This week's poll was suggested by hkanz. Are we living in the Matrix? Are you sure about your answer?

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Who is more valuable?
Choices:
Friends - votes: 776 (26.8%)
Family - votes: 2116 (73.2%)
There were 2892 total votes.
The poll ended: March 6th 2021

For those that answered "Friends", I'm curious how your actual family is

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

Well i can only give a proper scientific answer... And as far as science concerned it is a possibility, but we don't know really...

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I am envoy from nowhere in nowhere. Nobody and nothing have sent me. And though it is impossible I exist. © Trimutius

According to all existing philosophical logic, our experiences are real because we have the capacity to self-reflect on them. Therefore, while I would've picked "I don't know" (it seems unlikely, but not impossible) if the last answer wasn't there, I had to pick It doesn't matter because our simulated experiences would still be real experiences that we personally experienced.

I kind of hope it's a simulation because that would be one of many avenues to have potential additional experiences outside of what we know as "life". But again, it seems unlikely.

No. I don't know the exact philosophy behind this and I don't care to look it up, either, because it seems illogical no matter how you think about it. Why would anyone run a simulation of this sort? Who has the power/time/ability/desire to simulate an entire planet/galaxy/universe? And what would they gain from it?

Ah, sometimes it's so good to have been born into an atheistic religion, in a country whose majority population is atheistic. No one ever tried to mess my mind up with this kind of thinking. Well, except the internet XD

The reasoning for this thinking doesn't have to be religious. You could be in a coma and have simulated this reality within your own mind. Its only as big as you have envisioned (ie can prove).

Though my personal choice was It doesn't matter, I also have a leaning towards "yes" on religious grounds, maybe.

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Internet Lurker At Heart

NO

NOOO

I do find the philosophy interesting though, as the latest iteration of the ‘how do I prove that I/my surroundings are real’ question that philosophers have been writing about since the beginning of time. People who are interested in reading a bit about it can google ‘The Simulation Argument’.

If you want to get an idea of what the philosophy is behind it, all you need to do is watch the trailer for The Truman Show, and that should answer all your questions. And, if you want to see alternate takes on the concept, then you have the retarded boomers who followed Q and formed a cult around Trump, and the idiots who unironically think "I am the only one who is self-aware of world, and everyone else is a mindless brainless sheep/NPC."


One word: entertainment. Or a simple way to get your thesis paper so your awarded your PhD.


But, this entire principle is dependent upon atheism for it to be believed and considered. In the Western religions, the simulation argument falls apart because it IS possible for ordinary people to be raised up to God(s)'s level through the work of a God. And, in the Eastern philosophy, the entire purpose of living, dying, and being reborn is to become "awakened" to the world around you and being able to ascend to the next plane of existence.

When you remove religion from the equation and start to look for a purely "logical" answer to everything, the first conclusion to arise is that humans are nothing more than sophisticated biological computers evolved from primates. And, once you get to that conclusion, you start going down the rabbit hole of Enlightenment Era thinking that has gotten the first-world into the identity crisis that exists today. You're already arrived to the conclusion of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, so what's the next logical step? To conclude that if humanity has evolved rather than created by a spiritual power, then arrives to the likely conclusion Nietzsche made with The Gay Science of the Madman running around screaming that "God is dead". This arrives to the ideology of nihilism that life has no purpose. But, OF COURSE, life has to have a purpose to it, doesn't it? No. If there is no God(s) and there are no spiritual plains of existence (Heaven, Hell, karma, purgatory, whatever), then there is nothing backing the reason why people do what they do. Even murder is nothing but socially engineered morality to it because the person murdered is just as pointless as the murderer, with any argument to the contrary beginning and ending upon the fact that it's opinion and semantics made by people who are also pointless. This then leads down to the various poisons prevalent throughout society. You have Herbert Spencer's ideology of "survival of the fittest", born out of Darwin's theories, that comes to the conclusion that the "ultimate purpose" in life is to be the last group standing and become Nietzsche's Übermensch (The "super man" ). Then you have Max Stirner giving rise to anarchism because, while "survival of the fittest" is nice and all, the only thing that really matters in life is what YOU want and anyone who gets in your way is simply an enemy, which leads to Ragnar Redbeard's Might Is Right. Or, if you want to "die with the most toys", then you arrive to Marx and Engels theories on Socialism, which detail that the party is the only God in the world who declares what rights people have, the preservation of the party is life's ultimate goal, and anyone against the party deserves to be massacred because they oppose the party's interests and are too stupid to be capable of changing their way of thinking in the first place.

