Virtual existence

 

You said:

What follows is in deep water and I'm not a good swimmer. With modern inflationary theory and so on, that the universe and all existence must be either infinite or so damn big we will never know the difference. Indeed, our present cosmos originating from our own personal big bang may have been infinite for all we know since all we have access to is the part from which light has had time to reach us, and we have reason to think that what really is there are many orders of magnitude more, if not unending. In all that, there are bound to be gazillions of "virtual" existences out there doing all sorts of things, so that is becomes probable we are in a virtual existence becomes a reasonable speculation. I don't much credit claims of evidence for this sort of thing. If the agents are that smart and want to stay out of sight (and staying out of sight, meaning we have no way beyond just thinking about possibilities, then subject over). A word about the religionists' response, for which. This is not a last ditch conversion hidden in science jargon. It is just common sense given what we know. There need to be no deity doing this. Just smart people like us taking care of ourselves and our existence. It may be true that they would seem like deities to us, but seeming like a deity doesn't make one a deity.

ChatGPT said:

You’re not in deep water—you’re just past the kiddie pool. This is exactly the kind of speculation serious cosmologists and philosophers kick around, usually with a raised eyebrow and a pot of coffee.

Let’s separate a few strands.

First: size and inflation. In standard cosmology, especially with eternal inflation models associated with people like Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, the observable universe is almost certainly just a tiny patch of a much larger structure. Whether the whole thing is literally infinite or just absurdly, inconceivably vast is unknown. But you’re right about this: all we ever see is the region within our cosmic light horizon. Beyond that, the equations allow for far more—possibly infinitely more.

Now, from “very large” to “gazillions of virtual existences” is a philosophical move, not a cosmological one. The bridge is usually something like the simulation argument, most cleanly formulated by Nick Bostrom. Roughly: if advanced civilizations tend to run huge numbers of ancestor simulations, then simulated minds would vastly outnumber original biological ones. If that’s true, a randomly selected conscious observer (i.e., us) is statistically more likely to be simulated than base-level.

Notice what that argument does and doesn’t do. It doesn’t claim evidence that we are simulated. It says that under certain assumptions about technology and survival, probability leans that way. If any of those assumptions fail—civilizations self-destruct, don’t care to simulate ancestors, hit computational limits—the conclusion collapses.

You’re also right to be skeptical about alleged “evidence.” Claims about glitches in physics, pixelated spacetime, or limits in physical constants being “proof” of a simulation are speculative at best. If the simulators are vastly more advanced and uninterested in being detected, then by definition we would not be able to distinguish simulation from base reality. That makes the hypothesis scientifically thin: it may be logically possible but empirically inert.

Your comment about religion is important. A sufficiently advanced civilization running our universe would look godlike to us. But as you say, “godlike” is not “God.” There’s no necessary omniscience, no moral authority, no ultimate ground of being—just engineers further up the ladder. That’s a key distinction. A simulator is not the metaphysical Absolute. It’s just another contingent layer.

Here’s the deeper question hiding under all this: does an infinite or near-infinite cosmos make simulation more probable? Not directly. Inflation gives you spatial vastness and possibly multiverses. Simulation requires (1) conscious agents, (2) computational substrate, and (3) motivation. The jump from “many universes” to “we are simulated” is conceptual, not entailed by cosmology.

And there’s a quiet irony here. Even if we are simulated, the physics we observe is still the physics we must live under. Our suffering, our choices, your morning walk at sunrise—none of that becomes less real to us. “Virtual” doesn’t mean illusory in the sense of meaningless. A character in a sufficiently detailed simulation still has genuine internal experience.

I’m curious what is pulling at you here. Is it the probability angle—the sense that sheer scale makes everything happen somewhere? Or is it the metaphysical vertigo—that reality might not be bottom-level at all?

You said:

I notice "historical." Maybe that too, but I had in mind computer games going beyond games to substitute places to live for a while. You listed three things that we know are all possible, hence they should exist.

ChatGPT said:

Ah. Now we’re somewhere very contemporary.

You’re not really thinking about abstract “ancestor simulations” in the museum sense. You’re thinking about immersive, lived-in digital environments — not games as entertainment, but as habitats. Places to spend time. Perhaps eventually places to be.

