How does that feel different from the feeling of not living in a simulation? If there is a difference, then it is a poor simulation that does not properly simulate.
Ayaan_817 wrote: ↑May 3rd, 2020, 12:19 pm
Imagine, one day, a super advanced species in the distant future was taught in school that millenniums ago, there lived a species called homo sapiens and well, one curious student decided to know more. The student used his/her virtual simulation machine to visualise what life during the time of the homo sapiens was like. He created a simulation and generated brains that would process and get info that was necessary at a particular moment.
For example, if the brain was looking in a specific direction, then only the objects ‘present’ in his field of vision would be visible and this would reduce the amount of data to be processed.
He/she created multiple such ‘brains’ and pre-programmed some information into them that would allow each of them to function co-existentially.
I just hope the student’s mom doesn’t pull the plug on the simulation and ask the child to go do his/her homework!
Science fiction stories are not real. So far, no one has been able to make such a thing, and it may be that no one ever will. When someone says it is possible, they are being optimistic about the ability to make such things in the future. But right now it is just wishful thinking, not real at all.
But, if we were in a simulation, what difference would it make? If it were a perfect simulation, then everything you experience would be exactly the same as if it were real. So what difference would it make?
As far as shutting off the simulation goes, eventually, you will die. The best available evidence is that your consciousness is the processing of your brain, or a result of that processing (actually, a proper subset of the brain activity, as much of it is not consciousness, as, for example, it sends a signal to your heart to beat and other such regulatory bodily functions). Much is known from studying people with brain damage, how part of their mind can be eliminated and things can be changed. (A good place for a regular person to start would be with a book by Oliver Sacks, like The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. When a brain is damaged, very strange things can happen to the person's mind.) So, most likely, when you die, it will be like someone shut off the simulation; you are no more, just like you did not exist in the year 1800. That is what the best available evidence suggests will be the case. This idea, though, is quite old, as philosophers like Epicurus taught this idea thousands of years ago.
Or, if you are in a simulation, it being shut off will be for you like things were for you before the simulation started. That was nothing to you.