If we knew that this is a simulated reality, would it become less real to us?
How would we know IF it even is a simulated reality?
Are there even the possibility that we are living in a simulated world?

Metaphysics on DRL?

Yeah this isn't gonna go well.

Yeah i know it's going to be locked at one point, but i just wanna hear people's opinions on the fact that they might not realy exist.

I personally wouldn't care if reality was real or not. What does it matter whether you're in the "real" reality or in the "artificial" reality?

As far as I know, this IS an artificial reality, and since I'm the only one who I can even remotely confirm can think, I'm the only one who can be at all trusted. But until I start seeing dead pixels in the sky, I'll stick to the idea that reality exists, for preservation of sanity.

if we're living in a simulated world, and we knew it, we'd all be nihilists because nothing would matter. On a side note, when i read the thread title, I thought you meant augmented reality (that thing with the cameras that layer CGI over the camera in real-time to interact with a virtual environment, using real-world stuff)

but seriously, if the world is artificial, and nothing matters, either you can try to escape into a world that you know nothing about, or you can stay in a world you know something about, knowing that it doesn't matter, and hope they don't change the rules on you. there's really not a lot you can do. I mean, Hypothetically this is the matrix. If people went out of the way to cause WW3 in the matrix, and everyone died, the robots would have no power, and have no reason to keep it running.

plus a cow-matrix would not only have more energy, but less to maintain. Which means this isn't *that* artificial reality. there's also the god & satan one that I heard on a conspiracy web-site... that one was a trip, it made the 'reptilian' conspiracy look sane, and even tried to incorporate it. and in that, well, its like HP Lovecraft's logic... all you have to do is not believe. if everyone does that, POOF problem solved.


As for the philosophy of "if you knew the world was fake, would it affect how you think?"

Yes, as I said in the first paragraph, we would all be nihilists. If the world you are in is not real, than it does not matter. If the people you talk to, may or may not be real, do they matter? do you mater? what if your just a consciousness without a body, and even your body is imagined? not even you would matter to yourself. and that, is nihilism. Funny thing about nihilism is, it's pretty unpredictable. you might believe that nothing matters, and just kill people on a whim, because they aren't there, or you could try talking to squirrels, because you, the squirrel, and the people who see, don't exist, so if you look stupid, it doesn't matter. you'd be more willing to go sky diving, because maybe the ground doesn't exist, and if you die it wouldn't matter. In that sense the only thing that matters is your train of thought, and the experiences that cause it.... And that's really not a change.

I don't see why it should. If our inputs and outputs were identical in the simulation as they are in real life, there is no plausible difference and it might as well be reality. The only reason you should change your mode of thinking is if there was a chance reality would "crash", or - as stated above - dead pixels started appearing in the sky. Those events could very much affect things.

But that's just me. Some people want to make an actual difference in the world; some people want to make it to the moon; some want to meet aliens. If those things aren't covered/allowed in the simulation, those people would likely get unhappy as they no longer have something to live for.

I'm happy to live live just for the sake of the experience, even if there is no lasting impact or my file is deleted after 20 years.

Of course, some people say that to really live you need a "soul" or some sort of spiritual component, perhaps even coupled with a god or some such. I cannot comment on that path of thinking.



We wouldn't unless those glitches appeared. Or perhaps the simulation doesn't model things to, say, a subatomic scale, and when we look down that far we just see static or something? But I'm assuming the simulation covered those bases.



I think it is quite definitely possible. You are essentially asking;

"Is it possible for one race, in the lifetime of the entire universe, throughout all of history, has made a computer powerful enough to simulate an entire planet, atom by atom?" (they can build addon servers for the moon and mars once we get there)

It's simply a matter of scale. The answer is a resounding Yes. Even if it isn't processing in real time, we wouldn't notice. Maybe each frame of Earth.exe takes ten years to computer? No worries.

I suppose the interesting question is then to ask "would anyone bother building a supercomputer capable of such a simulation?"... Well, then it becomes a matter of scaling costs.

Is it cheaper to just seed new life on a planet than to build this supercomputer? Is it cheaper to just explore the dang universe to find conditions that we want to simulate?

I think most of those answers rely on the presence of Faster-than-Light drives. If they aren't possible, then supercomputers simulating planets is VERY possible.

Now if the question is simply, "what if I'm the only one alive and the rest of YOU are simulations?"... Well suddenly your supercomputer only needs to calculate my current room and it becomes all the more likely.

But miles, even if the reality we are in is real, what more point is there to existence? Whether you live in simulated or "real" reality, the same sensory input is being given to your brain and the same rules apply as far as whether you can tell if people are conscious like you or not.

Btw, let's not bring in the matrix right now because the matrix is based on flawed science, though I will admit it was a damn cool movie and I wish I could learn stuff just by inserting a training disk and downloading it.

EDIT: Weasel expressed my thoughts in a more verbose and explanatory manner.

EDIT2: On the off chance that there is some dude up on top of the computer chilling and watching me: Wassup dude, any chance I could get some hax?

