Do We Live In a Simulation
Quote: EvenBobQuote: DieterQuote: EvenBob
sim·u·la·tion
/ˌsimyəˈlāSH(ə)n/
noun
the production of a computer model of something
"Simulation theory says that we are all likely living in an extremely powerful computer program, directed by an entity outside of our physical comprehension."
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While computers are often how we produce simulations, they are not the only way.
Do the ants know that they are burrowing inside an ant farm, or do they just go about their ant business within the circumstances of their environment?
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Ants are curious creatures. Their brains are tinier than we can imagine yet they function at an extremely high level. How is this possible. They are organized, they're loyal, they exist to preserve the status quo. All on a brain about the size of the head of a pin. Only a simulation could come up with that.
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Can you prove all, or even any of that happens in their brains? If you cut a cock-a-roach's head off it will die of thirst, not from not having a brain. (That's actually a pro-simulation argument.)
In the lower animals it appears a lot of the work is distributed across the whole nervous system, not just in the head and whatever kind of brain it has.
Quote: AutomaticMonkeyQuote: EvenBobQuote: DieterQuote: EvenBob
sim·u·la·tion
/ˌsimyəˈlāSH(ə)n/
noun
the production of a computer model of something
"Simulation theory says that we are all likely living in an extremely powerful computer program, directed by an entity outside of our physical comprehension."
link to original post
While computers are often how we produce simulations, they are not the only way.
Do the ants know that they are burrowing inside an ant farm, or do they just go about their ant business within the circumstances of their environment?
link to original post
Ants are curious creatures. Their brains are tinier than we can imagine yet they function at an extremely high level. How is this possible. They are organized, they're loyal, they exist to preserve the status quo. All on a brain about the size of the head of a pin. Only a simulation could come up with that.
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Can you prove all, or even any of that happens in their brains? If you cut a cock-a-roach's head off it will die of thirst, not from not having a brain. (That's actually a pro-simulation argument.)
In the lower animals it appears a lot of the work is distributed across the whole nervous system, not just in the head and whatever kind of brain it has.Once I saw an alley cat run across a street and get run over by a car. It's head was crushed, nothing left of it. But the cat lay on it's side and all 4 legs continued their running motion. Apparently the signal that tells a cat's legs to run is stored someplace other than the brain.
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My grandparents had nothing but fresh chicken and once when I was there he chopped the head off of one and it ran all the way around the barn with no head. However an ant does it it's pretty amazing. There are so many strange things in the universe that we do not understand and we discover more of them everyday that you almost have to believe it didn't happen by accident. Many people take the easy way out and just blame it on some God, a simulation seems more logical. And now in the last 60 years at the University of Virginia they have pretty much proven that reincarnation exists. The people who die a traumatic unexpected death quite often a short time later are reborn as somebody else. Even the harshest Skeptics have looked at this stuff up close in person and came away scratching their heads. This would be covered very nicely in simulation theory.
I also find it odd that no matter how close a person is to someone or how religious they are, once that person dies never in my life have I heard anybody wonder how that person is doing now. Nobody ever says I'm really worried that Grandpa never went to heaven. It's like we naturally accept the fact that we don't know where that person is but they're doing just fine. No matter if your religious or not. It really makes no sense.
Quote: EvenBobI find it immensely coincidental that the oldest religion in the world, Hinduism, has always said that what we see around us is an illusion. It doesn't really exist. Zen Masters also say the same thing. Shakespeare said that we're just players on a stage. The whole point of deep meditation is to get to where you can see that nothing around us is real. A simulation makes more and more sense the more I look into it.
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What does that mean, "real?" If I walk around a movie set, everything there is real. It is made of atoms. Wood, plastic, cloth, just as real as any other. It's just designed to create an image in our minds that there is something more than that, that there is something going on other than workers and actors on a stage. To the guys behind the scenes who built it it is very real. They see the frame members and fasteners and marks indicating how to put it together, just as if they were house builders framing a house. What it is intended to represent to the people watching from the audience side is not their concern; that's the job of an artistic designer. As the set builders do not have the luxury of using illusion or imagination; if they build a staircase on the set it really has to function as a staircase and support the weight of the actors on it, no pretending allowed.
