If we are in a simulation is there someone going “Ohh great, who decided to wire up the Metaverse to this Dyson Sphere’s quantum processing cluster? Now the processing available for my tasks has dropped and before I can get things back I’ve got to check for intelligent beings and try not to enact genocidal mind crime by just shutting it down“
Or you know, something like that.
The other option is that someone asked Chat GPT v257 which is wired up with the ability to connect to systems which can run simulations and asked what ALL of their family would think of them marrying that guy from down the street. So it’s computed since the start of the Universe in order to work out the answer.
My guess is she should’ve just specified her family that are currently alive and won’t be interested in what her great great great grandad and all the other family in a massively increasing branch thinks about it. Let alone what some hundreds of Trillions of amoeba a few Billion years ago would be able to comprehend of the request (not very much).
Maybe dreams are where some of these requests are processed? You know, there could be a whole bunch of other people asking questions and you might as well batch them all together.
Or maybe movies and stories are part of that?
Just a random existential thought for today
A note of clarification.
My understanding is that dreams are actually a way of preventing our brain from re-wiring the visual cortex of our brain for other tasks. Apparently it only takes 90 minutes of not being used before our brain marks an area for re-development. So maybe don’t play a game of pretending to be blind for too long unless you want some of your visual processing capabilities to be converted to audio or touch processing?
As such random noise is probably injected into a key part of the visual simulation part of the brain which can then trigger dreams. Over time we’ve also managed to have our brains use the time for repeating important tasks and actions and strengthening neuronal connections which likely matter.
Sleeping is especially required in order to help clear out the waste from the neurotransmitters and rest the body.
I do think we are “in a simulation” in the fact that our senses are moderated by a simulation layer based on past experiences. The simulation is in our head.
When you look around you are only perceiving a small part of the world but sense a lot of the rest of what is going on based on expectations from running a simulation. It’s when reality doesn’t meet expectations that we have a reaction. When you feel something against your skin you weren’t expecting, even if that’s just your own clothing. Most of the time you don’t notice it, it’s expected.
We also to some degree try to run simulations about what we think other people think and will do. That’s a harder process and we barely know what we will actually do in a situation. Still my guess is that without such meta-cognition most of modern civilisation wouldn’t really exist.
