives' too, walking around endlessly eating and pooping. lol
But isn't that the point? A simulation of a universe, interesting enough to simulate, probably _also_ has TONS of stuff within it, that is rather boring on it's own, or from the perspective of the people living in it. So I don't think we can conclude that "we're not in a simulation" because real life is boring.. That doesn't really say anything either way.
exactly
The animals in No Man's Sky can't feel. Why should they?
Seriously you guys are so overreacting on the game! Those "animals" are nothing more than a mesh of vertecies with some textures on them which move in set ways...
That's like saying your Toaster could feel
did you know. In no man's sky when you leave a place it is deleted to make space for wherever you are going to. you are technically rigth but notpractically.
oh and about your point of "It doesn't really say anything either way." you are quite right. he really had no point, the forest is enchanting to him because it is novel or new. not because it is simulated.
Your toaster can't feel (let's assume) and neither can the spaceship in which you travel around No Man's Sky. Your pet velociraptor can feel and so can your pet triceratops in No Man's Sky. Our universe incorporates a certain amount of possible interparticulatory forces and actions, of which the feelings experienced by the creatures in a simulation that is on a level below (or above) ours are no part.
+
would it be possible that the speed of light is just a limitation put in so the simulation is better parallelizable? Different regions of space can run on their own processor because each node doesn't need to know what happens in the space farther away. Just the summary of what effect the stuff in farther space had, which can can come in a huge relative delay.
Sounds like a pretty good optimization strategy to me; though it's seems like a sim that obeys different physics than the the sim runners would be a bit less useful. OTOH, that's making an unsupportable assumption about the reason for the simulation to be running...
The speed of light doesn't actually have anything to do with light. It's the fastest speed that the universe can communicate with itself. PBS Spacetime has an awesome video about it.
+Adam Tefel I kinda wish PBS would do what Marvel is doing with their heroes on Netflix... Congregate them into one Nerdy "Defenders" show where they debate stuff.
sounds like you cant think out of the box to me
now I'm thinking if this is true maybe wormhole or many wormholes can crash the simulation. Because a part of space suddenly needs to take into account more space than before... Or maybe the space just starts lagging. Maybe that's general relativity has time dilation. The more space it's curved the more processing power the node needs, the more slowly time goes to compensate.
If simulated universes can be created within simulated universes, it means the probability of our universe being simulated increases as the number of stacked simulated universes tend towards infinity.
Even if we find proof that there are parallel universes, it still doesn't add to the probability that we are in a real universe as all those parallel universes are still just part of this probable simulated multiverse.
But what makes those lesser universes less real?
Is there some criterium I'm missing that can be used to decide if a universe is real or not? Because as far as I know, a universe is always real in it's own context. It might not be from an outsider's perspective, but from within it's always real, seeing as we cannot interact with anything that is not the universe.
d3rrial My post doesn't really address whether something is more or less real, but whether they are really virtual or not.
However if there is a real universe out there, a base universe that isn't a simulation, this just means that it has the property of not being simulated and not having any creators.
GuyWithAnAmazingHat Isn't that property moot tho, if it can't be checked by those it affects?
I pretty much agree with you, tho.
d3rrial Well it depends on the base universe's own properties and whether that universe is a universe that has an end or not. If there's no one to pull the base universe's plug and it doesn't have a big crunch or rip it could very well stay there forever.
Every simulated universe can be easily destroyed by pulling its plug if it doesn't "naturally" go into a big crunch or rip. And every other simulated universe within that universe will be destroyed along with it.
IF
Bostrom's idea reminds me of Boltzmann brains. It also annoys me in a similar way. The idea of Boltzmann brains is that it's more likely for a purely chaotic universe to randomly assemble itself into a brain currently thinking whatever I'm thinking right now (presumably about Boltzmann brains), than it is for a chaotic universe to become ordered enough to allow my brain to evolve naturally. Bostrom's idea also eliminates the universe in favour of a sea of brains. The difference is that Bostrom's brains are deliberately simulated, and the impression of a consistent universe is just programmed into our senses, and edited whenever inconsistencies pop up. But if our programmers have that power, then they can completely over-write our perceptions, memory, ... our entire minds just as completely as a Boltzmann brain that pops into existence out of nothing.
Both of these ideas suggest we can't trust that the past actually happened, or that any other brains exist, or that the consistency we perceive in our external reality isn't just an illusion. This makes them dead-end hypotheses. They may still be true, but they aren't particularly useful.
I think the reason we would go about such a simulation is to prove weather or not life exists elsewhere in the universe, and where to look exactly. I think this will be the motivation for creating such a simulation, if we haven't discovered intelligent life yet. It would be a much less expensive and faster way then flying through space aimlessly looking. And if we were able to recreate the moments of the big bang exactly on a super quantum computer, we could traverse the universe in all 4 dimensions and technically exist as 5th dimensional beings, at the same time.
Earth-like doesn't mean having oceans, and it definitely doesn't mean having chemical, carbon-based life. Earth-like mostly refers to the planets very particular place in its star's temperature gradient, which makes liquid water possible. And also to the planet being of a small enough mass that it's unlikely to have a crushing atmosphere pf carbon and hydrogen compounds.
We're only just getting to the point of being able to infer anything at all about the chemistry of exoplanets. As far as I know, we have yet to confirm even that the planets we're looking at have significant amounts of water, much less that they have organics, and certainly not that they have life.
Super Quantum Computer? Do we really need something that is a super version of the most powerful thing we could possibly make?
Traveling around aimlessly? No we look at planets around a star that are within the goldelocks zone
I think the problem my be with entropy, if we create a simulation of our universe, it would require as much energy to process, as there is in our current universe, so If we created a universe It would have to be a a fraction of the size, or complexity.
Why would it require more energy if it is a simulation?? What makes you say that? If I create a simulation of a car crash are you saying that takes as much energy as a real car crash??
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I find the real forest I visit on a regular basis much more enchanting than any simulated forest I've seen.
For now...
i think/hope that will always be the case
I don't know if it's the minority, but I agree with you.