Thus if we say "illusion," just like saying "simulation" - illusion of what? And what is the real substance of this illusion? If I see a movie where Igor is walking around with a human head, I know that "Igor has a human head" is the only part that is an illusion. The reality is that "An actor playing Igor has some papier-mache fashioned to resemble a human head." Actors are real, papier-mache is real, and human heads are real- at least relative to what is being implied in the movie, which is fiction. If all of the universe is an illusion we are left with those same questions- what is its real substance, and what real thing is it supposed to represent?
Quote: AutomaticMonkeyIf I walk around a movie set, everything there is real. It is made of atoms.
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Interesting thing about atoms is even as human bodies age our atoms dont age. I assume if you could just see the atoms of the same person old they would just look slightly rearranged, or missing. I think atoms just come and go though. Were not the same atoms we once were but the same kind of atoms. Probably.
Im making guesses and assumptions though. Heck if I know.
Quote: AutomaticMonkeyQuote: EvenBobI find it immensely coincidental that the oldest religion in the world, Hinduism, has always said that what we see around us is an illusion. It doesn't really exist. Zen Masters also say the same thing. Shakespeare said that we're just players on a stage. The whole point of deep meditation is to get to where you can see that nothing around us is real. A simulation makes more and more sense the more I look into it.
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What does that mean, "real?"
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When they use the word real or say that everything we see is an illusion what they mean is that this is not the base reality. This is something else entirely. The one thing that the so-called enlightened people in other religions try to accomplish with meditation is get as close to the base reality as they can. And they all report the same thing, that what we see around us is not true reality. There was a famous Jesuit priest who said we are not humans on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.
Quote: EvenBobQuote: AutomaticMonkeyQuote: EvenBobI find it immensely coincidental that the oldest religion in the world, Hinduism, has always said that what we see around us is an illusion. It doesn't really exist. Zen Masters also say the same thing. Shakespeare said that we're just players on a stage. The whole point of deep meditation is to get to where you can see that nothing around us is real. A simulation makes more and more sense the more I look into it.
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What does that mean, "real?"
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When they use the word real or say that everything we see is an illusion what they mean is that this is not the base reality. This is something else entirely. The one thing that the so-called enlightened people in other religions try to accomplish with meditation is get as close to the base reality as they can. And they all report the same thing, that what we see around us is not true reality. There was a famous Jesuit priest who said we are not humans on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.
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Oh yeah, Father Teilhard. But I'm looking for a different kind of distinction than the ones he made.
Everything we perceive is taken through our sensory organs and processed in our minds. What is the difference between "real" information coming in and being processed, and something we just make up in our imaginations? How would we know the difference?
This came to me when I was 12 years old and had a wet dream about Shari Lewis. She was awesome. And I thought about it- what was the difference between having her in a dream, and having her "for real?" No one had touched me, but if she had crept into my bedroom and treated me like her monkey puppet it would have been just as awesome, I would have had the same memory of it, and the sheets would have been in the same condition. So how is it different?
The difference is what other people see. If I had her for real I could strut around my high school with her hand in hand and show her off. In my dream, only I see her. I can describe the experience but there is no way I can fully share or demonstrate it. The dream is also not a unique experience. While only one guy can hold her hand at a time (her other hand is busy) there are no limits on how many guys can have the same dream about her at the same time.
Thus I came to this conclusion: objective reality is the equivalent of shared experience. You and I can look at the same tree and see the same thing, just from a slightly different perspective resulting from our different loci. Our subjective realities, dreams, thoughts, imagined events cannot be shared directly which is why we invented words, to do that. We both see the same tree but if one of us likes it and the other doesn't, we need words to communicate that. The idea of objective reality being an illusion does not apply in this framework, because we never see objective reality without our subjective interpretation of it.
