and governs reality whether we believe in it or not.
This is the key which almost everyone in this tangent has forgotten. The original comment was NOT about
beliefs!
"My point about being a pointless trippy exercise is that even if it were correct, it would make absolutely no difference to our day to day lives"
If there was no gravity, that WOULD make a difference. Just about every part of our lives would be different if there were no gravity. Interdependently of whether we
believe it in or not, the fact is if I drop a bowling ball over my foot, it will fall and hurt my foot. If there were no gravity, I could let go of bowling balls anywhere and anytime and not experience a crushed foot. The existence or lack of existence of gravity affects day to day reality.
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Maybe my posts are just too long, so this point was glossed over, I'll try to focus better:
Modeling the entire universe with a one-to-one correspondence of particles - the original premise, which the assumption of simulated consciousness depends on - is inherently impossible.
Infinitely nested simulations - which the "1 in billions" idea depends on - is inherently impossible.
The crux of the mistake was summed up by Atrex: "I can carry 0 ounces in a backpack. Surely if I'm carrying n ounces in my backpack, I can carry n+1 ounces in my backpack. Therefore, I can carry 1,000,000,000 ounces in my backpack."
In order to represent a single sub-atomic particle in memory, you need, at an absolute minimum, a bit to describe its type (potentially including flavor, spin, or charge) as well as several bits to describe its position and velocity.
Our best memory to date (written at a MB per day), using synthetic DNA can store one bit of data with roughly 250 protons neutrons and electrons. With quantum computing, lets say we could hypothetically get that down as low as 1:1
You are never going to get a half dozen pieces of individual information storage out of a single particle, so even just statically holding the type, position, and velocity of every particle in the universe in memory is going to take MORE THAN the total number of particles in the universe. That's without any allowance for processing, let alone any tangential computer architecture.
This means that no matter how good our technology gets, we will never be able to make an accurate detailed simulation of the entire universe that includes both the entire breadth of the universe all broken down to the level of subatomic particles.
We could hypothetically model a universe worth of stars. You could possibly model every individual atom in the human brain. You could not possibly ever model every atom in the universe. It would take a universe sized computer. It would be called: the actual, real universe.
Yet we know that the universe we live in actually is composed of individual atoms.
So that means the only possible way this could be a simulation is if the "real" world were many many orders of magnitude larger, more complex, and more energetic than what we experience.
But if that is the case, then this simulation ISN'T a reflection of reality, it isn't a 1:1 map, it isn't "indistinguishable" from reality.
And if that's the case, there is exactly zero credibility in assuming what the "creators" of real reality are like, what their purpose is, or what they would do. Which in turn means that we have no criteria to base the assumption that they would "probably" create many copies of simulation, which means we can not claim we "probably" live in one,
Nor that they would "probably" create even a first one. They would live in such a different reality that they would likely have little if anything in common with us, and we can not reasonably assume they would have any interest in "video games" or "ancestor simulations"
While I will grant that it is entirely conceivable that consciousness could exist in a simulation and not realize it was in fact a simulation, I see no more (or less) reason to think it is true than any other religious origin story.