Living in a sim...

[Irreligious Atheist]

^. Here's the crux.
Either scenario (goddidit vs sim) both devolve into infinite regression.
If we are real and godditit, then who made god?
If we aren't real, then where did our sim hosts come from?

eg: God "poofed" the sim hosts into existence who consequently went on to simulate us, is just about as far from Occam's as conceivably possible. <least likely.

You gotta admit, it's a breath of fresh air to dispense with all the baggage  and assume we are real. Eg: we evolved from primates via evolution. <most likely scenario.
Phew! Now I need a banana...

Infinite regression is not a problem at all with the simulation hypothesis. There have to be some base realities when you go back far enough, even if we are a sim within a sim within a sim and so on. Eventually you get back to base reality, where the first simulators are living in a natural universe.

We are real whether we are simulated or not, and there is no discernable difference to us, other than this is a cool thing to think about. What happens in my dreams is even real. I experience it.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think it's undercut by a few things, even as an interesting idea. You mention your dreams, good example - but your waking world is no less of a simulation. That much is discernable, and we've discerned it. We're simulators looking at the world and thinking - isn't it so weird that the world looks like a simulation? This hole is precisely my size........

You'd think that people would realize that sim theory has more application and more to say about us than it does the universe.

[Irreligious Atheist]

I think it's undercut by a few things, even as an interesting idea.  You mention your dreams, good example - but your waking world is no less of a simulation.  That much is discernable, and we've discerned it.  We're simulators looking at the world and thinking - isn't it so weird that the world looks like a simulation?  This hole is precisely my size........

You'd think that people would realize that sim theory has more application and more to say about us than it does the universe.

Good point.

I have no clue whether a simulation of an entire universe is possible. I'm not bright enough to have a clue about that as it's way over my head. I need to know whether the afterlife is possible though. Please let me down gently. If the simulation is played back again, will that be the current me, or just a copy of me? I know my name is irreligious, and I wouldn't really say that I fear death, but still, it would be nice to be immortal.

[HappySkeptic]

I have no clue whether a simulation of an entire universe is possible. I'm not bright enough to have a clue about that as it's way over my head. I need to know whether the afterlife is possible though. Please let me down gently. If the simulation is played back again, will that be the current me, or just a copy of me? I know my name is irreligious, and I wouldn't really say that I fear death, but still, it would be nice to be immortal.

There is no way to definitely answer your questions.  It requires an explanation of what "you" are.  I feel this is the fundamental question surrounding religion.

I can only give you my personal answer.

I think that consciousness is a process.  Wherever there is consciousness, there is the experience of an individual.  I feel that the "self" is created by the combination of persistent memory (which reminds you of just who you are), and the fact that the entire brain/programming is also a persistent and unique thing.  What separates "us" from nature and others is the barrier of communication.  If we were all Borg, the communication would blur the concept of "me" vs. "we".

I see the "self" like a bubble in a stream.  It comes from nowhere, persists for a moment, and then disappears.

I also view each moment as equally important as every other moment.  Death is a tragedy only in that it ends the possibility of experiencing more moments.  However, the life lived is somehow a persistent feature of the universe, and does not lose its importance because it has ended.

I also see "others" as no different than myself.  We are separated by an ocean compared to the connections within my own brain, but each "bubble" is the universe becoming aware of itself.  What seems like a short existence isn't so bad when I realize that while I am unique in my isolation from other minds, I am otherwise identical to them, and minds will exist for many more "moments".

A replay of a simulation might be "you", or it might not.  I prefer to think that "me" is an illusion, and that we are all just part of the same type of process.

[The Grand Nudger]

Good point.

I have no clue whether a simulation of an entire universe is possible. I'm not bright enough to have a clue about that as it's way over my head.

Strictly speaking, impossible by definition.  A universe, even sim theory, is all existing x.  Our universe, as we have it, includes simulated realities.  They aren't different or whole universes in anything other than some novel sense.  They're not actually free of the constraints of our universe, nor would our universe be free of the constraint of whatever it was instantiated in or on if it were a sim, instead of all existing x.

