one time strawberry tree and i were talking about the world as a simulation. if the simulation is running on a computer somewhere in a physical world with physical constraints and costs, like ours, then they would want to optimize it. they would cut out unnecessary computation. the little quantum fluctuations in the core of a rock don’t really matter unless someone happens to be looking very very closely at that moment. so they’d use some coarser model that simulates the rock as a whole.

this makes me wonder how much of our experiences are actually happening. maybe it’s only quantum mechanics that’s simplified away. maybe the line is drawn at life. maybe nothing is simulated except one mind and set of sensory inputs, which are generated to suggest to you a coherent world.

and more generally if their goal is to learn something about minds, the absolute minimum they’d have to simulate is your state of mind at some point in time, which is made of

  • your current sensory inputs
  • your memory both of which can be pretty spotty or fake. i’ve heard of studies that say that people can easily be gaslit into believing in childhood memories that they never had. and people often hallucinate sensory input. so the simulator does not have to get these things 100% consistent.

if they wanted to see a person’s life through time, they wouldn’t need to simulate the entire process. they could just create a series of snapshots, with each one informing the memories of the later ones. so if you spent a week of your life playing a computer game that has no impact on the rest of your life, they might just not simulate that at all, and that week did not actually happen for you. neither did any of the meals you ate, or the showers you took. you probably dont even remember those at all, so they don’t even have to think about putting them in the next snapshot. this is sort of a motivator. if i don’t do anything interesting with my time, that time will not exist. if i am not unique in some way, i will not exist.

if the simulator wants to understand psychology, they might use thousands or millions of time steps per person. but what if it’s something higher order, like sociology or economics? then the day to day thoughts of people probably don’t matter as much, and they might use twenty steps per person. what if it’s cosmology? then maybe they don’t even simulate individual minds at all. if our planet ends up blown up because we got beaten in some sort of race, maybe our planet never existed, or only has a few bits of information describing it.

but then you wouldn’t be feeling consciousness. i think, therefore they simulated at least one instant for me.

but your whole past, the whole history of the world might just be AI backfilling a plausible story, just like an LLM fills in plausible next words.