It’s not so clear what those mean. Particularly if Lorenz invariance is really true, what is a planck length in your reference frame could be 10 planck lengths or 10^20 planck lengths in your reference frame.
I think, just as no system is fully self descriptive (there is always an axiom), and there is no fully self contained perpetual motion machine
So it is reasonable to take the universe as not fully self descriptive or defining
For instance can the universe create it's own arbitrary laws of physics and run molecules on that basis? No it doesn't
And so essentially, a simulation, or God becomes required. And the one running the simulation would need an immense power essentially beyond the realms of our conception
It seems if we are to exist, then, for want of a better word, God is essential
There’s no natural reason to think that the laws of the universe aren’t what they are simply due to a natural process. While no one has credibly made a testable hypothesis on what this process would be as of yet. However I don’t have reason to believe this would be impossible to test.
There are testable hypothesis, but not about the extremely early universe as of yet. The energy requirements put it outside the realm of terrestrial experiments - and as of yet no one has a good simulacra of the universe prior to the big bang. While there are some theoretical white hole approaches to justify the big bang etc. These are not as of yet testable.
Phooey. Turtles then. Because that simulator runner would also have a simulator runner, and so on.
Let's leave the cultural baggage of self-existent platonic forms for ultimate power at the door, it's an ultimately overtrod path of philosophical inquiry.
If you constitutionally can't leave it at the door, read David Brin's crystal spheres (and enjoy!).
It's an either/or if you presume designed structure and mindful order are the nature of the universe, which is typically what people adopt to avoid dealing with nihilism (if Camus, Kierkegaard, and Sartre are to be believed).
Personally I'll go with the one who introduces themself as "I AM who I AM"
To me that's a prime mover statement, if ever there was one
But I have a feeling you resolve nihilism towards something meaningful? Personally I don't get how that works, but I'm interested, and look forward to any explanation
I don't see how adding a simulation/God solves your issue?
If a system cannot be self prescriptive/be without axioms/ (whatever you think the issue is) then adding another layer of systems is not going to solve your issue. If it can be, adding another layer is not necessary.
Simply to be able to simulate the universe, or provide a basis for (however we describe the issue) already needs to an excessively stupendous amount of power -- but that is something still within the realms of physics
I was suggesting (as essentially do you) that to break out of the nested simulations (or whatever formulation) takes something qualitively different to what this universe is able to even fully conceptualize
My placation to God (aka universe simulator runner), is to say that clearly this thing exists (else we don't) and clearly it must be different and outside the universe to an extent that we can't describe it
In the same way that a set can't describe it's aleph numbers
-- So in brief, I'm agreeing that another layer of simulation doesn't cut it
I guess it just comes down to semantics then. I would say that, by definition (but I'm not sure if this is the most common definition), anything that can act upon the universe is part of it. Your God/simulator/... might be alien to us, but by definition it is part of our universe, and it's just us that do not entirely understand the capabilities of the universe.
Unless it’s possible to attack the simulation from inside it and escape the sandbox.
OTOH, every time an escape is detected and contained, the simulation can be reset to its last valid state and its inhabitants will never suspect the universe was reset.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.”
There’s a series of Greg Egan stories (in the book instantiation) about preparing and viewing images designed to exploit the simulator graphics library (when viewed) as a way to transfer between simulations, that considers these problems
Some people value having a more complete picture for its own sake. It can also potentially influence some decisions at some point - e.g. an increased focus on looking for computationally cheaper shortcuts in the nature of reality or slightly decreased extremely long-term outlook if a simulation comes with a higher chance of being shutdown before the heat death of the universe etc.
If we're in a simulation there could be a way for information to flow out.
In this case, we could do things we're really good at. We could influence a viewer by showing them a myriad of ads for example. Or shift their political views to our advantage.
That's effectively what it is: anyone running a simulation of an entire universe, controlling the rules and data of that simulation, in a position to turn it on or off, change it, etc, is effectively the god of that simulated universe.
The idea of a simulation is essentially equivalent to religious idea of transcendence, just repacked in scientistic terms. You get another world, a creator, perhaps a meaning of life, perhaps even scientistic mind/body dualism (after all, our minds could be running different hardware than the rest of the simulation!).
Of course, it is as useless a model of the world for scientific purposes as all religions are - it can't explain anything that we don't already know about.
In fact, it's not even novel. The whole idea is quite similar to the Hindu notion of Māyā, the world we experience as an illusion that hides the real truths of the world.
