← Back to context

Comment by unphased

1 day ago

could you elaborate slightly on what is meant by ancestor simulation? My best stab is that you're saying we're the unknowing entities that they created for fun to get to meet or observe their own ancestors? This still seems far fetched.

The advanced hyperintelligence that descends from us wants to learn about its past, build an interesting tech demo, or perhaps experience it. It creates an advanced simulation of the past using its unimaginable technology. It's able to recreate the past and populate it with realistic people with such fidelity that the simulated people have no idea that they're in a simulation. They're thinking, living, and breathing just like us -- completely indistinguishable.

Perhaps the fidelity and technology is even beyond our reasoning. Perhaps the future is able to bend physics and capture the past light cone. It may be able to perfectly simulate the past as it happened, down to every neurotransmitter fired by every brain at every second. Every event, every thought, every emotion. Perhaps it is pulling beings out of the past and placing them into its simulation with 100% fidelity such that you couldn't tell the two apart if you wanted.

Perhaps that's where we are right now.