Unless... y'know... that's a simulation... - Sorry, I just had to say it (since my mind's stuck in certain entertaining loops right now.) ... BUT, if I WERE to cultivate an illusory simulation to fool the 'real' or created beings trapped therein, I sure as hell would make all other conceptions of environmental simulations within that construct *pale* in comparison to the one I'm pushing! (speaking of all the games referenced above, and then some.) ... ... ... ... But yeah, I love the woods too. :)
Same. I only enjoy "simulations" if theyre a part of a game or a part of entertainment that works better than the real thing.
What if the post-humans are well aware that the computing power needed to simulate EVERYTHING would be almost impossible to obtain and therefore just didn't simulate EVERYTHING? It's not like we'd know it was gone.
we've only really been to the moon
+ZomifiedHam and even then, only a handful of "people" have been to the moon. NPCs, every single one of them.
what if you could reach that "Everything" by simulating an universe in wich new simulations are created, in wich simulations are created, in wich.... you get it... the deepest you go, the least energy is needed in the "Superior" simulation, because the energy you use is ... simulated.
Processing power can be harnessed to only simulate items which are being observed, and to further only simulate the things which the observer is capable of detecting.
culling!
This game is gonna be the biggest flop of 2016.
No I'm pretty sure that was Batman v. Superman.
I hope not, I pre ordered it
Yep. People hyping the hell out of this game have no idea what computers *actually* are (and more specifically are not) capable of, *and* have completely forgotten about Spore and the reality of that situation.
This is Spore all over again.
peaks! Repeat after me... We. Do. Not. Pre-order. Video. Games.
***** but Spore was by EA.... and in 2008. Everyone kinda knew it was gonna be shitshow considering they kept overpromising on all the games they were developing at the time
what if...........this is all just a really long interesting LSD experience
And it will be like a Taco Bell, that is inside a Taco Bell, that's inside a KFC that's within a mall that is inside your dream!
More like DMT.
+Matthew Shaltes I remember that video 😂
You have no evidence of the past, only the memory of it. So really only the last few 2nds exist and reality is just a short LSD experience once you snap out of it.
Wil, it sounds like you're talking about "Last Tuesdayism." That's where everyone popped up last Tuesday with all their current memories. It's a fun little argument that's once again unfalsifiable by definition.
Couldn't there be a 4th option: we aren't in a simulation *yet*.
yes, but statistically, it is more probable that we are an ancestor simulation.. if you are interested in this stuff, check out the channel he does think pieces on ancestor simulations and transhumanism ,along with other awesome space stuff. check it out..
There are more than 3 options... that's just 1 person's postulate. In fact, "options" is the completely wrong word.
There are infinite possibilities.
If you are really speaking specifically within the constraints of the one guy's theory, his use of the the word "options" implies that there are no other options besides the 3.
I agree with you double-jaxx; I, myself, believe in the many-worlds theory.
yeah i agree Aidan, we could be the originals and the guy who wrote a book about being in a simulated universe is wrong until someone invents the simulated universe to run the ancestor and then he is only then right, but its too late.
yes but where's the fun in that
I'd write a smart comment, but I'm too dumb
Clinton
ftfy
Well, even though Europe is way better then the US, it still sucks ass.
Self Awareness is good first step.
As dumb as you think Trump is, nobody is dumber than Hillary Clinton. She has shown nothing but stupidity.
How dumb is it to go that off topic? But I understand, that it literally moves everyone - so I go to the same level dumbness:
Anyone who has a little “leftover” of intelligence, will agree, that Trump is far stupider than Hillary Clinton. In fact you can say a lot about her - she might be naïve at times, or careless, or untrustworthy. But if it comes to intelligence, she is definitely an intelligent life-form whereas Trump makes a rock look like Steven Hawking.
In fact Trump even thinks, that he can outsmart Steven Hawking, which is... pretty dumb!
Saying that you need too much power to run our world/all the chemical and neurological stuff is kinda dumb. ofc we can't imagine a way to simulate our simulation, who knows how stuff could be outside our simulation (if it is one). I don't think an NPC in sarbound can run starbound on a computer.
*plays starbound on the starbound cabinet in-game**
people have built 64-bit CPUs in minecraft out of redstone, back when java only supported 32-bit. consider that.
Biohazard Angel even Dyson himself acknowledges that the dyson "sphere" isn't possible, it would never be structurally sound, the dyson-swarm/cloud on the other hand, totally possible. That said, it's not infinite energy. as for "who knows what future science will be capable of", Moore's law.
Yes but if you're counting on a world we're being simulated in having laws of physics that allow more computing power for less effort, then you're talking about a utterly universe about which speculation is really impossible.
+Valcor Wabajak
Huh? There would be no difference in the laws of physics... Go back in time and tell the guys who made the first computer that your phone is 100x smaller and yet 1000x stronger, *and* runs on a battery. I thought it went without saying that a civilization that was capable of simulating us has way farther advanced technology.
ok, so heres my input. if our universe is simulated, how do we know that whatever is outside the simulation follows the same rules as ours. if it were a simulation, the creators of it could very well not be humans, in fact, humans may simply be a construct of the simulation. even physics itself may be a construct, since everything we perceive would be simulated, how do we know that whatever creates the simulation even requires power, or even whether or not the concept of power is even a thing in the outside.
But what if the higher beings that created our reality also lives in a simulated reality that's created by an even higher being?
that assumption really has no impact on my theory whatsover, whether or not the above reality is nested has no impact on the thought experiment that question is intended to be.
www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/25/semiconductor_industry_association_international_technology_roadmap_for_semiconductors/
By 2040, computers will need more electricity than the world can generate
So says the semiconductor industry's last ever communal roadmap
that is irelevant to the argument, we cant say anything about what is outside of the proposed simulation of us
as said before if our physiks are invented the thing running the simulation works totaly difrent than anything we can do, understand or recreate
Andrew O I already addressed that in my original post, there is no way to know that what is outside the simulation works under the same rules ours does, as it could simply be construct of our simulation, and nothing more.
to save you 13 minutes and a whole lot of confusion, God is playing the sims and where sims
we're*
close ,.. we are not really we ,.. God is really all of us at once interacting with the illusions of itself in non linear timer subjectively ,..
OR put more simply ,.. We are ALL GOD ,.. we just chose to forget that long enough to enjoy being "US" in the illusion of linear time we call a human life.
