As someone once said, “It’s so bad its not even wrong”
It isn’t a theory worth even a moments thought because it is inherently unfalsifiable. If this world is perfect, constructed illusion then any evidence that might point to that fact is a construct as well.
Were this theory the reality it is not possible to ever know it for sure and so there is absolutely no point spending time worrying about it.
Maybe you’re looking for a quick answer in a few posts, but I would recommend you take a couple of 100-200 level college classes in Philosophy, where these kinds issues have been discussed by sophomores every semester for over 100 years.
Its very useful and simple evolutionarily for your senses to accurately reflect the environment. There are some exceptions, such as classic optical illusions, where the heuristics of image interpretations may lead to incorrect conclusions, But those are generally cases of the brain trying to provide a more accurate picture of the world by making assumptions that are correct most of the time. There is little evolutionary advantage in generating outright hallucinations on a regular basis. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? (i.e. cite?)
Not to get solipsistic again, but you are using your senses to prove your senses. It’s circular logic.
I can though think of examples where what we perceive does not tell the whole story. For instance, I can’t see ultraviolet light. It arguably exists and it arguably conveys information that is real, but for a number of reasons, it was not useful enough for me to evolve the ability to sense. There is something there that exists that my senses do not find useful, so I don’t perceive it. We have been able to discover ultraviolet light via other means, but what haven’t we been able to discover? If I were to make an argument say 1000 years ago about the existence of a new ‘color’ that conveys information that we don’t yet comprehend, I could easily be accused of making an unfalsifiable assertion and thus I should ignore this ‘color.’ By relying on my senses to accurately describe reality, I would be misled.
It is overtly the case that there are myriad things about reality that we humans cannot perceive with our senses. I would not personally describe this situation as being in a simulation.
Nor would I. A simulation implies artificiality-a creation outside of nature. While we can never really rule that out, what I’m more interested in is whether what we perceive as ‘real’ actually reflects an objective reality or whether it is merely an internal creation of our own minds. For instance (assuming that the predominant view of reality is correct), when I look at my wife, I know that she’s not truly a single object, but rather a collection of smaller objects which are themselves collections of smaller objects which are actually mostly comprised of not really matter at all, but simply a field surrounding a very small particle. So what I conceive of as ‘my wife’ is simply a bunch of electromagnetic fields behaving in predictable ways and reflecting light into my eyes. It was not biologically useful for me to perceive my wife in that way or more accurately, a mechanism to perceive her in that way never evolved or if it did evolve, was less useful than what we currently have. I perceive my wife as a single ‘thing,’ when in reality she is a billion billion billion different things that act in concert. My senses simply don’t find perceiving at the we’ll say ‘real-est’ level to be useful or perhaps possible, so they take a shortcut.
I’m not sure it’s incorrect to call your wife a single object merely because she has constituent parts. Composite objects are real things - look at a given basketball team. It’s actually a collection of members, but that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a basketball team, and the basketball team has properties that its individual members lack which emerge as a result of the interaction of those members. (For example, no single player can play a game by themself, but the collective can.) Similarly your wife may have cells and molecules, but she’s still your wife, and has wifeness properties that are a result of the specific arrangement and interaction of her parts. In a different arrangement - like say a large pile of loose molecules - those parts would really be a different thing which would not be the same as your wife. So being able to detect the wifeness of the components arrangements is not being decieved; it’s detecting a real thing.
So all the levels are equally real, from the quarks to the electrons to the atoms to the molecules to the cells to the organs to the wife to the basketball team she’s a member of. You can’t see all of those levels, and the ones you can’t see are still real. But that doesn’t mean the levels you can see are less real.
There is a difference between understanding that something is made of different pieces and can be treated as a whole and physically being unable to perceive those pieces. In the basketball team analogy, I can certainly understand that a team functions as a unit and treat them as so. At the same time, I am not incapable of seeing Lebron James and only seeing the Cavaliers as soon as they suit up. In a similar vein, it’s one thing to treat my wife as a single object and it’s quite another to not be able to perceive that she is not. In the first case, I am judging how to treat a conglomeration of things. In the second, I am incapable of seeing it as it truly is and only able to see a mental representation.
Perhaps amusingly, the back of my mind is telling me that your biggest beef is with opacity. You’re stymied from going even one level deeper in your examination of your wife because your view of most of her organs is obscured by that big one in the way - skin. Of course if you removed her skin in order to improve the view of the other organs she might get annoyed at you. (But you could still try!)
Human senses are necessarily quite limited, being as they rely on certain specific ways to gather the data. This again doesn’t mean that you’re getting a false picture, but it does mean that if you want to know your wife’s blood type you’re going to have to use some approach other than direct sensory observation. But that applies to everything over ten thousand miles away from you too - human perception is a limited view on reality.
Still not sure how that makes the limited perception false.
Ed Fredkin, a proponent of the universe as program hypothesis, said that early miracles were bugs, and the reason we don’t have them any more is that the bugs got removed.
