The Downsides of Living in a Simulation
Which would be a major bummer especially if the real world is one
By MARTIN REZNY
Maybe you think you know where I’m going with this, but I’m reasonably sure I’m headed elsewhere. When people criticize simulations (mainly in the form of video games) or the simulation hypothesis, it tends to have something to do with a belief that living in a simulated world is living some kind of lie. That simulated worlds are bound to be fake, meaningless.
Assuming this world is simulated, and even just following the latest trends in computer technology, a simulated existence could conceivably feel every bit as real as the familiar version of real life. Whatever you’re feeling right now could be simulated, and it wouldn’t be any less than what it is.
The same goes for entities. It doesn’t matter what hardware your mind runs on, as long as it has consciousness and intelligence. Once a personality reaches certain level of complexity, it wouldn’t makes sense to not count it as real. At least to you, even if it were an NPC without its own consciousness. A felt (illusion of) free will is also way real enough.
As long as your experience exists, you are a real entity. The problems that I would like to explore are those that a simulated world may present, in contrast to a truly chaotic, fully emergent, meaningless world. Or in other words, the kind of world that most scientists assume we do live in.
A common intuition related to this distinction is that a meaningless world must be worse. Hence all the stories that we have come up with to infuse meaning into the world, including all of the religions. To convince ourselves that the world is fundamentally fair, caring, the best possible one. Who knows, but as it turns out, chaos does have upsides.
The Terrible Burden of Cosmic Justice
One fundamental aspect of an artificially created universe is almost guaranteed to be some version of karma. For whatever reason, fairness is an inescapable concept in philosophy, especially in situations with multiple people who have to somehow find a way to coexist with each other. Once you start thinking logically, it just pops right in and doesn’t leave.
There’s an endless debate about what exactly is fair or how to make any particular system perfectly fair, of course, so there’s a lot of wiggle room in implementation. But at the end of the day, some version of it is the most rational arrangement to vote for, between equals under uncertainty.
Imagine you were a soul before being incarnated, behind what the philosopher John Rawls calls a veil of ignorance, and you had to choose the properties of the world into which you are about to enter. How unfair would you want it to be in the extreme, without knowing the exact circumstances into which you will be placed? Probably not very.
Some measure of especially temporary unfairness may be generally acceptable to most intelligent beings, to keep life interesting (and to maintain suspension of disbelief), which is my critique of Rawls’s conclusion. However, any ensured measure of it is a lot more than none.
Like the above quote from Babylon 5 illustrates, in a perfectly chaotic world, there is solace in that whatever terrible thing has happened to you, it probably wasn’t personally deserved. Or, to be more precise, perhaps it could have been deserved arguably, but not objectively, naturally.
In a simulated world that allows for any kind of reincarnation, one of the balancing mechanisms could result in worse people being reborn worse off, having to suffer the kinds of harms that they have previously inflicted on others. To make the scenario perfectly symmetrical, they would also have to suffer the harms as innocents, without knowing they deserve it.
In order to conceal the fact that life is fair, the balancing would make sense to happen from one life to the other. An obvious ironic comeuppance always happening to everyone right away would be obvious, which would interfere with the possibility to actually test anyone’s character.
Which brings me to the next level of this downside. So far, the idea was that the simulated life would be fair just to be fair, because most “players” of games are likely to choose to play a reasonably fair game. In a simulation, there could be much more to it. It could be a lesson and/or test.
Only the Good
As the saying goes, only the good die young. Which Rimmer from Red Dwarf, in the animation above depicted kneeing the Grim Reaper into his crotch, most definitely is not. Have you ever thought about this common wisdom? Why would it be that a good person is supposed to be more likely to die younger? There are reasons why they would exit a simulation.
You could make a conventional statistical argument to support the mantra, along the lines that the younger one is, the less likely they have had a chance to live long enough to see themselves become a villain. You could also think of it as a sentiment similar to not speaking ill of the dead. They died young, so the least we can do to honor their memory is to assume they were good.
But if this world is simulated, and the point of it is to test character through suffering, there would be a lot of sense in releasing the good people early. Literally for good behavior. Or to “reap” or “harvest” them, in a sense, if the testing is more of a quality control-type process for useful AIs (us).