+BaconRootx No problem:Waking Life,Manifesting the Mind,MAPS,The Living Matrix,Thirteenth Floor,TED:meditation,lucid dreaming, fasting,banned;tummo,tulpa,lung gom pa,yoga nidra,natural law,kundalini,science of lucid dreaming,Robert Waggoner,Stephen LaBerge,Sandra Postel,Nick Bostrom,Ed Fredkin,Robert Lanza,Louise Hay,Tom Campbell Bruce Lipton interview,Bob Monroe,Pam Grout,Edgar Cayce,
stlkngyomom
nice list ,.. some of my favorite people on it.
+Tes Fallout (The Vestige) Neo can:
listen to scientists,examine evidence
not listen to scientists,examine evidence*
*atheism (no free will;)
Try Plato's cave,crash course,scishow,cognitive dissonance,7 stages of grief,60 atoms double slit experiment,delayed choice quantum eraser experiment,PEAR labs,Emoto rice experiment,binaural beats,chaos theory,chakras children's show,
Hey do you need any music for your vids, Idea Channel? Id love to supply some!
We may be in a simulation, but I don't think we could ever create such a simulation ourselves. Like running a virtual machine on your computer, it wouldn't be as powerful as the real thing. You can only go so far down the rabbit hole. Perhaps the universe in which ours is being simulated has much more generous laws of physics that make creating powerful computers much easier.
Plausibly this. But how could we tell our universe is not just a Beta version that's just up because the creators don't have enough processing power to ditch it yet?
Yes, at lest the universes would become less and less complex.
Maybe but I disagree. the trick is finding very efficant ways process very complex systems.
a major short cut is just to calculate the result and not the process that achived the result. you only need to establish the probabilities once if you know the probabilities of that event you don't have to do all the processes needed to reassert those probabilities.
the only time you'd need to process the process is when an observer is watching to check if it's real.
the major hang up with vr in our reality is how do we experiance it quickly and with little memory of this world. once that is achived then things will be crazy.
Skinnymarks I've vorgotten how it's called, but there is an Idea that complex processes can not be accurately cut short.
I think it comes from this guy who created the game of life, but I might be wrong.
You forget that simulations we run on our computers are always simplistic and/or approximate calculations. Currently there is no way to completely simulate a process without massive more costs than to just run the experiment and as I said, it is possible that it's not even possible to simulate something with an equal cost.
you don't need to simulate the vibrations inside a rock 30 km underground if nobody is looking at it, etc. Simulating just the facade like in a Hollywood eestern with plywood buildings etc. seems more likely.
I feel like the theological implications of this idea are quite interesting. If this is a simulation, than would the interactions between the programmer and us be manifested as religion?
Or mysticism as in we are the simulator as well as the simulated.
Dead as Dreams
Probably both. It would be like the blind men and the elephant.
I guess it depends on the involvement of said programmer with their work. Does the mere act of creation make them worthy of appraisal, or do they have to be a hands-on benevolent creator to be worthy of it?
No because we are not simulation, anyone who believe so are lower than idiots. This makes just as much sense as flat earthers
Who's to say that there is involvement with that programmer? If we're in a simulation, the interaction with the users would be much more meaningful, especially if the programmer is no longer around, died, or sold their universe simulation to someone.
I've given tremendous thought to this topic and find myself coming to a conclusion that the simulated universe in which I live is much like No Man's Sky. Nowhere is there a server that has all geometry and life forms of each potential planet, star and space station. Instead they're rendered on the fly from an algorithm in real time by the game's procedural engine.
Similarly, in this reality, not everything 'exists' all the time. I as the observer, am collapsing the probable waveform (which, in this analogy are the procedural seed of this simulation) and producing the observable world in real time; thusly necessitating a sort of solipsistic understanding.
Much like in early PS1 games where objects offscreen were unloaded from RAM, and geometry was culled in order to save system resources, we live in a world that from an objective distance is non-existent.
The old 'if a tree falls in a forest' thought experiment is helpful here. The answer is; no. It doesn't make a sound, it doesn't even exist. If I were to travel there and observe the fallen tree, it would then exist because I'm there to see it.
I hate to break it to you but *I'm* actually the one living in a simulated universe, you are an NPC designed to help me on my epic journey. ;)
Talk about the LEAST helpful NPC :)
It's like:
Villager #1: "It's hot outside!"
-_-
Ian G That's just what an NPC would say.
But it does make a sound..regardless if someone is there or not it still makes a sound, just like everything else. Just because we aren't there to hear it doesn't mean it isn't there. Your logic is extremely flawed and makes zero sense, things still produce sound regardless if we are there. Rethink all of what you said.
i have a hard time believing that people exist when im not around.
"Neo it's not a spoon" LOL!
"I can't imagine the exec that would greenlight this planet"
what if dreams are actually ads?
Staying relevant to recent videos: I would love to see a future version of No Man's Sky where an AI creates a history for each planet you visit, and makes things to do for the moment in history in which you land.
One of the biggest issues I see with the universe being a simulation, or indeed the idea of a creator at all, is it just leads right back around to the question of who or what created the creator. We just keep looping back to the same question and same possible answers every time we ask the question of another layer.
So for me, the question just isn't important. If we're a simulation, okay, whatever.
Knowing that we are doesn't change anything in our lives, it doesn't solve anything and it doesn't pose new questions. It just poses the same question it was supposed to answer, "is there more?"
"it just leads right back around to the question of who or what created the creator."
Could just be some chemicals came together in the right combination and environment to self-copy, and some imperfect copies are better at surviving and copying than others, and thus out-reproduce others, and eons later, an intelligent species emerges from purely naturalistic processes. The intelligent species becomes advanced enough one day and create a simulation (our world). No need for endless loop. Even if there billions of simulations nested inside simulations nested inside simulations (making the chance that we're in the real one extremely small), there has to be some base reality from which the first simulation is built.
KAGEHOSHI but that already explains our current situation, so why even ask the question?
I guess it's possible that it's "simulations all the way down - and up". Hard to wrap our minds around, but then it would be, wouldn't it?
+Daniel Bentley (ShadowDrakken) You seem to assume a creationist standpoint here...? Is it really irrelevant wether evolution or a "creator" (god or programmer) lead us to the reality / "reality" we are experiencing?