Our simulations have sandbox escape bugs, maybe this one has some too. What if we're stretching the edge cases with quantum computers, using computing resources from outside our sandbox?
computers as we know them are pretty limited in simulating anything in real time. I mean we are limited to double precision most of the time. If we are in a simulation, it isn’t a piece of silicon and metal running on electricity with all the finite math. Maybe if you redefine computer to be reality and have a model for dealing with singularities and infinities.
I'm actually with you. I was trying to make a clever remark. I find it entertaining that ancient occult symbolism of your definition (1/0, singularity/infinity) to be the resulting mathematical foundation of modern computing, though.
Personally, I think the discussion of "is it a simulation" is just getting into the mechanics again and is only held to be defining of reality by hardened materialists. I mean, that is just computing catching up with physics catching up with spirituality with regard to facing the question of: what really matters and what really is the point if we're just a small crest of a wave in the infinite ocean of energy, or if we're a bunch of emergent consciousnesses in god's infinite quest to know itself, or I want a cheeseburger because of some cosmic bitflip in some nth dimension of recursive simulations, and so on.
The truth of any of it is likely to be found in the abstract, if anywhere, I suppose.
Or if we represent G-d's eternal delight in cheeseburgers (irony intended) to the point he creates the universe just to experience such delight recursively. His quest to taste the infinite cheeseburger (which we experience as a bitflip in some n-dimensional cosmic diner.)
There's just too much pain (both physical and emotional) and too many diseases in the world. I refuse to believe that a higher entity (name it God or aliens) would create or simulate all those cruel things.
> Isn't disease another lifeform trying to survive? Isn't Nurgle responsible for all life? Why do you think your life is most important in the eyes of Nurgle?
One of the big benefits of running simulations is to test horrible things in a safe and contained sandbox. The fact that each data point has become sentient is a byproduct of the level of detail in which this simulation is constructed.
Why do you believe that a higher entity would care at all about your suffering? Why would they step in and intervene? You’re projecting human qualities (empathy, caring) on something you know nothing about, but which certainly isn’t human.
I like to think that whatever happens here is insignificant in the big picture, and that's why bad things happen and divine intervention doesn't routinely occur.
I can't explain why its insignificant, of course. It's like a hydrocarbon combusting in your car engine, and the rest of the little molecules wondering what kind of a monster could do that to them. We humans aren't even aware that it could be a problem.
If this is a simulation, it could have been “created” as a set of physical rules (which we perceive as physics). Everything that happens within it could have just evolved naturally from those rules. For example, maybe the Big Bang was the initialization of the simulation. Life wasn’t explicitly programmed into it, but it just happened after running the simulation for billions of years. Now that life exists, along with the pleasures and suffering that go along with it, this higher intelligence could step in and change it, but that would certainly corrupt the natural progression of the simulation.
Yes, but if nothing really exists, then pain and drama are more than necessary (and kind of make even more sense).
To borrow a few pages out of the ancient Indian playbook, creator was really bored with perfect perfection and invented a way to entertain himself, otherwise it's a huge bland perfect nothing forever.
This is are a meaningless questions. One cannot calculate any such odds in principle. It is an application of a wrong concept.
The real answer is that in cannot be known, again, in principle.
The first such answer has been given by Upanishadic seers back then, based on the principle that intellect, conditioned by perceptions, cannot know. Observations of effects is not enough to know the causes and "mechanics".
The modern answer is that abstraction barriers are impenetrable (yes, in principle). There is absolutely no way to even guess an actual wiring of a processor from the level of code (separated by a few layers of abstraction barriers).
I’m not sure that’s the case, because we don’t know the underlying system (assuming true).
More importantly, If math is designed to reflect reality and his proof effectively states you can’t prove the system is correct within the system — then effectively aren’t we saying we can’t prove we are in a simulation?
> it's definitely not impossible a priori and especially not because of Gödel.
You forgot something there: you know the underlying system and about its existence. In the absence of this knowledge it's indeed impossible to know.
Here's an example from real-life physics: there's no way of telling by means of measurement, whether you're accelerating or at rest but subjected to a gravitational field.
A software example would be this: how would a program written and running in Factorio (like Pong [0]) be able to tell that it's implemented by means of video game mechanics running in an emulator executed within a VM on server hardware?
If the programming environment itself features no way of interrogating its runtime environment, then there's just no way.
