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It's also contradictory to the answer Feyneman gave in his "Aunt Minnie is in the hospital" story in response to being asked "If you get hold of two magnets, and you push them, you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them around the other way, and they slam together. Now, what is it, the feeling between those two magnets?": https://fs.blog/2012/01/richard-feynman-on-why-questions A somewhat similar approach can be taken to the simulation question itself - rather than the default response of pondering the likelihood of it being true or how it might be implemented, I much prefer the ~"Is there any utility in the question itself?" approach taken by George Hotz starting at the 2:30 point in this interview on the Lex Fridman podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SpptYg_0Rs [Hotz] ...it wasn't a very practical talk about how to actually escape a simulation, it was more about a way of restructuring an us-versus-them narrative. If we continue on the path we're going with technology, I think we're in big trouble - like, as a species, and not just as a species but even me as an individual member of the species. So if we could change rhetoric to be more like...to think upwards...like, to think about that we're in a simulation and how we could get out...already we'd be on the right path. What you actually do once you do that, well, I assume I would have acquired way more intelligence in the process of doing that, so I'll just ask that. [Fridman] So the the thinking upwards, what kind of ideas, what kind of breakthrough ideas do you think thinking in that way could inspire, and what did you say, upwards? Upwards into space are you thinking? [Hotz] The space narrative that held for the modernist generation, doesn't hold as well for the postmodern generation. Like Elon Musk...like we're gonna build rockets, we're gonna go to Mars, we're gonna colonize the universe. The race to space. That was a great modernist narrative, but it doesn't seem to hold the same weight in today's culture. I'm hoping for good postmodern narratives that replace it. My interpretation of his thinking is, regardless of whether we are actually in a simulation, it is possible to think of reality as a simulation - it (and the characters within it) behaves like a simulation, and it can be acted upon as one can act upon a simulation (changing variables, observing the result, etc)...so, let us (humanity) start to collectively conceptualize it in this manner, and collectively act upon it in a logical, coordinated, systemic manner. The benefit of this approach is it can help humanity and the individuals within it break out of this kind of "trance" we seem to be in where we kind of act and think as if the state of the world is mostly beyond our control, that ~"nothing can be done" beyond that what we are doing now (what we have ~always done). Whether this idea would actually work is obviously speculative, but considering the existential predicament we find ourselves in, it seems to me like a fairly decent idea, especially compared to the competing ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz The original talk being discussed in the interview: Jailbreaking the Simulation with George Hotz | SXSW 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ |