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.
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.
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.
Wait, so if you have infinite time, an NES will eventually be able to render one frame of Minecraft RTX?
If you had infinite time, and assuming the NES was somehow unbreakable and wouldnt stop working the NES could simulate your entire mom. Or even something smaller like the universe.
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.
Nuh uh I’m the only consciousness being experienced and the most real thing about the simulation!
Oh something to add about free will. Something that i find interesting is in people who have had the 2 halves of their brain cut off from eachother due to a seizure treatment they could have the person sit somewhere where they can only see half of their body. Then they’d tell one half to hand something to the other half. The person would do it as told. But if they asked the other side why did you pick that up and move it to your other hand the person would just make up a reason. Theyd be like “Because i felt like it”. As one side of the brain processes speech and the side that processes speech wasnt aware they had been told to pick that object up. So they just had to make up a reason for why they did it. Which the person did believe. They werent lying. They genuinely thought that they just did it because they wanted to.
This places unnecessary restrictions on their ability to simulate things. For example we could all be the exact same student living every single life as every single person. Including all the babies who get spawn killed. Or alternatively we could be 8 billion or so students all participating in the same simulated world with altered memories. Each of us randomly assigned a life at this snapshot of history.
Also the argument of im conscious so i have agency doesnt really jive either. Your memories could all be fake. Your decisions all manipulated in a way youd never notice. The idea we have free will at all is debatable honestly. I mean we didnt choose to exist, and we can’t choose to stop existing. Your body won’t even let you bite off your own finger go ahead and try. There are always guardrails in place. We have limited agency even if we assume the decisions we do make are our own.
I tend to take the view of humanity itself being like a super organism. All of us en masse are collectively reacting to the material reality around us, and operating much like cells in a body might. We can individually choose to do some things, but generally we are slaves to our own personal reality. Where we were born, who our families are, who we meet, etc. The Human species itself continues to grow and develop on a macro scale as we go about our lives. We are like many small pieces that make up a greater whole. Its like how we view Bees or Ants. We see them as “hive minded” but they really arent. Theyre all individuals who are part of a greater whole. They all do things independently as well. It just so happens that these independent choices thanks to evolution line up to be coordinated, and seem as though they are all controlled by the same “mind” because they are all reacting to the same stimulus, and all have the same goals, and similar psychology.
So thinking of humanity as a unit, rather than thinking of all humans as individuals, gives a new perspective. Why simulate 1 small part of a greater whole, but not the rest of it? Everything causes reactions. Even a baby that dies right away. It has an effect on the world that ripples out in ways we can’t begin to measure. The mother reacts to its death, maybe becomes bitter, is rude to someone on the train, that person goes home to take out their anger on their children, their children bully others at school because of home troubles, now how would that child being bullied know it was because some womans baby died last week? Not even the bully knows that. In fact there isn’t a single human being who knows that. Because everyone only has pieces of it. All of us are interconnected in ways we can’t fully understand.
If though you could simulate 1 day for the earth. Then have a student live that 1 day as every single person. They’d begin to understand a bit. Bringing it back to capitalism. Capitalism itself corrupts. Its a system that rewards selfish and destructive behaviors. greed. What better way to teach a student about that then to have them live as both the miner who slaves away, and the mines owner who happily benefits? And to live as the victims of climate change when the coal gets burned, and causes worse storms. To see the world from all these different perspectives. To experience both oppression, and being corrupted and committing atrocities yourself. To learn first hand that nobody is immune to reactionary thought. To learn how to recognize the warning signs, and avoid them. To grow your empathy for your fellow humans by literally standing in their shoes.
Frankly i don’t think we live in a simulation. But i was thinking well if we do its got to be socialists doing the simulating. Capitalism wouldn’t do something unless it was for profit, and i don’t see how they could profit from this. So why would socialists simulate our world? I think one of the most plausible reasons is as i described above. To learn from history so as to not repeat it.
For example we could all be the exact same student living every single life as every single person
this is the metaphysical concept of universal consciousness.
I can think of many good reasons for why a futuristic capitalism would simulate the current Earth. Simulating the Earth might not be profitable on current hardware; however, in the future, it could be trivial.
-
Simulate how capitalism could succeed over communism.
-
Even in our current day, we are running out of data to feed to AI to keep improving them; that is to say, to generate infinite new data for training AI or to sell among capitalists.
-
Capitalists could be simulating the Earth specifically as a form of cryptocurrency, wherein, to keep profits high and the workers of the real Earth enslaved, they must sell digital products like NFTs to NPCs.
-
They could also, as said above, be a form of torture where they implant a prisoner into the life of one of the most downtrodden.
-
It could also simply be a simulation to figure out wealth extraction—how best to exploit the population.
-
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.
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.