Even if the simulation is a purely voluntary learning experience, a good person arguably already has learned what they needed to learn, whatever their age is. They would choose to stay inside of the simulation (subconsciously from our vantage point, or super-consciously) perhaps only because of the needs of others. As parents, or teachers, or the like.
Conversely, a good person could also become tired (as well as extremely undeserving) of living a life filled with pointless suffering, stuck in a society of much less evolved souls who don’t understand or value them. To the extent to which such a society would be comprised of doomed people who have proven unwilling to grow, it would be a kind of hell. A hell in which the good person would suffer unjustly, and fruitlessly, so they might as well start over.
Which brings me to one more logical downside of this type of existence. If we’re supposed to learn, which has to involve suffering to the extent to which we’re doing it wrong, and if we’re released when the lesson is done, then this world isn’t supposed to be fixed. It’s supposed to be continuously broken.
The Government of the Worst, by the Worst, for the Worst
There’s a term for this idea, cacocracy. Most people, even in the developed, democratic world, tend to believe that the people in charge by and large aren’t very good. A not insignificant portion of people believe that the people in charge are some of the worst people in the whole of society.
A conventional explanation might be that there’s something wrong with all political systems, which could be fixed, or at least improved, by some kind of reform. Democracy is already a kind of reform of the older systems of government, which tend to be seen by most thinkers as more broken.
Monarchy, for example, is in effect a genetic lottery — any one king can randomly be great, terrible, or anything in between. As in most games of chance, sooner or later, you will roll snake eyes, meaning that dynastic monarchies are inevitably bound to crumble in several generations.
Autocracy is generally understood as a product of a crap leader (a narcissistic psychopath, or a bunch of them), and bad to live in. It doesn’t matter whether it’s just authoritarian (don’t make waves and the absolute ruler may ignore you) or full-on totalitarian (there’s no escape from having your life micromanaged constantly). These regimes also aren’t stable in time.
There can be a series of revolutions from which you get a series of different crap autocrats, or the regime can fester for as long as the great leader or party members remain on life support. Either way, eventually, the charisma or ideology that these regimes depend on will lose vitality and appeal.
Democracy “fixes” these flaws with leader selection process, at least to some extent. The selection isn’t random, so a fully incompetent leadership, while possible, isn’t statistically guaranteed within a few generations. At the same time, a violent takeover of the regime is illegal, although democracies have been known to sometimes deteriorate to a point when that can happen.
As Winston Churchill put it, democracy is the least worst regime. In a chaotic, meaningless world, the odds that people will keep choosing mostly competent, pro-democratic leaders are reasonable. In a meaningful simulation, especially one focused on personal growth, not so much.
If souls (people) are supposed to learn to grow or be tested, it has to be against something bad. The easiest way to make sure that there are big bads to grow against or to tempt people is to tip the scales of leader selection through apparent happenstance to ensure that bad leaders abound.
If not that, then a meaningful simulation would be wired to punish people for bad moral choices, like when they vote for bad people, making sure it ironically backfires. In a chaotic world, a bad actor can accidentally be a positive, constructive leader. In a simulation, you may have to deserve a good political system that isn’t oppressive or creating massive problems.
As for aspiring leaders themselves from their own perspective, a classic type of moral test is being tempted with power, wealth, fame, or some other reward. The greater the promised reward, the greater the test. Some leaders will undoubtedly pass that test, but likely never the majority, and that’s not all.
“Passing” the devil’s bargain-type test may often mean rejecting the power despite wanting it. Which, while admirable on a personal level, will exclude one from being able to actually make things better in the world. Assuming most people fail a high-stakes corruption temptation test, then politics would always be a kind of hell, in which good people don’t deserve to be involved.
I guess the scales would also be tipped for the world to not explode because of that, so there will always be just enough “luck” on the side of the few successfully good great leaders to stabilize the world. Or maybe even to ensure that there is an arc of history toward a better world, gradually.
In my analysis, a moral learning universe is likely to only allow politics to stop being a chief calamity when all souls learn that the whole business of wanting to rule people, or needing to be ruled, is wrongheaded. The only true way to win this game would be to stop playing it — everyone living in a true anarchy, without wanting to ever limit or harm another, while knowing themselves.
What do you think?
