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Redvolition t1_ivrj8x1 wrote

Reply to comment by h20ohno in How might fully digital VR societies work? by h20ohno

I always thought the best argument for why we are not living in a simulation is that it would have been a senselessly gruesome and suboptimal one, with an abundance of negative emotion.

You just made me think that maybe our current world is a first run of the simulation just after we are born, so that we fully develop and mature into functioning adults, before being revealed that, in fact, we are isolated brains kept on artificial support machines.

Just imagine that when you reach 50 years old or whatever, you go to sleep one day and wake up in a white room full of people looking at you, and one of them speaks:

- Welcome, anon, you concluded your maturation successfuly, now you will be introduced to the real world.

Everyone around us is just either a simulated philosophical zombie, or other humans in the maturation run, and everyone above 50 or so is an NPC acting as a placeholder for somebody tha already matured and left the first simulation.

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h20ohno OP t1_ivro728 wrote

That's an interesting way of seeing the simulation hypothesis.

A crazy idea I had could be that technological progress is a way of gradually acclimating the trainee to the digital era in a way that doesn't shock them, and maybe you could run people in different eras to produce diverse outcomes in mindsets, someone who 'graduates' training in the 1800's would see things different to someone from 2020.

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