Are we living in a Simulation? – The Saint | Hacker News Reader

Are we living in a Simulation? – The Saint

alexstjohn.com

4 pointsmwilcox9 comments

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There is a lot of suffering in this world.

High levels of social conscientiousness (mutual aid) is a positive selecting factor in evolution of highly intelligent species (Darwin/Kropotkin).

Therefore, no intelligence smart enough to build a universal simulation would do so. IMNSHO.

Human perception is highly relative - our capacity to feel suffering is necessary for joy to be meaningful. Kind of like there would be no far without near, and no up without down.

What if this isn't just a simulation, but a game, and we're avatars? A game needs challenge and conflict, nobody wants to play a game that is basically "press start to win."

Why are people born into such disparagingly disparate circumstances? Pretty shitty game. Why are some born healthy, and others sick. This mode of thinking is... illogical. It also encourages an unhealthy, almost fundamentalist disconnect from all thinking/feeling things. The disturbing, fascist aspect of Zen or Shinto (nothing is real, there are no consequences because there is nothing), or the 50 virgins afterlife of the funda'islamism, is all very very dark disconnected thinking. Makes me despair somewhat. Like he says in the article, another form of religion.

Controlling the circumstances people are born into would require controlling the circumstances up until their birth, which would mean mean the "game" was fully deterministic. If the game was deterministic, it wouldn't be like playing a game, it would be like watching a movie you already know by heart - i.e. not so engaging. The fact that you are free to act, and the outcome is uncertain - that is what makes for a compelling experience.

Additionally, you assume poor people in third world countries are automatically miserable. In actuality, they're only miserable when they're hungry, sick, mistreated, or made to feel want by having affluence rubbed in their faces - kind of like us. It is true that their odds of being hungry or sick are higher, and in some unstable countries there is a lot of mistreatment going on. That being said, I've been around a fair number of third-world villagers, and my experience is that in general they are just as happy as your typical first-world american.

Have you had a chronic illness?

No advanced civilization would find it ethically acceptable to put people through the suffering many go through on a day to day basis.

My own life has been plagued by chronic, treatment resistant depression. I can't do things other people do, because my stress response does not allow for recovery. If I was born in a third world country, hell, even some place like Eastern Europe where it is almost impossible to find work at the moment, I'd have had to have killed myself long ago. Simply unable to survive. Even worse some place like Syria, where for the last 4 and a half years have been having the equivalent of a Paris Terrorist attack every single day. People are forced into shitty boats, into countries that don't want them, to escape bombs made in the countries that don't want them.

Suicide is the one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In countries privileged enough to have data collection and less cultural taboos on the issue, the largest groups that suicide are also the most likely to be the most disadvantaged. In some Aboriginal communities, for instance, child suicide is a common occurrence.

Do you know what it is like to be a parent and to lose your child in any kind of way? My god! What kind of a monster would create a world like this?

OK... step back..

Let's say we discovered a scientist was deliberately rearing children genetically engineered to have some kind of un-treatable illness. IT WOULD BE UNACCEPTABLE. Now multiply by millions every year.

How do you not understand that that is unacceptable and unethical?

You think the holocaust would be a interesting game? Maybe pop into a body just as it's being gassed? Or maybe to observe?

Doctor Mengele type shit right there, son.

edit: I am not complaining, or bitter about my own situation, however, I WOULD NOT WISH IT ON MY OWN WORSE ENEMY. I do not believe in the death penalty, nor seeking vengeance by torture. Certainly wouldn't want to be the axe-weilding bag of high-functioning idiot dildos who thought up the idea to create this universe.

I have overcome ASD, crippling social anxiety to the point that I never left the house, extreme morbid obesity, homelessness, drug abuse and depression so bad not only was I contemplating suicide multiple times a day, I spent a significant amount of time researching and planning it. My game setting was extreme hard-mode.

I never gave up, and in the end I overcame it all. Now I've got a body that could make an underwear model jealous, I have an amazing career, I regularly win speech contests, I've got several inventions in the patent process, I'm about 150 pages deep in a book I'm writing, the list goes on.

For every person who endures great suffering, there is someone else out there experiencing incredible joy. You need to be able to experience one in order to have the other - our emotional systems are relative. Furthermore, the freedom that makes it a game rather than a show to be passively observed unfortunately implies the freedom to be nasty to other people. Nasty stuff like natural disasters, killer viruses and painful genetic conditions are unfortunate, but there is so much out there that is wonderful.

I don't want to be preachy, but I've been to the darkest part of the abyss, so maybe I could offer you a little bit of advice. You need to stop paying so much attention to the negative messages floating around in the world and open your eyes to the beauty that is abundant all around you. Additionally, you are stronger than you think, you can take control of your life, you don't have to be a victim.

"The water supply of south Asia comes mostly from glaciers in the Himalayas. They're melting. What happens when they disappear? There goes the water supply for South Asia. Couple billion people in India alone, an estimated 300 million barely have access to water, what's going to happen to them? All over the place. Coastal cities will disappear. Extreme weather events will increase. One person per-second is now fleeing the severe effects of weather -- more than refugees right now. We're seeing a major disaster right now." - Noam Chomsky, not to mention all suffering and torture that has happened in the past

I'm really glad for your cool situation. You are one of the lucky ones.

Maybe it's a simulation created by accident, as a by-product of some other process. That isn't what you're saying. What you're saying is that you think there is a possibility this is a game, or some kind of VR hologram. Your reasoning seems to be that you need to go through bad experience to then feel good ones. Which is completely flawed on its own. Social and cultural relativism has been debunked by science over and over again. We see morals emerging independent of experience. Some people will never know what it means to be a paraplegic, or blind, and on and on. The idea that one needs to pay their dues assumes some kind of karmic balance, which is garbage. Thankfully many people have a good life, but through history, all of this suffering, death, carnage -- no intelligent being alive would think that was worth a dime for your washboard abs. Stop victimising yourself by going with this ignorance is bliss bullshit. It will make you feel good in the short term, but... I think we've gotten personal enough. Let's try to keep it with the simulation thing, eh? I've done some awesome shit too. Wouldn't use that as an excuse to play Dr Mengele though. Kind of messed up.

The need to be able to experience pain to know pleasure isn't about social or cultural relativism, it's a function of how we perceive stimuli. Try putting your hand in hot water for a while, then put your hand in cold water, and repeat the procedure without first putting your hand in hot water. The cold water will feel much colder going from the hot water. Research has also demonstrated that pain that doesn't change in character or intensity is noticed less over time. Our perceptions are not based on some absolute scale but relative to other perceptions.

My argument is that in order for a game or story to be compelling, the outcome must be uncertain, and the possibility of loss or failure must exist. Nobody wants to play a game that is basically "push start to win" and nobody wants to read a story that is basically "a long time ago, in a land far far away, everybody lived happily ever after".

I'm happy to stay out of the personal, you were the one that brought up your depression. I'll leave that track with the suggestion that maybe it is worth entertaining the possibility that your depression isn't the result of some chemical imbalance resulting from a bad draw of the genetic lottery, but rather a product of your beliefs and thought process.

I don't see how I'm "victimising" myself by recognizing that there is both good and bad in the universe, and put on the cosmic scale, the good massively outweighs the bad.

OMG I'm cured. Thanks Mr Mansplain. Great therapeutic use of passive aggression! I can't tell you how useful this has been! All my own doing! Of course! You should write a monograph on the subject: "Depression is existential angst in people with whom one disagrees: how I created a universe of suffering and lifeless rocks in order to provide relative validity to my own thoroughly dealt with existential angst, which I am in complete control of, and for which is certainly not the reason for having created said universe in the first place."

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