As a further comment, regarding the idea that you can “unplug” a simulation: You can do this in everday life with nuclear weapons. A nuclear weapon can reduce local reality to its constituent parts—the smaller pieces that things were made out of. If you turn off a computer, you similarly still have the basic underlying reality there—the computer itself—but the higher level organization is gone—just as if a nuclear weapon had been used on the simulated world. This only seems different because the underpinnings of a real object and a “simulated” one are different. Both are emergent properties of some underlying system and both can be removed by altering the underlying system in such a way as they don’t emerge from it anymore (by using nuclear devices or turning off the power).
It would have to be a weapon that somehow destroyed the universe in order for me to see the parallel. Hmmm. A “big crunch” in which all the matter in the universe disappears into a black hole would do the job.
If you can somehow pull that off, I might have to consider you immoral if you went ahead and did it. From outside this universe, of course.
As a further comment, regarding the idea that you can “unplug” a simulation: You can do this in everday life with nuclear weapons. A nuclear weapon can reduce local reality to its constituent parts—the smaller pieces that things were made out of. If you turn off a computer, you similarly still have the basic underlying reality there—the computer itself—but the higher level organization is gone—just as if a nuclear weapon had been used on the simulated world. This only seems different because the underpinnings of a real object and a “simulated” one are different. Both are emergent properties of some underlying system and both can be removed by altering the underlying system in such a way as they don’t emerge from it anymore (by using nuclear devices or turning off the power).
It would have to be a weapon that somehow destroyed the universe in order for me to see the parallel. Hmmm. A “big crunch” in which all the matter in the universe disappears into a black hole would do the job.
If you can somehow pull that off, I might have to consider you immoral if you went ahead and did it. From outside this universe, of course.