Why not? Not like they can break out or anything
Because their creators allowed them to ponder and speculate about it.
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.
Yes it does. What it might not mean is that we are intended.
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.
Why do we allow ants to ponder us as we walk over them?
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.
Obviously for the lols.
Because that’s what people outside of a simulation would do.
Have you ever seen the movie “The Thirteenth Floor”? It’s like that.
:)
Have you ever tried driving to a place you’d never go?
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
If we weren’t capable of higher reasoning to ask this kind of question, it wouldn’t be a very good simulation, would it?
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
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
Maybe our types of thoughts are so primitive compared to them that they can’t even imagine that we’d have them.
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].
