Brings a smile, xorcist :) "The great unknowable" experiencing itself, through itself, by imposing arbitrary restrictions upon spliters of itself." Which conception gives rise to a fundamental existential question: "To what extent am I puppeteered/ pre-ordained, and to what extent (if at all) am I able to exercise 'free will'?" On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 03:02:34AM -0000, xorcist@sigaint.org wrote:
Too cerebral.
It's interesting to me that the simulation hypothesis has so much in common with Buddhist philosophy. In fact, Buddhism already answers this sort of thing.
Alan Watts, as a Zen Buddhist, presented the view that life is essentially a game played out at the cosmic level. All life is essentially the ultimate source of consciousness, God, the Atman.. whatever you want to call it. God desired to experience life as Alan Watts, and Richard Nixon, and dogs, and lions and gazelle in order to expand its experience, its awareness, of itself.
Put another way, intelligent life is the part of the universe that endeavors to understand itself. We're the Universe's subconscious. We are the dreams of the ultimate mind.
So, the equivalent Buddhist question would be - why would an incredibly advanced mind dream of us? Well, the answer to that is why do you dream the things you dream? It's a statement of desire, or of dread - because fundamentally life is a bit boring, and its much better if you're banging supermodels or running from zombies. So those things come up in dreams. Likewise, its incredibly boring being God. Imagine it. Never being surprised, needing nothing, all goals can be met without the slightest effort, and so on. It would be an incredible drag.
Casting this notion into the framework of a simulation, one might say that this advanced civilization is simply bored. Imagine Star-Trek type technology, where you just hit a button and get a perfect steak. The SAME steak, every time. There is no need to cook, because you'll never beat the machine, and yet in the end.. it all ends up tasting plastic.
Even with our meager technology, a great many people enjoy "roughing it" in the woods, camping and going low-tech. They enjoy getting away from TVs and phones and nonsense, and getting back to a more basic existence.
No need for existential crisis. Just a desire for life to be flavorful.
So many people have proposed we're simulated... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
Now why would such an extremely advanced civilization / collective want to simulate us? Is this an unanswered question?
Certainly they have long since - solved biology, live forever, down/up load their brains against trauma - solved life and mobility throughout their universe - lost and forgotten their prehistory - etc
They could sim anything they want. So why sim us?
Because something happened to them, something very big, something serious and existentially threatening. And now they're *desperately* trying to learn about death, life, humanity, the individual... something they lost but is still encoded in them just enough to let them think of making the sim...