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Something I find interesting is that humans have spent so much time, effort, and energy into believing the world is not real. The author mentions religions that
by ericmay 5y ago
Something I find interesting is that humans have spent so much time, effort, and energy into believing the world is not real. The author mentions religions that consider the world an illusion, Plato suggested the allegory of the cave, Descartes suggested the demon, now Bostrom and others suggest the video game.
Are humans instinctively on to something? Or is that we have such a difficult time comprehending our existence that we have to invent other gods to explain it away? Are Jesus Christ and the concept of God not just different flavors of simulation theories? Is the theory proposed by Bostrom just a generalization of all religions?
- hiptobecubic 5y agoI think we are "instinctively on to something" but not because it's useful or somehow increases our fitness. Humans and their runaway brain power make all kinds of systematic reasoning errors, for all kinds of interesting reasons. The "need" to find some explanation for why the world is such a crap sack is probably powered by the same mechanisms that drive us to look for creative solutions to problems in the first place.
- karmakaze 5y agoA source of deeper understanding leading to 'not real' could be the realization that basically everything we experience isn't real. Our senses give us a very small set of samples from which we interpolate and extrapolate to give a full description of what those samples are of. If anyone was to be so aware of their own processes they would have to conclude that perception is imagination.