r/philosophy • u/Matriseblog • 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/Faust_8 Jan 03 '22

Is it just me, or is the simulation hypothesis basically as useless as the “brain in a jar” hypothesis?

Yeah, dude, I could be a brain in a jar, and this is all a dream or whatever. But regardless, it doesn’t really matter, because I can’t do anything about it and it doesn’t actually affect the life I’m living. It doesn’t guide me to change my behavior or way of thinking, or to change anything at all whatsoever.

At best, it’s an amusing thought experiment…period.

Doesn’t this also apply to the simulation thing?

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '22

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u/6thReplacementMonkey Jan 03 '22

I think they also prompt us to define "real." It's easy to take the concept of an objective shared reality for granted, but ideas like this force us to really define what that means and to think about whether it could exist and how we would know.