this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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No such thing. Ask away!

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[–] tfw_no_toiletpaper 4 points 1 hour ago

Why not? Not like they can break out or anything

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Do they, though?

How many people can stop for some moment and think "Yeah, this thing called existence seems so bizarre... Maybe this spoon I'm holding right now actually doesn't exist?" on their own?

People wake up and rush in an exhausting day-to-day stuff, until they sleep to rest for another busy day. People's minds are constantly flooded with mundane stuff. For many, many people, it's mundanely impossible to have some spare time to stop and come to realize that there's no "real".

But when a person did come to that conclusion, even when they aren't so dedicated to keep questioning the conundrums of existence, they can't plant The Seed of Doubt inside the minds of others, because, as mentioned before, the other people are too busy to listen to something that won't really help but make them gaze into the depths of the abyss and be gazed back in a wonderful yet painful connection with the primordial chaos filling the emptiness of every single atom.

So, the "creators" of this "simulation" (actually I believe there is something more complex to be nominated, it has to do with too-long-to-describe cosmic principles all the way to the aeternal interplay between primordial order and primordial chaos) don't need to "disallow/prohibit" the pondering and speculation of the nature of the existence, the constant bodily and mundane call for survival makes it impossible to have a time and space for those questions to happen, and those who have will simply have no means to effectively spread the act of their own questioning.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago

Because their creators allowed them to ponder and speculate about it.

[–] scarabic 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Just because we’re living in a simulation doesn’t mean we are simulated. So perhaps the architects of the simulation can’t simply program our questions away.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Yes it does. What it might not mean is that we are intended.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Not necessarily. You're correct that we cannot account for intention. Neither can we assert whether we are simulated. Even if we can prove this reality is simulated we cannot be sure if we are part of the simulation or inserted into it (a la The Matrix) from our current position.

[–] VoterFrog 10 points 7 hours ago

If we're in a simulation, it's probably a massive universe-spanning one. We're just a blip, both within the scale of the space of the universe and within the history of time of the universe. In that case, we're not important enough for a simulation creator to even care to adjust our capabilities at all. They're not watching us. We're not the point of the simulation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Video game designers do something similar to this in hiding “Easter eggs” in their games and the code that makes the game that often break the 4th wall or just bypass it.

Maybe it’s fun? See who can figure it out and come as close as they can to the truth without actually getting to the truth?

[–] FunnyUsername 7 points 9 hours ago

My best guess: The thought processes required to ponder the possibility of a simulation are too important to the goal of the simulation itself to disable.

[–] theywilleatthestars 37 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Maybe that's the entire point

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

Maybe the devs were debating whether it’s possible for a simulated sentient intelligence to figure out it’s in a simulation. What if there was a bet, and the only way to prove other dev wrong was to actually build the simulation and let it run its course. I mean, it’s just a quick little experiment about a single universe in 3D space with linear time.

[–] MissJinx 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Reality ia amazing but to value our blissful existence we have to go through a simulation of how horrible the exitance could be. I for exemple am incredibly happy in reality but Taylor swift is an 1 eye, no arms, Afgan orfan in reality.... Or just reality Mcdonalds employeeq

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

This comment reads like a person who keeps being pulled into previous lives, and started hallucinating they were some monkish writer.

Are you ok?

[–] MissJinx 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 hours ago

There are happy people in the world. Just not on social media so much talking about how they feel. Because they are fine.

[–] randomdeadguy 24 points 13 hours ago

Creators don't have to be all-knowing. Also, because believing this reality is a simulation does not change the rules we live by, there is no difference between the life of a sim-denier and sim-believer. It's not as if you'd be punished just for [redacted].

[–] dejected_warp_core 8 points 11 hours ago

Because that's what people outside of a simulation would do.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Depends on the structure of the simulation. If it's general enough then they didn't specifically plan to have this capacity, it's just the result of the inputs and constraints of the simulation. If anything it would be beneficial to see an outcome as to the types of intelligence that arise.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

Obviously for the lols.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago

If we weren't capable of higher reasoning to ask this kind of question, it wouldn't be a very good simulation, would it?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 13 hours ago

Maybe they're testing to see if and how we prove we're in a simulation as part of figuring out if they are themselves in one

Maybe they're re-creating the circumstances of their own world to test theories that they can apply in the real world, and since they can ponder whether or not they're in a simulation then we have to be able to as well or we'd act too differently

Maybe it's a total accident. They're actually studying something over in Andromeda and we're just a funny accident created as a byproduct of the rules of the simulation

[–] [email protected] 12 points 14 hours ago

It's not like my Conway's Game of Life creatures can ever escape their petri dish. I'm so zoomed out that I wouldn't even notice if they were intelligent.

[–] AbouBenAdhem 9 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (3 children)

So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of—and maybe “simulation” is the idea we’re hard-wired to replace it with.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

I like this observation a lot. Because I was going to say that if we couldn't conceive of a simulation, we'd probably just speculate about the closest thing we could imagine.

[–] lath 2 points 13 hours ago

Replace simulation with book where only a framework is defined and and the plot is built within the set rules.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Like a limited 'fake' world edifice structured through legal fictions like money, debt and contracts, which attempts to assert that it is significantly more powerful and pervasive than it actually is, through stories like The Matrix, to instill a sense of hopelessness upon anyone who even considers not submitting to it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

man I can't find the dilbert where dogbert makes one and when dilbert asks something like this he says he programmed them to distrust intelligent people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

You've probably read about language model AIs basically being uncontrollable black boxes even to the very people who invented them.

When OpenAI wants to restrict ChatGPT from saying some stuff, they can fine tune the model to reduce the likelihood that it will output forbidden words or sentences, but this does not offer any guarantee that the model will actually stop saying forbidden things.

The only way of actually preventing such an agent from saying something is to check the output after it is generated, and not send it to the user if it triggers a content filter.

My point is that AI researchers found a way to simulate some kind of artificial brains, from which some "intelligence" emerges in a way that these same researchers are far from deeply understanding.

If we live in a simulation, my guess is that life was not manually designed by the simulation's creators, but rather that it emerged from the simulation's rules (what we Sims call physics), just like people studying the origins of life mostly hypothesize. If this is the case, the creators are probably as clueless about the inner details of our consciousness as we are about the inner details of LLMs

[–] RizzRustbolt 1 points 9 hours ago

Because everyone is always looking up.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

It's probably a bug.

Fuck, if we're in a simulation I'd be most amazed that nobody has managed to trigger a null pointer exception to crash the whole thing yet.

Oh, also, infinite recursion... and we got so close with https://youtu.be/xz6OGVCdov8

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 hours ago

Why do we allow ants to ponder us as we walk over them?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Have you ever seen the movie "The Thirteenth Floor"? It's like that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

:)

Have you ever tried driving to a place you'd never go?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

Maybe our types of thoughts are so primitive compared to them that they can't even imagine that we'd have them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

Movie rights. Were something like bitcoin. Our ideas generate value to the creators. The more in-sim value that’s created, so it extends to the creators. Mirrors are to blame, you see. Whichever creator allows mirrors to exist in-sim nearly destroyed the sim the first time a “person” stood between two mirrors and saw their infinite reflection. The immediate fix was to allow the concept of infinite universes and sim life.

[–] jBlight 1 points 13 hours ago

Life isn't as fun if you have all the answers. You'll lose the opportunity for growth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

Maybe it's not actually a simulation, but something else that we're programmed not to be capable of thinking about?