I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith. You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.
But if you do accept that premise, isn't it reasonable to say that there would be many simulated realities compared to a single "real" reality, and that therefore any given consciousness is a lot more likely to be experiencing a simulation than experiencing the base reality?
> I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith.
I don't see "the simulation created the universe" as any different from "god created the universe" in any significant way.
Scott Adams believes in the simulation. He says he's been able to, by thinking certain thoughts, influence the simulation. There's a word for that - "praying".
I think I did explain what makes it different? There’s a logical, statistical argument behind the theory. It may not be correct, but it deserves more than a casual dismissal.
Not at all. This is a category error - you can't place simulated realities on the same 'level' even among themselves, much less with the realities 'above' them.*
Let me put it this way: Most of our 'simulations' involve 'realities' with laws which have at best a weak relation to our reality and little relation between themselves. You can't deduce the situation of a higher reality - or even correct laws of logic - from a simulated reality. You can't know from a simulation n levels deep, how many simulations the n-1 level supports, so you can't assume there are many other possible simulations of same complexity level (which is critical for the statistical argument). You may not be able to even make a logical argument in the first place. For all we know, the 'true' reality is 1+1=5. The simulation argument is ergo incoherent.
* Aside, this argument fails statistically even if we do accept the category error. As Sean Caroll pointed out, most simulations will simulate below them, and therefore most simulations will not be able to support life. Our situation must be atypical in any event.
Let’s say we actually did live in a reality with billions of high fidelity simulations being run. You can pop on your v100 Neuralink and have a fully immersive high fidelity experience that from your perspective lasts an entire lifetime, but in “reality time” lasts only a few hours.
Are you really saying this has no bearing on whether the ‘base’ reality is also a simulation? I think once we see these sims happening in the n reality (as you put it), we have to also assume it’s possible in a hypothetical n-1 reality.
Another way to say it: once we have incontrovertible physical proof of the existence of a simulated multiverse, why should we assume that our reality is the base reality? Isn’t that akin to assuming that the earth must be the center of the universe simply because it’s where we live?
There are two types of simulations: 'cheating' simulations and 'complete' simulations. Complete simulations give out a set of rules, and an initial condition which is evolved per the rules without significant external interference. A cheating simulation tries to simplify things, say by editing the brains of anyone inside the simulation to never notice the simulation, emulating only parts they notice, etc.
I'll posit that a complete simulation of our universe is very likely equivalent to the universe. Quantum mechanics suggests it can't be emulated by anything less complicated, so a complete simulation is merely a different substrate. It's an interesting implementation detail, but how much does it matter?
It might be possible there's a significant simplification if the actual universe worked by different rules, but there's no known theory which could accomplish this.
Now we have a cheating simulation. Your example is a cheating simulation. It doesn't actually create a simulation of a universe, it emulates the perceptions you'd have, but I don't think it will or can bother calculating the correct cosmic gamma-ray radiation intensity (for example).
A cheating simulation can have very different rules than the base. For example, many of our current 'simulations' have some form of magic system. We (in reality N) could today write a game where the N+1 NPCs have the v100 Neuralink. By carefully 'editing' them and the world, they'll never notice. Or maybe we allow them to notice - and they presume we also have a Neuralink - but we in the N reality are not yet able to build a real Neuralink!
We could have presumed the N-1 reality could also do the complete simulations that the N level v100 Neuralink could do (since it must be able to calculate the Neuralink simulation), but v100 cheats, and cheating creates simplifications which mean we can't really tell much at all about N-1.
The statistical argument for simulation rests on aggregating 1..N...X? levels together and doing some universal logic, but cheating makes them inconmensurable (does the same logic even apply?) and uncountable, and I don't see how we can do any statistics on that.
>You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.
I don't think it's the best formulation. Let me formulate this in IMHO a better way:
If a simulation is of an equivalent complexity level to the 'true' thing, it's essentially equivalent and might as well be true. There's an argument from quantum mechanics that this reality cannot be properly simulated with anything simpler. If true, the conclusion is that since we exist we are real.
But if you do accept that premise, isn't it reasonable to say that there would be many simulated realities compared to a single "real" reality, and that therefore any given consciousness is a lot more likely to be experiencing a simulation than experiencing the base reality?