With all that’s happening right now around the world, one could only wish that this is all just a nightmare — a bad dream that we will all wake up from. But what if all of this is really not real? And not just this one, but everything that’s happened in our lives? This theory of us being in a computer simulation has been around for quite some time. And now, a new theory emerges and takes this theory to a whole new level.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper Are you living in a computer simulation?, where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings, whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new theory comes along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings like that either and everything in "reality" is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?
More about this hypothesis over at Big Think.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)
I suspected this for awhile
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God knows.
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This viewpoint is congruent with non-dualism oriented philosophies, where there is only the 'seemingly' real, where the mind gives everything the only value that it has, with no inherent 'self' as an independent entity, and where the nature of reality itself is 'being dreamt', all part of a 'not-two' unfolding of awareness. Kinda like a stereo track with on one side the apparent reality and its experience of a physical world, and the other where there is actually nothing being everything, and all is unfolding perfectly just as it is.
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Let's see. Beings so unlike us that they create computer simulations just like we do. Hmmmm. Reality is a self simulation? New idea? It has been understood for thousands of years - east and west and everywhere in between - something gotta just be "there" for anything to be somewhere. In any event, we can each create a joyful, loving individual consciousness regardless of what the true metaphysics may be. That, ultimately is all we can do and the only thing we know of our empirical reality that can't be denied without losing every trace of value.
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Look up Descarte's Demon (16th century) and before that Plato's Cave (Ancient Greece - BC).Also the "Brain in a vat" ideas that extrapolate on both - also before computers existed (pre ww2)
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