What Does It Mean If Our Universe Is A Simulation?

This is a purely hypothetical follow-up to my blog post titled The Reflective Universe Hypothesis. (That whole blog post is hypothetical too. This one is even more hypothetical.)

Everything in this blog post is just a fun idea, probably completely wrong, and should not be taken too seriously.

• A simulation of a sparrow as seen in an AI generated video cannot be made real in our world (a lower-order substrate.)
  • Therefore, it stands to reason that we probably cannot be made real in the universe's own lower-order substrate (if one does exist.)
• There might be a lower-order version of conciousness.
  • If "heaven" is real (big if) then being in heaven might be the experience of existing "beneath" our universe in a lower-order substrate.
  • Even the concept of conciousness and subjective experience might be possible on a lower order level. Something much deeper and wider and in more dimensions than what we experience. (If you can try to imagine what that is like.)
  • If you follow the line of reasoning from my first point, then even if heaven does exist, we probably have no way of getting there.
• A sparrow in our real world can be simulated and represented in a higher-order simulation.
  • This simulated sparrow almost certainly does not "feel" like a sparrow. But if it was an ontological simulation instead of phenomenological, then it probably would feel like a sparrow.
  • Something like a San Junipero virtual world might technically be possible, if you're only talking about the appearance of a virtual world and not the reality of living inside it.
  • Due to the constraints of our universe, it may not be possible to produce a human-level consciousness inside a simulation. If we do ever simulate some kind of conciousness, it would likely be an approximation.
  • Note: ChatGPT is far closer to an "illusion" than a "conciousness".
• The AI generated video of the sparrow was willed into existence by typing a few words.
  • I simply typed in the following prompt:
    • grainy black and white security cam footage in the corner of a shopping mall food court showing a sparrow flying around, stopping on a table briefly to eat some crumbs, then flying off again and swooping around and landing on a little ledge to the left of the camera, then turning to look at the camera, and hopping over until you see the sparrows blurry head take up almost the whole frame, then flying off.
  • This kind of resembles the start of the book of John in the Bible: In the beginning was the Word.
    • But that's not really how an ontological simulation is created. Only a phenomenological one. Or in other words, the "fake" version that is just an illusion.
• Don't come after me, but the Bible might have been written by someone who didn't understand the difference between Ontological, Phenomenological, and Epistemic simulations or realities.
  • Building an actual ontological simulation of a reality is way, way harder than simply "speaking a word."
• I can replay the video as many times as I like, but it does not change.
  • The video itself is not the simulation, it is just a recording of the simulation. Those are the pixels that were produced during the act of simulation.
• The simulation happened only once, and then it ended.
• I could theoretically pause the simulation itself, rewind it, change something in the middle, and then resume it from any point.
  • We'll probably never be able to create our own time machines, but an entity in a lower-order substrate might have the ability to help us out.

• Maybe life on earth is special after all?
  • If it turns out that life is very hard to produce and you have to run a ton of simulations until you find one that works, and if our universe is one of those simulations, then it might explain we haven't yet found any other life in the universe. This simulation might have been kept running because it's one of the rare times that life actually got started.
• We are slowly getting better at simulating our own universe over time.
  • What if this same process of improvement is happening simultaneously across all ontological orders?
• If so, would this be like a "hall of mirrors" where all simulations are slowly converging towards one "true reality"? Or is it diverging into infinitely diverse realities?

• We can put on VR headsets to enter a simulated higher-order world.
  • Therefore, if there is such a thing as a "soul" (big if), then maybe you could describe that as a VR headset from a lower-order substrate.
    • You could even try to imagine what it is like to be a lower-order operator where a simulation of your present-order consciousness is executed by a higher-order San Junipero simulation.
• When you put on a VR headset, there is no rule stating that you can only play as a virtual human. You can be all sorts of things.
  • Therefore, if there is such a thing as a "soul" (big if), and a soul is really just a lower-order operator, then there might not be any rule that states that a "soul" is something only a human can have.
  • The converse might also be true. There might be some humans that currently have a "soul" (operator) and some that don't.
• Remember that this would still be a lower-order abstraction, so it changes absolutely nothing about the world, our history, your memories, or your consciousness. You wouldn't know that it exists at all, because it would operate at a fundamentally different level.
• Some lower-order operators might even be playing a cosmic version of "Prop Hunt". They might choose to "log in" as a cat, or a bacterium, or a trash can, or a hurricane, to see what it is like to be that thing. Perhaps the game "controls" are nothing like joysticks, but closer to nudging probability distributions in quantum space. Tiny influences that bias where random events collapse.

• Or perhaps they are playing some other kind of lower-order causal game that we can't even begin to understand.

Theological and Religious Implications

Some of these ideas kind of line up reasonably well with parts of the Bible. I say this purely out of interest, nothing more. You can almost see some possible explanations start to form for:

• Speaking the universe into existence
  • Prompting
• Sending your "Son" to earth
  • A holographic "projection" of a lower-order entity, less like wearing a VR headset and more like being in The Matrix
• Your "Son" having the ability to perform "miracles"
  • Hacking
• Or even what it could mean to be "possessed by a demon"
  • A lower-order operator taking over and controlling a human "NPC"

Again, just a bunch of interesting thought experiments with a lot of "big ifs".