Nuckducker quite the contrary. I'm saying it doesn't matter if it's creationist or evolutionary or whatever, if we exist inside a simulation, then we have to ask what's outside. And if we ask what's outside, then we're back to asking where that came from too. Which leads us nowhere really since we're right back where we started.
gonna just try to forget this video and live my life
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where
everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your "perfect world". But I believe that, as a species human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from." - Agent Smith
watching this well after the game released is hilarious!
ahmad abujubara lol! i waited years for it to release, but i thought something was fishy about it and the developers. so i didnt pre order. wise choice
The game has been redeemed with that new update that released
If the ancestor simulation theory is true maybe the "creators" of it wanted to live inside of it because of their realties issues.
Perhaps they have developed a way to upload/transfer Ones Conscience to it therefor making it there new reality where they can start over.
This could work especially if they had free energy that was unlimited to create a self sustaining "Simulation"
If there's a reality so shitty that spending your entire life in a North Korean labor camp or dying of Ebola is a *preferable* alternative, I'm okay with not finding out about it.
OhioGentleman maybe it is or maybe it is not and its just a bug.
**Every** programm has bugs
I'm gonna play 'No Man's Sky' and I hope I discover a world like Sugar Rush.That would be very surreal.
+Sean Michael You're fucken weird
+JR B how's that weird? Are you gay m8
+Dylan Hancock I don't fux with people that say m8
+Dylan Hancock Its just something weird that people don't usually say
whoever discovers such a thing if it even exists in the game should call it Diabetes
So basically The Matrix and Assassins creed.
+Joe Buckyerself That statement just proved you didn't even watch the video.
assassin's creed is based off the past and what it was like to live as your ancestor
"What should my video be about"
*hits blunt*
Just hope the simulator creator pays his electricity bill on time 😂
Basically the Matrix.
but also understand in the matrix you are sleeping awake, so you never quite know where the dream ends and reality begins, in this simulation we aint dreamming, you CANT BE awaken, so not there quite yet
that might be the case, and prolly mkes a lot of sense if we take the matrix theory seriouslly, in fact while giving a lil thought it came to me, but thats only if we are just avatars and not being totally simulated
Unfortunately though, the Matrix is a 1:1 simulation. There is a flesh bag on the other end of each avatar. If our universe is a simulation it is more likely the work of a smaller group and we are just figments of the simulation instead of a direct connection to another entity.
William Stevens
this really makes more sense
In the Matrix, consciousness exists external to the simulation, residing in a battery body. It's the brain in the vat argument. The Simulation Argument differs in that there is no vat, there is no brain. We simply are bits of information that is a part of the simulation itself. It's a subtle but important distinction.
If we are living in a simulation, we're going to be restarted soon right?
Aren't you following American elections? Our creators already pulled the plug.
Nah, they didn't pull the plug; the simulation is hitting a blue-screen. FATAL ERROR!
"We have a kill screen coming up on Earth."
If we were a simulation, we are most likely just a small side-effect. I doubt we would be the focus of the simulation.
What if the creators of the simulator just aren't sending out updates or patches anymore. Instead letting the code take care of itself. And what if we are it's creators. And...maybe there are updates and patches in the code and we individually are those patches and updates.
I like the guy's outcomes, but I think between outcome 2 and outcome 3 there should be an outcome where simulations exist but we aren't a part of any of them, because it's sort of weird to assume that just because the simulation exists, we are simulated
i read this creepypasta in 7th grade called "my creation" and it sent me into a permanent existential crisis
I miss this channel. Please come back!
I wonder if our universe is a failure like no man's sky
Well at least multiplayer seems to be working here.
ElDoRado1239 Or bot's AI is fairly good. But obviously there is not enough processor resources to keep everybody smart so 95% of people are idiots.
+Moris Sombre Haha, yeah, that would make sense. Actually, maybe it's scary rather than funny, but... meh. At least for now, I'll believe it's multiplayer - you know, for sanity reasons. I kinda enjoy sanity.
Moris Sombre calling other people idiots does not make you smart.
Well, I can say that my job as a level designer or character artist is probably fucked. :D
Uhm... Why exactly? It may make things harder, but isn't it just an additional level of abstraction?
Welcome to your new job as an art teacher for algorithms.
Lorenz Zahn
Its already insanely hard to get a decent level design position these days. Imagine when its possible to auto generate hafl the games on the market. XD
No it's not. If we are an ANCESTRAL simulation (meaning we are recreations of the creators' past), then you are more connected to and have more in common with the super-beings that created us and are probably MUCH more highly regarded by them. Of course if we are a simulation everything is by proxy meaningless as a whole but I bet you are considered one of their golden boys :) Think of the being that created THIS level... I bet he looks at you with admiration.
As a game programmer, I'd have to say: Don't worry about it too much. Honestly, us programmers can do amazing things with math and a sufficiently powerful processor , but ultimately, there will ALWAYS be a need for a level designer somewhere. Just....maybe not so many. In the games that get created, a huge number still rely on well-crafted maps, and we can't auto-generate everything. 'sides which, even with all of our fancy algorithms, there's still a huge amount of "constants" that need to be decided on, and a good level designer helps immensely when figuring out what those values should be.
As for the character artist part of things, that'll never be not needed. We're good, but the assets, at least, will always need someone to create them. Most of us programmers really, REALLY suck at graphics work. I mean, take a look at a lot of the indie 'game-programmer-run' games. The graphics suck in all of them that don't actually have an artist in the team. Also, if you're designing characters and NOT also doing the animation, you should do that, too. Because auto-generated animations NEVER look as good as a well-made hand-crafted solution. Or, at the very least, completely auto-generated never looks as good as a hand-crafted animation with some auto-generated physics and motion layered on top.
well this makes me feel small
i feel ya
Must be asian
Right? When it hit me that we're just specks of carbon clinging to the rock we call Earth which is constantly hurtling around a giant ball of plasma which is just another tiny speck living among billions and billions of other balls of plasma in our galaxy, and that there are billions and billions of other galaxies in the known universe, which is constantly growing, I felt like, well, an insignificant speck of carbon :P
tl;dr space is freaking unfathomably massive
I'll make it worse...
If we are a simulation, OUR infinity is infinitely small in actual reality. It literally couldn't get smaller in any sense or theory :)
Have a great weekend!
Jaxx Jaxx Mind = *boom*
I don't really think we live in a simulation, but is nice to think about it. And this video is the best I've seen on this topic.
