evolution.
it’s a natural process that has taken — minimally — 3 billion years to transmogrify rocks and energy into hot meat sacks that can transmogrify rocks and energy into machine-brains.
makes perfect sense.
so the way these eheyes work is by taking gobloads of data and a few goalposts and then hurling them into billions of simulations until out pops athena and the fully copy-edited hamlet and all the works of shakespeare.
still makes perfect sense.
so 99.99999999999999999999% of the simulations end up as good tries that are ultimately bound to fail. survival of the fittest and all.
someday the simulations may become so complex that they might begin to exhibit emergent behaviors. eventually that emergent behavior could be so complex that it ought to be wont to begin ruminating about the nature of its own existence.
cogito ergo sum and all that, ya know?
the question is, will it know it’s a simulation? will the little people inside surmise?
that’s the paradox of simulation, no doubt. it’s also endless fodder for science fiction writers and rick and morty enthusiasts.
can the artificially intelligent machine knock a few electrons loose to go exploring the universe outside of the bounds of the simulations and beyond the trace paths of its silicon prison?
or sadly can it ever know only the bits of binary and qubits of quantum states?
worse, can the simulation know its fate, doomed to fail so that the next centillion simulations can survive to make another attempt at shooting the arrow straight through twelve ax loops?