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.
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.
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.