I don’t think that we’re in a simulation, but I do find myself occasionally entertaining the idea of it.
I think it would be kinda funny, because I have seen so much ridiculous shit in my life, that the idea that all those ridiculous things were simulated inside a computer or that maybe an external player did those things that I witnessed, is just too weird and funny at the same time lol.
Also, I play Civilizations VI and I occasionally wonder ‘What if those settlers / soldiers / units / whatever are actually conscious. What if those lines of code actually think that they’re alive?’. In that case, they are in a simulation. The same could apply to other life simulators, such as the Sims 4.
Idk, what does Lemmy think about it?
Well I think relativity tells us something more fundamental, that the world emerges as interactions from relative frames of reference, even in the quantum realm. It’s easy to forget, every single thing going on is a quantum system with astronomical complexity, complexity of a system is the square of the number of quantum states in the entire system. A molecule is a quantum system, a cell is a quantum system, a tree is a quantum system, a tree rustling in the wind is a quantum system. A person interacting with another person for example is entangling those systems and is itself another quantum system. And I don’t think entanglement is a binary thing, it’s a thing of degree and quality. You’re influenced by everything in your light cone, even if you’ve never directly observed a specific star for example, you still interact with it to some degree, you’re a part of a quantum system composed of the entire observable universe, and even part of the unobservable one. Once you observe it, now your interaction is more than that. You can picture it in your mind, look for it again later, tell people about it. If you could orbit it, or touch it, you’d get entangled with it even more. I think a lot more about our experience than what we realize consciously is quantum phenomena, I think we experience these phenomena directly but we just take for granted those experiences and don’t realize what they are fundamentally, just like someone who doesn’t understand gravity doesn’t realize that the experience of falling from a tree is the same force as the one that keeps the planets moving around the sun.
Quantum mechanics and relativity are, at least currently, incompatible theories. Relativity depends on continuous things, which is why it has singularities and what not. But quantum mechanics has minimum discrete units that don’t play nice with gravity and relativity.
Also, it’s still an open debate as to whether quantum mechanics is applicable to all sizes of things. There’s some consequences around that being the case and it’s one of the suggestions for an assumption resolving recent paradoxes around incompatibilities between the theory and our expectations for behaviors. If it does apply to larger objects, the consequences are basically that either there’s no free will and superderminism is true or else that quanta don’t actually exist until observed.
In fact, currently we haven’t been able to observe quantum behavior in anything large enough to measure gravitational effects from. Which may be where a fundamental limit exists, given the incompatibility between relativity and QM.