I need to know whether the afterlife is possible though. Please let me down gently. If the simulation is played back again, will that be the current me, or just a copy of me? I know my name is irreligious, and I wouldn't really say that I fear death, but still, it would be nice to be immortal.

That's probably not an explicitly religious concern.  IDK whether or not the possibility of a soul or our universe being a sim or even the notion that ideas of self and continuity are - at a fundamental level, replicable states of a replicable mechanism has anything to do with it.  It might be like wondering whether there are unicorns..... because we really want vanilla ice cream. Personally, I' think that even if our reality is Really Real - we're still simulations, and I don't see that giving us any chance at an afterlife.

I bet we can be made to believe as much, though. That, if there's a way to make a copy, it would feel like the original. Pretty good deal for the copy no matter what happens to us.

[ignoramus]

But how can we ever know what the "original" felt like?
For all we know, Kevin @ universes 'r' us has restored our backup 1,000 times because of dodgy hardware.
After all, we only live in the now. A second before doesn't exist and the next second in time will be generated shortly.
Our memories "are" the illusion.

[The Grand Nudger]

Our memories are already illusory in a world that isn't a sim and without need for a kevin to restore us to a past state - which isn't how our memories actually work, so he'd have some trouble accomplishing that task if he were trying.

[ignoramus]

Yeah, I understand that we live in an illusory world created in our pitch dark brain using primitive senses.
And here we are living in this base reality recreation of our world which we can never fully comprehend, but also hypothesizing about nested sims.
It's all pure speculation and fantasy isn't it. We are not even qualified to entertain other sims when we bare know how this "real" one works...
Apes will be apes...

[The Grand Nudger]

Our memories, in practice, are illusory on top of all of that. Yes, all of that is true, and we also construct memory on the fly to be useful to us in the present.

I don't think it's pure speculation or fantasy, personally, to my mind our being simulators and/or our doing memory that way is a good indication that our universe is as real as we are. We're simulating for effect. It;s also, as the sim theorists will tell us - a good reason, grounded in our reality, to consider simulated worlds. We have enough processing power just on this rock to simulate all human beings. It would be amusing to find that the mechanism we imagine would have to be immensely complex to have the resources to present a universe as we see it was actually relatively simple. Not just in some universe over and above ours, but for someone in ours, for someplace, even, in ours. Time dilation could balloon our ballpark figures of our potential output by orders of magnitude, and it wouldn't be an issue of making a better computer so much as getting that standard computer into a more desirable piece of real estate.

Would it be possible to simulate something that presents as the universe to it's contents? Probably, and we probably don't need any other universe to do it in. Might we all be living in a sim? Certainly are... though we can't say it had to or has to be that way. Is the universe a sim...can't be, by definition.

(to clarify an earlier comment - we all know what it feels like -to be the original - we all feel that way. I'm me, the real me. It wasn't a comment on the specifics of what that means - to me, only the suspicion that any accurate copy of me would feel like me, in that I feel like myself, the real deal. Thinking of kevin - maybe he got just a few of the details of that other thing, the contents of me, wrong. The new me isn't an accurate replica in that sense - and we'd have a dispute between two distinct individuals each equally certain in their originality, each convinced that no matter what else is true, they're still true. I'm not the clone, you're the clone. My contents aren't wrong, yours are. - that kind of thing. Imagine that argument if kevin, stoned fuckup that he is, hit my clones language slider to max. He remembered learning and spoke every language. Fucker might even think he's better than me - and I don't think I'd argue with him so much as hit him on the head with a brick and pretend it never happened.)

[ignoramus]

I truly can't imagine a more hellish environment for Kev to put us in if we are subjects of "his" sim.
Why would he put us through hell for? What lesson do animals learn ripping each other apart for food?
What insights does Kev learn from seeing little kids die of cancer?

Only a sick fucker like Yahwey might be entertained by dishing out this type of misery.
And we know the chances of him being "real" are infinitely less than Kev being real.
It's basically just us stuck on our rock forever. I'm cool with that. I'm xenophobic like that anyway...
We just try to enjoy it for the brief time we're here, that's all.