Well, if the world is real, than the things you do have consequences. killing people makes you a horrible person. if the world was real, that matters. If it is not, then they might not be real, so there opinion does not matter. Thats just one example.

A real world has real consequences, a fake one, has fake consequences. also if the fake world glitched somehow, you could escape your fake consequences if you knew how. you know, 'oh, this jail wall isn't real' or 'oh, these bullets aren't real', or 'oh, i dont need to breath, I think i'll walk on the bottom of the ocean'.

As for the matrix, I just assumed thats where we where going, with the glitches being brought up, and dead-pixels in the sky.... which also makes me point to a certain XKCD comic. actually a few of them, including the one on nihilism.




also, @ weasel.

What if the simulated world, was non-scientific like in the case of that crazy conspiracy I read.

God creates the world, god creates satan, god creates humans, satan creates a fake world and traps the humans in it so he can play god. everything thats black is really white, god is the devil, and everything we know is wrong, because some ♥♥♥hole demon is playing a joke on our entire reality, by making stupid things, and really in the real world it is just a giant flat plate of ground with light-bulbs in the sky, and satan just wanted to complicate things. when you bring in religion to the fake-world idea, you get some complicated stuff... like "would satan really want to imprison the entire human race, to laugh at them, and piss god off?" actually yeah, I think he would. Does that mean I'd believe it? no.

a world like that would be more prone to having 'agents'... in that particular false-world conspiracy, the 'agents' are the 'reptilians' who made a hollow earth, and are shape-shifters, control the media and governments, stole the sun and replaced it with a giant spinning cube covered in light-bulbs, thats spinning so fast we see it as a sphere, and that somehow had something to do with the nazi flag because it's actually a giant spinning box that makes a circle in a sky thats not really that color. the scary thing is, is that *if* god was real, AND *if* satan was real, AND *if* this actually happened, those situations could well be true, and we'd have no way of knowing, because satan could be like 'yo, you can't actually see that.'. and noone would believe it was true, because of how ridiculous it all is, which means everyone believes the made up world, which means the made up world will never collapse. It's a giant loop.

Given that my stance is that religion is that it's just a bunch of made up stuff to explain what we don't understand, you can see how ridiculous this sounds to me. I could probably invent a fake world situation based on a mix of Buddhism and marvel comics and it would be more sane.


The whole idea of changing your perception to account for 'nothing matters' can be both good and bad. you'll certainly take more risks. they might be good, but they might be really really bad. if your wrong, you'll probably die, or get lucky. if your right, well, it won't matter because you'll survive because it's not real. It's really up to what you want to do... right?

Replace all instances of the word "computer" in my above rant with "god" and you get roughly the same thing. It's just a more powerful computer.

So let's take my original example. Let's say a civilization makes a moon-sized computer that can render earth in realtime.

Now let's say a thousand years later they finally perfect shrinking that computer (or terminals to that computer) down to a laptop-sized unit.

Then let's say market forces ensured that every single member of 4chan could pick up one of these planet-simulating laptops for $5 from the corner store. Or maybe it's available for digital distribution on Steam.

I mean, if I was a god, I would create universes all day long. I'd toy with things. Heck I'd even put a sock on my hand and call it the "devil" and toy with people even more. I mean, I do it with ants, why wouldn't I do it with entire planets?

Life would just be one big game.

Believing in god, for the purposes of this argument, is simply believing in there being EVEN MORE CHANCE that things are "not what they seem."

I have thought this too, but the thing is to us this is reality and whatever we do has an effect on our lives so in a sense even if it were some ridiculously amazing simulation it's still real to us. of course I don't actually think it is some simulated reality but I like to amuse myself with such thoughts helps keep a man sane... hold on a second what the fu-

I like to imagine god as a player of this simulation, trying to making a decent planet in a life sim. he starts of making some kind of program where you can "react" two or more "elements" and very quickly he realises the complexity of this and decides to make a physics engine, after making a pretty epic physics engine (which a weird "quantum mode" to make some of the things in the simulation work), he realises that yeah after a while it gets pretty boring a few supernova some weird ♥♥♥♥ called a black hole (he spent some a lot of time debugging that bad boy) but really after a long long time he realises that it's actually not that interesting, so he develops an idea where you can put in a few "creatures" and they evolve on their own procedurally, after a while he sees that the growing as big as possible whilst being a huge ♥♥♥♥ to all the other creatures isn't really going to make anything other than a completely savage planet, asteroid, take 2, thinks long and hard after programming the dna of another successful mammal the *[insertname]:"monkey"*, realises the potential of this creature and BAM starts frantically working on the new genotype which he calls "human", he doesn't have the power to be looking at everyone at the same time but through history he focusses on one person at a time, einstein, da vinci blah blah blah... and thats the story of how we are all just bits of data in one guys program.

we are all just named characters in HumanFortress, build 153910.8

We would probably just be numbered when created, since people can change their names any time or multiple people can have the same names.

That would explain the presence of insane people too

Crazy/mentally challenged people are glitches. UFOs are mods. Terrorists are people that are directly controlled by the simulator user who want to blow stuff up.