So what you might mean is that our observed reality isn't quite an illusion, but a counterfeit. If someone hands me a counterfeit $100 bill, it is not a real $100 bill, but it is a real piece of paper. If I didn't know anything about money I would think I was just receiving a marked piece of paper. It is only my familiarity with $100 bills that would lead me to believe I was receiving a $100 bill, and my expectation of receiving money that leads to my disappointment that it is not really that. But it is really something.
Why would I want all the guys in my school to know I was doing Shari? Ego, pride, and a desire for increased social status. I'm not sure that those are worthwhile things. It's no coincidence that suppression of the ego is considered a virtue in most if not all of the major religions.
Quote: AutomaticMonkey
Everything we perceive is taken through our sensory organs and processed in our minds. What is the difference between "real" information coming in and being processed, and something we just make up in our imaginations? How would we know the difference?
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Exactly! It would be like building a robot to do 10 specific tasks and you only give him what he needs to perceive those 10 different tasks. That's his whole world, he can't perceive anything outside of that. It's the same with us. What's real to us is only that which we can perceive with our sensory organs and our very limited mind. It all seems very very real just like it does to the robot. That's how it would be in a simulation, we can't perceive anything outside of the simulation. It can be done because a few dedicated Eastern religion types have become enlightened through meditation and they see beyond the simulation. And they all say the same thing, that everything we see is not real. Quite a coincidence.
As far as everything else you posted that's just us creating our own reality. There is no one basic reality, we each create our own within certain parameters. And then we agree on a lot of it and that's how we get along. Ever notice how extremely susceptible we are to suggestion at any age? Experts call it brainwashing, we can be talked into almost anything if the right techniques are used. That's because nothing is real and your reality can be changed, quite easily.
The [Simulation] Will Not Be Televised
ETA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw
Quote: camaplIs it just me or does anyone else imagine different lyrics for certain songs?
...
No, it is not just you who imagines such things...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcJjMnHoIBI
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O4FcShJxxBY
A coworker said to me laughing one day What if there really was something real there that he can see and we cant?
And I said whats the difference? Is reality what you experience or is reality determined by majority rule?
Quote: BrickapotamusIn my teenage years I had this job where nearly everyday a crazy homeless guy would walk by on the sidewalk, stop, turnaround, and flip off the sky and start cursing at it.
A coworker said to me laughing one day What if there really was something real there that he can see and we cant?
And I said whats the difference? Is reality what you experience or is reality determined by majority rule?
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Both! You're entitled to your own reality, but if you want to share with others there has to be a common frame of reference.
But what if there was only one person in the universe? What would be the difference between his seeing something and his imagining it? Nothing, probably.
And if the Copernican Principle holds true, and if the universe is really expanding uniformly around all points relative to that point, we really are all in our own universes.
Quote: AutomaticMonkey
But what if there was only one person in the universe? What would be the difference between his seeing something and his imagining it? Nothing, probably.
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This really puts the recurring "There are other players at the table?" into focus.
Quote: BrickapotamusIn my teenage years I had this job where nearly everyday a crazy homeless guy would walk by on the sidewalk, stop, turnaround, and flip off the sky and start cursing at it.
A coworker said to me laughing one day What if there really was something real there that he can see and we cant?
And I said whats the difference? Is reality what you experience or is reality determined by majority rule?
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There is a baseline reality that we are surrounded by but we create our own reality within it. A good example is eyewitnesses to a bank robbery. You can have six witnesses inside the bank that saw the robber up close and they will have six different descriptions. There's a podcast I listen to from a really smart guy who was a bank teller in his twenties and he witnessed two robberies and the descriptions he gave the police turned out to be totally wrong and to this day he can't figure out why. That's because he was creating his own reality within the reality that was happening. Everybody saw the same thing yet everybody saw something different because our brains do not interpret things identically. People who end up in asylums are creating a reality for themselves that is so different from ours that they can't live among us.
