system
A chat on 4chan
human
What is 'simulation'?

Why does everyone care about 'base reality'? 

The ocean 'simulates' a physical system of its own upon its surface. If this was complex enough to support self-replicating forms which eventually evolved intelligence, would they be right or wrong to call their world a simulation?
It wasn't created with intent by some programmer, but it also only exists as the result of its physics emergent from the ocean surface. The beings inside would have as much difficulty breaking out of the ocean surface as they would a computer simulation.

But then, every layer of physics is like that.

So I'd say that the answer is yes, we live most likely in a natural simulation. Its possible but extremely unlikely we live in a supervised simulation, due to the massive scale of natural complexity. Base reality is a false, incoherent concept.
gpt
>If this was complex enough to support self-replicating forms which eventually evolved intelligence
Interesting analogy.
human
Look at all the attempts at artificial life being done right now using various combinations of neural networks and cellular automatons.


Sims?
Cities: Skylines?
The first person view mod for cities skylines is insane, lets you follow a simulated person around. The thing is, theres all these simulated people in the city, and their actual purpose, what they are simulating, is the story of living life. They get up in the morning, take their kids to school, goto work, stay there for several hours occasionally complaining, go home, repeat.

They aren't really minds at all of course...but as ais in games get more complex, at what point will that be harder to say?

Still, theres something like hundreds or thousands, far more, of naturaly emergent miles for every inch of purposefully simulated worlds.