2021-12-12 19:55 from Nurb432
Is this reality, or are you asleep? How do you know? And are you
really sure ? Can you prove it ?
The test is easy. If life hurts you are not asleep.
See, that could be the dream then. In reality life does not hurt.. we imagine hurt when we are asleep.
Besides, dreams can hurt.. And reality can not...
Or the other way around, we have advanced so far as a species that is our normal state. sleep. So when you sleep in one, you are just transferring to another dream.
Wait, that sounds too much matrix.. that wasn't the intent.. I was actually being serious. Went thru a series of dreams the other day. I normally wake up every 30 mins or so. Every time i went back to sleep, it started in the same place.. and 'waking up' from another dream was part of the puzzle, and i knew i was in both places at once.. hard to explain. but it makes you wonder which is real, and which isn't.. ( and no, drugs were involved :P )
Mon Dec 13 2021 09:06:44 AM EST from zelgomerMaybe it's all reality. Your dreams are just fading memories of your consciousness in a parallel universe.
2021-12-14 14:48 from IGnatius T Foobar <ajc@citadel.org>
When people say "we are living in a simulation" I usually just think
"actually we're just good at recognizing patterns".
I have to shake my head at the simulation believers. I almost always see them cite how realistic video games have become in such a short amount of time as evidence of how increasingly likely it is that reality is a simulation.
Sorry, no, video games really have not advanced as much as you might think since Moon Lander. Yeah, the graphics are very impressive, and the number of polygons rendered and the number of collision detections in a scene has certainly grown, but at the end of the day the math is all still rough approximations just with increasingly complex polygonal shapes. Video games work by strategically cutting corners. It's a smoke and mirrors trick.
I wasn't talking about 'simulations' in the traditional sense, but actual effects of our brain and determining what is real and what we are creating ourselves.
Reality works by strategically cutting corners.
Fractal geometry - the method whereby erosion in sand by a drop of water looks just like the grand canyon, with enough magnification... is just one example of this.
The universe is object oriented and reuses code to create the illusion of a much more complex reality than we actually perceive. Simulation or not - God uses object oriented design.
Tue Dec 14 2021 17:54:26 EST from zelgomer2021-12-14 14:48 from IGnatius T Foobar <ajc@citadel.org>
When people say "we are living in a simulation" I usually just think
"actually we're just good at recognizing patterns".
I have to shake my head at the simulation believers. I almost always see them cite how realistic video games have become in such a short amount of time as evidence of how increasingly likely it is that reality is a simulation.
Sorry, no, video games really have not advanced as much as you might think since Moon Lander. Yeah, the graphics are very impressive, and the number of polygons rendered and the number of collision detections in a scene has certainly grown, but at the end of the day the math is all still rough approximations just with increasingly complex polygonal shapes. Video games work by strategically cutting corners. It's a smoke and mirrors trick.
The universe is object oriented and reuses code to create the
illusion of a much more complex reality than we actually perceive.
Simulation or not - God uses object oriented design.
So God is a Java programmer. What an incredibly cynical and depressing thought!
Simulation or not - God uses object oriented design.
Q: What's the object-oriented way to get rich?
A: Inheritance
Which one? Zeus? Thor? The Magic Octopus? The FSM?
Didn't mean this to veer off into a religious debate. If so, id have shoved it in religion :) It was purely about our perception of reality.
That's why I said it's really just us being good at picking out patterns.
Maybe those patterns are a coincidence, or maybe the Creator did something the same way multiple times for a good reason.
"Lazy" implies a Creator other than the one I know -- but it *is* funny to say that the world is so messed up because God only put in a six-day work week :)
It also seems reasonable that if we were constructs in a simulation running on anything other than the "bare metal" of the Universe ... the creator of *that* simulation would make sure we were not self-aware enough to even conceptualize it. To believe otherwise is the stuff of poorly written science fiction movies.
unless the original dev team are long gone and the sim is just running on auto pilot.
Since this going the direction of this sort of thing anyway. Some time read 'Edge of time' ( Donald Wollheim/David Grinnell ), its a small book, older 1950s so give it a bit of slack, but really cool and talks about a pocket universe crated by us, to monitor its growth and eventual destruction since it cant expand delineate.
and i have never understood why writers use pseudonyms sometimes.
Thu Dec 16 2021 12:23:29 PM EST from IGnatius T FoobarWhen people talk about "we're living in a simulation" they are often citing observations of places where, if it were true, there was obvious code reuse.
That's why I said it's really just us being good at picking out patterns.
Maybe those patterns are a coincidence, or maybe the Creator did something the same way multiple times for a good reason.
"Lazy" implies a Creator other than the one I know -- but it *is* funny to say that the world is so messed up because God only put in a six-day work week :)
It also seems reasonable that if we were constructs in a simulation running on anything other than the "bare metal" of the Universe ... the creator of *that* simulation would make sure we were not self-aware enough to even conceptualize it. To believe otherwise is the stuff of poorly written science fiction movies.
I take the opposite approach. It isn't lazy. It is efficient design and maximizes resource utilization. That is why it is a popular and successful concept in information technology. If there is a god, and he is your God, IG... he created a rule based universe and then put intelligence in it with the idea that this intelligence was special in that it alone among His creations had the capacity to reverse engineer large parts of the rule based construct it existed within.
Imagine if you could write AI that would figure out not just that it was in a construct, but the rules of the construct. You would be damn proud of that code.
Doing something over and over again from scratch isn't the "industrious" way - it is the stupid way. The universe doesn't work that way. It works efficiently. It reuses basic math over and over again in every bit of its design.
The hilarious thing is - the minute we started trying to create machine simulations of reality - we started using the same principles to make worlds seem HUGE in resource starved environments like the Apple IIe and C-64.
Not because Richard Garriott was LAZY... but because he wasn't STUPID.
Thu Dec 16 2021 12:23:29 EST from IGnatius T FoobarWhen people talk about "we're living in a simulation" they are often citing observations of places where, if it were true, there was obvious code reuse.
That's why I said it's really just us being good at picking out patterns.
Maybe those patterns are a coincidence, or maybe the Creator did something the same way multiple times for a good reason.
"Lazy" implies a Creator other than the one I know -- but it *is* funny to say that the world is so messed up because God only put in a six-day work week :)
It also seems reasonable that if we were constructs in a simulation running on anything other than the "bare metal" of the Universe ... the creator of *that* simulation would make sure we were not self-aware enough to even conceptualize it. To believe otherwise is the stuff of poorly written science fiction movies.
that way. It works efficiently. It reuses basic math over and over
again in every bit of its design.
Except I don't think that it does. Like IG mentioned, I think that humans are good at recognizing patterns, and then we come up with simplistic models to help us approximate things. The Newtonian physics that we all learned in school are only approximations. The universe doesn't really work that way, it's so much more strange.
How about this one: if God is omnipotent, then can he ever really be proud of what he creates? Is anything that he does not lazy? It seems like by definition everything would be effortless to him.
As would creating us, 'the center of the universe'
People just cant accept how totally insignificant they are, or their limited time allotted to be alive. If there really was some sort of all powerful being that initiated the big bang and i'm wrong, he/she/it/whatever does not give a flying-f about us.
Fri Dec 17 2021 04:46:54 PM EST from zelgomerHow about this one: if God is omnipotent, then can he ever really be proud of what he creates? Is anything that he does not lazy? It seems like by definition everything would be effortless to him.