^ Westworld is a great show indeed, although the unusual thing about the Westworld scenario is that the inhabitants of the simulation are, apparently, on par intellectually or even exceeding the intellect of their creators. While this could happen, even without a requirement for AI, just through keeping real live humans in a carefully orchestrated Truman Show type bubble, it's probably one of the lower probability scenarios when it comes to simulated realities as the architects of any reality simulation would most likely have created a far larger quantity of "lower fidelity" realities inhabited by "lesser" beings (case in point, humanity and all the video games we've ever created - these are all low fidelity "simulations", in a sense, but no video game character has any hope of ever breaking out of their enclosed universe).
Of course, the Westworld scenario is appealing because if it is there's a higher reality a lot closer than we might think - and we have a non-zero chance of finding a way to access it. We'll never truly know if our own reality is something like this without trying to escape it though, and therefore, IMO, we should continue to try to live as if we might find a way to break out of the simulation, keep pushing forward with science and our understanding of the cosmos in the hope that we'll one day work out a way to break the laws of thermodynamics, reverse the flow of entropy, and/or open a portal to another universe, or simply into the Bulk.
I was just reading about
Boltzmann Brains the other day and realised that this is essentially an older version of the Simulation Argument, with many parallels to what I was saying earlier - that the Simulation Argument does not
require computers or advanced technology.
Just to nutshell what I gather so far - the emergence of complex universes where entropy appears to be very low despite the fact that entropy should generally always increase is presumably a result of brief localised quantum fluctuations. The kind of fluctuation that spawns an entire universe, compared to fluctuations that spawn smaller things (smaller universes? or just other random shit), is likely quite rare - but on timescales approaching infinity, or at the very least, truly cosmological timescales, these fluctuations become more likely. Over the course of eternity, at least 1 such fluctuation has obviously occurred to spawn our universe.
However, no matter how likely it is for this to happen, smaller things are overwhelmingly
more likely to emerge from the incessant vacuum flux of empty space. For that reason...
Wikipedia said:
The Boltzmann brain argument suggests that it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for our universe to have come about in the way modern science thinks it actually did.
Ergo, the quantity of disembodied brains floating in the multidimensional substrate of eternity, or at least, the region of it that spawned our own reality, that are simply
imagining entire realities is vastly larger than the number of
actual realities (again - whatever that means!).
I might be butchering that explanation somewhat, but I think it's close enough. Evidently also the Boltzmann brain argument was originally an attempt at reductio ad absurdum, and obviously it does a good job at reducing any attempts to think about what is really real to the level of absurdity. But then, that's not hard to do, reality is in many ways pretty absurd, and it could be so absurd that everything we think we understand about logical reasoning is, in actual fact, just wrong, a deliberate experiment to run a universe based on weird logic, where 2+2 actually equals 5 but omniscient script injections continually subvert the thinking of every conscious entity within it to think that 2+2 actually equals 4.
