Of course you're in a simulation. Minds are made of information. Objects are made of matter. Those two can't directly interact, it's a ghost in the machine problem. The reality you see is a mental construct, a false world within your mind. Obviously.
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There's another answer in this thread that's taking the physiological interpretation. But I like this Cartesian one. The question remains of your brain is informed by a trickster.
Yeah, it is. Processing truth is a waste of resources. Fitness beats truth every time. Donald Hoffman proved it.
It's trippy to think about. The only things we know about existence are through our own experience, so there's basically nothing about our reality that we could say proves we're not in a simulation.
By that logic it seems probable that we are in one that could be ran by any civilization only moderately further along the scale of time and technology than we are. I don't think it would change whether I thought life was worth living or not, but it would certainly be weird to imagine somebody could be watching what you're doing at any given time.
Ludicrous. If we were in a simulation weβd be erased by now because they wouldβve done a factory reset and started again.
Why? Maybe this is just history class where you learn firsthand the shit show of the 21st century that eventually gave rise to the conditions which created a world capable of simulating its past.
It's an interesting idea but inherently impossible to prove and thus ultimately kind of a useless question for anything but entertainment. I think it's really not much different than believing life is a very elaborate dream and you're going to eventually wake up as a butterfly or whatever.
We could make a religion out of this!
Think more dwarf fortress and you have the way I look at it
I feel like it's secular metaphysics and ultimately doesn't matter. Kinda black mirror if your RTS shotgun guys are conscious know that they will be deleted to free up memory.
I think if you take a kind of birds-eye view (i.e. The proverbial forest) of the world around us without putting effort into understanding the granular nature of the individual things (i.e. the trees) around us, then one of the takeaways could be that we exist in an otherwise chaotic universe, which might give rise to this thought that we're living in a simulation. βThat said, the world isn't chaotic, not really. It is an incredibly complex group of relations and things, and most of it has little concern for us as individuals.
Some of us sometimes struggle to see the forest from trees. Others of us sometimes struggle to see the trees from the forest.
There's a big ol' beautiful world out there beyond our computers and the games we play. It's worth going out and studying a lot of it.
-What would be the implications if we were in a simulation? would it matter?
Life is not a game.