this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Same. Why don't the other people just log out too? Are they that addicted to this silly game? I like logging out at night to relax a bit.
Interpretation a) they are not real. They are part of the game/simulation and are not real, therefore they can't log out.
Interpretation b) they don't have the correct command. Sometimes computer are very nitpicky on what they understand and how you have to formulate a command. But one person seems to say exactly the same as the one who logged out, so either the computer is very nitpicky on the specific timing of words, or the command is user specific.
Interpretation c) they are not allowed to do that. Like in they don't have permission to execute the logout command, like you don't have permission to shutdown the computer infopoint in a mall. Or think of it like the matrix, where someone doesn't want to let you out.
Interpretation d) subconsciously they don't want to. Imagine the command is not what you say but what you really want, so they can't log out, because subconsciously they do not want to.
Personally I tend to interpretation a) because there is this theory that in an endless or nearly universe, it is basically given, that some species will invent a computer that is capable of simulating an universe, which in turn will have a simulation going, because the same rules apply. Now if you follow this train of thought, you will arrive at the conclusion that for every universe, if there are multiple, there is a basically endless number is simulated ones, which makes the chances that you are not part of a simulation practically zero. Yeah, so that's that.
My main gripe with simulation theory is that this claim just seems... false.
First off, it's not possible to create a simulation of equal complexity to the host universe, so each iteration would necessarily have to be smaller, and I would contend significantly so.
Even the wildest theoretical computers can't even simulate Earth, much less the universe.
There are a couple tricks one could use like having some parts of the simulation skip steps in less important areas, simulating different parts at different times in the host world and only syncing them back together when necessary, which would end up being invisible to those inside, as well as the simulation not running in real time, where it might be running slower or inconsistently in the host world, while inside the people see it as stable and not slow.
Not that I'm claiming it's true; it's simply an interesting thing to think about and ways around processing speed issues. If humanity ever makes a simulation of even a small universe, I imagine some of these tricks that are smoothed over in that universe would be used, since it can look messy from the outside but look normal on the inside.
You're, of course, right about simulation speed not necessarily having to match host universe speed, but an issue you can run into is that your universe experiences heat death before anything interesting happens in the simulation.
I'm extremely skeptical of in-universe physics hacks not being observable. What does it mean for an area to be less important when we can look up at the sky and observe tiny little photons from the beginning of time (almost)?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232062849_Constraints_on_the_Universe_as_a_Numerical_Simulation
I mean more that things people in a simulation can't observe with great detail yet won't be simulated with great detail until they can see that kind of detail, and by then, I assume technological advancements in the host world would have improved hardware to run on that allows that kind of detail to be simulated in a reasonable amount of time. Plus there's also the ability of the host world to edit the simulation so that things that weren't simulated in great detail when observed by people in the simulation before retroactively was changed, so that people inside always were able to see things in great detail in their memory, history, and other forms of knowledge from their points of view, but from the outside, things inside were changed minimally to make them consistent with any retroactive simulation conflicts. Not in a dystopian way, mind you, just in ways like "this very star was actually always a few light years away from its current position in the sky", like small technical details that are smoothed over in the internal history as seen by the simulation inhabitants to match up with other parts of the simulation.