this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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I've literally never met someone who claimed we actually live in a simulation though
yeah its a strawman (checkmate athiest)
I cast ignite.
I cast manual breathing
I cast testicular torsion!
Strawman rolled a nat 20 on its DEX save, takes no damage sorry
I light our table on fire I hate this DM
Natural 20s don't matter except on attack rolls RAW
I saw a theory by some physicists that there is some evidence we may be a hologram but I'm not smart enough to understand exactly what that means. Sounds neat
Yeah that doesn't mean we're running on an alien projector. Science communication of theoretical physics is horrible.
Anytime you find yourself getting excited about some galaxy brain SciFi stuff just clap out some chalk board erasers and inhale the dust. That's about how pleasant and exciting theoretical physics is (and how worth doing, fight me you keyboard tapping nerds) and it should help you get in the mood for appreciating findings.
I'm also not smart enough to understand it completely but I think they meant something strange could be happening with dimensions (think Flatlanders) rather than us being a computer program. anyone with more understanding please elaborate tho
There's an argument that because some of the physical limits we see around entropy density (due to singularities) are proportional to the area of a sphere around the volume, together with math indicating it's possible to translate physics in a 3D volume to a 2D surface, the whole universe might be a projection from the 2D surface of a sphere
It's a hell of coincidence that this is the second time I heard of this, the first being 2 days ago in a video game. Said video game is full of crackpot conspiracies though.
Musk said it in Rogan a few weeks ago, and it became a justified belief overnight. It had huge flaws in logic when he said it, and no one who is parroting the talking point today is thinking beyond "the real life Ironman says we live in the matrix".
Pretty sure simulation theory has been around since the late 80s. Just not in the main media zeitgeist anymore like when matrix came out so Elon just revived it in mainstream media
I mean, Descartes had brain in a vat theories well before the 1980s, and Plato's allegory of the cave is fundamentally the same. My position was that "the reason we're talking about it again all of a sudden is because one idiot got on the podcast of another idiot and poorly explained it to the throngs of their uncritical fans".
The whole simulation theory stems from observations about how fast technology is advancing as a whole, and kind of plays hand in hand with the fermi paradox. Either we are a special advanced civilisation that will continue to advance until we could in theory simulate an entire species/planet/civilisation or whatever or we are doomed to die out before we can advance enough to achieve either that goal or potentially other goals such as building replicating space exploration technology that might be capable of exploring/consuming/adulterating part of the galaxy or even the galaxy as a whole.
Both theories are basically an extrapolation of our current technological progression with some large assumptions made about the way things in this universe operate as a whole. I don't think they are particularly far fetched, but I also don't really see much evidence to support either being a possibility, except maybe the whole we are fucking up our ecosystem and heading towards some type of collapse before we get too advanced parts of the fermi paradox.
Another theory that I've heard which is really just a statistics thing is that it's most likely that we are an average civilisation that lasts an average amount of time in an average part of the galaxy and that it's likely we are right about in the middle of the total number of humans that has or will ever exist (about 100 billion came before us, probably another 100 billion to go) which could be a couple centuries or millenia left of human reign over planet Earth.
All being said, it's pretty likely that since the future hasn't happened yet we just won't know how it all turns out until it does. We're all just as uncertain as anybody else, and whoever preaches the gospel of kingdom come is just as ignorant as you and I.
Meh, when we find big space monoliths or mega structures in the asteroid belts we'll probably feel a lot less special
Sounds like someone saw the devil in a screen during a brief but short psychosis and then extended this idea into his own depersonalisation/derealization experience of his whole life
Yeah not the first to think something like that, kind of like people once thought their whole lives were a dream lol
If you take your opinion from either of those sources I really can't help you they aren't representative of what the majority or anyone worth their shit thinks
You have a level of happiness most of us can only briefly imagine as being possible.