You mean that reality might have been created by intelligent being(s)? wow… Nobody ever thought about that one before.
I don’t know about ya’ll, but from my perspective, the simulation would only have to simulate my world.
You all might not even exist.
Counter question; would it make any difference?
I think it would matter if these simulations existed if we could interact outside or between them somehow.
If we’d manage to communicate with parallel universes, would it matter if they are all real or simulations along with ourselves?
How could we possibly interact with any machinery sophisticated enough to be our entire universe or the parent universe where these machines can be conceived?
It’s like pacman breaking out of assembly language and figuring out how to sneak out of the arcade.
A simulation could be hacked, and that’s really fun to think about
Fictionally, sure. Realistically, humans could hack a simulated universe like fish can hack the aquarium.
That’s the point - it wouldn’t. People seem to expect that things would be different or meaningless if we did but I’ve never understood that logic. Even if we do live in the base reality it could just as well be a simulation and nothing would need to change.
Exactly. Even if it was definitely proven that this is all a simulation, there is exactly zero chance humans could ever break out of it or hack or exploit or even begin to understand the machine the simulation is running on. We have still not even figured out the rules for our universe and understanding what the real universe where this is a simulation is way beyond the scope of human understanding. We could not affect it in any meaningful way except maybe some laboratory tests or cause some hideous corruption. Yet we think and feel and experience living in the only way we know. Hence, I’d argue it would not matter.
This is quite literally how many religions view their divine beings. They are so massive that they are beyond your comprehension and we would be powerless to impact them.
Including the Abrahamic religions except people are simple and have rewritten the mindboggling idea “can not comprehend” to punishable dogma “must not mention by name, gaze upon, depict”.
The prohibition is for any graven image not just God. That’s why there aren’t a ton of sculptures of living beings/animals made by Jewish artists in the ancient world.
Except then the same gods are really worried about what you eat, or do with your specific meat-based mammalian reproductive anatomy.
A remote, totally amoral deity a la Lovecraft is at least consistent with facts. Nobody wants to believe in that one, though. You could go polytheist to avoid immediate falsification, too.
The believers would argue that of course these gods have desires but you wouldn’t understand them because you cannot much like the fly in front of me cannot grasp astrophysics.
Yeah. Saying “you just don’t get it and never will” is a great way of defending anything you want. Even if, like in this case, it’s not consistent with the facts. The “it’s a sin to question, so don’t or else” approach has also seen quite a bit of use.
And for some reason, what god is telling us is always convenient for the powerful, and for the dominant culture…
Ignorance is bliss!
Just connect me to my reality.
Then he got wacked by Tony Soprano.
It’s questionable whether it’s even a well-founded question because of this. Like, it depends on your choice of theories about ontology and epistemology. This shows up if you try to do math about it, which I mentioned a bit in my own reply.
it depends, can simulations run simulations inside themselves? because if so, i think this would increase the odds. if we were able to model reality, down to the subatomic level, with perfect accuracy, then maybe there’s another world simulating us. unless we’re in a pretty bad or locked-down simulation that doesn’t allow recursion.
We don’t need to model reality, only people’s perception of it.
Did you really interrupt my minecraft game to make me read that?
In reality, simulations would outnumber reality. So that’s the ratio and therefore the chances.
Assuming reality and/or consciousness can be simulated, which we have no way of knowing is true (for now).
about 3.50
God damn you love ness monster!
Loveless monster? Oh poor thing…
I hope so
Also, can somebody please turn it off? I think we took this one as far as it’s worth
50%. We are or we aren’t.
Just because we do t know something doesn’t masks it 50%
I don’t know if there’s a gorilla in my upstairs bath at the moment but the odds aren’t 50/50
On the question of god or a simulation, they aren’t 50/50 either
- Whoosh
- Given the lack of any meaningful information to base an estimate on, they essentially are.
50?! You’re crazy! 0.5 at best!
Nah, at least 0,50
I figure that we are all definitely living in a simulation because, even if the world has real physical existence, consciousness is essentially a simulation created our brain to make sense of the world.
consciousness is essentially a simulation created our brain
Have you ever been surprised?
surprise is simply the sensation of unexpected information
I have no idea what you are trying to get at by that.
So now you wonder what you need to answer.
thanks Baudrillard
There is no connection because consciousness is not fundamentally tied to society (although obviously its contents can be heavily influenced by it).
Same as the odds that a higher being (a god) exists.
Can’t prove it, can’t disprove it. All arguments for it speculative and subjective.
People claim that it is the most likely option because eventually tech will be so advanced that we could make a world simulation, and then we would make multiples, and therefore the probability of this not being a simulation is low.
This claim assumes that computers CAN get that complex (no indication that they could) it also assumes that if they could, we would create world simulators (Why? Parts of it sure, but all of it?) And it assumes that sentient beings inside the simulation could never know it (Why?)
It is as pointless as arguing about god.
I don’t know why people assume that computation power increases indefinitely forever until it simulates a universe. why would it do that?
This claim assumes that computers CAN get that complex (no indication that they could)
I mean, if you take an existing physics simulation and just scale up the hardware…
I would hope that we wouldn’t build such a thing just out of ethical concerns for the inhabitants, but then again we’ve built a giant AI-training network with very little knowledge of if they have some kind of limited consciousness during the process.