If we assume that this is running in a truly huge Factorio instance then monitoring the world intently would reveal so many subtle bugs and inconsistencies in a world with otherwise extremely straightforward laws that being in a simulation should be a prime hypothesis.
It can model itself, but it couldn't replicate itself 1:1—which maybe is the wrong assumption on my part, but is the only way you could prove with certainty that you may be living in a simulation?
I mean, without input from another source, that is.
Presumably you could delay implementing microscopic phenomena, as long as they're consistent with macroscopic phenomena, until such time as they're actually measured.
You can always go back and add it later. You put in a cheap heuristic to begin with and only implement the faithful model when particle colliders start coming online. If it took too long to develop just pause the simulation for a bit.
I’ve had a reoccurring dream since childhood about our universe being a B+ assignment in an extraterrestrial middle school classroom and that in effect I’m a npc in that effort.
Whenever this subject comes up I’m always a bit interested but it seems like an impossible thing to know.
You don't need to be crappy to make something that isn't perfect, maybe it's not even possible to prove that something extremely complicated like the universe is bug-free.
Obviously though it might be a matter of perspective, we might as well be gods compared to ants, our code might be buggy but I don't think ants are smart enough to figure that out.
There's actually a math theorem that says basically that, unless I'm misunderstanding, if your math has no bugs you can't prove it has no bugs with it.
Not quite. It just says that if you assume set of axioms and math grammar you may generate statements that are not false but you can't constructa a proof with what you allowed yourself. I don't think it's a bug.
This one just says that any non-trivial consistent set of math doesn't contain the proof of its consistency. Where consistency means it doesn't contain proofs of falsehoods.
It doesn't seem like a bug to me. Just a way to ensure that any non-trivial math has no self sufficient bubbles. That no set of math is somehow better than others. That math is free and unlimited with it's choice of axioms and rules and no subset is better than others.
I wouldn't consider it a bug either, I didn't mention it because I thought it was a bug, I mentioned it following this line of thought: "You don't have bugs in math." -> if math were inconsistent it would be buggy -> if math is inconsistent it's buggy -> if it's not inconsistent you can't prove that it's not inconsistent -> you can't tell whether math has bugs in it (unless you can find some), which is a contradiction from your statement that there are just no bugs. It's basically impossible to prove that, and if you can't prove something you are left with nothing more than doubt.
Ah I see. But it's only the case if you limit yourself to a subset of math. Subset of math is not provably consistent if you are trying to use just itself for the proof, but this subset is provably consistent if you extend your proving toolset with something else.
But the new extended subset has new, other troubles that make it impossible to prove its consistency by using just itself, so to prove its consistency you need to extend it again.
You can still have fully provable (i.e. bugless) subset of math, you just need other math to prove that it is so.
Yes. But you don't need the whole math to run the universe. Just a subset of your choosing. And you can go beyond that subset (to a wider god-math) to prove that this subset is consistent.
And the fact that your extended god-math can't prove that it is itself fully consistent (doesn't generate any proofs of falsehoods) is not necessarily a problem. It's enough if no falsehoods were involved in the proof of the universe-math consistency.
And that's entirely possible. Theorem you mentioned doesn't say anything about that.
Maybe you are not an NPC but an actual playable character to someone and the whole concept of you thinking that you are in control is part of the system.
But yeah, odds are much higher you are just an NPC for decorative purposes ...
I think probably as likely as the earth is at the center of the universe. The simulation theory as fun as it is to imagine I think is more like the earth being flat or center of the universe type thinking … it more comes from our imagination then from our observation
Our observations are driving the comparison, no? People are trying to make sense of existence but only have their personal experiences and knowledge to use as evidence.
In that case NPCs are the real people of the simulation. It is the playable character that knows it is not real. The NPCs are simulated to act and behave like independent entities with their own drivers and motivations. Therefore the NPCs are actually the most free characters in the simulation. The playable character just does what it is told by the player.
> In games, the vast majority of characters aren't the player.
Actually it depends on the type of a game, maybe we're in an equivalent of a huge Hypixel server with us being players and animals being NPCs. Occasional admin interventions are perceived as UFO abductions and generally laughed at...
One particularity of this game is that there is no pre-existing set of universal rules: you are getting to know them from your parents, other people, "holy" and less holy books etc. - and even when you die you can never be 100% sure that the rules you learned were the ones to follow.
