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.
You should look into contextual realism. You might find it interesting. It is a philosophical school from the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist that basically argues that the best way to solve most of the major philosophical problems and paradoxes (i.e. mind-body problem) is to presume the natural world is context variant all the way down, i.e. there simply is no reality independent of specifying some sort of context under which it is described (kind of like a reference frame).
The physicist Francois-Igor Pris points out that if you apply this thinking to quantum mechanics, then the confusion around interpreting it entirely disappears, because the wave function clearly just becomes a way of accounting for the context under which an observer is observing a system, and that value definiteness is just a context variant property, i.e. two people occupying two different contexts will not always describe the system as having the same definite values, but may describe some as indefinite which the other person describes as definite.
“Observation” is just an interaction, and by interacting with a system you are by definition changing your context, and thus you have to change your accounting for your context (i.e. the wave function) in order to make future predictions. Updating the wave function then just becomes like taring a scale, that is to say, it is like re-centering or “zeroing” your coordinate system, and isn’t “collapsing” anything physical. There is no observer-dependence in the sense that observers are somehow fundamental to nature, only that systems depend upon context and so naturally as an observer describing a system you have to take this into account.