A different perspective on the same question. Do you live in a simulation?
Many of us here on steemit have been excitedly talking about the possibility that reality may actually be a computer simulation with us at the simulants. I now am going to metaphorically speaking switch gears and come at it from a different perspective. I like considering different perspectives. Perspective can change everything.
Do you live in a simulation
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You very well may spend at least a very large portion of your day dwelling within a computer created environment. This was the thought I found myself thinking about as I was driving home from removing some equipment from some of our racks at the data center.
What does your life consist of?
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Mine is not outwardly complex.
I spend 90% of my waking time in front of a computer. I do this for work, and for entertainment. You see the majority of what my reality is resides inside of a computer. My deepest musings and thoughts are within a computer. When I have some weird experiment to try out. It is almost always inside of one or more computers.
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Later at night I'll usually watch some shows and talk to my wife. We then fall asleep. I wake up and mostly return to the world of the computer.
This may seem incredibly dull, but I like to think, I like to use my mind. I may dive into books, and I will certainly watch documentaries, but when it comes to using my mind the computer seems to offer me a near infinite supply of materials to work with.
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My friends in a slack that I frequent have called me a Machine, and they are not the first to do so. I call myself long winded, and that is certainly a candidate for understatement of the year. Some posts analyzing posting habits to try to detect bots awhile back always had me on their report. Why? I post no more than 4 blogs a day, but I do comment on a lot of posts and have dialogs with people. The end result is I appear to be all over the place.
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This is kind of the reality I am in.
I can start reading blogs, replying, building thoughts, looking at news sites, buying software tools to build more things using funds from steemit, and barely come up for air.
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So am I living in a computer simulation? At least 90% of the time I am awake that is likely...
Yes
How about you? Are you simply my neighbor, and we're hanging out here swapping neighborhood gossip and tales?
Parting words: Yes, I am aware I don't currently lead the most healthy of life styles.
this is actually a very old argument. originally put forward as the evil demon thought experiment, by ren'e descartes. see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
Wait, I read the link too and I think I have heard of this. It actually is fairly similar. Here is my take...
Some people have died and come back to life with an after-death experience involving a demon trying to convince them that everything in this world is all an illusion. In some cases, the demon says it was made up by YOU... In which, Deva, is strikingly similar to your comments about living and creating on your computer.
This really appeared to frighten the hell out of these people when they cam back from the brink of death.
When I first heard this I thought to myself...
If I created all of this, then I am pretty darn creative and I don't think I would be scared. I think I would be impressed.
I don't consider it evil at all. I don't hurt anyone. It is what I choose to be, and choose to do with my time. I checked out the link (thank you by the way) and did not see the similarity. I am unfamiliar with that idea though and had never encountered it until you just shared it.
didn't intend the evil part, that is just what it is called. i think the metaphor is very apt.
Yeah I wasn't complaining. I may be interested in a lot of subjects, but I truly had never encountered that argument until you shared it with me. I do like learning new things. So thanks. I haven't completely internalized what I likely should from that link.
i only know about it from other philosophy context. i don't know all of its consequences. it was the first thing i thought of when the simulation theory started popping up a couple years ago. some of the ted talk explanations i have seen weren't very convincing. of course descartes had some of his own crazy. i didn't mean to be snappy or short. thanks.
Are you living in a simulation? Or is the simulation living in you? Or both at the same time?
It seems to me that anything that comes into consciousness, real or imagined, is a simulation of something "out there," in the so-called real world. And it seems we can affect and interact with things "out there," but we can never be sure to what degree our internal simulation reflects "reality."
So these simulations in our digital devices, it seems to me, aren't complete simulations until they are experienced by consciousness. Until that point, they are at best meaningless groupings of ones and zeroes. No, not even that. They are just differences in voltage on billions of little transistors, or of light intensity and frequency amongst pixels on a screen, totally unconscious and without meaning until consciousness completes them.
Yeah so basically i guess the questions is, are we programmed in a way that we can only see and feel what we have been programmed for ?
Let's take an example, the first Apple computer
He can only read floppy disks and this will be his reality, when you shut it down (sleep) he is not aware of himself, he is programmed in a way to have his own reality.
We may be highly sophisticated programmed beings to live in a limited perception of reality, welcome to the matrix
I'm just kissing up cause I can't code.....
so when our robot overlords take over..... you'll speak up for me
I'm an anarchist. They might not like me. :)