You are in a simulation, much as described in this one. It is designed to be of finite duration; at some point it will end and you will return to your real (or at least one-level-up) life.
However, it is possible to keep you in the simulation for ever. When you went in, you were asked to choose a passphrase that would make that happen. In a fit of whimsy, you chose “I no longer consent to being in a simulation”. If you ever say or write that passphrase, then when the usual time limit expires you will not leave the simulation; you will remain in it until your in-simulation death, and “when you die in the Matrix, you die in real life”.
Remarks on the motivation for the above variant: OP’s “there is something super-important but you hear of it only in passing, in circumstances that give you no real reason to believe it” reminds me of the claims of the world’s various religions, many of which hold that it is vitally important that you accept their doctrines or live according to their principles, even though the only things you have telling you this are obviously unreliable. One particularly extreme version of this is Pascal’s wager, where merely considering the hypothesis that (say) Roman Catholic Christianity might be correct is supposed to be sufficient to make you do your best to become a good Roman Catholic; and one standard reply to Pascal’s wager is to point out that there are other hypotheses with apparently nonzero probability and exactly opposite consequences...
Yes, similarity to Pascal’s wager and other religious thought is not a coincidence at all. Our existence is marked by the ultimately irreconcilable conflict: on the one hand, if you view people as ML systems, being alive is both the fundamental goal of our decision-making and the precondition for all of our world-modeling; on the other hand, we are faced with the fact that all people die.
Even if we recognize our mortality rationally, our whole subconscious is built/trained around the ever-existing subjectivity. That’s why we are so often intuiting that there must be some immaculate and indestructible subject inside of us, that will not perish and can transcend space and time, as if “choosing” where to be embodied. You can see this assumption driving many thought experiments: cloning, teleportation, simulation, Boltzmann brains, cryonics, imagining what it is “to be someone else”, and so on. All of them presuppose that there is something you can call you beside being you, beside the totality of your experience. Major religions call it the soul. We, rationalists, know better than to explicitly posit something so supernatural, and yet it is still hard to truly embrace the fact that if you strip away every circumstance of existence that makes you you, the perfectly abstract observer remaining is devoid of any individuality and is no more you than it is me.
Variant thought experiment:
You are in a simulation, much as described in this one. It is designed to be of finite duration; at some point it will end and you will return to your real (or at least one-level-up) life.
However, it is possible to keep you in the simulation for ever. When you went in, you were asked to choose a passphrase that would make that happen. In a fit of whimsy, you chose “I no longer consent to being in a simulation”. If you ever say or write that passphrase, then when the usual time limit expires you will not leave the simulation; you will remain in it until your in-simulation death, and “when you die in the Matrix, you die in real life”.
Remarks on the motivation for the above variant: OP’s “there is something super-important but you hear of it only in passing, in circumstances that give you no real reason to believe it” reminds me of the claims of the world’s various religions, many of which hold that it is vitally important that you accept their doctrines or live according to their principles, even though the only things you have telling you this are obviously unreliable. One particularly extreme version of this is Pascal’s wager, where merely considering the hypothesis that (say) Roman Catholic Christianity might be correct is supposed to be sufficient to make you do your best to become a good Roman Catholic; and one standard reply to Pascal’s wager is to point out that there are other hypotheses with apparently nonzero probability and exactly opposite consequences...
Yes, similarity to Pascal’s wager and other religious thought is not a coincidence at all. Our existence is marked by the ultimately irreconcilable conflict: on the one hand, if you view people as ML systems, being alive is both the fundamental goal of our decision-making and the precondition for all of our world-modeling; on the other hand, we are faced with the fact that all people die.
Even if we recognize our mortality rationally, our whole subconscious is built/trained around the ever-existing subjectivity. That’s why we are so often intuiting that there must be some immaculate and indestructible subject inside of us, that will not perish and can transcend space and time, as if “choosing” where to be embodied. You can see this assumption driving many thought experiments: cloning, teleportation, simulation, Boltzmann brains, cryonics, imagining what it is “to be someone else”, and so on. All of them presuppose that there is something you can call you beside being you, beside the totality of your experience. Major religions call it the soul. We, rationalists, know better than to explicitly posit something so supernatural, and yet it is still hard to truly embrace the fact that if you strip away every circumstance of existence that makes you you, the perfectly abstract observer remaining is devoid of any individuality and is no more you than it is me.