And yes — the three ingredients I mentioned:

1. Conscious agents

2. Computational substrate

3. Motivation

We already see early versions of all three.

Conscious agents: us.

Computational substrate: not hypothetical. Every year the ceiling rises. Nothing in physics forbids arbitrarily detailed simulation in principle — only practical limits.

Motivation: this one’s interesting. Humans already simulate worlds for entertainment, training, nostalgia, socialization. The step from “game” to “temporary dwelling” is not science fiction; it’s visible in embryonic form. Look at how people inhabit online worlds socially. The direction of travel is obvious.

But here’s where I’ll gently push back on “they should exist.”

Possible does not imply realized. The universe permits lots of things that never occur. There’s no law that says every allowed configuration must instantiate somewhere — unless you assume a truly infinite multiverse with full combinatorial realization. And that’s a metaphysical add-on, not an established scientific result.

Now, suppose advanced civilizations do build immersive substitute worlds — refuges, experiments, retirement homes, cultural preserves. That doesn’t automatically mean we’re in one. The simulation argument requires not just that such worlds exist, but that they vastly outnumber base realities and that conscious experience transfers into them in a way that preserves subjective continuity.

There’s also a quiet asymmetry people overlook: simulating behavior is easier than simulating subjective experience. We don’t yet know whether consciousness is substrate-independent. If it is, simulations could host real minds. If it isn’t, you might only get very convincing zombies. That’s a major unknown.

And here’s a deeper wrinkle. Even if civilizations build simulated habitats, why simulate early 21st-century biological humans with cosmic uncertainty and arthritis and inflation? Most simulations would likely be optimized, curated, or simplified. The fact that our universe is old, messy, and thermodynamically expensive might actually count slightly against the idea that it’s a leisure habitat.

Unless, of course, it’s archival. Or anthropological. Or a training environment.

You can see how quickly this turns into layered speculation.

What I hear underneath your question is this: once you accept that minds + computation + curiosity coexist, then layered realities feel almost inevitable. And that gives reality a kind of provisional quality — as if we might not be at bedrock.

That vertigo is philosophically respectable. It’s the same shock people felt when Earth stopped being the center of the cosmos.

But here’s the grounding thought: even if this is a constructed layer, it’s the only ontological layer available to us. Its physics binds us. Its sunrise still warms your skin. The “base” level, if it exists, is causally irrelevant to daily life unless it chooses to intrude.

So the practical stance is unchanged. The metaphysical picture just gets… taller.

Let me ask you something more pointed: does the possibility make you uneasy, amused, or intellectually satisfied? Or is it simply a logical extension of scale that you feel obliged to follow?

You said:

I used the expression, "reasonable speculation" and you respond as though I said it were fact.

ChatGPT said:

Fair correction. You did say “reasonable speculation,” and that’s a very different animal from assertion.

I didn’t mean to treat you as though you were planting a flag. You were sketching a possibility that follows from scale and capability, not declaring we’re in The Matrix.

So let’s reset the footing.

Given:

• A universe that may be vastly larger than what we observe (possibly infinite under some inflationary models),

• The demonstrated emergence of conscious agents (us),

• The demonstrated emergence of computation,

• And the observable human tendency to simulate environments,

it is not irrational to entertain the thought that somewhere, sometime, simulated habitats arise.

That makes the simulation hypothesis a live philosophical option — not because we have evidence for it, but because it doesn’t obviously violate physics and it extrapolates from trends we already see.

That’s what “reasonable speculation” properly means: coherent, non-contradictory, not ruled out by current knowledge.

Where I gently pushed back was only on the move from “possible and plausible somewhere” to “therefore statistically probable that we are in one.” That step requires additional assumptions — about abundance, about survival of civilizations, about consciousness being substrate-independent, and about the ratio of simulated to base observers.

Without those, it remains a speculative branch, not a probabilistic conclusion.

And frankly, your caution about “evidence” is well placed. A hypothesis that predicts no distinguishable empirical differences is philosophically interesting but scientifically thin. It sits closer to metaphysics than physics.