I mean, if you take an existing physics simulation and just scale up the hardware…
Then what? We have no reason to believe that would cause parts of the simulation to be conscious and think they exist in reality.
We’re physics. It seems like we exists.
But we have no evidence that we’re anywhere close to being able to accurately simulate physics, even with planet sizes computers.
Biggest reason to to a complete simulation would be reversed time dilation. Run the simulation until the civilization is a few hundred to a few thousand years more advanced than your own, and see what technologies they have invented and refined.
Belief in a simulation implies intelligent design of some sort, so this is, in my opinion, just a 21st century way of asking the age old question, does God exist?
God is a loaded term though. Yes there would be a creator but it could be a completely passive observer.
Why would being in a simulation require that those who create or maintain it only observe?
Edit: I misread, merely observing is certainly a possibility.
Not OP, but they said “but it could be”, not that it is required.
The modern Christian God is mostly a passive observer, whenever him or his agents have visited us there have been tons of miracles and magical shit, but that does not happen very often, and we’ve been basically alone for millenia while He is busy in his own realm. If Christ visited again, it would likely portend the end of the world, at least in a lot of Christian world views.
Christians are shitty con-artists who spread their filth by lying to, subverting, and intimidating others.
I’ll never get over how they call the Torah the “old testament.” They do this as a sneaky way to make it seem like it’s all Christianity with no ties to Judaism.
He might be passive but the implication is that you’re supposed to live certain way or you’ll end up in hell. This most likely isn’t the case in a simulation.
The world already ended, and all that jazz. Happened in 1844. Just look around you. If you brought a “modern homosapien” from 12,000 years ago to the year 1800 or even 1840-1850, they would recognize things from their world. Those things may have had eons of refinement, but a horse is still mostly a horse. Bring a modern human from 1850 to today, and they will recognize almost nothing. Their world is gone. A new one took its place, as was predicted.
Oh no! All my thoughts and prayers!
That’s no different than saying the universe is a simulation.
Or we are NPCs in a game played by a 9 year old.
Maybe it implies intelligent design, but I don’t think that it implies that we are a part of that intelligent design, necessarily. I mean there’s a whole universe out there that’s mostly just hot hydrogen and the space in-between with spacetime shaped accordingly. Who’s to say that life on earth isn’t just noise? Outside the scope of whoever is running the simulation? It would seem like a waste to calculate a whole universe through all of time specifically to study the great apes of earth.
I’m inclined to believe that if our universe is running on a machine in a higher universe, it’s for something bigger than us, and its operator is likely not specifically aware of this galaxy, let alone us humans as individuals. Given the consistency we observe, any intelligent design would only be in the laws of physics and perhaps the initial conditions of the universe, everything else would be calculated based on those from there.
We need to be careful not to be too human-centric in these discussions, because every human-centric theory of the universe that humanity has come up with so far was eventually proven wrong.
nah
What, did the simulator get assembled by a passing tornado? Everyone who believes in simulation theory thinks this reality was designed, constructed, usually by someone that looks like us. That’s pretty damn close to Christianity.
A simulation wouldn’t be this stupid
That’s just what the agents want us to think, man!
You telling me you never did absolutely stupid things in sim games?
well, you’re asking this question in a platform which has the sole purpose of presenting a digital representation of social interaction, so I’d say pretty fucking high.
You don’t need the matrix plugging needles into the back of people’s heads for the world to be a simulation. smartphones and computer screens are more than enough.
I mean is there any proof we don’t live in a simulation? Like I am not arguing for simulation, neither am I arguing against it just, personally, I don’t see simulation theory as something life changing and important. Odds would probably be 50/50, but don’t see how it changes anything. If I live in simulation, I live in a simulation and someone is either controlling me or someone predestined me to do what I do, and it would be their fault for bad things happening. That would actually raise question why didn’t they gave us more clear understandings of morals so we don’t do bad things to each others, also why did they make us kill, and get sick…
If simulation is not real, then that doesn’t change anything we still have questions about who or what made us, who or what was before our universe even existed.
You can’t prove a negative.
The positive assertion is “we live in a simulation”. All that can be done is gather evidence to support this assertion.
You can’t prove a negative.
That principle doesn’t apply here, because you can use simple language to turn the words around, and then you have a positive, while the task of proving it remains the same.
Specifically: when you say you can’t prove that we don’t live in a simulation, then it is the same as saying you can’t prove that we do live in reality.
But “we do live in reality” is a positive. Now the words are different, but the task is the same: prove that we live in reality.
The only way it matters is that maybe there’s a way to escape ‘to a higher plane’. But even without a simulation, there’s always opportunities to understand the universe better and maybe make some fundamental breakthrough. Or there’s mysticism. Of those three, a simulation may offer the least chance for a breakthrough.
Greater than zero.
You wanna tweak your melon a bit? Look up “Last Thursdayism.” It’s a thing — due to the way short term and long term memory work, the theory goes that anything before “last Thursday” is a lie. It’s an arbitrary day of the week. The movie Dark City played off of this, when the — I forget what they were called — did their tuning and rearranged things and swapped peoples’ memories around.