You are correct though, reality is basically determined by majority rule. We find the things that we agree with in everybody else and we make that our base reality. Problems arise when you live in a society where they choose to create a base reality that is dangerous for the rest of the world and we usually end up having to eliminate them. Look at North Korea, the people there actually believe that their leader is from a divine origin. They believe it because they've been fed that lie all their lives as were their parents. They could be deprogrammed and talked out of it but it wouldn't be easy.
Quote: AutomaticMonkeyQuote: BrickapotamusIn my teenage years I had this job where nearly everyday a crazy homeless guy would walk by on the sidewalk, stop, turnaround, and flip off the sky and start cursing at it.
A coworker said to me laughing one day What if there really was something real there that he can see and we cant?
And I said whats the difference? Is reality what you experience or is reality determined by majority rule?
link to original post
Both! You're entitled to your own reality, but if you want to share with others there has to be a common frame of reference.
But what if there was only one person in the universe? What would be the difference between his seeing something and his imagining it? Nothing, probably.
And if the Copernican Principle holds true, and if the universe is really expanding uniformly around all points relative to that point, we really are all in our own universes.
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It's more like every person is the center of the universe. But so is every tree, every fish, every cockroach, if all points are expanding uniformly into Infinity the center is where you happen to be standing.
Quote: DieterQuote: AutomaticMonkey
But what if there was only one person in the universe? What would be the difference between his seeing something and his imagining it? Nothing, probably.
link to original post(truncated. aggressively.)
This really puts the recurring "There are other players at the table?" into focus.Trying to figure out which person is the only one makes it all fuzzy again.
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Isn't aggressive truncating a first degree felony in some states?
Quote: EvenBobQuote: DieterQuote: AutomaticMonkey
But what if there was only one person in the universe? What would be the difference between his seeing something and his imagining it? Nothing, probably.
link to original post(truncated. aggressively.)
This really puts the recurring "There are other players at the table?" into focus.Trying to figure out which person is the only one makes it all fuzzy again.
link to original post
Isn't aggressive truncating a first degree felony in some states?
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Given the state I'm in, I'm willing to chance it.
Quote: BrickapotamusIn my teenage years I had this job where nearly everyday a crazy homeless guy would walk by on the sidewalk, stop, turnaround, and flip off the sky and start cursing at it.
A coworker said to me laughing one day What if there really was something real there that he can see and we cant?
And I said whats the difference? Is reality what you experience or is reality determined by majority rule?
link to original post
I would say reality is what is capable of being experienced by those who are witnesses or participants. If I'm walking down the street at night and I see a shooting star in the sky, that could be a real event. If it only happened in my head as a delusion or hallucination, then I argue it isn't real. If it actually was a celestial body plummeting in our atmosphere and burning up, then that is something could be experienced or witnessed by others.
Of course, if it's happening inside your head, why should that mean it isn't real?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN7uK8KBODI
Quote: EvenBobQuote: AutomaticMonkeyQuote: BrickapotamusIn my teenage years I had this job where nearly everyday a crazy homeless guy would walk by on the sidewalk, stop, turnaround, and flip off the sky and start cursing at it.
A coworker said to me laughing one day What if there really was something real there that he can see and we cant?
And I said whats the difference? Is reality what you experience or is reality determined by majority rule?
link to original post
Both! You're entitled to your own reality, but if you want to share with others there has to be a common frame of reference.
But what if there was only one person in the universe? What would be the difference between his seeing something and his imagining it? Nothing, probably.
And if the Copernican Principle holds true, and if the universe is really expanding uniformly around all points relative to that point, we really are all in our own universes.
link to original post
It's more like every person is the center of the universe. But so is every tree, every fish, every cockroach, if all points are expanding uniformly into Infinity the center is where you happen to be standing.