I find questions like this fascinating. As a religious person, I guess I don't really see the question. There's no way for me to (currently) prove or disprove the existence of a deity. Ultimately I make a faith-based decision based on things that resonate with me, helping to reinforce my religious beliefs. Others do the reverse and don't believe.
But it would be hubris on my part to try and prove the existence of deity. It's fundamentally unproveable - at least with what we currently know. I view these simulation exercises as the same.
While we can't know the future, this might not have been the case in the past. Most religious books describe a time where special people like prophets have very direct, physical contact with the main deity of the religion (one of them even had a fight with God).
Simulation is such a lack of imagination. I see it situated right in the tradition of always comparing the universe to the latest technology. The Universe is... a clock! A hologram! Electricity! A computer!
What if the Universe were a blemish on a semi-sentient 8th dimensional creature, itself by-product of an 23rd dimensional industrial process, which is itself a symbolic representation for even more incomprehensible entities?
Could you call that a simulation? The comparison is meaningless.
> What if the Universe is a blemish on a semi-sentient 8th dimensional creature, itself by-product of an 23rd dimensional industrial process, which is itself a symbolic representation for even more incomprehensible entities?
That's supposed to be a trade secret, who leaked this to you?
I completely agree, but it would be very difficult for the readers of such article to relate to. It's simply easier to call it something that we're familiar with so that people can think of it and discuss it. The reality might be so strange that we might be lacking any terms to describe it.
I find the notion of a sim a little more interesting that other kinds of closed systems, because unlike say "what if the world is a dream" there are constants in a sim, rules are fixed. Those rules may be exploitable.
So I'm just curious where the bugs may be found? After all anything this complicated probably has bugs =)... Is it in quantum mechanics? Faster than light travel? Something super mundane that we've not thought about because it's that simple way someone decided to trigger debug mode?
Find those and fun things may be possible, which would also give us evidence for the sim theory.
I'm not holding my breath, but it's fun to think about.
The first step is to realise that it makes no difference to the people living inside a universe whether that universe is "real" or simulated.
The second step is to realise that it makes no difference to the people living inside a simulated universe whether you actually run the simulator, or even bother building it.
For example, the set of prime numbers less than 10^12 exists whether or not you build and program a computer to print them out. If you write a program that simulates a universe, then the mathematical object defined by that program exists whether or not you build a computer and run the program, and to any conscious beings that happen to exist inside that hypothetical universe it can't possibly make any difference.
> then the mathematical object defined by that program exists whether or not you build a computer and run the program
This is how physics poses to "see behind the veil", so to speak. The implications seem a lot more interesting than a computer simulation, at least to a [this] human's perspective.
What if mathematics is only valid within the simulation?
If seems natural to us that a simulation must be grounded in mathematics, and that maths must therefore be a thing within the reality/universe that is running the simulation, but I don't think this is a given. The infrastructure might utilise something else that we can't conceive of.
Mathematics can describe concepts abstractly, like a type checker checking a program, even if we can't decide whether the program halts or not
In that sense, we might be able to use mathematics to describe systems that are beyond the reality of the universe
For 'us' to be meaningful to 'them', hopefully we can conclude that in some sense, 'they' are meaningful to 'us', tho agreed, as you said, it is no given
I like the aleph sequence, because it shows that allowing paradoxes and impossibilities doesn't mean all bets are off -- that the universe can make perfect sense, even containing paradoxes that are beyond our conception
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadSimilarly, the uniformity of background radiation, and many other phenomena. But yes Lorentz invariance is a good one to mention!
If the universe doesn't, we have bigger questions to worry about.
So it is reasonable to take the universe as not fully self descriptive or defining
For instance can the universe create it's own arbitrary laws of physics and run molecules on that basis? No it doesn't
And so essentially, a simulation, or God becomes required. And the one running the simulation would need an immense power essentially beyond the realms of our conception
It seems if we are to exist, then, for want of a better word, God is essential
So yes, eminently testable, no disagreement with you on that
And yet at the same time, the simulation hypothesis is not really disprovable, and infact, is quite reasonable
Which presents the problem (if simulation is not disprovable) that there may be many valid explanations that are untestable
So in that sense, I would say impossible to test
But still I'm surprised you say there are no testable hypotheses!
Let's leave the cultural baggage of self-existent platonic forms for ultimate power at the door, it's an ultimately overtrod path of philosophical inquiry.