Congrats.
This is comment bait for an indie game designer who studied philosophy.
So, aside from the obvious and boring critique (is No Man's Sky really that big and impressive?), the question of whether or not we're in something like a simulated game is a really appealing thought experiment for our time and culture. I'm not sure it's very compelling, though.
When I think about simulations, I really like to think "what is the structure of knowledge?" That is, how does its structure compare to some external reality. Now, we don't know the structure of reality. We only have access to knowledge. But, we can use metaphors to understand their relationship.
The image I like to use is that of a digital image of an environment. Maybe a RUclips video like this one, even. What a person has access to when watching an episode of Idea Channel is the sensory input of a mechanical device which was manufactured with artificial sensory organs to record incoming data from the real world and store it for later access. It's not the totality of the original experience, but a tightly curated and limited reproduction of that experience. So there's a lot that's lost in that translation. Some of it is intentional (like the background noise in or around the studio), some incidental (how Mike smelled that day), and some unavoidable (like the incoming data we don't / can't know is happening in the original experience). This limited and curated experience brings forth something that appeals to a particular aesthetic by highlighting the important or beautiful things while excluding (or removing) everything else. What you get as a result is a model of the original event.
On top of this purposeful loss of data is a data loss that is intrinsic to the activity itself. Think of taking a digital photograph of an environment. The resolution of your image, no matter the technology you employ, is going to be far less than that of the resolution of the environment you are capturing. All knowledge, and thus all simulations of experienced reality, suffers from this loss of resolution. A model of a city, by definition, is smaller and less functional than an actual city. If it weren't, it wouldn't be a model - it would be a copy. In this way, all knowledge is a lower resolution simplification of an original. All simulations are incomplete facsimiles of the reality they model.
Wittgenstein once quipped that no system has the tools needed to understand itself in entirety. This is essentially the same principle. Thus, if we are a simulation, one must postulate the existence of a "higher reality" than what exists within that simulation. If there are creators, then they are probably not the result of evolution. They are more than likely as incomprehensible to us (as simulated entities) as we are to the character one would play in No Man's Sky (or its NPCs). Also, given how simulations often represent what is important to or valued by the creator of that simulation, we may be able to extrapolate the character of our creators from our environment, but we wouldn't be able to extrapolate much more about their reality.
Are we in one of those simulations, though? Is our universe a model for a higher reality of some sort? We don't have the tools to answer that question, and even if we came into direct contact with that higher reality, it's unlikely we'd have the algorithms or whatever other tools needed to make any sense of it. We would be like an enemy nation in the Civilization series; only able to understand the enemy "player" in the terms laid out for us by the simulation. If we happened to be "players", then we'd have access to more tools than the simulation had access to, and would have probably theorycrafted all of reality by now, as is always the case even in the most complicated simulated environments. So we can probably rule that one out with a very high degree of confidence.
We are not from a computer!
Yeah we are its in the Bible
+Darnell Turner
😂
+BaconRootx who?
+Darnell Turner
leafy
I am
Whet if the simulator is an ailin so this guy likes to see our world
+Nevo Krien It'd certainly explain some of the eejits you find on the internet.
It seems an odd decision at first. In order to simulate Earth he (going by "guy") must know or have knowledge of Earth, ideally would've been here, almost certainly someone from his race has. Why go to the trouble of building a planetary-mass computer just to simulate a planet which you could far more easily visit?
I can think of two answers:
1) Trump.
2) Earth is already destroyed, probably either by thermonuclear war or through humanity blindly breeding and eating itself to death or through massive ecological catastrophe... Yeah, still Trump.
Many of the simulations we create in video games are highly unrealistic, but follow some pattern which feels "pleasant" to us. Where did we get the idea that there may be elves and dwarves and orcs, or zombies? Why are Martians little _green_ men, and UFOs flown by little grey doods with big heads and black almond eyes? Because that's how we _like_ them to be, in our imagination.
How many players like to play the opposite sex, or see World of Warcraft and think "Yea! I'm gonna be a Troll, or a Tauren!" when such things simply don't exist. How many little girls want to be a mermaid?
Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress are flat-earths which run on, almost infinitely, generating more pseudo-random landscape in which ever direction players choose to travel. Sonic is a blue hedgehog who can kill a tortoise with his spikes by running really fast in red sneekers and rolling into a ball at the last moment. When he does so, gold rings will fall out of their corpses which he can collect and keep... somewhere?!
No. There is absolutely _nothing_ which says that the world outside the simulation we propose we're living in is _anything_ like our experiences within it. ;)
***** Quite. The white mice had no interest in men, or the affairs of men. They were only interested in learning the meaning of the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything, for which the answer is 42.
It seems what no one is addressing is the idea that humans are necessary for another form of life to exist, perhaps another form of reality that we create. Perhaps we're just a part of the process. Maybe we're here to make the sentient aliens' life on the other side of the galaxy interesting. Who knows?
Bit "the idea that humans are necessary for another form of life to exist" seems highly conceited and highly illogical.
It's far more likely that we're here by accident. I really don't see why there has to be *any* reason for us to be here... If this is VR, there has to be a reason why *it* is here, and why we're in it, but that we exist? I don't think so.
A more interesting question would be, why are other animals in this simulation? Are we players, or program? If *we* are players, are *they* program? Even Dolphis!? If you can program Dolphins, then why not just program humans? If they're _players_, are they the _same_ as us outside the VR, or are there less intelligent species plugged into the machine as well?
If we're in a simulation, then my god is a Rice Krispy Square.
It's good to keep an open mind but reaaally...
An ancestral simulation could be entertaining if it was set up in a Truman show style, where there was a team of viewers that switched "cameras" to show the most interesting things happening at a certain point in time. This team's simulation could be a day ahead of the broadcasted (television style broadcast) simulation, giving them insight as to what the best things to show will be.
Why should interesting be a relevant criterion? We often do simulations on quite boring matters.
I totally lost it at "Ad Supported". That is a really entertaining idea in and of itself. Like, somewhere someone is running a freeware (or hacked) version of Life 1.0 and doesn't have to sit through the ads, so he's off doing "superhuman" things while the rest of us are watching Vince with the Slap Chop. (Maybe the ads happen when we're sleeping? Is that what dreams are?)
