Why do so many people believe we are in a simulation?
I've listened to so many people on the internet say they think the government has somehow put a chip in everyone and we are all unconscious on some table in a facility and they are pumping vivid dreams into our head which is what we call our reality. Like, where did this ideology come from? You can understand how lions and tigers exist but you think your thoughts and feelings must be fake because someone had a brain fart and forgot what they were saying. And you think that's because we are all robots.
Houston, we have a problem2020-09-06T03:35:00Z
Ironically, those who believe they are simulations...aren't believing....they are simply performing as the simulation dictates. So there can be NO ONE that believes they are a simulation.
I think the idea is rooted in the fact that our experience is indeed a simulation of a sort. I don't mean a simulation like the one you describe. I don't mean a simulation that is being authored, controlled, and fed into us by some outside entity. I mean a simulation that is created by our own brains.
When one holds something in their hand, feeling and seeing it is both a physical and a mental experience. The physically existing sensory receptors in the fingers react to the thing's physical qualities, such as texture, weight, and temperature. The sensory receptors in the eyes react to light waves that reflect off of the object and onto the retina. These experiences are physical. The information that is conveyed, by sensory nerve impulses to the brain, is used to construct a non-physical mental image of the object. Our physical bodies experience the physical world; our minds do not. The mind experiences only a conceptual representation of the world.
I believe that it is this underlying fact, which (it seems to me) most people are only vaguely aware of, that is the root cause of simulation delusions of the type you describe.
Pyrrho of Ellis brought up the notion of the epoche, or the problem of the criterion: not simply the regression unto "First Cause" but what = Truth. He and later contemplators, like Descartes, noted that even atom-counting (or bean-counting, back in the day) was not 100% proof-positive, e.g. for the "what iffers" like Hume. So, if you're a what-iffer on the opposite side from Hume, then there could be a Big Causality. A female scientist at Harvard shows more common sense: Dr. Lisa Randall, a physicist of the first order, says, paraphrased, "Why would a higher species want to simulate us?" Thus, one may note the solipsism and even fear of a negative what-iffer, and compare it with the similar general condition of solipsism of the science fiction engineer/what iffers who are into building things. "Why would a Level III civilization want to simulate us?" Very perceptive, almost like the difference, writ large, between action figures building a fort, and a proper tea party with dolls.
The question of the simulation is a philosophic issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis and Plato's Cave allegory and even such as https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/
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