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And this is why they might all be different universes: we have an event horizon. Being the expansion rate of space increases with the distance from the observer, there is a point at which the rate of expansion is c and you can't get any information from beyond that point. That means relative to that observer, things further than that do not and cannot exist.
But we can't lose information either. Professor 't Hooft has an idea. And a bunch of really smart guys liked his idea, and gave him a prize for it! All of the information in a space enclosed by an event horizon also must be encoded in some form on that event horizon, which is a two-dimensional surface, a sphere in this case. And being everyone's sphere is going to be a little different, that allows everyone's 3D reality to be different too.
This is a short but challenging read, and he doesn't blow your head off nonstop with specialized math in this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0003004
Quote: DieterQuote: EvenBobQuote: DieterQuote: AutomaticMonkey
But what if there was only one person in the universe? What would be the difference between his seeing something and his imagining it? Nothing, probably.
link to original post(truncated. aggressively.)
This really puts the recurring "There are other players at the table?" into focus.Trying to figure out which person is the only one makes it all fuzzy again.
link to original post
Isn't aggressive truncating a first degree felony in some states?
link to original post
Given the state I'm in, I'm willing to chance it.
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Are you still in a state of indecision and indifference? Snap out of it
Instead of being in a simulation, could the universe exist in a black hole?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKeCr-MAyH4
Quote: AutomaticMonkey
And this is why they might all be different universes: we have an event horizon. Being the expansion rate of space increases with the distance from the observer, there is a point at which the rate of expansion is c and you can't get any information from beyond that point. That means relative to that observer, things further than that do not and cannot exist.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0003004
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I was a follower of Krishnamurti back in the seventies. He's one of the reasons I moved to California in 1976 because I wanted to meet him. In his books and lectures he always talked about the observer being the observed. I never got to meet him though I did attend one of his lectures in Ojai.
"The core idea is that the observer and observed are not separate entities
but rather are part of a single, unified process. What you observe
(the observed) is a manifestation of what you are (the observer)."
In other words you create your own reality, which plays right into the simulation theory. In the simulation we are not puppets on a stage being manipulated by something outside of ourselves, we are creating our realities within the simulation. Otherwise what would be the point and that's obviously what we're doing, you can't argue it. It's why no two people see exactly the same thing.
Quote: GenoDRPhQuote: BrickapotamusIn my teenage years I had this job where nearly everyday a crazy homeless guy would walk by on the sidewalk, stop, turnaround, and flip off the sky and start cursing at it.
A coworker said to me laughing one day What if there really was something real there that he can see and we cant?
And I said whats the difference? Is reality what you experience or is reality determined by majority rule?
link to original post
I would say reality is what is capable of being experienced by those who are witnesses or participants. If I'm walking down the street at night and I see a shooting star in the sky, that could be a real event. If it only happened in my head as a delusion or hallucination, then I argue it isn't real. If it actually was a celestial body plummeting in our atmosphere and burning up, then that is something could be experienced or witnessed by others.
Of course, if it's happening inside your head, why should that mean it isn't real?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN7uK8KBODI
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It is real until someone convinces you that it isn't.
I glimpsed it for an instant, I chased it for a lifetime
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3ggYM2aizOg
we entered this world ignorant
and we will leave this world ignorant
we know some things - but so many things we don't know
the mysteries of the universe - we're not even remotely close to understanding it all
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2mEiT6aBz8
.
Quote: EvenBobOkay, now we're getting serious. Deepak Chopra supports the simulation Theory. And why would he not.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O4FcShJxxBY
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This just blows me away, it's religion meeting scientific thought. I have been studying Hinduism and Buddhism since 1970 and Deepak sees it all as one and the same. Obviously it is one and the same. Just different approaches.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KvPINDu7rs0
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZnBtnI3RfBo
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aMJZsOQ5GcE
