I think we’re getting close to a slogan for an inspirational poster with a picture of a thunderstorm and a rainbow.
The only question I have is why would anybody have any concerns about being in a simulation? I don’t get it. What is the cause for concern? For example, the person I just spoke to is a simulation, this causes me concern because _______________ (fill in the blank).
When this comes up it’s usually in the context of someone denying evolution, denying climate change, claiming fake news, etc.
I might make something up like: If you jump in the air are you sure you’ll come down? You’re not 100% sure that if you say “Banana” at just the right moment you keep flying upwards forever.
These people are victims of sophistry and philosophical deconstructionism because they don’t know what those things are. If it’s someone I care about I might try to get into that but usually not. I have a 0% success rate enlightening people other than myself.
But sophistry works both ways, you can’t unfuck someone’s mind but maybe it can be further fucked to the point where they lose interest in politics.
At the moment, I’m half-employed and could use some bumper sticker royalties.
Sign me up.
I see that most people are dealing with the original question as pertaining to “what if everything we consider real is just a simulation?” Hmm… I was thinking of that as just an extreme example or something.
There is a well known hypothesis attributed to Nick Bostrom that argues that if (as seems likely) posthuman civilizations eventually develop sufficient computing power to simulate entire universes, they will conduct many such simulations. This means that a much larger number of conscious beings will arise in these simulated universes than in real universes. Therefore, our universe is more likely to be a simulation than real.
Have you tried turning your life off and on again?
(Actually - don’t do that…)
I blame those stupid Matrix movies for popularizing this nonsense.
Star Trek did it earlier…and better!
i was always the downer - thinking life is pointless, what’s is ALL OF THIS (universe, this laptop im typing on, this world i’m living on, etc, etc)
the way that i looked at life is that all animals are basically programmed to act a certain way, like birds doing those crazy formations in the sky and migrating when it gets cold,etc they’re not conscious enough to know anything, but it comes so naturally to them. Humans are a bit different, we have “ego’s” and we feel like we are in control, but in the grand scheme of the universe, we aren’t in control, and that each of our actions are already predicted by the unraveling of the universe… something like that.
these days … i’m just happy to be alive, appreciate those around me, enjoy life, focus on my hobbies / passions … that’s all you can do. just take it easy, one day at a time…
I agree with those who equate it with solipsism. It’s the same formula. The inputs that you’ve got are the inputs you’ve got. It should occur to everyone at least once in their life that “hey, maybe all of these input signals are not really connected to anything real”, and contemplate that possibility, but after doing so, you recognize that you can’t know and that there’s no way to proceed on the assumption that they are fake info since they’re all we’ve got to work with. So we proceed on the assumption that they are what they purport to be.
I think there’s a difference, inasmuch as we might in principle find evidence that the universe is a certain type of simulation. Whereas so far as I’m aware solipsism doesn’t really make any predictions, it seems to be little more than an expression of existential angst.
The only way you would be in trouble if this IS a simulation, is if you decide to ignore the rules of the simulation. Same thing as if this is a real world. If you ignore the rules of whatever environment you may or may not be in, you are likely to have a bad time. Of course, masochists who would have a good time having a bad time might be exempt.
But most of all, this thread question isn’t about to be real or not to be real, it is about how to find peace of mind through logic, given the two possibilities.
And back to Pascal for a moment, no matter how he schmoozed about it all, his whole idea was based on getting non-believers to behave the way that he thought that they ought to and would, if they had actually been believers to begin with. Saying that they should fake it in hopes of redemption or of coming to see the light, is functionally the same as what people being tortured are usually told to reason.
Basically, he said that since the punishment for non-believers is so very horrible, that all non-believers should GAMBLE that they might some day COME to be believers, by cooperating with the authorities from now until they die. That’s not a gamble, that’s coercion.
Such certainty.
“Works for me.”
Or, “works on my machine.”
You might in principle find evidence that the universe is a simulation, but in the absence of finding such evidence you can’t know that it isn’t one. And therein lies the overlap with solipsism. A simulation need not leave any trace of the fact that it is, indeed, a simulation. If “you” are actually a consciousness whose entire sensory input is a set of wires and leads sending you signals from a virtual reality program, and none of that sensory data corresponds with anything akin to a real universe, there is no reason whatsoever to posit that there would be so much as a scintilla of evidence available to you, from the stream of signals coming in through your wires, to allow you to know it to be the case.
Investigate it as directly as you can and act in ways that seem the most correct to you based on how your actions affect yourself, others, and your environment. Even if this environment is a simulation, it is the only one we have until we have reason to think there is another environment out there that we are being blocked from accessing.
Well, we know for absolute certain that some things are simulations. For the obvious example I can be entirely certain that everyone on the internet except myself is a bot.
The only reason I can think of to be concerned about being in a simulation is fear of a capricious creator. (Think ‘The Sims’.) This is exactly equivalent to believing in gods, mind you.
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The mind constructs the reality you live in, so even if it’s a simulation, it’s still real as you have created it.