Are we living in a computer simulation?
Saw this article in Vox this morning, which got me thinking.It seems to me that this is religion, or more precisely, Gnosticism, which is a belief system as opposed to a philosophical argument, and one that has bubbled up to the surface in times of stress and transition throughout history. For all we know, we COULD be living in a computer simulation, in an impostor God's botched creation, in an alien creature's fever dream, or in Plato's cave. But no matter where or what we "really" are, the only reality that counts is the one that we can observe, measure, and, up to a point, infer using indirect means, like radio telescopes or mathematics. If we don't know how to make sense of that environment, that doesn't mean that there is another "real" environment that does make sense, where Schrodinger's Cat, for example, is either alive or dead, and no good deed goes unrewarded. All that it means is that we haven't been able to make adequate sense of our here and now. We still have to live here.What disturbs me isn't the idleness of these very smart peoples' speculations--it's the implication that if we ARE in a game, then some of us are supernumeraries whose sole role is to provide texture to the gamer's experience. Some of us are designated victims (like the Red Shirts in Star Trek), some are enemies to be destroyed, and some of us are the avatars of real players, who alone have agency. That's religion too--it's like Protestant predestination, or worse still, Antinomianism, because it gives a person who believes they're a "player" the license to do anything they wish in this world, no matter who it harms. More than license--if they think this is a first-person shooter game, then shooting is their sole reason for being. Of course, maybe that's what explains the behavior of a Trump or a Barr.I keep coming back to this quote from Emerson, that I remember reading in college: "Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.” It's a tenet you could live by.
