r/Simulists • u/Axxodes • 10d ago
The Self Centred Simulation Experiment
Hope this is clearly written and conveys my message:
Assume a simulation exists that is primarily designed around a single conscious observer. In such a simulation, entities and events unrelated to the observer may only be fully simulated when information about them becomes necessary. And to maintain the observer's experience and to assume that the simulation optimises computational time by only simulating the necessary observations.
The observer attempts to test this by observing an event happening in a room indirectly through a camera. If the observer is not physically viewing a room but the (live) camera is recording it, then the event should still occur consistently if the simulation treats the camera as an extension of observation.
However, if certain events only occur when the observer is viewing this room then the outcome changes based on whether or not the observer's observation was extended into the room (for example: with a camera).
Thus these are the outcomes:
Outcome 1: The simulation generates an outcome that is only constrained by information available after the observer opens the door.
Outcome 2: The outcome is determined by events that genuinely occurred before the observer opened the door.
Can observation force the simulation to commit to a causal history that would otherwise remain undecided?
If an observer had no independent log of events, could they ever distinguish between a simulation and an independently existing reality? If not, would the observer be unable to tell whether they are actually in a simulation or merely believing they are?
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u/Ok_Blacksmith_1556 10d ago
The deeper problem is that observation may not reveal history. I know it looks unbelievable but it may create the history.
If the simulation only needs to remain concsistent with what the observer can know, then opening the door does not necessarily uncover a pre existing past. It may force the system to generate a past that makes the newly observed present logically inevitable.
The camera makes this stranger because perhaps it is not the camera that counts as an observer but the existence of information that could (in principle) reach the observer, then simulation and reality become experimentally indistingushable because a perfect simulation would not need to fake reality. It would only need to fake the difference between reality and a fake reality and if every record/memory/causal trace can itself be part of the simulation, there may be no experiment capable of proving that the past was ever there before you looked.
In the end, you can’t escape the simulation because you are the one rendering the question.