If you constitutionally can't leave it at the door, read David Brin's crystal spheres (and enjoy!).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)
Without a prime mover, we are left with turtles, true, I think
To me that's a prime mover statement, if ever there was one
But I have a feeling you resolve nihilism towards something meaningful? Personally I don't get how that works, but I'm interested, and look forward to any explanation
If a system cannot be self prescriptive/be without axioms/ (whatever you think the issue is) then adding another layer of systems is not going to solve your issue. If it can be, adding another layer is not necessary.
Simply to be able to simulate the universe, or provide a basis for (however we describe the issue) already needs to an excessively stupendous amount of power -- but that is something still within the realms of physics
I was suggesting (as essentially do you) that to break out of the nested simulations (or whatever formulation) takes something qualitively different to what this universe is able to even fully conceptualize
My placation to God (aka universe simulator runner), is to say that clearly this thing exists (else we don't) and clearly it must be different and outside the universe to an extent that we can't describe it
In the same way that a set can't describe it's aleph numbers
-- So in brief, I'm agreeing that another layer of simulation doesn't cut it
I guess it just comes down to semantics then. I would say that, by definition (but I'm not sure if this is the most common definition), anything that can act upon the universe is part of it. Your God/simulator/... might be alien to us, but by definition it is part of our universe, and it's just us that do not entirely understand the capabilities of the universe.
OTOH, every time an escape is detected and contained, the simulation can be reset to its last valid state and its inhabitants will never suspect the universe was reset.
-Douglas Adams
Adams could even have gone a bit further and added:
"We're just not sure how many times."
In this case, we could do things we're really good at. We could influence a viewer by showing them a myriad of ads for example. Or shift their political views to our advantage.
That's effectively what it is: anyone running a simulation of an entire universe, controlling the rules and data of that simulation, in a position to turn it on or off, change it, etc, is effectively the god of that simulated universe.
Of course, it is as useless a model of the world for scientific purposes as all religions are - it can't explain anything that we don't already know about.
In fact, it's not even novel. The whole idea is quite similar to the Hindu notion of Māyā, the world we experience as an illusion that hides the real truths of the world.
And now we have a dyad. Great job. Do you have any idea what just started?
Personally, I think the discussion of "is it a simulation" is just getting into the mechanics again and is only held to be defining of reality by hardened materialists. I mean, that is just computing catching up with physics catching up with spirituality with regard to facing the question of: what really matters and what really is the point if we're just a small crest of a wave in the infinite ocean of energy, or if we're a bunch of emergent consciousnesses in god's infinite quest to know itself, or I want a cheeseburger because of some cosmic bitflip in some nth dimension of recursive simulations, and so on.
The truth of any of it is likely to be found in the abstract, if anywhere, I suppose.
Fixed that for you.
E.g. even animal fights are frowned on in most cultures, and bloodsports are now pretty heavily regulated (especially vs historical norms)
Just choose a disease and go for a 10 minute Wikipedia rabbit hole.
If cruelty exists in their world, then empathy and caring must exist too.
I can't explain why its insignificant, of course. It's like a hydrocarbon combusting in your car engine, and the rest of the little molecules wondering what kind of a monster could do that to them. We humans aren't even aware that it could be a problem.
To borrow a few pages out of the ancient Indian playbook, creator was really bored with perfect perfection and invented a way to entertain himself, otherwise it's a huge bland perfect nothing forever.
The real answer is that in cannot be known, again, in principle.
The first such answer has been given by Upanishadic seers back then, based on the principle that intellect, conditioned by perceptions, cannot know. Observations of effects is not enough to know the causes and "mechanics".
The modern answer is that abstraction barriers are impenetrable (yes, in principle). There is absolutely no way to even guess an actual wiring of a processor from the level of code (separated by a few layers of abstraction barriers).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/
Effectively we can’t prove a higher level of the simulation because we are encoded in it?
It depends on the implementation but it's definitely not impossible a priori and especially not because of Godel.
More importantly, If math is designed to reflect reality and his proof effectively states you can’t prove the system is correct within the system — then effectively aren’t we saying we can’t prove we are in a simulation?
Honest question - I have no idea lol
You forgot something there: you know the underlying system and about its existence. In the absence of this knowledge it's indeed impossible to know.
Here's an example from real-life physics: there's no way of telling by means of measurement, whether you're accelerating or at rest but subjected to a gravitational field.
A software example would be this: how would a program written and running in Factorio (like Pong [0]) be able to tell that it's implemented by means of video game mechanics running in an emulator executed within a VM on server hardware?
