And that would be in some sense sensible and perfectly correct.

> We would only recognize it as a "glitch" if we had a specification to compare it to,

Nah. I disagree. If you are playing a game and you fall through a wall you can call that a glitch without seeing the game's specification. It is because that experience is not in line with the rest of the system.

Imagine if we find that a specific reaction between high-energy particles goes measurably differently in one bounded patch of the universe. We find this randomly. Then an army of physicist descends on it. They measure a lot. Perform experiments. They characterise the effect to a high degree. Map out the precise boundaries. Map out what exactly happens on the boundary, and so on and so on. ... Is this just physics? Yes! Would this effect feel like a "glitch"? Also yes!

> I don't understand what "gaining root" would mean either.

Transcending the laws of our Universe. Being able to change them. Rewriting the very fabric of reality. Becoming god or gods. Peaking behind the curtain and finding a brand new playground beyond it. Being able to change PI to be actually 42.

> To me this seems like solipsism

I think you are hang up on some specific flavour of how the universe could be a simulation. Maybe try to think of other possible ways?

Your suggestion that this may lead to us "being gods" certainly does not change my view that this is solipsistic and that the conclusions it leads one to are silly at best and dangerous at worst. The idea that you can become God doesn't seem compatible with a healthy life where you accept your limitations and find a way to live vibrantly despite them. It sounds like something a supervillain says at the beginning of a Marvel movie.

Hey fellow human being. You are being incredibly insulting here. I can assure you that I have both a wholesome and healthy life and believe that maybe we live in a simulation. If the two things seems incompatible to you that is a limitation of your cognition.

Can we discuss ideas without insinuating that the other is living an unhealthy or less vibrant life? Thank you very much.

You talk about this idea being “solipsistic”. I had to look up the word. Merriam-Webster defines solipsism as “a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing”.

I think you are still only thinking about “brains in a jar”. The idea where a brain or brains is attached to some machine which feeds them with simulated sensory input.

That idea is indeed solipsistic. By the very definition. It is also not particularly interesting to be frank and not the kind of “simulated universe” I am thinking about.

The kind I find more interesting is where the laws of physics are executed on a high fidelity simulation. The difference here is that here the brains are not hooked up to the machine, but part of the simulation. An emergent phenomenon inside it. Same way as that flower there, or a neutron star yonder.

This is fully compatible with living a wholesome life. You play board games with your friends, make hot love and cold gazpacho. Walk barefoot under moonless skies on lush meadows etc etc. It just might be a simulated person in a simulated universe, there is nothing wrong with that. Doesn’t make it any less vibrant or feel the grass any less cold.

You might also ask what does it matter if physics is simulated, how would we even know? If the simulation is “perfect” then we might never know. So far we found that the laws of physics are the same no matter where we look. If we would find certain kind of anomalies those could indicate certain kind of simulation systems.

Let me tell you an example: Imagine that you are designing a simulation to run a universe. You have a mindbogingly lot of compute at your disposal but not infinite amount. You might want to shard your simulation to clusters you can compute in paralel, and you want to minimise the information transfer between these clusters. Having gravity (which clumps stuff together) and speed of light (which keeps speeds bounded) helps with this. This is so far not predictive. I just wrote up a bunch of speculations. To make it interesting you need something we can test. Here comes the prediction: if I were coding a universe simulation distributed this way I would hate the boundary interactions between clusters. Would probably be super hard to make it seamless with the rest of the simulation. Therefore if we live in such a simulation I would expect anomalies in the finer details of the laws of physics at the boundaries of clusters. Lets asume that the clusters are rougly aligned with star systems. We could send a probe to the nearest one which keeps making detailed measurements on-board while it travels. If it encounters a boundary where physics “skips a beat” then we might see that in the measurements. We know it can’t be some huge stuff. We see the light of other stars, we observe matter which traveled interstellar distances. But maybe it would be enough to disrupt the internal oscillation of an atomic clock as it is crossing a cluster boundary.

It is important to understand that I am not saying that we for sure live in a clustered simulation of a universe. What I am illustrating here is that this kind of thinking can lead to theories about how the universe might be, and those theories can lead to testable experiments. There are people much smarter than me, and they will think of thousand times more intersting ones. I am sure about that. Do you still feel this solipsistic?

I find the idea you expressed - specifically that godhood might be attainable and that it's a goal one could work toward - to be extreme and dangerous, and I have first- and second-hand experiences where I've observed similar ideas to be harmful. (It would be fair to ask that I share these experiences, but I am not comfortable doing so; I realize that's unfair to you because it denies you the opportunity to interrogate them, and I apologize for that, but they are personal and painful and not all of them are mine to share.) I have no judgement of you, but I have a distaste for this idea. The rest of the ideas you're expressing, about life being just as fulfilling in a simulation, seem to be an ecstatic and joyful response to nihilism, and if that is working for you, that's awesome. But surely you can imagine a circumstance in which the idea "godhood is attainable" causes harm.

I think you're thinking that I just haven't thought this through properly and that if you just explained it better I would agree with you. But I have given this a lot of thought. I first encountered these ideas about 15 years ago, and your elaboration isn't really presenting anything new to me. We agree on what this thought experiment means and what the implications would be, we just interpret the results of the experiment quite differently. I do find it to be solipsistic, with some small concessions, like "okay, I admit that other minds exist as much as my mind does, so instead I hold that all of us are fictions." The idea that reality might be so malleable that we can "hack" it is, in my mind, inherently solipsistic, a natural consequence of centering one's ability to manipulate the universe as the most real thing.