Great points , thanks for all the input.
I see how it couldn't really matter in the end. It dosen't make our experience any less real. Also, is there really any difference between praying to god or to a programmer?
That being said, it does give me some strange deterministic, existential comfort.
On the question of whether it's true or not, there is also Bostoms trilemma, which states that either:
- The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or
- "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero", or
- "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one"
One of these must be true. Either (1) a species will always die off before they reach a level required to run a simulation, or (2) there is such a strong concurrency between advanced species, that virtually none of them would have any interest in running simulation or (3) we are living in a simulation.
Unless we are now living in a simulation, it is reasonable to assume that our ancestors will never have the possibility, which I think is equally mind-boggling.