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Because such a massive simulation without players serves no purpose that'd justify the waste of the resources needed to run it.
Maybe it's someone's sick fun... or an experiment.
I saw a movie or, probably, an anime with this theme in the last year. People discover they are a simulation, manage to breach through to this race that is just lost in viewing virtual space. Wreck shit, go back.
I prefer The Thirteenth Floor. 1999 scifi noir.
spoiler
A person from 1937 finding out their world is a vr simulation in running on a 1999 computer. Then the 1999 people finding out their world is a vr simulator too, running on a 2024 computer.In a way, this is also how Sausage Party ends.
@speck
Expelled from Paradise?
That wasn't it. Damn it. I'm trying not to get pulled into figuring this out, but my brain is of the opinion that there's no better use if my sleep time lol. I'll see if it comes back to mind
If someone is both capable and willing to spend such massive amount of effort for such an experiment, he already has all the answers the experiment might provide. It's like thinking NASA would create massive telescope and place it on an orbit, just to point it at Earth and record how cats hunt.
Same with fun. Whoever possesses enough resources to waste them on "fun" alone, already has the access to way more interesting pleasures. It's like thinking Jeff Bezos is going to buy a private island and buy a luxury bunker there, for the purpose of torturing cockroaches.
I never said any of this might not be true, I just said what if. The experiment idea seems more plausable to me. And why not make an experiment, as you said, if they're that advanced, making this experiment would be a piece of cake to them, like us making experiments with ants or bees.
I simply observed that logic dictates such an experiment obsolete.
Whoever has all the technology, resources and skills to conduct such a massive test, already has all the answers the experiment might provide. Beings capable of conducting such a test definitely have better questions to answer.
It could still theoretically be that our reality is some kind of entertainment. For example, people enjoy playing The Sims. There are still active communities for the older versions even though there are newer, more engaging games out there. And more generally, some people prefer old games even though their computers have like 1000x the processing power needed to run it.
If the reality we experience is a simulation, it could be for similar motivations, the hardware would be sophisticated but still a user will run whatever they prefer on it.
We enjoy watching SIMS and playing video games, because our reality is too bleak and dark. It's a form of escapism, mostly.
Civilization that could create and sustain such a massive and complicated simulation as our reality, already knows ways to make the life interesting enough that it makes any form of SIMS-like entertainment obsolete.
Maybe they're just mice trying to find the question to life the universe and everything.
I know where my towel is, but again: the effort it takes to create and maintain such a simulation belongs to order so high, it no longer cares about such trivialities.
I've "played" plenty of simulations that are just things that run entirely on their own without a player input aside from the starting parameters. Chiefly being the one aptly named "The Game of Life."
These are highly primitive and limited simulations, that follow basic patterns and can't evolve much.
Ours is a reality complicated, vast and chaotic. They can't be compared.
I wasn't comparing them... I was pointing out how simulations don't need "players." 🙄
You said you "played" simulations. I pointed out that what you were playing can't be compared to the complexity of our reality and therefore does not constitute a plausible argument.
Just for the sake of clarity: I'm not attacking you, it's just that what we can simulate and observe can't be used as an argument in discussion concerning our reality. It's apples & oranges. We operate on entirely different level of complexity to whatever we may simulate.
If it's a simulation your imagination and understanding of the world (simulation) is limited and you have no idea how resource intensive it would be to run, perhaps we're a kids toy for some being
Again: the resources, the effort needed to create and sustain such a massive simulation just for fun, belong to civilization of so high advancement, that it renders the idea impossible.
Beings being able to do it would be able to bypass any stage of infancy or childhood, because it'd be obsolete and pointless for them.
how do you know the motives of something like that enough to know what's pointless?
Because that's how evolution works in intelligent species, or at least should - it leaves behind everything that's no longer needed.
We, human beings, can simulate worlds more complicated than the real one. It doesn't have to be like The Matrix. It could be like Dwarf Fortress. We wouldn't know if we are the simulation because it would always seem real and complex to us, even if all the creatures running the simulation see are numbers/text.
No, we can't.
We can't even simulate less complicated worlds, but so alien that they follow entirely different "natural laws" to our own.
Dwarf Fortress is ridiculously primitive in comparison to our reality.
...?
If it's a simulation all the laws of physics and so on that you're basing these theories on might not even exist outside the simulation.
And you have absolutely zero clue what such a being would find interesting or pointless.
You can't simulate a massive environment so alien to your own that they have nothing in common. You could answer "of course I can", but all your arguments for that would be Russel's Teapot.