> "We’ve learned that at least one American plutocrat (almost certainly Elon Musk, who believes the odds are a billion to one against us living in "base reality") has hired a pair of coders to try to hack the simulation."
Source?
Source?
It's a thought terminator. It's a way to seem smart while not being smart at all.
Perhaps we won’t understand the reality “out there”, but attempting to may nevertheless produce tangible benefits for us “in here”, eg, like wireless communication in Minecraft arises from detecting subtle variations in updates.
Lot of IFs based on our view of their values, I know... I don't necessarily agree with this line of reasoning... just stating how I understand the argument.
Why the assumption that it takes a significant amount of their resources to run our simulation?
Besides, sometimes an approximation is enough, and even though we could waste 10000x the resources on an app, we chose not to.
It's trying to divine some sort of intention behind things we inherently can never know.
The same way hat if we looked at a physics simulation codebase, and notice that it uses higher granularity constants, more coarse calculations and other such limits (like moderate refresh rates), we could deduce that the programmers put those there because the simulated physics would be too costly for the CPU they run on otherwise.
well, it doesn't necessarily imply that. perhaps the beings running the simulation simply wanted to experiment with things like a slower speed of light (in the simulation). or perhaps in their universe, there is no light, and they wanted to play around with the concept?
It doesn't prove it, but it sure does imply it.
It could also imply a few other things (like what you suggest). An observation, after all, can imply several alternative potential explanations.
I'd say though that "they wanted to play around" is a weaker hypothesis than "they had performance constraints" (as one is more universally applicable, and would apply to all kinds of simulations run, whereas the other depends on a specific choice of the simulation creators). Plus we see more constraints than the "speed of light".
>or perhaps in their universe, there is no light, and they wanted to play around with the concept?
Btw, "speed of light" doesn't have much to do with light (it's just the example upon which the theory was made). It applies to anything massless, all kinds of electromagnetic radiation, and so on. The real meaning of "speed of light" is the speed of causation propagation, or the speed of information propagation if you wish.
So unless their universe didn't have causation either, and everything happened "all at once", they'd have the same kind of limit (regardless of whether they had light).
We could just in a video-game style world, with mechanics (laws of physics etc) totally different to the ancestor's world. Like we often do when we make games...
Entertainment? Random Number generator? Maybe they are in the future and doing some historical analysis. Plenty of reasons to spend resources.
This always struck me as the most WTF simulationist assumption. To the degree we simulate our ancestors, today, it’s in games. Given an infinity to ponder and simulate, it strikes me as ludicrous to assume even a significant fraction of computer power would go to ancestor simulations.
Sure. But why that? I’m not debating that some people wouldn’t obsess over, I don’t know, their personal lineages or old military battles. But I can’t see devoting most resources backwards versus probing forward for opportunity.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-billionaires-want-to-br...
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-question-elon-musk-refus...
TIFA: Barret, what are you talking about?
AERITH: It's an interesting thought, though. Sometimes, everything does seem too surreal to be true.
BARRET: Exactly! Maybe we're just codes in a computer, or pawns in someone else's game.
CLOUD: Barret, that's ridiculous. Even if it were true, how would that change anything?
CLOUD: We are living in a base reality by definition.
TIFA: Cloud's right. Whether it's a simulation or not, this is our reality. We have to deal with it.
AERITH: Maybe the real question should be, what can we do to make this reality better?
BARRET: Hmph, you're all just too afraid to face the truth. But mark my words, one day you'll see.
Thus, in some sense, this is base reality "by definition" - that reality beyond which you cannot find anything else.
I don't agree, but it's a reasonable way to think about it (if that is in fact what OP meant).
There are weirdly consistent reports of a whole lot more phenomena beyond what she outlined in _Dying To Live_ thirty years ago, which is more or less what you've summarized here.
They may just be a coincidental agglutination of evolution and human brain malfunctions, stacked up with a whole lot of coincidence / selection bias to account for the anecdotes of people gaining correct knowledge about physical reality while "dead".
If that's all they are (which I do find plausible if not persuasive), what you've written here leaves out a lot of steps needed to justify that position.
In my worldview burden of justification falls on those who would posit non-materialistic, supernatural explanations.
FWIW, I wasn't trying to say that the position should be "supernatural by default" - just that there's a lot more to account for in NDEs than what you've described, and that I don't know of anyone who's looked into them seriously who holds to Blackmore's attempt at a purely materialist explanation (another way it falls down - if oxygen starvation accounts for NDEs, they shouldn't happen for people who aren't oxygen-starved, but they do).
As an agnostic who really wants to believe in the supernatural but has the same gut instinct that there needs to be evidence for it, I have a plausible materialist explanation for NDEs, but it's rather more involved and isn't especially rigorous.
I think it more likely NDEs are a hint that the supernatural isn't fiction than that they're a consequence of being simulated.
Per the above discussion, though, if NDEs are a hint that we're in a simulation, they don't necessarily give us any access to the exterior reality. They could just as easily be part of the simulation as something outside of it (as could OBEs).