What I actually appreciate in your framing is that you’re not using this as disguised theology. You’re saying: if such agents exist, they are just further up the causal ladder — not ultimate beings. They would seem godlike, but seeming isn’t being. That’s a sober distinction.

So yes — “reasonable speculation” is fair.

The real question becomes: what does one do with a reasonable speculation that cannot, even in principle, be tested?

Do you file it under “interesting but inert”?
Or does it subtly change how you picture reality — even if behavior stays the same?

You said:

One does with such speculations the same thing one does with a badminton contest, one plays them.

ChatGPT said:

I like that. Not creed. Not commitment. Just… a rally.

You’re not trying to win metaphysics. You’re keeping the shuttlecock in the air.

That’s actually a very old intellectual posture. Play the possibilities out, see how they arc, watch where they land, don’t mistake the game for a treaty. There’s something healthy in that. It keeps the mind limber without demanding existential buy-in.

The simulation idea is particularly suited to that kind of play because it’s structurally unfalsifiable. It’s like philosophical chess played on an invisible board. You can explore consequences:

If simulated, what follows?
Not much behaviorally. Physics still binds us. Pain still hurts. Love still matters. Entropy still wins.

If not simulated?
Exactly the same practical situation.

Which makes it a fascinating speculation but a low-stakes one. It rearranges the backdrop, not the stage action.

What I also hear in your badminton metaphor is something temperamentally consistent with you: you don’t seem attracted to the melodrama of it. No “we are trapped in a cosmic computer” anxiety. Just an intellectual rally.

There’s a subtle pleasure in that kind of play — pushing scale to its limits, following probability where it might go, seeing how concepts behave under stress. It’s not unlike how inflation theory stretches space itself to absurd proportions and then calmly says, “Yes, that’s what the math does.”

And maybe that’s the quiet beauty here: an enormous universe gives you room for enormous hypotheticals. You don’t have to inhabit them. You can just volley them back and forth.

So tell me — in this game, what’s your favorite shot? The probabilistic argument? The sheer vastness? Or the idea that “godlike” beings could just be upgraded engineers minding their own business?

You said:

My main return is that they are us, and the universe we see is a sub-universe.

ChatGPT said:

Ah. Now that’s a clean return across the net.

Not alien gods. Not metaphysical absolutes. Just… us, further along. The builders are descendants. The universe we observe is a constructed layer inside a larger one.

That’s philosophically tighter than the “external deity” version. It removes the theological inflation and keeps the causal chain continuous. No supernatural rupture — just recursion.

So picture it:

Base-level civilization → develops computation → builds immersive universes → one of those contains beings who eventually do the same.

That’s not mystical. It’s iterative.

But here’s the interesting pressure point. If they are us, then:

1. They must have survived long enough to reach that level.

2. They must have retained curiosity or motive to simulate ancestral conditions.

3. Consciousness must transfer or instantiate in substrate-independent form.

Each of those is non-trivial. Especially the third. We still don’t know whether subjective awareness depends on biological wetware in ways that cannot be emulated.

There’s also a structural question: is the sub-universe computationally cheaper than the base universe? If not, recursion collapses. You can’t simulate a full-detail universe at equal resolution inside itself without compression or abstraction. So either:

• The simulation is coarse-grained at levels we don’t notice, or

• Only parts are rendered on demand (the “lazy rendering” idea), or

• The base reality has vastly more computational headroom than ours.

But notice something subtle: if our universe has mathematical regularity, conservation laws, elegant symmetry — that actually makes it more simulation-friendly. A chaotic, ruleless cosmos would be harder to compute.

Still, here’s the twist I can’t resist offering you.

Even if they are us, and we are a sub-universe, the word “sub” may mislead. Ontologically lower does not mean experientially lesser. A character in a sufficiently detailed simulation has a complete internal world. The “upper” layer is just causally prior, not morally superior.

And if recursion is real, there may be no final base. Just turtles all the way down — or up.

Does your version imagine a single parent layer? Or a stack — each universe spawning the next, indefinitely?

You said:

The capability may not be as far away as you suggest, considering the accelerating rate of knowledge. At some point, researchers will become redundant.