I don’t think the write-ups about him say this, but I heard it from him directly when he talked to a class I took at MIT while he was there.
IOW, people can find words to justify absolutely anything they choose to believe.
Here’s my argument against this:
We sometimes think of “real” or “illusion” as some property an entity or reality can have. But it doesn’t really make sense when you follow that logic through. For example, what would it mean to say everything is an illusion: it’s *all *a dream, but there is no outside “dreamer”? How would that differ from a universe where everything is real?
I think in fact, illusion and reality are labels based on how we interpret reality.
If I’m playing a VR game where I’m a fish, we call that illusion because the interpretation “I am a fish” does not explain the totality of my experiences as well as the interpretation “I am a human playing a VR game”. If I’m a fish, why can I remove the headset and see a room on dry land?
At any time, the best interpretation we have is real, and the rest are illusion.
Given all this, the OP is saying, I believe, “I have a better interpretation than our current best interpretation”.
Well, what is it? And what does it explain better?
Otherwise, we stick with what we’ve got: I’m a human living in a space-time matter-energy universe.
I would call it false because it’s not the real picture. There is more to it than what I observe and what I observe is simply a mental creation in my head that is useful, but it doesn’t convey the whole truth. We absolutely, positively know that that is so, so what other things am I completely missing just because I haven’t evolved the senses to observe them? It’s completely possible that there is an entire universe of ‘things’ surrounding us that we simply don’t know how to observe and may never figure out how to observe them. We’ve lucked into technology that lets us observe some of these ‘things,’ but how many more of them are there that we haven’t lucked into the technology yet to ‘see’ and never will because our senses prejudice us against them. It seems to me that it’s nearly a guarantee that we’re missing something and maybe many things or an infinity of things.
Getting back to opacity. Opacity is exactly my point. Opacity is just a mental interpretation of light reflecting off of things. We don’t see all of the light and sometimes the light behaves in strange ways. If there were X-rays that made it through the atmosphere and we somehow evolved to shield ourselves from them, it’s possible that I would have evolved to see my wife as semi transparent. I’m looking through a window right now and cannot see it. If I had evolved to see only UVB light, it would appear as a solid panel. You can say, so what? You see an interpretation of reality that we agree on and it isn’t useful to see it otherwise, but that’s my point. I’m seeing a mental interpretation of reality and not an objective reality. I am forced to assume that my interpretation more or less lines up with some sort of ‘real’ thing, but it’s just an assumption. I know that my senses have evolved to exclude things and ignore things that aren’t ‘useful’, I can only assume that they haven’t evolved to add things that are ‘useful.’ I’m not sure it’s a path toward truth to make that assumption.
It is so the real picture - it’s just not a complete picture.
Consider a textbook. Consider that there is at least one fact that is not in the textbook. Does that mean that all the facts that are in the textbook are false?
If your answer is no, then I agree - and immediately point out that your inability to see something that’s 10,000 miles away doesn’t mean you can’t see things in your immediate vicinity and your inability to see through walls means you can’t trust your observation of the wallpaper pattern.
If your answer is yes, then why am I typing? This post doesn’t contain everything in the entire universe and thus you’ll disregard it anyway.
We haven’t “lucked” into any technology. We developed the science of the electromagnetic spectrum which lets us develop technology to measure signals at different frequencies. Mysterious rays were big in late 19th century literature but we’re past that now.
You are also not accepting nuances of accuracy. Say you have a 5 foot board. Is a measurement of 4 foot 11.9 inches as false as a measurement of 20 inches? That seems to be what you’re saying.
@ the OP:
My response to such solipsistic questions is - OK, so? If the world is a hologram or illusion, then I’m still going to live my life in such a way that the hologram or illusion benefits me. Right now, for instance, according to the hologram illusion, I have very little savings in my bank account. But I’m going to keep saving and scrimping so that I can* accrue more and more monetary savings in the holographic illusion.*
And I hope that, in this holographic illusion, I’ll get married someday, have a great family, publish my fiction novels and music recordings, go traveling all around the world of this big hologram.
I don’t know if this is related to the OP. But my chemistry/Physics teacher in hs once said we all might be a figment of God’s imagination. This got me thinking. Then on SNL, there was a skit in the early 80’s where a rabbi lamented we were all just caught up in God’s dream. Don’t laugh. That actually got me to thinking about this deep subject too.
As far as to whether or not this is all a computer simulation, I hope not. There is a lot of suffering in this world. And so the creator would have to be very unethical.
Actually though, on a slightly less serious note, if this was a sophisticated simulation, it stands to reason the computer programmer would leave some clues, as to the true nature of the world. ‘Easter eggs’ they’re called, by people who support this theory. And as I said in the past, I may have uncovered one or two.
The Mount Rushmore coincidences and the Tecumseh Curse.
I am not saying I actually believe that myself. But hey, anything is possible.
When I read about people who are saying incredible stupid things that fall to pieces at the slightest application of reason, I start thinking too.
But I’m guessing our thoughts are completely different.