A socialist perspective on simulation theory.
A socialist perspective on simulation theory.
I was thinking about human development and how as we get further into a socialist society we may find it hard to get children to fully grasp what past systems were like.
There are people who theorize we are a simulation and they give various ideas for why this might be. One most of them wouldnt consider as they are libs is we could just be in a full immersion learning environment. Imagine we are all students in some future school who have been sent into a simulated past to live the lives our ancestored lived and see first hand the horrors of capitalism. Start taking notes youre probably gonna have to write a paper on all this shit once you wake up.
If that's true they better have me in full body binds or put me in some bodyless spirit in the next world because I've got a slight problem with the ethical implications of this "simulation". It reminds me of Christians who say this world is a moral test but then babies get murdered who had no chance to make any decision. If this were true the people in charge are unethical by almost any standard
Kinda funny tho to imagine your the student who dies .05s after being born and you wake back up and the teachers like "Bad luck i guess not sure how your gonna turn that into a 5000 word paper."
If this is a simulation, it's more likely that every student must experience the same life so that they have an equal understanding of the material. I can also see an alternative where there are a select number of simulated individuals rather than a single one, but it seems much simpler to only use one for ease of development and standardization.
This means the babies that die too early to experience the simulation properly are not students. If the point is also to teach students about life under capitalism and the necessity for socialism, it follows that having this realization during the simulated lifetime is a necessary part of the curriculum. I also know that I am conscious and experiencing the world from my personal perspective.
For these three reasons, I've come to the conclusion that I am likely the life being simulated, meaning all of you are a part of the simulation and have no real consciousness or agency. Even if I only have the illusion of agency, I am the only consciousness being experienced and the most real thing about the simulation.
Maybe, but my main issue is that it doesn't change anything. Let's say we assume that we are in a simulation...what now? If you had 100% irrefutable proof of it, what would we do? And if you can't convince others, what would change on an individual level? I still feel pain and love and sadness, so it's kinda pointless, i feel anyway.
Well like i said in another comment i dont actually think we are in a simulation, but if we were it would have certain practical applications. We could attempt to manipulate the code of it, and also like that argument works on lots of stuff anyway. Who cares if there was a big bang i still have to go to work. Who cares if the sun will go supernova in 4 billion years, etc. Just because something doesn't have an immediate effect on our daily life doesnt mean we shouldnt be curious about it. In fact id say the fact some people are so downtrodden by capitalism that they dont care about stuff like that is pretty sad.
Would be very poetic to read so many horrifying texts on torture from both perpetrators and victims only to come out of the simulation and try to argue that it is also, in fact, torture.
Hopefully I wouldn't come out sounding like this git.
I do get why you might see it as torture. I do think though that we should keep in mind with the level of tech required to simulate an entire world the same group could probably easily just scrub through your memories of the time you spent here and get rid of anything too traumatic. Once its over it might feel more like watching a horror movie from the first person. Where you know what went down but it doesn't effect you the same way it would to actually experience it. With tech like that something like trauma might not even be a consideration. They could probably snap their fingers and fix issues like that.
Obviously if we start to consider this idea too seriously we hit a wall of trying to conjecture how such a hypothetical culture and society external to the stimulation would even work, given the extreme amount of cultural and worldview diversity in our own world.
But in my Earthly perspective of torture, I don't believe not having lasting effects or trauma would be enough of a disqualifier. My own existence is quite a painful and unpleasant affair, primarily from things outside my control, and I don't even have it anywhere near as bad as I could have. And I believe that to willingly put somebody in these worldly conditions without informed consent (as our worldly mind would have no worldly knowledge of the simulation) or means of stopping the experiment would count as torture.
I suppose that's why "what if's" like this and Last Thursdayism get such aggressive reactions from a lot of people. It's either seen as invalidating ("what you went through didn't actually happen") or attributing a greater cause to suffering.
You might find It's Hard to be a God or its adaptations interesting. I haven't gotten around to reading or watching it yet, but it's about an observer from advanced socialist society on a medieval backwards world.
I don't think we live in a simulation. You can only simulate things of lower computing power within things of higher computing power. This means that if we actually lived in a simulation, the machine that is simulating us must have more computing power than anything we have ever built or will ever build.
Not really how computing works. You can compute anything on any computer. It just takes longer. Plus efficiency comes into play. There are code optimizations that can be made. For example if you wanted to simulate earth for 1 day. You could build a supercomputer, and have it process that 1 day over the course of 1 year outside the simulation. From inside it would still feel like 1 day.
So long as you have a single transistor eventually youd compute anything. It would just take a super long time that way. So we build bigger ones to do it faster.
My take on simulation theory is that it describes the conscious experience of dreams and reality.
The conscious aspect of the human psyche exists in a simulation created by the unconscious. Hence the perception of reality is nothing but a dream chained to the material world by unconscious's interpretation of the senses. Given the physical limitation of human eyes and ears, the ability to perceive and navigate in 3D can only be possible by the unconscious reconstructing a doppelganger of the material world. In a way that is similar to the architecture of an intelligent agent.
What counts as the present, the current second, millisecond or nano second? In such an infinitely small slice of time sight and sound contains little information. They can only mean something through the temporal accumulation of data creating an imagined perspective.
Consciousness can not exist without this simulation hence the inability to perceive the state of being a sleep but not dreaming. In spite of complex thought still occurring during that period.