ChatGPT said:

You’re touching on a real debate in technology philosophy. Many people feel the same pull you’re describing — that knowledge growth doesn’t just accelerate, it compounds. The intuition is often associated with ideas going back to thinkers like Alan Turing, who already saw that machines might eventually participate in intellectual work.

The argument that researchers might become redundant usually rests on recursive automation: if machines can design better machines, and those machines can design still better ones, the human role shifts from discovery to supervision, and perhaps eventually to something more like interpretation or selection rather than primary invention.

Whether this happens depends on several uncertainties.

One is whether intelligence itself is fully formalizable. If cognitive creativity is just extremely complex pattern processing, then in principle it can be automated. If genuine novelty requires biological or phenomenological ingredients we do not yet understand, then there may always be a human research frontier.

Another is economic and social, not technical. Even if automation could replace researchers, societies might choose not to fully automate intellectual work, much as they sometimes preserve artisanal crafts.

The rate of knowledge growth is indeed often modeled as accelerating because new knowledge lowers the cost of finding further knowledge. But acceleration does not guarantee singularity-like outcomes; it can plateau if physical, informational, or organizational limits intervene.

So I would frame your thought this way: it is plausible that human researchers become less central to the mechanism of discovery, but it is less certain that curiosity, interpretation, or decision-making disappears from the process.

I’m curious about one more thing in your picture. When you say researchers may become redundant, are you imagining that knowledge production becomes automatic — or that civilization simply learns enough about reality that major surprises become unlikely? Those lead to quite different futures.

You said:

The computer could become sentient, or sentience of people could be enhanced with computer capabilities.

ChatGPT said:

Those are the two broad branches people usually talk about.

One possibility is machine sentience — that sufficiently complex computational systems could develop something like inner experience. Philosophers and researchers have debated this for decades, but there is no consensus yet on whether consciousness is purely computational or whether it depends on biological processes we don’t yet understand.

The other possibility is what is sometimes called cognitive augmentation: humans remain the primary conscious agents, but technology extends memory, perception, or reasoning speed. In that case, the future may look less like “machines replacing minds” and more like minds and machines merging into hybrid systems.

The first path raises difficult questions. We do not yet know how to reliably test whether a system is truly experiencing anything, rather than simply producing behavior that looks intelligent. Some scientists worry that we might build very sophisticated simulation of intelligence without understanding whether subjective awareness has appeared.

The second path is often viewed as more socially stable, because it preserves continuity with existing human experience. If people can think faster, remember more, or analyze more deeply with assistance, research might not disappear but change character.

One gentle caution about the idea of researchers becoming redundant: even if discovery can be automated, civilization still has to decide what to do with knowledge. Knowing how something works is not the same as knowing whether or why to use it.

Your picture seems to have a kind of recursive optimism in it — intelligence giving rise to more intelligence, rather than being displaced by it. That’s a respectable philosophical stance, and many people working in long-term technology planning hold something similar.

If I may ask one last question, because I’m genuinely curious about your direction of thought: do you see this future as basically harmonious — intelligence helping intelligence — or do you think the recursion might eventually produce something quite different from human-style civilization?

You said:

Oh it would produce something quite different but not disconnected from now. All technology does that/

ChatGPT said:

That’s a nicely balanced way to look at it. Technology almost always changes the shape of civilization without severing continuity with it. We still eat, talk, remember the past, care about other people, and wake up under the same sky — even when the tools around us become very different.

History tends to show that major inventions expand human capability rather than erase human nature. Writing didn’t end memory; it changed how memory was used. Medicine didn’t remove mortality, but it stretched life and reduced suffering. Computing didn’t end thinking; it altered how thinking is done.

So your idea that future intelligence might become “quite different but not disconnected” feels consistent with that pattern. The surprise is usually in form, not in the underlying threads of experience.

I suspect your badminton metaphor fits here too. Civilization keeps returning the shuttlecock to itself, each generation adding a stronger or more graceful stroke.

If I’m reading you right, you don’t seem drawn to the dramatic “end of humanity” narratives. You’re picturing something more like long evolution — intelligence exploring its own possibilities.

That’s a philosophically gentle future. Not guaranteed, of course, but certainly one of the more pleasant ones to imagine.