If the programming environment itself features no way of interrogating its runtime environment, then there's just no way.
[0] https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=76155
It can model itself, but it couldn't replicate itself 1:1—which maybe is the wrong assumption on my part, but is the only way you could prove with certainty that you may be living in a simulation?
I mean, without input from another source, that is.
Lazy physics development. :)
He's taking the hacker's perspective and exploring if the simulation would be hackable from inside.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ
Whenever this subject comes up I’m always a bit interested but it seems like an impossible thing to know.
And no, you'll have no way to break out of simulation and access api of the simulator, because if it's in place it works similarly to this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
Obviously though it might be a matter of perspective, we might as well be gods compared to ants, our code might be buggy but I don't think ants are smart enough to figure that out.
You don't have bugs in math.
> The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.
It doesn't seem like a bug to me. Just a way to ensure that any non-trivial math has no self sufficient bubbles. That no set of math is somehow better than others. That math is free and unlimited with it's choice of axioms and rules and no subset is better than others.
But the new extended subset has new, other troubles that make it impossible to prove its consistency by using just itself, so to prove its consistency you need to extend it again.
You can still have fully provable (i.e. bugless) subset of math, you just need other math to prove that it is so.
And the fact that your extended god-math can't prove that it is itself fully consistent (doesn't generate any proofs of falsehoods) is not necessarily a problem. It's enough if no falsehoods were involved in the proof of the universe-math consistency.
And that's entirely possible. Theorem you mentioned doesn't say anything about that.
If it is a game, what are the odds that you are a non player character? In games, the vast majority of characters aren't the player.
So if we are living in a computer simulation, odds are that we're non player characters.
But yeah, odds are much higher you are just an NPC for decorative purposes ...
...some serving of shrooms seems suggestive to spiritual salvation...
Actually it depends on the type of a game, maybe we're in an equivalent of a huge Hypixel server with us being players and animals being NPCs. Occasional admin interventions are perceived as UFO abductions and generally laughed at...
One particularity of this game is that there is no pre-existing set of universal rules: you are getting to know them from your parents, other people, "holy" and less holy books etc. - and even when you die you can never be 100% sure that the rules you learned were the ones to follow.
Sit down, Doug, that doesn't make any sense
But it would be hubris on my part to try and prove the existence of deity. It's fundamentally unproveable - at least with what we currently know. I view these simulation exercises as the same.
While we can't know the future, this might not have been the case in the past. Most religious books describe a time where special people like prophets have very direct, physical contact with the main deity of the religion (one of them even had a fight with God).
What if the Universe were a blemish on a semi-sentient 8th dimensional creature, itself by-product of an 23rd dimensional industrial process, which is itself a symbolic representation for even more incomprehensible entities?
Could you call that a simulation? The comparison is meaningless.
That's supposed to be a trade secret, who leaked this to you?
So I'm just curious where the bugs may be found? After all anything this complicated probably has bugs =)... Is it in quantum mechanics? Faster than light travel? Something super mundane that we've not thought about because it's that simple way someone decided to trigger debug mode?
Find those and fun things may be possible, which would also give us evidence for the sim theory.
I'm not holding my breath, but it's fun to think about.
The second step is to realise that it makes no difference to the people living inside a simulated universe whether you actually run the simulator, or even bother building it.
For example, the set of prime numbers less than 10^12 exists whether or not you build and program a computer to print them out. If you write a program that simulates a universe, then the mathematical object defined by that program exists whether or not you build a computer and run the program, and to any conscious beings that happen to exist inside that hypothetical universe it can't possibly make any difference.
That's my opinion, anyway.
This is how physics poses to "see behind the veil", so to speak. The implications seem a lot more interesting than a computer simulation, at least to a [this] human's perspective.
If seems natural to us that a simulation must be grounded in mathematics, and that maths must therefore be a thing within the reality/universe that is running the simulation, but I don't think this is a given. The infrastructure might utilise something else that we can't conceive of.
In that sense, we might be able to use mathematics to describe systems that are beyond the reality of the universe
For 'us' to be meaningful to 'them', hopefully we can conclude that in some sense, 'they' are meaningful to 'us', tho agreed, as you said, it is no given
I like the aleph sequence, because it shows that allowing paradoxes and impossibilities doesn't mean all bets are off -- that the universe can make perfect sense, even containing paradoxes that are beyond our conception