And, once you start going down the rabbit hole of any one of those schools of thought, it's not that much of a stretch to also arrive to the conclusion that we're nothing more than plants in a terrarium, rats in a cage, fish in an aquarium. No real purpose in life aside to satisfy one's curiosity, with our existence ending once we all either die, reach the maximum capacity, or our observers grow disinterested and pull the plug.

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I'm leaning towards no, but in the end I don't care so It doesn't matter mmm...

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I will change this world mmm...
So the world can change me mmm...

There isn't an "exact philosophy" behind this "logic" because it relies on axioms completely grounded in the physics of our own known universe (which in this hypothetical, would be a mere simulation).

If we *are* in a simulation (and I'm not saying we are--as I stated earlier, it seems unlikely), then the hypothetical meta-universe would be incomprehensibly more complex. So complex, in fact, that simulating a universe of this scale wouldn't be that hard to do--the question of "Who has the power/time/ability/desire" would be simplified down to "who had the power/time/ability/desire to make video game worlds in our universe". In a sufficiently complex universe with sufficiently complex life forms, making our universe could theoretically be "only that hard".

Much of our physics is still experimentally determined. Why is the speed of light capped? Why is everything a discrete particle? Why do quantum waveforms not collapse outside of observation?

A hypothetical meta-universe could involve not just a different planck length (instantaneous light transference?), but it could even have truly continuous matter. The combination of the two would allow hypothetical computation incomprehensibly more powerful than what we have. People (and their spatial senses) could exist in seven or more dimensions instead of 3 (or 4 if you want to count time). There may have been no "big bang" there--the meta-universe may truly have always existed without meaningful growth or change. We really would have no idea.

The hypothetical philosophy that "disproves" this universe as a simulation relies on assuming that the physics of our universe is absolute. We know (and have proven!) that we couldn't simulate something as complex as our universe within our universe. But we *don't* know that a hypothetical meta-universe isn't complex enough to simulate our universe within it. And it's almost certainly impossible to prove anything to the contrary, since we can't even comprehend what it is we'd be disproving.

Last edited by HikaruYami at 6:10 am, Mar 9 2021

No. Philosophy has always bored me for a reason.

Are we living in a simulation? No, but a lot of deception is going on....

I like how many human body systems work without conscience effort and automatically

are you too hot? sweating time
drink too much? vomiting
burn 500 calories at the gym? you can now smell cookies from 50ft away

it even has virtue signaling
haven't eaten in 20 hours? eat some low quality food and your brain will tell you it tastes great! keep eating

we got some good programming beepboop

I actually have something to contribute after this poll closed. Zack Snyder's Justice League is getting solid reviews and is flirting with a Golden Tomato? I fought a 5-year battle without honor and humanity to restore honor to his name and his films. I pushed for the release of this film as if it was my job and film critics, the prime evil force of the Snyder fanbase, are on my side. At least for now? He even won a Hollywood Critics Association award 2 weeks ago!
We need to unplug the Matrix. None of this can be real anymore! But don´t wake me up before my sequels and further director´s cuts of old comic films come out. This sleeper can´t awaken.

I still can´t believe a bad 2017 reshot of Justice League managed to get Joss Whedon canceled for good. He deserves it though.


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I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
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