Discussion do we live in a simulation/sandbox?

[_Minsk]

i just can't wrap my mind around the theory that the universe arose from a random event, afaik at least in our universe, there has to be a cause to cause an effect, things just don't happen out of the blue right? maybe theres a spiritual place and in it is this universe, at least i hope that.. i mean how can the laws of this universe be so precise and how can such thing be a result of randomness? i mean just look at the atoms, the building bricks of matter, i can't believe this came out of pure randomness.. something must have initiated it, i wish i would knew all these answers, anyway, what are your thoughts?
some people claim that this place has it's purpose, it has been created so consciousness evolves or something, idk, it sounds good, maybe its wishful thinking

 

[Bleak]

I feel me trying to answer such a question is like an ant trying to grasp astronomy. If the world's greatest minds have no answers then I am certainly not going to produce any. But yes privately I wonder and hope things like this are answered after death (I am not religious).

 

[justsayin]

i just can't wrap my mind around the theory that the universe arose from a random event, afaik at least in our universe, there has to be a cause to cause an effect, things just don't happen out of the blue right? maybe theres a spiritual place and in it is this universe, at least i hope that.. i mean how can the laws of this universe be so precise and how can such thing be a result of randomness? i mean just look at the atoms, the building bricks of matter, i can't believe this came out of pure randomness.. something must have initiated it, i wish i would knew all these answers, anyway, what are your thoughts?
some people claim that this place has it's purpose, it has been created so consciousness evolves or something, idk, it sounds good, maybe its wishful thinking

The whole simulation thing became popular in recent years because Elon Musk mentioned it. You should keep in mind that he is not a scientist, but a businessman. I also recommend watching this relatively old movie:

The Thirteenth Floor (1999) ⭐ 7.0 | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

1h 40m | R

www.imdb.com

I could talk for hours about the questions you asked, but OCD prevents me from writing long posts here, and it would not matter much. Getting a grasp of those concepts would require lot of time and effort, and it will also create new questions. I can only sugest you to relax, take it easy, for there is nothing that we can do.

 

[rationalis]

I don't know who Elon musk is, but people have always speculated on the concept of reality. The cave and how to prove we exist. The Matrix.

Current society is surreal where people construct there own realities and society won't challenge most people with basic facts. It does seem like it is a challenge to stay in reality instead of expecting a Game Over sign to pop up any moment.

 

[Life sucks]

Regardless of whether or not life is a simulation. Life is not random but chaotic.

It's true that it's impossible to completely understand the universe because it's large but thats why also we can know what are the limitations to the universe even if we assumed there is something behind the universe.

It's impossible for the universe to make a universal law, but it's impossible also for something behind the universe to make a universal law also because it needs to make universal laws about itself (and that's going to make an infinite loop.)


The universe isn't random but undirected because a direction is an impossibility. Life is a glitch and an error.

 

[demuic]

i just can't wrap my mind around the theory that the universe arose from a random event, afaik at least in our universe, there has to be a cause to cause an effect, things just don't happen out of the blue right? maybe theres a spiritual place and in it is this universe, at least i hope that.. i mean how can the laws of this universe be so precise and how can such thing be a result of randomness? i mean just look at the atoms, the building bricks of matter, i can't believe this came out of pure randomness.. something must have initiated it, i wish i would knew all these answers, anyway, what are your thoughts?
some people claim that this place has it's purpose, it has been created so consciousness evolves or something, idk, it sounds good, maybe its wishful thinking

And what created the universe of whatever created "this" simulation? You could just ask that question ad infinitum, and there would be an endless chain. The way I see it, with no clear evidence as far as I know to anything else, things just happened, and they happened in this particular way.

And what would you do if we somehow discovered the answer was yes? How would that change things?

 

[lostundead]

And what created the universe of whatever created "this" simulation? You could just ask that question ad infinitum, and there would be an endless chain. The way I see it, with no clear evidence as far as I know to anything else, things just happened, and they happened in this particular way.

And what would you do if we somehow discovered the answer was yes? How would that change things?

Imagine the "people" who created this universe live in a simulation too and only created this simulation, where we live in, to find out how they could end their simulation. And the same goes for the creators of their simulation, and so on....an infinite chain of simulations.‍

 

[looseye]

Someone (I think Neil deGrasse Tyson) once said: "The universe has no obligation to make sense to you." - or something similar, anyway. At this point I have just accepted that whatever is going on, I most definitely wouldn't be able to understand it even if I had all the answers.

 

[BeansOfRequirement]

If a universe was randomly created without any purpose/designer, what would it look like to you? To me, it would probably be a bunch of shit crammed together at certain locations, a lot of space, things flying into other shit, different shapes and sizes of things, some shit lighting on fire randomly, weird phenomena of pulling, pushing, slamming, attaching, exploding; and finally a shit-ton of idiots twerking in between periods of genociding each other.

 

[TotallyIsolated]

If that's making your head spin, try reading about the anthropic principle- an explanation of why the universe seems to be 'just right' for complex stuff like humans to exist - imagine for a moment that there was more than one universe, and each one was just slightly different. In those universes where it's impossible for life to evolve, there would be no intelligent beings around to ask that question.

 

[milly]

isn't it insisting on such questions that brings people here

 

[mlha]

Imagine the "people" who created this universe live in a simulation too and only created this simulation, where we live in, to find out how they could end their simulation. And the same goes for the creators of their simulation, and so on....an infinite chain of simulations.‍

Look at the problem of the stop button and corrigibility of artificial general intelligence. If you make AGI with a goal, it easily becomes a threat to you; if you add a stop button nothing changes, you can't make AGI indifferent to it. What you need to do is to make AGI which naturally aligns its goals to what you want. How do you achieve that if you can't correct it? That's right you sandbox it, give it no goal, and hope for the best that the sandboxed environment induces your desired goal in it.

If you had a stop button, would you be indifferent to it?

 

[NumbItAll]

The simulation hypothesis to me is just a modern rendition of the "god of the gaps" fallacy, which doesn't mean it couldn't be possible, but it's not compelling at all IMO. Some of the previous replies did a good job of explaining some problems with it. Of course that's just my stupid ape brain analysis of it; I don't actually know anything.

 

[netrezven]

It's very possible. But still that simulation should have laws, like laws of termodymanics, like time. And if it's a simulations those laws can be broken, exploited or changed. That's gonna be fun :)

 

[kevinj430]

i just can't wrap my mind around the theory that the universe arose from a random event, afaik at least in our universe, there has to be a cause to cause an effect, things just don't happen out of the blue right? maybe theres a spiritual place and in it is this universe, at least i hope that.. i mean how can the laws of this universe be so precise and how can such thing be a result of randomness? i mean just look at the atoms, the building bricks of matter, i can't believe this came out of pure randomness.. something must have initiated it, i wish i would knew all these answers, anyway, what are your thoughts?
some people claim that this place has it's purpose, it has been created so consciousness evolves or something, idk, it sounds good, maybe its wishful thinking

DNA nowadays can be tweaked by scientists and it has been said that it is nothing more than computer code