We could make a religion out of this!
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
Your mind is gonna conjure up anything it can to make sense of the world it lives in.
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?
You know, whenever this theory is discussed, everybody seems to assume that this simulation that we're allegedly living in is supposed to be an approximation of the parent universe, similar rules, but probably lower fidelity (basically the sims).
I think we should forget that assumption. It's human centric. Who's to say that the entity running the simulation even meant for it to be a simulation at all? Given our universe appears so much bigger than our pale blue dot from the inside, if our universe is a program running in a parent universe, I doubt that we - homo sapiens - are the point of it, or it'd be leaner, more focused. We'd be the center of the universe. But at every step of scientific discovery, we've found that that isn't true. We're just noise, sand on the beach, dust in the wind. If we live in a program, I doubt that the person running it is even aware of us specifically as a species, let alone as individuals. I doubt that they're specifically aware of any particularly galaxy, in the same way a neural network developer isn't aware of any specific weight in their model.
Granted, you could argue that that the rest observable universe is an illusion, a wilderness mural painted on the walls, designed by the simulation operator to make us think that we weren't in a zoo. But that sounds a lot like "God put those dinosaur bones there to trick us", so personally, I doubt that's it.
No one knows. I just find this universe too imperfect. It's nonsense. I just want it to end.
Life is not a game.