Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?

[Bowser]

Watched this video today and thought it interesting.  I don't personally believe that I'm a character living within the "Matrix," but it's an entertaining thought.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/4ZVeC1gXYNE

[Syne]

Love Paul Joseph Watson. And I agree, if these scientists and others truly believe it is a simulation then they do believe in intelligent design. It's just the inevitable end to deifying science as a replacement religion. The impetus of religion will always persist.

Personally, I think this world is a simulation...just not a computer simulation. It is the simulation of truth through the propagation of a great lie.

[Bowser]

Personally, I think this world is a simulation...just not a computer simulation. It is the simulation of truth through the propagation of a great lie.

I like that.

[Secular Sanity]

That’s right, boys.  Just keep popping those blue pills.

[Zinjanthropos]

Have to wonder, is there a computer simulating our simulator's universe....and so on? Could they rewind me to when I was 28 but knowing what I know now.

[C C]

Have to wonder, is there a computer simulating our simulator's universe....and so on?

Yep, assuming that the "previous" level in the hierarchy wasn't as potentially limited in microphysical or computational "room" at the bottom as our is (and so-forth with the other prior in rank simulations)... Then such a proposal is another "homunculus argument" scenario or "turtles all the way down" situation if using a computer to produce the virtual reality.

Or if employing any substrate to enable the simulation which we're familiar with in this world. Constructs that fall out of extrinsic relationships are by that very nature vulnerable to simulation; and accordingly any device dependent upon such (like a computer) that was holding / carrying-out such reality generating processes, would itself be yet another material, mechanistic object vulnerable to the possibility.

Something different has to be introduced for explanatory purposes to halt such nested, Russian-doll regressions. It's ironic that the Platonic and Pythagorean (mathematical cult) traditions, which were the precursors to this genre of speculation through prior centuries, did go the exotic solution route (albeit ambiguous in nature). By positing an intellectual domain of principles, noumena, abstract forms, etc, that differed radically from our existential mode of "outward appearances" located in a spatiotemporal "place".

[Syne]

That’s right, boys.  Just keep popping those blue pills.

Don't get me wrong. It is only a simulation to the extent that epistemology wouldn't allow us to know whether it was illusion from within the illusion, so it really makes no practical difference. Does pounding your fist in a table prove the table exists...when both are composed of the same stuff in the same system? It need only be internally consistent.

[Leigha]

No, but maybe it's one big fairy tale gone wrong, and the Author of the book has a lot of explaining to do.

[Syne]

No, but maybe it's one big fairy tale gone wrong, and the Author of the book has a lot of explaining to do.

The problem is that we're the authors, and personal responsibility is often on short supply.