Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

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Consider that your perception of reality is just that. What your brain tells you and what is really there are not necessarily the same thing. There was another excellent article on QuantaMagazine arguing that there's even an evolutionary imperative that would drive our brains to beneficially misrepresent reality: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga... That article is a bit of another very interesting tangent.

The point is that reality is little more than what you experience. All that simulating a reality requires is that an individual's experiences are able to be constrained to within the controlled ream. Take a child, 'disable' all senses except sight - and install permanent VR goggles. That child, lacking outside interference, will believe in a reality that is not really real. Should it develop the cognition to wonder it will likely do as we do. Why do large bodies attract one another? We can explain the operation of this through perhaps the curvature of spacetime, but that then again one can ask then why is there spacetime? At some level the answer simply ends up being that because that is the way it is - a inherent facet of our universe.

A child you made deaf like that would still discover sound as the vibrations that distorted the lenses on the eye once detection got sensitive enough.

I dispute the very notion that it's possible to cut someone off from the basic nature of reality, because you must fundamentally have constructed the cage from that reality and thus their interaction with their cage will reveal its mechanics (and hence the mechanics of reality) to them.

You can only make it take more time by suppressing noise, but eventually the "errors" will carry accurate information inside. (And someone inside can accelerate this process by causing noise in certain manners.)

> lacking outside interference

Depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is either impossible (Bohmian; maybe all of them) or insufficient (Copenhagen, MWI) -- in either case, small "errors" will reveal information about the actual nature of reality.

If you didn't know, his example is just a re-hash of Plato's cave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

Sure, but the same objection applies --

The Cave itself is only given definition in terms of what we might call the Ultimate (in a Platonic setting); though it's essence is to obscure the Sun (a symbol of the too bright to observe Ultimate), the very ability to do so is fundamentally related to the fact it's also a manifestation of the Ultimate.

Similarly, the Fire and anything used to cast Shadows. By careful observation of the nature of Shadows and Light from the Fire upon the Cave, we observe a manifestation of the Ultimate interacting with itself, because the Light from the Fire is merely a transposition of Truth from the Sun, while the essence of the Cave is revealed in it, and we can see the Ultimate through the lens of the Cave.

It's fundamentally impossible to separate the manifestation of an Essence from an expression of the Ultimate interacting with itself; ergo, any structure capable of self interacting and capturing its "Errors" will find in them the ability to distill a view of the Ultimate.

-- the argument is pretty endemic to any structure capable of expressing existing: what exists cannot be cut off from the nature of existence, because fundamentally it's doing that.

(Also, first time I think those philosophy classes came in handy.)

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