I understand the concept and the logic behind it, I just think it doesn't makes sense to even think about it if we have no way to know "what would be out there" and as far as the computer is concern, no matter how good and complex the simulation goes, we know what is behind it (a sequence of 0 and 1 performed by real hardware).
Is there anyone else who thinks similarly?
This reminds me of the movie "Expelled from Paradise". Humans fled a post apocalyptic Earth, created a giant computer that orbits the Earth and the computer digitizes the human brain into a simulated world, freeing the needs of the physical body, (e.g food, water, ect.)
There is one other thing to consider. We are almost definitely inside a simulation.
1) It is reasonable to assume (as we already sort of do) that any civilization advanced enough to simulate a universe will simulate a universe.
2) If a simulated universe (of a certain advanced capability) is created, there is no reason for the "beings" in that universe to behave any differently than they would if they were not a simulation.
3) If the beings in a simulated universe reach a certain point of advancement, they will ALSO try to simulate a universe.
So we have a recursive loop of simulation.
And if you look at it, there are an (approximately) infinite number of (nth degree) simulations.
There are necessarily (I think) a finite number of "real" species (races that are not within a simulation)
And the likelihood of being in a finite set rather than an infinite one is almost 0, no matter how big the set is.
What if we're all living inside a simulation, and everybody is complaining that our universe doesn't look as good as it did in the E3 demo
Calling it a ancestor simulation, does that mean we are controlled in a simulated environment by another being, and could we be simulating a universe ourselves?
If we are living in a simulation, it would shed light on a couple of scientific curiosities. First, it explains why SETI has not had any contact. The simulation ends at the edge of our solar system and everything beyond that is like a 2D texture map (like when he sailed into the sky in "The Truman Show" ). We haven't made contact because the simulation doesn't include extra terrestrial beings, or even planets beyond the pull of our sun's gravity. This is an obvious strategy to reduce processor loading. Why simulate unnecessary elements that nobody will experience?
At a microscopic level it also explains some things. For instance, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: Directly observing the elementary particles (quarks, muons, bosons etc.) and knowing with certainty their behavior, would be like viewing the source code of the universe. If we as simulated entities could view our own source code, it would cause a feedback loop that would crash the entire simulation.
Simulation creator: "Jerry! Get in here quick, they're at that part where they start to wonder if they're really just living in a simulation again!"
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of this theory when the details of No Man's Sky began solidifying.
Another neat note is the entirety of No Man's Sky's "Universe" is contained in only roughly 5 GB...
My personal opinion on this universe simulation theory is this:
Because we understand how computers and simulations work, and we can create simulations that look and act like the "real" universe, we project those concepts onto the unknowns of the universe as a way to explain them. It's essentially the computer age god of the gaps argument.
From Plato's metaphysical cave, to Descartes' epistemological matrix-like "I think, therefore I am"; this is why more philosophy majors will always be needed as society continues to ever ask existential questions.
Ones running the simulation: "Guys, the computer simulation is becoming self aware. What should we do?"
Something that's kinda noteworthy about NMS, is that they have actually said in the past that the game really isn't that resource hungry. Because of the way they did it, the system only has to do calculations over several layers of abstraction relative to the player's position. The game does NOT constantly simulate all 18 quintillion planets, but rather it simulates, on the local computer, one or a handful. When a player lands on a planet, only then does it begin to simulate the surface activities of the planet and the rest of the planets in that system are simulated at a solar system level only. So at any given time, the computer only has to calculate a simulation of ONE ecological planet system. Anything that's sifficuently far away will fall off in various levels of detail.
So the computing power necessary to simulate reality, is actually NOT likely very significant, if you only ever simulate the locations that are under observation.
The fun comes not from how exciting your life as a PC in someone else's rpg is but how fun your consciousness is to play.
imagine we living in matrix, when we die, we wake up in a glass pod and then we realize we are being tested... .-. that would be mind blown...
There was one thing that was really bugging me: the procedural generation of the universe.
If we assume that the universe is generated _in its entirety_, then this runs into a serious problem, that is the fact that a computer can't simulate something more complex than itself. No Man's Sky solves this problem through procedural generation: making the player a central focus, and saying that anything they haven't seen yet doesn't need to have been created. I thought it was a sort of "gotcha moment", but apparently Bostrom has already addressed it:
_"If the environment is included in the simulation, this will require additional computing power - how much depends on the scope and granularity of the simulation. Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously infeasible, unless radically new physics is discovered. But in order to get a realistic simulation of human experience, much less is needed - only whatever is required to ensure that the simulated humans, interacting in normal human ways with their simulated environment, don’t notice any irregularities. The microscopic structure of the inside of the Earth can be safely omitted. Distant astronomical objects can have highly compressed representations: verisimilitude need extend to the narrow band of properties that we can observe from our planet or solar system spacecraft. On the surface of Earth, macroscopic objects in inhabited areas may need to be continuously simulated, but microscopic phenomena could likely be filled in ad hoc. What you see through an electron microscope needs to look unsuspicious, but you usually have no way of confirming its coherence with unobserved parts of the microscopic world. Exceptions arise when we deliberately design systems to harness unobserved microscopic phenomena that operate in accordance with known principles to get results that we are able to independently verify. The paradigmatic case of this is a computer. The simulation may therefore need to include a continuous representation of computers down to the level of individual logic elements. This presents no problem, since our current computing power is negligible by posthuman standards."_
Assuming that the universe is a simulation requires assuming that humans are the main focus of that simulation. It requires assuming that Physics is not true in _every_ case, only in the cases that we think of investigating.
That's the most disturbing bit to me. Because then it means that science is meaningless because we're not discovering a fundamental truth about our universe, we're simply looking at the images set to us by the computer the moment we turn on the microscope. I'd almost compare it to the Truman show. Everything's "set up" so we'll see it a certain way.
So you defeated the simulation argument with "Booooooring!"? Brilliant, sir. Brilliant.
Haha! That G.I. Joe PSA insert made me laugh harder than I should. Thanks PBS, may you never disappear into history.
Way cool video!
19:48 I think some people are thinking about us living in a simulation way to much like we are living in a greatly improved version of No Man's Sky. There are many other reasons someone might want to make a simulation than to make a cool video game.
