Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by breuleux 3723 days ago
That could happen, but I don't think it makes much sense for it to happen on a large scale, so I wouldn't put a lot of probability on it. Entertainment is the most likely use for that kind of simulation, but I like to imagine they would be less boring than my life is right now.
2 comments

Well, what if you're just 'one of the zombies' and I'm actually the only conscious being just reading your comment? Joking, but in all truthfulness I don't think it's all that unlikely. What if the simulation you are experiencing is being put in place by yourself—that is, 'you' in the higher dimension? Or, it could also be some kind of experiment to see how 'you' given your brain, environmental inputs, etc. grow and respond to stimuli. That doesn't seem unlikely at all.
Well depending on scale, your entire "existence" could be a few "minutes" in the "real world" (that's a lot of quotes...)

Much like how we are making ML applications now, you could be a complicated AI who's purpose is to calculate something encoded in your experience. You wouldn't need to know your purpose in order to complete it.

I'm clearly grasping at straws here, its just fun to think about :)

I find it far-fetched, but you're right, it is fun to think about :)

To be fair, far-fetched things happen all the time, the trick is that we're usually wrong about which ones do.