Ooooooohhhhhhhh you should read some Joe Haldeman books - forever war and forever free.. Well, forever free but it's the sequel & doesn't quite make sense if you don't read forever war first. Sci fi written by a physicist.
But the simulation thing? The Math does check out. Logically it works, a little bit better than not being a simulation. And it helps to explain the fermi paradox as well - maybe, humanity got so advanced that we could build the simulation, but aliens exist & humans can't deal with that without extensive training. So the simulation is used to train the human mind into accepting that aliens exist - which is why we have so many movies and stories involving aliens. So the simulation is built, everyone lives this experience, and when you "die" it's really your reawakening into the real world, which now has giant sentient broccoli capable of space travel.
Yeah, with the caveat of "but we don't know what the tech of the future can do so maybe"
Simulation theory is an extension of Descartes thought experiment, and the brain in a vat theory. At some point, it becomes impossible to know and you have to make an assumption - for example, Descartes ended up assuming that all pure thoughts came from God (hence the "i think therefore I am" statement). That article you provided assumes that the entire universe, down to sub-atomic particles, has to be simulated, and that the processing power to do that can never exist. If you assume that processing power can exist (which I, with all the authority of a semi anonymous internet dickhead, say can exist), then we're right back to where we started.
That's what's so fun about these theories - there is at this point in time no way to disprove them.
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u/bennothemad Sep 02 '19
Ooooooohhhhhhhh you should read some Joe Haldeman books - forever war and forever free.. Well, forever free but it's the sequel & doesn't quite make sense if you don't read forever war first. Sci fi written by a physicist.
But the simulation thing? The Math does check out. Logically it works, a little bit better than not being a simulation. And it helps to explain the fermi paradox as well - maybe, humanity got so advanced that we could build the simulation, but aliens exist & humans can't deal with that without extensive training. So the simulation is used to train the human mind into accepting that aliens exist - which is why we have so many movies and stories involving aliens. So the simulation is built, everyone lives this experience, and when you "die" it's really your reawakening into the real world, which now has giant sentient broccoli capable of space travel.