Is it just scifi escapism or what? Where did this stuff come from?
It's a completely coincidence that the idea we live in a simulation happened right around the time we invented simulations. The people who live their lives ruled by computers and automation just so happen to feel that even their physical universe itself is a computer program.
There is no connection between material circumstances and how people view their lives or the universe. Science is objective, so we have to assume that we must be living in a simulation because smart people say so.
Science is objective
Nothing is objective. We can only ever have approximations to objectivity. Science is a social institution.
I was being sarcastic. The point is that science is biased because it exists in relation to the mode of production like everything else.
the observable universe is constructed from a system of pulleys and water buckets
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players..."
Tell me that's not a description of the universe as a theatrical production.
We've been theorizing about the universe being something less intrinsically real for as long as civilization has existed; it's just the latest technology that we tend to define it by because that's the limit of our imagination.
It's an idea popular mostly with people in the tech industry. Of course, nobody in the tech industry knows anything about art, culture, or philosophy, because they all took computer science and never bothered questioning the neoliberal argument about the arts and humanities being worthless. So these techbros look at the world around them, and choose to explain it with the only works of art, culture, and creativity that they have ever paid any attention to: video games. These computer scientists have talked themselves into believing that the universe is basically like a video game, and that therefore the universe can only be fully explained by computer scientists.
I haven't bothered thinking about this properly until now but the part of it that caught my attention was the statistical argument:
If we were theoretically capable of creating simulations of life as we know it, surely a sufficiently sophistocated simulation would have the capacity to contain a simulation of itself, and so on recursively, so what are the odds that we exist in the 0-level base reality instead of one of the millions of recursive simulations?
However it just occurred to me that the same thing could be said about the dream of a 200 foot giant squid that lives in a liquid oxygen ocean in another galaxy, so, eh, not too compelling
What if we're running on the equivalent of a shitty redstone computer in minecraft
Psychic quadrupeds running minecraft on their communal wetware to simulate a bunch of theocratic barbarians who ambulate by falling forward
Welcome back, SethBling here, and today we have built a simulation of reality using repeaters and command blocks
The statistical argument is just pseudo-scientific woo. It's bad statistics. To make any kind of probability model (and validate it) you need to have sampled multiple universes and go from there. We only have the one, and nothing in our current experimental methods can change that.
It's basically a slightly twist on Pascal's wager, where you take some unexamined pre-existing phylosophycal beliefs and arbitrarily assign "probabilities" to them. Bleh
People have been questioning whether what we experience is actually real for thousands of years. The simulation hypothesis just gives it the trappings of technology because people like technology. It's not really a particularly interesting or relevant question, I don't see how you'd go about proving or testing it, and I don't see what difference the answer makes. I suppose it could take the place of religious belief for people who consider themselves to be too smart for religion.
Look at a list of names of American right-wing politicians and tell me we don't live in a fucking simulation
It's also that these dweebs don't understand what physicists meant by simulation.
Edit: I guess it'd help if I described it. "Simulation" in physics doesn't mean "running on some dude's computer," it means "our 4D universe is a simulated abstraction of higher dimensional physics." Physicists usually use the word "hologram" for this though, but that's where the general public leaped from for the "simulation theory."
The only analogy I can give that makes sense is to imagine a 2D [1] universe existing in our 3D one. Now imagine you took our 3D globe and projected it into that 2D universe. They would observe weird behavior near the poles, their bodies and physical reality would seem to stretch due to the inaccuracies presented by stretching a globe onto a plane. They would chalk up these reality distortions to gravity near the poles or something because their 2D reality cannot sufficiently abstract the 3D globe they're living on, so there are weird distortions in their reality. Some physicists think this might be an explanation for gravity warping space the way it does. It may be a force in a higher dimension that's weirdly projected into our 3D reality. So reality itself is not a simulation, but our 3D conception of it is a simulation of the full reality. This is all hypothetical though. You'll never get more than a might out of physicists about this because it's untested and only makes sense in certain frameworks like string theory and such.
Due to the overload of bull shit when you google "simulation in physics," this is about all I can give you.. Only this specific section on the page is relating to physics. The rest is "lol Matrix" guff.
- technically 3D. 2 spacial, one temporal dimension
i thought the NPC thing was an annoying thing like "unless you have an air-tight explanation for every single thing you say, you're brainwashed and don't think for yourself"
Me, I always take away my auto-upvote because upvoting oneself is bourgeois
People here are being a bit unfair with the simulation theory thing. I think it's a fun thought experiment. But what I think is the most interesting is that it is obviously an eschatology. It's amazing how techbros on an obscure BBS like less wrong will use their incredibly big rational secular brains and end up brewing a return to christianity but with cyber jesus, for what is a simulation if not the world in the back of a turtle. And what holds this turtle if not another, bigger turtle underneath.
I dunno, watching people think their way into existing eschatologies does make me wonder how inescapable religion actually is, consider that rokos basilisk operates in exactly the same way the christian god judges man (not fighting for god in every aspect for your life nets you punishment because God is the ultimate Good and so on).
Ultimately I don't think it matters, the universe itself will always remain fundamentally unknowable. The more we discover and model, the more obvious and inescapable the rift of the unknowable will become like a horizon we can never quite reach. Thus why I think the universe can't be modelled and recreated as some sort of stochastic process, it can't be known. Also why we will never escape eternal returns to religion, funny how the very inception of the simulation theory is due to its own impossibility.
It’s applying the god label on the shit that’s closest to us. Before it was cool mountains and big rock/tree/other landscape formations near us. But since everyone is on computers all the time it’s pretty natural for the brain to start viewing life through that thing.
Dorks watched The Matrix and Inception too much and made a psuedo faith for new atheists, kinda like a computer scientology
Since there are an infinite number of simulations and only one reality, we are more likely to be in the simulation than true reality.
I feel like with the amount of conjecture necessary to reach this point, even the statement "there is only one reality" might not be true.
I've always found the communication theory of simulacra and simulation more compelling because it's a less orthodox Marxist way of describing the recursive nature of the building of a simulated environment (think a town or city or house) and living within it feed off each other. We live within a manufactured environment and find ourselves unable to conceive of alternatives outside of it, this rendering it our idea of 'natural'.
Eh, he comes up alot in communications theory classes, particularly around advertising, but I think you would be right not to consider him exactly communication theory.
Something tells me that when they discuss Baudrillard in communications and advertising they gloss over most of his work in favor of phrases they think sound cool.
