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skissane 5 days ago

Do you know whether we live in a computer simulation?

If we do, well it would seem trivially possible for our simulators to provide us with an afterlife if they wished–and we honestly could have no idea what they might wish.

If you claim to know we don't live in a computer simulation, or that if we do, our simulators would be unlikely to grant us an afterlife–how do you know that?

P(we live in a computer simulation) ~= 0.5

P(there is an afterlife|we live in a computer simulation) ~= 0.5

Therefore, P(there is an afterlife) >= 0.25 even if we assume P(there is an afterlife|we don't live in a computer simulation) = 0.0 (which is itself highly debatable)

BLKNSLVR 5 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know and it makes literally no difference (to me, it may make a difference to people with more patience to dig into deep unverifiable theoreticals).

In the movie The Thirteenth Floor, the main character breaks out of his simulation (which also contained a simulation) into 'the real world', which changes almost exactly nothing about the presence or otherwise of an afterlife because the simulation was a simulation of the real world; the rules are the same. The boundaries of that real world are also applicable to all recursive simulations.

If you're in a simulation maybe you get reset to a prior state. You wouldn't know, so it doesn't matter. The simulation may run on stolen time slices of a processor, and seconds or minutes may pass in between milliseconds of progress of your simulated world, but it seems continuous to you because the entirety of your experience is within the simulation.

"You" as a coherent entity cannot exist outside the bounds.

If there is an afterlife it is most likely a rebirth of a new entity.

There is no you there is only me.

skissane 5 days ago | parent [-]

> In the movie The Thirteenth Floor, the main character breaks out of his simulation (which also contained a simulation) into 'the real world', which changes almost exactly nothing about the presence or otherwise of an afterlife because the simulation was a simulation of the real world; the rules are the same. The boundaries of that real world are also applicable to all recursive simulations.

But this isn’t true - if universe A simulates universe B, there is no requirement that they have the same laws of physics.

If we are living in a computer simulation, then the “real” laws of physics might be radically different from the apparent ones, and we might never know what the “real” laws are