personal thoughts
I wanna drop my thoughts in here, I really try not to read up on Simulation Theory. I've never seen The Matrix, I try to draw my own self-evident parallels between physics and ST. I'm just a normal dude, a hobbyist that loves to smoke and wonder. I try to keep my childlike wonder alive, and thinking about ST is a great way to keep it kickin'. I don't claim to know, just to wonder. I have so much more to learn about physics, and I'm confident my ideas will evolve over time. This is just a snapshot of where I am now.
Why I reject the idea that we're in "Base Reality" - My main issue with accepting our reality as Base Reality is that we do not have a clearly defined Day 1, Hour 1, Minute 1. We have "The Big Bang", but there's always the question of what caused TBB/what was 1 second before TBB. The uncaused caused. Something from nothing doesn't jive with our reality. But it took 13.8 billion years for the first lifeforms to look back and discover that things don't quite add up. That's a lot of time, that's a lot of experiencing, before that moral line of 'huh?' was crossed. Maybe we hit it early. Maybe they ran us too long. Maybe they don't care.
I believe Dark Matter is a hint. It only interacts with gravity, no other forces. But without it, our reality wouldn't be possible. It's filler, it's cosmic glue, it's fluff, it doesn't exist. But it does exist, and without it we couldn't. It exists to enable experience. It's this invisible glue making all of this work. Maybe it's here to be discovered, maybe it's here to confirm for any conscious mind that discovers it, that this is all generated. Maybe it's a touch of empathy from our creators, but we're just still, as a society, in a phase where we reject that concept. It could be one of several nails that need to be driven into the coffin of Base Reality acceptance.
We don't know what Base Reality could look like - anything is possible. Colors we've never seen. Lifeforms in shapes we can't imagine. Beings that can interface directly with God, who know how, when and why their reality began. But we don't have that privilege.
Why? Maybe we're the real AI. Maybe somewhere in Base Reality, some egghead ran a billion simulations for 20 billion years each at the flip of a switch. Maybe those simulations ran to completion in what we would perceive as seconds in their reality, but we're within them, living that time that passed in them, to generate the information that was harvested by the creators. Block Universe. We experience the crushingly slow, snails pace 1.0x speed reality - they had it at infinity speed. We don't exist anymore in their reality, we only existed for seconds while the query ran. But everything we're doing here, all of the things we're creating, our thoughts, our art, our music, our cultures - they're observed in those datapoints we're distilled into. And that's why they matter.
Maybe we're separated from God, specifically to keep us curious. Specifically to keep us wondering, creating, thinking. Because in a reality where you can simply ask, 'Why, God?', you may lose your curiosity - the all-knowing is right there to tell you right from wrong. Maybe they need to see some wrong to appreciate the beauty in right, and they can't do wrong in their reality as God looms above. Maybe it's all valid, positive emotion and negative emotion. Maybe we're just here to experience.
I guess I wonder if we're caught up in a prompt, basically. In that time between asking a question and receiving a response, our entire reality had to spin up to generate the answer. They took the data, we are stuck in that time between input and output. Maybe we are the calculator.