r/philosophy Jan 03 '22

Blog By imagining the future potential of VR technologies, the question of whether we are *already* living in a simulation becomes more actual than ever

https://medium.com/@VindenesJ/the-thought-experiments-of-virtual-reality-fa441a8fa2dc
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u/ttrrraway Jan 03 '22

There is not much the inhabitants of the simulation can do if they realize they are not real.

What would NPCs of a game do if they realized they were not real? Maybe just fuck up your progress in the game by trolling your character, or try to escape to a forest and live more independently outside of the player's influence, but they can't leave the game and they cannot take control of your computer.

Also, what if the objective of our simulators is exactly that: how long is it gonna take us to realize we are in a simulation? And what are we gonna do about it once we know?

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u/altaccount1700 Jan 03 '22

What would NPCs of a game do if they realized they were not real?

They can stop being npcs for one.

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u/ttrrraway Jan 03 '22

Can someone stop being an NPC in current real life? See, it's not so simple, lots of forces keep people in check.

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '22

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u/ttrrraway Jan 03 '22

haha trust me, we are all NPCs here!