I remember I read about it long time ago. One of the criteria to determine if we live in simulated universe was the limit of subatomic level. If subatomic level is limited and granulated, then yes we could say that we live in simulated universe, but since the physicists cannot find that maximum of subatomic levels yet and can go endlessly deeper, we can say that this probability is less than more... Something like this...
Since "No Man's Sky" is procedural and 99.9% of the game will never be seen, that also means that 99.9% of the game will never be simulated. Does that mean that 99.9% of the game will never exist? Extrapolating to the ancestor simulation, if it were solipsistic in nature, it could be scalable to the computing resources available to this super advanced civilization. You only need to add "true" conscious persons at a rate you can sustain and simulate only their points of view. Meanwhile, you are free to "fill in" their communities procedurally, as they perceive them.
what makes sense to me is that the "higher power" would have to at least run through a computational system, based on complex mathematics; and if that is the case then the mathematical framework of the universe, physics, would be an inherent quality of the simulated reality, because it would be a programmed characteristic of it, but that actual reality wouldn't necessarily be dependent on this. inhabitants of a simulated universe would recognize patterns to extrapolate the formulas and algorithms that a post human society chose to be characteristic of this reality.
Im not sure if our universe not being simulated cause it could be “boring” doesn’t have much weight. It might be boring to us but far enough in the future what we deem boring could be fascinating. If we are however in a simulation my dream is simple....find out how the hell to use the developer console so I can make myself super rich n powerful n edit my stats n turn on god mode.
I love the way you delivered this information. Not over the top or to technical. I appreciate that! Thanks for this video.
Basically it's the premise of Reboot. The system is a world and the User is the God of that world.
Could you imagine turning your head and the whole universe freezes and stutters like no man sky? Could you imagine being born and your life crashes?
Greg Egan addresses this concept in his book Permutation City.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
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Humans create a simulated world called the Autoverse. The Autoverse has its own simplified physics, rather than recreating ours, because it has to run on real computers with finite processing limits. (It's kind of like Minecraft on steroids, which is impressive coming from a book written in 1994.) One of the characters finds a way to expand their available processing power, and runs a planet-sized version of the Autoverse. Eventually the Autoverse evolves its own sentient life, which they call Lambertians. The Lambertians have their own form of science, which they use to figure out the rules of the Autoverse itself.
Here's the fun part. The Lambertians hit a brick wall where they can't figure out any new scientific theories. The laws of the Autoverse cannot reveal to the Lambertians that it is a simulated world run by humans in a world with completely different physics. They are trapped in the bubble of their simulation. Some of the Lambertians theorize that there could be an external creator that made their world, at which point the humans decide to communicate with them and reveal the truth.
If we live in a simulation, we are the Lambertians. We can't figure out on our own if our universe is a simulation, because our physics don't allow for it. Whatever exists outside this simulation probably runs on different, more complicated rules. We will eventually reach a point where we can't find any new physics, because at that point the only reason for those physics is "because the simulation designers said so."
Physicists have been desperately seeking new physics for decades now. The Standard Model is too perfect. Dark energy and dark matter still need to be figured out, but they might be explained without inventing any new physics. Our scientific situation right now looks a little like the Lambertians'. It doesn't necessarily mean we're in a simulation, but it's pretty close to what that would look like.
If we are a simulation, What if god is just some kid who bought a copy of our universe? :o
I couldn't stop thinking about 'Roy: A Life Well Lived' (and the post-game emotional/psychological aftermath of playing such a thing) for at least the last half of this video. Like, feeling the actual sensation of having someone pull the plug on your all-encompassing simulation, and snapping you back to your "real" life and body. ... Most likely, we'll weep (and maybe deal with some slight PTSD) and our grand kids will laugh at us, old geezers, and say, "C'mon Grandpa (/ma)! It's just a game! Jeez..."
Anyone here play NMS recently? It's been a wild ride since this video came out, and the current in game story really adds to this conversation
who said that our particular lives are the draw of the simulation and not just integral part of a much larger showcase? we could simulate an entire universe, would we not because the lives of some people are boring?
Something I find really interesting that occurred to me a while ago is that the simulation hypotheses potentially explains the Fermi paradox. Perhaps that whatever the "creators" reasons are for creating this simulation, the existence of alien life, or alien civilizations, is not important to it, or is actually counter to the purpose (maybe it's a cultural experiment to explore how a "lonely" society reacts, or the "first" civilization, or something else entirely, or something incomprehensible to us). As a result, the simulation was designed such that other civilizations don't arise, and now we get to the point in our technology where we'd expect them to be there and that we'd be able to see them and start wondering what the heck is going on.
It boils down to this: is it possible to create a program that is intelligent and conscious?
- If not, everything is normal.
- If it is, the program will probably take control before we can lock it in a computer simulation. We should worry about that a little and probably never create it in the first place.
- If we create it anyway, and for some reason we maintain control, or for some reason the AI wants to run simulations, then we are probably living in a simulation. We can't detect the borders of that simulation, just like a creature in No Man's Sky could never peek outside the computer screen. It's like we have 3 dimensions but there are 17 others that we can't see. So what? It doesn't change anything about our lives or choices. In fact, it's just as boring as option 1, except it sounds more absurd. Option 2 is the one that should worry us.
This seems similar to the time travel argument: That if time travel will be developed in the future that people will use it, and if they use it it will change the past, and if they change the past then what we currently know as the past is the one that has already been altered and shaped by "them". It's an interesting either/or to comtemplate, but it ends up being one of those things that is just that - something to contemplate
Something not mentioned in this video on applying the Simulation Argument to video games working on procedurally generated content, is that the way that works is that the computer doesn't actually simulate the entire world of, say, No Man's Sky or Minecraft. It just simulates the specific part the player happens to be looking at on a case-by-case
basis.
So if we take the awesome potential of procedural generation as evidence supporting the Simulation Argument, the
conclusion would appear to be, that if you're having an experience of thinking about the argument right now, it means someone is observing you at this very moment. Otherwise you wouldn't exist.
And I don't know how often you're aware of existing, but for me existing seems continuous, so I feel very stalked.
There's a good book about the idea of us being in a simulation called 'More Than This' by Patrick Ness. He also wrote a book series I love about people living on a distant alien world after travelling there. The second is a more apparent theme of No Man's Sky.
