Opting for Version B
I like this dream within a dream thesis better, there you got the chance to improve the whole system by dreaming a more positive dream and act like that. Looks like also the old religions of Asis point that way.
Couldn't a computer generating an evolutionary simulation eventually generate a program that takes over the operating system and installs new software that totally changes the game?
Simulation Hypothesis for kids (210 million views!)
And if you were to re-write the universal simulation, how would you make it better? More positive? Would the positive displace the negative completely? Would you eliminate the predator/prey/parasite relationships? How would you provide limitations, scarcity, adversarial competition, frustrations of the will? Would instant gratification be better? Would these modes of energy transfer be banned from your more positive simulation? How would you have a meaningful existence without goals? Having goals implies you don't have everything you want yet. This implies a frustration that motivates action. Without frustration, everything stops, no E-motion, no creation.
What does cheap energy and a lack of mortal challenge look like: Urban sprawl and Wal-mart at midnight. This is why beings on the road to godhood must be cast out of the Garden and not allowed to take hold also of the Tree of Life (free energy)... they must learn to survive by the sweat of the brow and struggle against the thorns and thistles of the land.
If you want your sim to have the Shire and Gondor you cannot neglect to include Mordor. The usefulness of the AI agent you are training can only be measured against the problems in the environment you give it to solve.
The Earth has been a hotbed of conflict for millions of years with every life hanging in the balance on the edge of survival and extinction and now in the last 2000 years or so, a blink of a cosmological eye, in our spiritual adolescence we have decided our Mother Conflict is a bitch and we could do so much better than her. Do we think if we become vegans or eat bugs the lion will lay down with the lamb?
Go back far enough in your family history and there will be someone who almost didn't make it.. someone who almost didn't succeed in becoming a parent to your ancestors. You are the product of generations who struggled to make it, who almost didn't, but finally did, and that struggle to pass on the torch of life and to encourage it to burn brighter against all odds and against all forces of man/nature/gods that seek to eradicate it is what gives your life a basic level of incredible meaning upon which you may build all other meanings of life with soul goals and self-generated pursuits.
I hate to quite literally be the devil's advocate here, but so much of "spirituality" has become ungrounded as it seeks a dis-embodied solution to end all problems and we need a problem, a challenge, a goal to be grounded. The serpent was the wisest of all the gods' creatures because the level of the adversary determines the level to which we may rise and overcome.
I have to re-share this awesome music video that K9 shared:
The message at the end is phenomenal. Life is about BOTH hardening to overcoming the gut wrenching challenges it presents to us AND learning to soften, to relax, and dance with the implicit dualities.
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... because I think it puts a major roadblock in the way of the dominant computer-based simulation Theory model.