Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/15/do-you-think-that-were-livin.html
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Yes, and a bad one at that.
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No.
This reality is too ridiculous and just downright stupid at times for anyone to have conceived of it and then intentionally designed it to be this way.
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I feel that way about a lot of software.
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There’s bad design which still sort of functions the way its supposed to, and there’s this clusterfuck we’re living in.
If this reality was a comic book or a movie, it would never get greenlit, for being too damn unrealistic.
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If we do live in a simulation, who wrote the code?
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The simulation theory is just one more non-falsifiable proposition in an infinite crowd of non-falsifiable propositions, like the existence of afterlives and deities. If you want to spend your time believing one or more of these propositions, that’s cool. However, if you treat others badly because of your belief in such propositions then you’re just one more insufferable jerk who’s dragging down the rest of us.
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Just as I don’t see any evidence for the existence of gods, afterlives and faeries, I don’t see any for this idea either. It goes onto the giant pile of made up stuff that’s impossible to disprove. Next.
And I don’t think highly of people who spend most of their time on such ideas either. Do something useful.
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The Coder.
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It’s not the code that’s the problem, it’s the weird data. Or did i parse you wrong?
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I suppose you can throw in string theory and multiverse theories for non-falsifiable theories. I believe both of them can exist. I believe the very fact we exist is similar to Steven Weinstein’s theories.
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No no no no.
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And it sort of doesn’t matter either. If this is all just a sim and we’re all just someone’s labrats … well, the rules (not the laws, the rules - maths, chem, physics, bio, etc) are internally consistent and discoverable, so … fuck it. Let’s just crack on. What other choice do we have?
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It’s a feature not a bug.
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I’m thinking the code creates the data. Let’s ask Mr. Peabody…
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To crack off? I’m crackin’ off right now… TMI?
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My humorless, serious response would be: Please define what you mean by simulation. Theoretically speaking it’s possible that the universe/reality we’re perceiving are projections or holograms of a 2 plane or higher dimensions.
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2017/01/holographic-universe.page
Also i believe experiments have been run to see if its possible that we’re living in a digital simulation, i have no idea how something like that could be set up but here you go
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Something that don’t understand about the “We might be living in a simulation” idea (to be fair, I haven’t looked very hard) is: Even if you made a strong case for it, how is it actionable? What would it mean about our lives? Old-school religion has prescriptions, from “knuckle under to authority” to “try to be good to each other,” but the simulation theory doesn’t imply anything as far as I can see.
I guess if we discovered limits to the simulation, letting us hack space-time, like Neo in The Matrix, that would be interesting. But if that’s the big idea, I haven’t heard it described.
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It’s like the Ontological Argument for the existence of God. It’s manifest nonsense, but it’s hard to articulate exactly why it’s manifest nonsense. Better to dismiss it as bloody stupid and move on.
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