Give me a chance, man! I stayed up pretty late. 
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I’m looking forward to nanotechnology becoming more ubiquitous. Because then it will turn out that we have been living in a nanotech construct the whole time. Maybe biotechnology and genetic engineering will become more commonplace before that. So then we clearly will be living in a bioengineered universe.
The real fun begins when we begin to understand the fundamentals of gravity and put it to our own use. Because then all of the gravity in the universe will be fake.
The crash comes later when we discover that the whole universe is energized by a giant coil of metal held in a state of tension by a clockwork. Then it’s turtles all the way down.
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More alternate causality:
- Random Chance
- Bad Luck
- Human Error
- “Evil” Spirits
- Novelty Theory, Terence McKenna & Timewave Zero
I firmly believe that, in 2017, almost nothing on television happens unscripted.
I do not believe this was ‘a mistake’. More likely “accitentional” to provide America with a chance to — i dunno what goes here. I don’t write dramas. I would guess either a chance to be magnanimous and forgiving (while feeling superior to that anonymous guy who made “the mistake”), or someone was trying to degrade the singular changes in format and contestants that this Oscar ceremony presented, a “you rocked the boat this is what you get” sort of thing. Every organization is made of individuals, and you cannot possibly know what moves them.
I’ve had a lot of devious people of bad character in my life at various times. I can see a set up, but I can’t always tell what it’s for. IMHO, This Oscar thing was no accident. (and not a glitch in the Matrix, either).
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Oh sorry, I’m with you. I suppose I should have clarified by referring to the “ship of modern society” or something of that ilk.
Well I don’t think that tracks at all. It’s just as much proof that we live in a multiverse where every possible consequence of an action happens in some parallel universe and we just happen to be the poor clods living in one of the highly improbable branches that such a theory requires to exist.
(Actually I think it’s all quite explainable by good old fashioned entropy. But tweaking the simulation folks is fun.)
I didn’t say anything about religious people and it’s not nice to suggest that I did. I made a point of attacking the idea in the article as a parallel to the religious fantasy (in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition which is followed by more than 50% of the world’s population) that what’s really important isn’t here and now. I am, however, extrapolating my own conclusions about the simulation proposition.
I am admittedly less familiar with some of the less popular religious and their particular ideas.
So the 70s version of pascals wager.
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Uh, you quoted a theoretical or actual person here (your quotation marks, too):
“The real world is beyond this one and that what happens here isn’t as important as what happens here and if something bad happens it’s because of God or the machine made a mistake and there’s nothing to be done and we might as well give up because we aren’t in control anyway.”
To whom would you attribute that? From where would that quote come? Who would or did say that?
It would be contradictory to say “religious people”, and you seem to say Judeo-Christian-Islamic people (which are ‘religious people’ and you have said something about what they believe when you summarized it)
And I think you did a shoddy job of it. It’s not nice to say, maybe it would be unkind to leave unsaid though?
Faith is no popularity contest.
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In the version of the “sim-head movement” that I (jokingly) suspect, rich/celebrity folks are actual pay-to-players who “bought” their exalted status. So I kinda expect them to “know” about the sim. They log off in the evenings and teleport back to Venus, or whatever.
Whereas I’m an NPC, so this feels real to me.
YMMV (your metaverse may vary)
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This would line up nicely with my Philosophy 101 profs worldview. He claimed that everynight he fell asleep, and woke up somewhere else. Same other place, night after night. He had some other clerical job there, and when he went to sleep there, he woke up as a Philosophy professor.
He may or may not have been making that up. I can’t know, but he was quite consistent about it. Now, of course, I wish I had asked more questions about it!
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The guy responsible for handing out the envelops with the category winners was reportedly busy tweeting pictures of celebrities. So I’d say the Oscars and the Trump victory do have a common cause - too many people are idiots.
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That’s pretty much what I wanted to say. The wrong idiots in the wrong places at the wrong times, unfortunately.
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I knew you would write that, it was dictated by your code which I peeked at (one of the perks of being an under-the-radar payer-player!).
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My religious education is certainly different from yours, and I certainly have even less complete information about religions I have not had formal education about. I did not come here to criticize religion, faith (in the religious sense), or to get into an argument about it. I apologize for the “religious fantasy” snark, as that was perhaps uncalled for.
To me the implications of saying that we are living in a sim and of attributing events such as the Trump presidency and the Oscar flub to that fact, seem to have much in common with what I have learned about religion. They seem to lead to a place of dis-empowerment.
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I can see that, however I don’t think that believing in either makes you more or less likely to hold a deterministic worldview. I don’t think that either the sim therory or religeous faith require or are very significatnly correlated to a deterministic worldview.
If we are in a sim, it does not follow that we can’t control things.
If there is a god, it does not follow that we lack choice (in fact quite the contrary with the Christian faiths I am familiar with).
If the religious people you know hold a deterministic worldview, and some very definitely do, some sects definitely promote this (some cults as well) it would be an easy assumption to make. Some do. Many do not, though. And even some folks who say they do, they don’t.
I hear you though, it would be easy to see the world as determined and effort wasted if this were a sim! Nobody likes a rigged game, right? (one person usually likes it, but they’ll never say so)
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Francis E. Dec was purportedly a disgraced attorney who claimed that he could see it, and called it the World-wide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Computer God.
His rants were as astonishing as they were offensive:
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I do figure we must be in a simulation since it looks likeP ≠ NP and that has got to be some resource constraints on the hypervisor.
I wonder if they left something like an old virtual floppy disk controller in place that somebody has exploited to break into the main platform?
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