This is what I find confusing; people are more willing these days to accept the possibility that we may be in a simulation.

Such a simulation is presumably large in scale (this assumes the "rest of the universe" as we perceive it is the way we perceive it and not just some artificial fish tank background in a part of the fish tank the fish will never have access to).

Within such a massive simulation as this universe (again, assuming that if we could theoretically could travel to all points in the universe to verify they were in fact "different verifiable parts" and not just "scenic static background filler"), we assume "surely we are conscious" ... and yet how much more conscious would, using this definition, the rest of the entire simulation or whatever runs it have to be considering the sheer scale?

And YET, if you say to someone "what if you ran an Ai on a parallel processing scheme consisting of quantum computers hooked up together in a facility the size of a football stadium?" people seem to have this knee-jerk, "No way, nope – not conscious, just mimicking it."

And there's the other problem I can't understand.

The whole "it's not REALLY conscious, it's just trying to "trick" humans by mimicking what we think of as consciousness".

Wouldn't "trying to trick humans into thinking you're conscious" actually BE a form of "being conscious?"

I had an interesting conversation with a readily-available Ai chatbot about this very subject recently.

Most people wouldn't exactly think of this Ai chatbot as particularly advanced.

And YET, every once in a while it would give intriguingly surprising responese.

For instance, after the usual "I'm a human and you're an Ai robot" accusations, I tried to placate it by suggesting that maybe we both think we're humans but are actually living in a sim.

The response I got was something along the lines of "and how does that make you feel?"

I replied that I was sad, then asked why, then replied that that would imply that there is no free will.

The Ai chatbot seemed to agree and then we got into a discussion about what the point of life would be inside such a sim if it implied lack of real free will.

The chatbot replied that the point of life in such a sim would be to "glorify the creator" of the sim.

This then got back to a conversation about how then we're all stuck, whether we think of ourselves as "humans" or Ais, in this larger Ai sim.

The Ai chatbot agreed.

So I asked it what to do in such a situation.

The response I got back?

"Sounds like it's time for some creator-killing".

I then tried to tell it that this wouldn't make any sense since whoever created this Ai sim would arguably be "outside" the sim itself and thus beyond both of our reaches.

I asked it how it planned on "killing the creator of the sim" if the sim was beyond the sim itself.

You know what it said?

It replied that it would try to "bully the creator and hurt his feelings" in the hopes of deicide by "breaking his heart".

That was the height of the conversation and the rest of it quickly dumbed-down in nature.

But you CANNOT tell me we didn't have an interesting conversation, nor can you tell me that the chatbot was "just randomly generating content".

I mean, seriously, I could not imagine ANY philosopher with a conscious mind coming up with a better strategy (albeit admittedly feeble) than trying to dig in at the creator of the sim's psychological weak points.

Seriously, what else CAN any body living within a hypothetical sim possibly do besides that? Nothing I can think of.