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If the proposition that we are living in a computer simulation is true, then the universe that we are observing is a small piece of the totality of physical existence, and the physics of the universe in which the computer is running may not resemble the physics of our observable universe. Therefore, our world would not be located at the fundamental level of reality. The veracity of that proposition could also mean that it could be possible for simulated civilization to achieve the posthuman stage and run their own ancestor-simulations, on computers built in the simulated universe. These would be like “virtual machines”, which is a common concept in computer science. Also, virtual machines can be stacked, being possible to achieve several levels of simulations inside simulations. If our civilization develops ancestor-simulations, this would support the third proposition, leading to the conclusion that we would most likely be living in a simulations <ref name=”1”></ref>.
==Living in a simulation==
The veracity of the simulation argument would not necessarily entail a loss of rationality or changes in human behavior. Even in a simulation, a person should continue life the same way as before. To predict what would happen in the simulation, ordinary methods like extrapolation of past trends, scientific modeling or common sense would be used. Also, if the third proposition is correct, that would decrease the probability of the first one, avoiding extinction before technological maturity. However, computational power constraints could make it possible that the simulators would finish the simulation before our civilization reached a posthuman level <ref name=”1”></ref> <ref name=”6”></ref> <ref name=”8”></ref>.
There have been some suggestions for behavior or to predict what would happen if reality was a simulation in order to increase the probability of continuing existence or of being resimulated in the future <ref name=”2”></ref> <ref name=”6”></ref>. For example, if the simulator happened to be a believer of some Christian fundamentalist church, the simulation might happen to reproduce those beliefs, and the simulated beings would be rewarded or punished according to Christian moral criteria. In this way, an afterlife would be a possibility for a simulated being, in which his existence would continue in a different simulation after death or be uploaded into the simulator’s universe and given an artificial body <ref name=”6”></ref>. Indeed, if the simulators intervene in their simulations and are not only passive observers, they can take aspects of gods, having power over life and death, determining and changing the laws of the simulation, and engineering anthropic fine tunings. They can end the simulation at any time or watch upon the development of the beings in the simulation <ref name=”2”></ref> <ref name=”8”></ref>.
Living in a simulation could also mean that a person could not be sure if all the people possessed a conscious experience. While some people would be simulated with enough fine-grain detail to possess the property of consciousness, others could be simulated at a cruder level, allowing only the appearance of real people, but without a subjective experience. However, according to Bostrom (2005), “some people have argued that it is necessarily true that anybody who acts sufficiently like a normal human being must also have conscious experience.” <ref name=”8”></ref>
The fact that the universe could be a simulation does not mean that the world around us does not really exist. Instead, one should perceive it has having a different nature than previously thought. Ultimately, the computer in which the simulation runs, and its electrical activity, would be physical at the basic level of reality <ref name=”8”></ref>.
==References==