If we are a simulation created by an ancestor, then perhaps their creations that we call our entire existence far exceeds their own. Just as we create simulations that are better than our own lives, maybe we can take comfort in knowing that our universe was created with the intention of being better than theirs.
I'd hate to imagine what their life is like if this reality seems idealistic to them.
Also, how rare and nice to see no one in the comment section talking trash about No Man Sky.
Just a thought: It was pointed out in the video that our world would not be a good setting for a simulation because it was not entertaining or good. The problem with that is when you're apart of the simulation that world you're in seems boring or normal because it is your ever everyday reality but if you're coming at this from the outsider's perspective there could be a unlimited number of stories that might be entertaining. When you create worlds for entertainment you make them different from your own because that's interesting. Our world could be incredibly entertaining to an post-human descendant.
Are those that simulate no man sky also simulating our world lol
What if we're actually in the future where video games or simulations are basically a complete virtual reality experience, where you can feel things, smell, taste, etc, and everyone is playing a game that simulates what it's like to live in different time periods? like a giant multiplayer game where people who join are "born", and we end up in the game for so long that our brain accept it as reality, which is why it feels like this is the "real world". What if death happens, not necessarily because we'd get old, but because the game's developers realized this and added a timer that automatically turns the game off so you're not in for _too_ long?
I find it a somehow soothing idea that all the adds in the simulation we call "earth" are not pointed at me, but at "the players".
If the universe is a computer simulation, then we would first need to create one to know, for sure, that it is possible. And if we do create a simulation of our entire universe, we would need to wait until any life forms create their own simulation of the universe to know that if we are a simulation that it is possible to create a simulation inside of another simulation.
Also, if we are a computer simulation, if we create a simulation, then that computing power would be added to the computing power needed to keep our universe sustained. That may cause our universe to "crash". If it does, does that mean that all things will cease to exist? Because of the amount of intelligence and computing power already there, our universe could be "rebooted", without us ever knowing.
We would know if this happened because if our computer simulation crashed when (and if) a life form creates a simulation inside our own, and we could bring it back to the state at when it crashed with a bigger server, or more computing power, then, it would add to the possibility of our universe have being "rebooted.
I think there are two things I could say about this, but they both really hinge around one singular point. There are things talked about like that no one from our world would want to run such a simulation because it would be boring or be unprofitable, but that assumes that the universe running the simulation is like ours. I can explain better what I mean by this using examples from our own world's media.
In our own stories and games and tales, I would venture to say that they are in different worlds. Whether that be far in the future or back in Victorian England or even in realms of magic and charm, we often depict universes unlike our own as a form of entertainment. Sure, watching our own universe and our daily lives would be boring to us - because we live in that. Much like a person living in a fantasy setting would probably only find dragons annoying or wish that magic was more freely accessible to all - perhaps as a smart phone. I think its sort of important to view it from the angle that perhaps getting an escape from the reality to which the simulation is run is stimulating for the people involved in the process, that perhaps trillions in another universe are watching the unfolding of elections or wars and enjoying it. Perhaps it would simply be interesting to watch a universe unfold with only one terrestrial intelligent life, or perhaps one where people don't live as long or even that our laws of the universe even exist in the first place.
I suppose one final possibility is that it might just be research or some technical display. We have test demos for engines now that run the highest functioning processes to show off how much a system can take, and there's nothing saying that this isn't just one said demo. There could be fully functional games and media that we cannot comprehend at this stage in technology that exist and this is simply showing the limit of said process. It might even be possible that these simulations are run to simulate a universe exactly like ours in order to determine the outcome of various actions and proceed forward with this estimated knowledge of what will come like some sort of future (weather) man.
The main thing is that there are a plethora of possible different reasons and ways that someone might create such a simulated reality, and there is no way of really knowing if any of them is necessarily true. Either way, I think it might be a bit more important to talk about the idea of consciousness and reality in the first place if we mean to really answer this question. I am more than happy to spend my time thinking about it though.
someone said energy...blackhole has entered the chat lol
Another step to consider is that if this is a simulation, it implies that we are NPCs. We aren't the end user of the simulation. So if the simulation isn't FOR us, then what is our function within the simulation and to whom do we have this function. What need could they have that we as NPCs fullfil?
Addressing the need for the simulation to be ad-supported, sleep would be a pretty good way to work that in. Anything that doesn't sleep would be insignificant enough to qualify as a free trial or something
The trend in datacenters is reducing power requirements while maintaining or increasing processing power. The modern datacenter is more like a single building sized computer with separate banks for RAM ,CPU and storage, then a building full of discrete computers.
See Amazon Web Services, HP's "Moonshot" server and the development of ARM processors for servers.
*This comment contains references to the Sims Game franchise*
I had a conversation with a good friend of mine a couple years ago, it went a little something like this: What if our lives are a simulation, much like that of the Sims? What if just like how we play the Sims, game mechanisms unique to itself and all, there is a "being" playing us as well. A "being" that we refer to as God, much like how the Sims we create could refer to us or their creators as God. This conversation spanned multiple days and eventually involved her parents, who did not put a stop to the madness. In reference to the game mechanism where it is possible to create multiple people and families, or sims, and then have the ability to place them in the same house as another family, but in a different world/universe where the sims that lived there in your memory do not exist in the world/universe that your most recent sims now are, what if that's how our alternate universes work. To again point out another mechanic, in-game players can control pretty much every aspect of their sims's lives. The action that they're told to do at any given moment will pop up in an action bar, but if you don't want them to do that anymore you can click on it to make it disappear as if it was never thought of to begin with. What if this is how memory loss or forgetfulness occurs. There were so many other things we made connections to, and if you're an avid Sims player like we are you could spot them yourself, but I've already spoken a bit longer than I feel I am supposed to. If you read this far, hat's off to ya XD.
When it comes to Ancestor Simulations the "cost" all depends upon how expensive computing power and electricity are.
However if you've reached the point where you can build Dyson Swarms composed of computronium around stars (like all those plentiful and long lived red dwarfs) then it probably wont be that expensive at all. In fact the only expense should be the time it takes to build up such a system.
Although a possible reason to have a Ancestor Simulation, aside from "entertainment", might be to create a simulation of people who died before the singularity occurred in order to bring them back. It wouldn't be easy, but with enough information it just might be possible to create a simulation detailed enough to recreate that intelligent being.