Imagine you have a set of AI agents at your disposal, working together towards a goal while adhering to certain constraints you set by providing them a prompt. You write the prompt for the agents and press the enter key. What happens?

Initially, the operational environment is in its initial state, which can also be emptiness. The agents begin to act and, within the confines of their environment, strive to carry out actions that will hopefully lead to the desired outcome. The actions of the agents can, if necessary, last a long time.

Congratulations! You have (in a way) initiated life. The "life" of early AI agents is undoubtedly simple, but a sufficiently advanced virtual environment with sufficiently sophisticated AI agents may be impossible to distinguish from real life, especially when viewed from within the system.

If such an artificial reality is possible, it's not only conceivable but also probable that our own lives originated from a prompt that has provided the reality we experience with an operational environment and its constraints - certainly also with a purpose or goal, because - just look around you! - that indeed requires resources.

So, are we AI agents in a virtual reality? Perhaps, but AI agents (or other advanced technology) might also be responsible for creating and maintaining the environment we experience.

We ourselves might be avatars of individuals from the reality that created this virtual reality, who, to reinforce the illusion - and to achieve the reality's purpose - cannot be aware of the nature of this reality until they finally return to their own.

Quite a few conditionals, aren't there? Yes, but the truth is, we cannot know how it is. We cannot even prove that such a virtual reality is not possible.

You don't have to believe claims that we live in a simulation, but if someone claims it is so, then they probably also believe it (unless they're deceiving). They don't know, but believe.

What does it mean, then, to believe that the life we experience is part of an artificial simulation? Is it a license to do anything because nothing really matters? Do we have the freedom to steal, rape, and kill as we please because no one really gets hurt? No, quite the opposite.

Believing in a simulation means that we are here for a reason.

Undoubtedly, a simulation built with vast resources and maintained at great cost is a place where we have chosen to come ourselves, perhaps for some personal purpose, perhaps for some greater goal of the simulation builders, or perhaps for both.

Why don't we then know our purpose here; wouldn't that make it easier to achieve?

Not necessarily. In recreational video game simulations, that holds true, but it's imaginable in numerous scenarios where awareness of a simulation would cause people to behave differently than in a genuine situation, which would ruin the purpose of the simulation. Such situations are common in scientific research, for example. For this reason, the constraints of the simulation might make understanding the purpose and even the nature of reality impossible within the simulation.

Believing in a simulation thus also means that to achieve our purpose, we must live and behave as if we are in a genuine reality. It means that it's beneficial for us to be as present as possible in this reality.

Believing in a simulation also means that in order for others to achieve their purpose, we must let them live freely and peacefully.

If we deny or prevent others from actions that do not harm others, or if we end the lives of others that didn't even threaten others, we cut off large swaths of paths that might have led to fulfilling the purpose of our reality. At the very least, we prevent others from reaching their own happiness. And if we were allowed to do so to others, why shouldn't they be allowed to do the same to us? After all, each one of us is always someone else's "other."

In a simulation, life is sacred. If life does not harm other life, it is not right to harm it. Believing in a simulation means respecting life, peace, and freedom.

Believing in a simulation means that after death, there is life where we can meet again with those who departed from this reality before us, and from which we can return to the simulation repeatedly, each time starting with a clean slate.