> doesn't seem compatible with a healthy life

Hey fellow human being. You are being incredibly insulting here. I can assure you that I have both a wholesome and healthy life and believe that maybe we live in a simulation. If the two things seems incompatible to you that is a limitation of your cognition.

Can we discuss ideas without insinuating that the other is living an unhealthy or less vibrant life? Thank you very much.

You talk about this idea being “solipsistic”. I had to look up the word. Merriam-Webster defines solipsism as “a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”.

I think you are still only thinking about “brains in a jar”. The idea where a brain or brains is attached to some machine which feeds them with simulated sensory input.

That idea is indeed solipsistic. By the very definition. It is also not particularly interesting to be frank and not the kind of “simulated universe” I am thinking about.

The kind I find more interesting is where the laws of physics are executed on a high fidelity simulation. The difference here is that here the brains are not hooked up to the machine, but part of the simulation. An emergent phenomenon inside it. Same way as that flower there, or a neutron star yonder.

This is fully compatible with living a wholesome life. You play board games with your friends, make hot love and cold gazpacho. Walk barefoot under moonless skies on lush meadows etc etc. It just might be a simulated person in a simulated universe, there is nothing wrong with that. Doesn’t make it any less vibrant or feel the grass any less cold.

You might also ask what does it matter if physics is simulated, how would we even know? If the simulation is “perfect” then we might never know. So far we found that the laws of physics are the same no matter where we look. If we would find certain kind of anomalies those could indicate certain kind of simulation systems.

Let me tell you an example: Imagine that you are designing a simulation to run a universe. You have a mindbogingly lot of compute at your disposal but not infinite amount. You might want to shard your simulation to clusters you can compute in paralel, and you want to minimise the information transfer between these clusters. Having gravity (which clumps stuff together) and speed of light (which keeps speeds bounded) helps with this. This is so far not predictive. I just wrote up a bunch of speculations. To make it interesting you need something we can test. Here comes the prediction: if I were coding a universe simulation distributed this way I would hate the boundary interactions between clusters. Would probably be super hard to make it seamless with the rest of the simulation. Therefore if we live in such a simulation I would expect anomalies in the finer details of the laws of physics at the boundaries of clusters. Lets asume that the clusters are rougly aligned with star systems. We could send a probe to the nearest one which keeps making detailed measurements on-board while it travels. If it encounters a boundary where physics “skips a beat” then we might see that in the measurements. We know it can’t be some huge stuff. We see the light of other stars, we observe matter which traveled interstellar distances. But maybe it would be enough to disrupt the internal oscillation of an atomic clock as it is crossing a cluster boundary.

It is important to understand that I am not saying that we for sure live in a clustered simulation of a universe. What I am illustrating here is that this kind of thinking can lead to theories about how the universe might be, and those theories can lead to testable experiments. There are people much smarter than me, and they will think of thousand times more intersting ones. I am sure about that. Do you still feel this solipsistic?