Living in a sim...

[vulcanlogician]

And what about folks who had their parents walk in on them while jerking off? Why the fuck would that be in some future ancestor simulation? If we are in a simulation, the people running it are assholes.

[Silver]

When it comes down to analyzing the Sim Theory, it's every bit as nonsensical as religion.

[Anomalocaris]

Does a sim even allow for free will? If not, why even bother? Just run it at 1,000x if you want to see its evolution?

I think free will as often brandied about is a shabbily defined concept.   there also seem to be no way to improve its definition without revealing it to be nonsense.

[The Grand Nudger]

And what about folks who had their parents walk in on them while jerking off? Why the fuck would that be in some future ancestor simulation? If we are in a simulation, the people running it are assholes.

-maybe there's no one at the helm.  

When my dad passed away, he'd gotten up from playing rise of nations for a cold shower.  I heard about it the next day - and the day after that, we were all over at his place doing what grieving families do.  His session was still running on the desktop.

[Anomalocaris]

And what about folks who had their parents walk in on them while jerking off? Why the fuck would that be in some future ancestor simulation? If we are in a simulation, the people running it are assholes.

-maybe there's no one at the helm.  

When my dad passed away, he'd gotten up from playing rise of nations for a cold shower.  I heard about it the next day - and the day after that, we were all over at his place doing what grieving families do.  His session was still running on the desktop.

This seems to get back to the most fundamental question,  what is meant by “simulation”?

Does it mean a consciously designed process intended to be an analogue to some other existent process?   By virtue of it being a analogue rather than replication, there has to be differences once one look deeper the the depth of analogies designed into the simulation.

Or can it just be some process that seems to not be “base reality” merely because it does not confirm to the particular way we’ve become accustomed through our daily experience to perceive reality?  In This cause the simulation is the reality, and therefore there is no differences between it and any “base reality”, only differences to what we falsely, if intuitively strongly, expect reality to be.

A “simulation” without no one at the helm could conform more to the latter, and it is a “simulation” merely because our intuitive grasp of “reality” does easily admit such things a it’s behavior to be real.

[Fake Messiah]

Sure, we are living in a sim game in which Elon Musk is the protagonist because he is the richest man in the world and probably the most famous, and we are all just bots around him some of which are here to help him and some to oppose him.
The game will perhaps end when he reaches Mars.

[HappySkeptic]

Sure, we are living in a sim game in which Elon Musk is the protagonist because he is the richest man in the world and probably the most famous, and we are all just bots around him some of which are here to help him and some to oppose him.
The game will perhaps end when he reaches Mars.

Perhaps the Sim is being run by Martians who are our descendants?

[Fake Messiah]

The truth is that this idea of people being just some characters is old as humanity itself. People first imagined that they were perhaps someone's dream, then they were just characters in a novel (there is even a 1991 novel "Sophie's World" that toys with the idea that even the readers of the novel are just characters that are being read by someone else), then characters in a TV show, and now characters in a video game.

[Irreligious Atheist]

Even if we conclusively prove we are in a sim, it still won't change anything, other than snowflakes and loonies going around killing because there's no extra life in heaven.

I would argue that all we have is our consciousness. And the qualia of that is the same irrespective. So the difference is theoretical at best.

I would say our being in a sim is the only chance we have for any extra life in heaven.    This is because impossibilities can be rendered seemingly real through simulation, so long as one does not look too closely.

If the simulator sent us to heaven or hell, that would just be a copy of us, I think. If the simulation is played back, I don't know if that would be a copy of us or the current us. I want to believe.

When it comes down to analyzing the Sim Theory, it's every bit as nonsensical as religion.

Not really. The idea of an eternal being who has always been conscious, while it can't entirely be ruled out because we can't prove a negative, is not a logical concept. The only similarity between theism and the simulation hypothesis is that neither can be shown to be true right now. A simulation is a logical concept and simulations already exist. Gods don't, as far as we know.

[ignoramus]

^. 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...