this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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COINCIDENCE!?
It's wise to treat any talk about The Simulation™ like talk of God and the afterlife. An interesting concept, but absolutely unverifiable, and therefore unscientific and of no relevance to your day to day life. Unless you want to believe, but then it's a religion.
If this is a simulation it's buggier than a Bethesda new release.
The free will and simulation arguments, while certainly fun to think about and possibly valuable to bear in mind, are completely pointless to a certain extent. Even if you confirmed that free will doesnt exist or that we are in a simulation of some fashion, the mere fact that it had to be discovered and was up for debate prior to that means that nothing about your life will change to the slightest.
Well, the simulation argument may not make a difference, but the free will one might. If nobody has the free will necessary for moral responsibility, then many of our punishment practices can't be morally upheld. If nobody deserves punishment, we should only use it as a means of keeping social harmony, and that means we should do it a lot less and a lot differently.
But if we dont have free will morals dont exist because you arent actually chosing anything, if free will doesnt exist we arent choosing those punishments either. It was all mechanically determined before the first star went supernova and created heavy elements. To quote Pigeon of Mike Tyson Mysteries "whatevers gonna happen, is gonna happen anyways"
I personally believe that free will exists because of the quantum nature of our universe. I think when quntum effects collapse into macro effects that is the universal uncaring impersonal consciousness presenting itself to discreet personalized units of consciousness in a way we can understand and work with. I think the entire universe has consciousness and that when our containers can no longer maintain the biological loci of experience we return to that eternal, ever present, always safe universal consciousness, the source of the sense of identity.
Consciousness does all this because a universe where nothing 'unpredictable' happens and there is no 'other' to share experience with would be eternal solitary confinement.
Just my thoughts on the matter of free will, obviously un-provable and un-testable in our current state of being.
Star Ocean: Til the End of Time already disproved your idea
Go play it for 600 hours and come back once you've been educated 😤
It makes no sense for it to be a simulation like a computer simulation. It’s a simulation like a dream is a simulation. Everything in the universe you observe is you. Waking up from the dream is realising this, and realising nothing exists, just being.
Welcome to the world and cosmology of The Elder Scrolls Games in general and Morrowind in special.
Does that mean that one of us isn't real?
Like a dream, you are just me. The floor I walk is me. The air I breathe is me. Everyone I meet, everything I feel, is just me. Nothing is real except I.
I took about 10 hits of acid once and had a conversation with something that seemed to be "God" or a close approximation to it, and it told me something similar. It told me that everything is connected, that we're all one, that we're all of us different aspects of each other, or something like that. This was 20+ years ago and I was zonked out of my fucking head that night.
So I'm still just having sex with myself? I should have known it was too good to be true.
We're all only having sex with you
I followed you (Egg Theory) right up until that last line.
Slash dot? The tech website is the only real thing?
I think that if life is a simulation, it's tech assisted dreaming, letting one dial in specifics for consistent experiences
If you don't exist outside the simulation then for all intents and purposes this is your reality. Might as well make it a good one.
This is the proper response to the various flavors of nihilism. The world is a simulation, or the universe is cold and uncaring and there is no god, or what if you're just a brain floating in space having a hallucination?
So what?
If the world doesn't exist, but every test you can perform is consistent with the world existing anyways, then so what? Where do you go from there? You'll still experience consequences for whatever you do, everyone else will still experience consequences for what you do (as far as you can tell), so... what has the nihilism or the simulation theory changed?
Doesn't matter what color we paint the backdrop if nothing about the play or the props or the players have changed.
This is basically what many eastern philosophies say. In Budism they fully admitted to the inability to prove the reality of one's existence. At the same time talking about the importance of engagement with reality.
Basically reality exists because we are here to perceive its existence.
Yep, your brain percieves stimuli and generates a virtual internal reality that runs with a tiny time delay between the objective reality and your internal subjective simulation of it. So we live in a simulation even if our universe is the objectively 'real' one, or we live in a simulation of a simulation.
Your personality may also be a simulation internaly created so that you have a way to 'justify' your bodies actions to other entities. Split brain experiments are veeeery interesting.
This is pure conjecture but I sometimes wonder if neuro-divergencies are caused by a fault in the internal simulation via brain chemistry