Social scientists could study people who had tried things like this and look for patterns, which would be much more informative than social science research tends to be now. (They could also run deliberate experiments, recruiting/paying people to make copies of themselves to try different lifestyles, cities, schools, etc. - these could be much smaller, cheaper, and more definitive than today’s social science experiments.)
One question I had after reading this: how do we know that the digital environments would be similar enough to our own environments to take them as the same? I’m having trouble explaining the thought further, because it feels more like an intuition, but I guess it feels like there’s some necessary degree of chaos present in our world that couldn’t be properly modeled in a digital world. That is, something feels importantly different about a created world versus ours, in a way that would seem apt to change how I interacted with the world if I were in the digital environment.
One question I had after reading this: how do we know that the digital environments would be similar enough to our own environments to take them as the same? I’m having trouble explaining the thought further, because it feels more like an intuition, but I guess it feels like there’s some necessary degree of chaos present in our world that couldn’t be properly modeled in a digital world. That is, something feels importantly different about a created world versus ours, in a way that would seem apt to change how I interacted with the world if I were in the digital environment.