Simulation Hypothesis

[Neil]

Moreover, why would an operator of a simulation be worthy of worship in any event?

Who says he would be?  Maybe he never asked to be worshipped, but some people somehow intuited his existence and do it anyway, and he finds it amusing/flattering so he does nothing to intervene.

It is impossible to intuit anything in a simulation.

[Caliga]

Thank you for proving my point:  Homos who have watched the Matrix too many times.

Speaking of which, imagine if Marti was the operator of a simulation we all lived in.  The following things about reality would be different:

a) every great figure throughout history would be gay;
b) everyone would not only tolerate gays but gays would be in charge of everything;
c) non-gays would do everything they could to convince themselves that they are, in fact, gay;
d) women would be impregnated by rainbows since men would be too busy being gay together;
e) a few people with psychic powers would sense this is all 'wrong' somehow;
f) the Gaythlic Church, with its Holy See in Warsaw, would have hit squads devoted to tracking down and destroying these deviants.

[Valmy]

The problem is God would have created Adam and Steve instead of Adam and Eve and humanity would die out in one generation.

[Caliga]

The problem is God would have created Adam and Steve instead of Adam and Eve and humanity would die out in one generation.

You're forgetting that rainbows impregnate women in the Martiverse.

[Zanza]

You can not a build a computer within a universe to simulate an equally complex universe. Unless you suggest that each derived simulation is less complex than the one before, it just can't work.

[Viking]

Actually yeah, I guess The Sims is a much better analogy.

So I think this basically answers your question. We already made The Sims and in 2050 "The Sims: Real A.I." version will answer your question.

[Berkut]

Moreover, why would an operator of a simulation be worthy of worship in any event?

Who says he would be?  Maybe he never asked to be worshipped, but some people somehow intuited his existence and do it anyway, and he finds it amusing/flattering so he does nothing to intervene.

He might not even be paying attention.

Maybe the entire universe as we know it exists in some tiny test tube someone forgot to throw away when they were done with it, and tomorrow they will remember to toss us in the incinerator.

[Neil]

The problem is God would have created Adam and Steve instead of Adam and Eve and humanity would die out in one generation.

You're forgetting that rainbows impregnate women in the Martiverse.

Women wouldn't exist in the Martiverse.  Homo purity is far more important than continuing the species.

[Josquius]

Sounds like it could well be true.
I don't like the conclusion from this though.
How do they come to.

Either:
   1. Almost no civilization will reach a technological level capable of producing simulated realities.
   2. Almost no civilization reaching aforementioned technological status will produce a simulated reality, for any of a number of reasons, such as diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc.
   3. Almost all entities with our general set of experiences are living in a simulation.

Number 3 is a bit weasley worded to seem like there's no real life in existance.
Sure, that I have a million people in my computer makes 'almost all' technically correct but....myeah. Just sounds bad.

[Razgovory]

Solipsism?  Really now Cal.

[Queequeg]

At some point, there has to be some hardware running the simulation.  Eventually, you're going to run out of processing power, even if the original civilization is willing to pour all their resources into such a simulation, which they of course would not be.

Bingo.  Unless we are as powerful as God, we'll never have that kind of hardware.  Limited simulations (say, the size of a city, or non-permanent, so that I could take a vacation to Ani in the 18th Century, when it is one of the greatest cities in the great Armenian Empire, and then leave for work when it would turn off, and then come back) would make sense, but a permanent simulation full of sapient scripts/sub-programs would take up too much energy almost no matter how you did it. 

Far more interesting/likely would be travel to alternative/parallel universes (say, one very similar, but where the Byzantines and Sassanids were not swallowed up by Arabs), but that has its own problems

[Queequeg]

For this model to work, within the simulation you'd probably have to have models of even sub-atomic particles such that the "simulated" society can reach the technological point where they can create such complex simulations.  But that'd take a fucking massive amount of CPU, as I have no idea how on any kind of hypothetical computer where you can store information on individual simulated sub-atomic particles.   More likely would be something similar to our current situation in computer games; a resolution such that to the naked eye things look like reality, that would have certain limitations on the existence of these simulated people.

EDIT: Come to think of it, quantum computing is the only way one could hope to get to the level of producing a truly convincing simulation, meaning that for the simulated universe to reach the technolgoical level of creating such simulations you'd have to model alternative universes within the simulated universe. I think that might be practically impossible. 

[citizen k]

...far more likely to be in fact a simulated construct than an intelligent biological organism. 

Or both?

[The Brain]

FWIW I do a lot of simulation IRL.

[Caliga]

EDIT: Come to think of it, quantum computing is the only way one could hope to get to the level of producing a truly convincing simulation, meaning that for the simulated universe to reach the technolgoical level of creating such simulations you'd have to model alternative universes within the simulated universe. I think that might be practically impossible.

This sort of thing would either involve quantum computing or some even more advanced form of computing we haven't even dreamed of yet.