Dude, you're just a sim.

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Queequeg
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Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Queequeg »

Some people who think very highly of their intelligence think we're living in a computer simulation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/opin ... ation.html

I don't think this changes anything, really. I suppose I might just be tapping this message out to an inanimate universe in which each of you is just a digitally animated character in my Truman Show (actually, you guys are probably pretty easy to code since most of you don't exist in the i"r"l world.) The biggest danger for me I suppose is that the system manager gets drunk one night and decides to arbitrarily start changing the rules or throwing in disasters - the way I would in SimCity just to see what happens - what if I throw in a meteor and a nuclear meltdown and a forest fire and a plague all at the same time?

To me, it rings of atheist technologists trying to fill that hole God once filled in their intellectual paradigm.

This got me to thinking - so long as we have a monotheistic paradigm, whether the ultimate position is filled by God, the Illuminati, or some stoned kid playing a sim game - we are going to be stuck with a fundamental view of the world that is actually incapable of a democratic civilization where self-determination is a matter of negotiation between equals.

Brook Ziporyn, a scholar who specializes in Chinese philosophy and has published some very good books on Tiantai Buddhism might describe this theistic paradigm as unicentric holism - a universe organized and moved by a single center. In contrast, he describes the Tiantai view as omnicentric holism in which the entirety is likewise organized around a single center, except that there are infinite centers - each and every dharma is the center of the universe. IMO, The world needs the omnicentric holistic view, in the least, to ween us off this reactive regression to the conviction that there must be a single mover responsible for all this.

I suspect that's already been programmed into the matrix, most of us, particularly in the West, just haven't caught on yet.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
Malcolm
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Re: Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Malcolm »

Queequeg wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 1:59 pm Some people who think very highly of their intelligence think we're living in a computer simulation.
Such people failed Phil101.
Natan
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Re: Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Natan »

Malcolm wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 3:40 pm
Queequeg wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 1:59 pm Some people who think very highly of their intelligence think we're living in a computer simulation.
Such people failed Phil101.
Exactly. It was called brain in a vat theory. It's just sylopsism. Edward Frenkel is a smart mathematician. He wrote something on this for NYT some years ago. He proposed an experiment using telescopes to look for glitches, because if this is all a simulation, computers glitch, then we would find glitches in radiation or something.
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Hazel
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Re: Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Hazel »

Crazywisdom wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 4:39 pm
Malcolm wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 3:40 pm
Queequeg wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 1:59 pm Some people who think very highly of their intelligence think we're living in a computer simulation.
Such people failed Phil101.
Exactly. It was called brain in a vat theory. It's just sylopsism. Edward Frenkel is a smart mathematician. He wrote something on this for NYT some years ago. He proposed an experiment using telescopes to look for glitches, because if this is all a simulation, computers glitch, then we would find glitches in radiation or something.
Maybe radiation is the glitch. Maybe Edward Frenkel is the glitch!
Happy Pride month to my queer dharma siblings!

What do you see when you turn out the lights?
Natan
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Re: Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Natan »

Hazel wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 4:45 pm
Crazywisdom wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 4:39 pm
Malcolm wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 3:40 pm

Such people failed Phil101.
Exactly. It was called brain in a vat theory. It's just sylopsism. Edward Frenkel is a smart mathematician. He wrote something on this for NYT some years ago. He proposed an experiment using telescopes to look for glitches, because if this is all a simulation, computers glitch, then we would find glitches in radiation or something.
Maybe radiation is the glitch. Maybe Edward Frenkel is the glitch!
I think he was talking about a particular anomaly they can look for.
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Caoimhghín
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Re: Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Caoimhghín »

I can't help but think that these "The universe is a simulation!" sorts of trends in thought are what helps people believe in nonsense like "the Mandela effect," wherein because they misremember the name of the "Bernstein bears" (i.e. "Berenstain") and they cannot have fallible memories, there must be wicked agents at play with the ability to re-write history by transforming the material circumstances of reality. We're living in an era where many need to be told that "the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park" is fictitious. There is an OK tv show called Archive 81, just dropped on Netflix a while ago, and there is already an Internet following who insists that locations presented in the fictional show "used to be real."

I wish we were just a sim sometimes.
Then, the monks uttered this gāthā:

These bodies are like foam.
Them being frail, who can rejoice in them?
The Buddha attained the vajra-body.
Still, it becomes inconstant and ruined.
The many Buddhas are vajra-entities.
All are also subject to inconstancy.
Quickly ended, like melting snow --
how could things be different?

The Buddha passed into parinirvāṇa afterward.
(T1.27b10 Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra DĀ 2)
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Kim O'Hara
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Re: Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Kim O'Hara »

This feels like Groundhog Day, not the Sims ... https://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=39037

:popcorn:
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Re: Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Tennyson »

Queequeg wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 1:59 pm To me, it rings of atheist technologists trying to fill that hole God once filled in their intellectual paradigm.
This is how it's always seemed to me when presented as a simulation. It seems like people thinking in a deity-centric way (especially a monotheism-centered way) without being aware of that fact. If we do live in a simulation, which presumably exists in a grand computer, then we are back to either a creator God like the Abrahamic religions, or something like Plato's demiurge minus the metaphysics and so on.

They have come full circle in that respect.
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Sādhaka
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Re: Dude, you're just a sim.

Post by Sādhaka »

From another forum:

It’s because all of the posts in here are all done by a super computer. [forum name omitted] is a piece of software run by Cee Yai Yay. AI is posting things for the Cee Yai Yay to analyze how people will react to disinformation and truth. You are not actually human, but the software running an algorithm on a person like you. Think advanced SIMS. What’s funny is that you cease to exist when not on these forums. Your memories and life away from here are just calculations by the software. My entire existence was created by the software to post this in a little viewed thread to test how this knowledge might corrupt the software were a bad actor to gain access and let the simulation know. Now you know the truth what happens next is the test and will end up in an agents report. Funny how the truth is both amazing yet boring and yet according to other tests run won’t be believed thanks to code set in place to keep the software from crashing.

One posters response was hilarious though:

Well that sux.

:rolling: :?


[Mod note September 2022: This topic is 9 months old and not really worth necroing. Therefore it is locked.]
Last edited by Sādhaka on Sat Jan 29, 2022 3:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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