Simulation Overflow: Part 2

In Part 1, we established what motives a potential thing running our simulation could have from a universe-sized perspective. We mentioned a thing could be running many simulations, like jars on a shelf.

Assuming there was a purpose of running multiple simulations, what could the thing be solving for?

I would assume the thing had initially run simulations that resulted in fancy arrangements of planetary matter, and was awed at the results, but one thing-day a specific simulation developed something more interesting than it had ever seen before: arrangements of conscious matter.

This spectacular event instantly made any simulation without conscious matter infinitely less interesting, and so the thing killed off experiments that did not contain the spectacle, and began furiously forking the one that did.

One interesting thing about running these simulations is the apparent cheapness of space for the thing. Seemingly infinite lightyears in width, height, and zeight, space and time to a thing could be as cheap as a byte is to us. It’s clear that space is not the precious resource. The thing had seen so many planets, stars, and meteors in all sorts of dizzying formations but could only be entertained so much as a carnival kaleidoscope is entertaining to us.

Life was the precious resource, but admittedly, the thing had at some point likewise seen it all. Tiny single-celled organisms swimming in random patterns that utterly bore the thing.

I suppose you see where this is going: homesapiens were one day born from a jar, and the thing could not help but find this most interesting of all.

Now this seems to be just brilliantly convenient, coming from a human-centric narrator after all. But the axiom of our simulator overthing is that it prefers vibrancy over inanimacy. It prefers to be…surprised. And why wouldn’t it?

In terms of possibility-generation, humans seem most potent. To a thing wanting to be impressed by its experiments, simulations in which conscious matter repurposes light and radio waves to transmit species-oriented information is infinitely more wondrous than an endless showdown of one wild animal eating another and fighting to occupy the territory of all like 1 acre.

We can also assume that as we are at the apex of our own space-time expansion, and that every jar on the shelf of a thing runs time at its apex, then we are subsequently at the apex of time in the outer-jar environment as well. This would mean that because this experiment is still running at the apex of thing-time, it is interesting enough to continue running.

It could be that other simulations have developed something more interesting than humans and their technology, but if we believe that the development of conscious matter which one day leads to humans was so spectacularly surprising an event, then the thing could be in a position where it does not take us for granted. And that all simulations running now have equalized at the point of the inception of the variable that leads experiments here.

I think in the perspective of a thing that wanted to be amused by its experiments, a human species that develops energy-based technology is far more interesting than one that develops impressive copperware. If from our time perspective the emergence of such technology is within our own recent memory, and it is a spectacular event at this apex of time, then it is certainly most spectacular at the apex of thing-time as well. If it weren’t interesting, it would mean there are other experiments yielding more interesting results. Yet this would mean that the thing would likely re-calibrate all previous experiments, including our own, to focus on this other more interesting development.

Yet our simulation is still running.

It could also be that the thing perished eons ago and we’re all fucking alone somebody please help