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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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The author of the LW post seems to imply that he thinks we would feel a pull to return to our "friends, loved ones, and projects". To which my response would be: hell no, don't put me back in that thing! Ex hypothesi, your "friends, loved ones, and projects" never existed in the first place, so there is no reason to act on any imagined attachment to them.

Hell no, put me back in! If the only difference between the simulation and reality is my knowledge (so everything I experience in the simulation feels as real as outside) then put me back in the simulation immediately. Now I can live in a world where I know for a fact there are zero consequences for my actions? I'd like to say move over Marquis de Sade, but my sexual preferences are closer to water than vanilla, so I'll just say it's fucking party time!

For a more serious answer, my friends, family and loved ones already only exist in my imagination. The people I associate those memories and emotions with are not the simulacra in my head, my brain has shaped them into identities based on our relationship. That will not change in the real world. I will still have learned all of my values from my simulated father and mother, my first love will remain warped by my memory into the lessons I refuse to learn, I will not suddenly value the friends I make in the lab more because I consider them real.

As any schizophrenic will tell you your perception of reality has and always will be an illusion, hostage to brain chemistry we don't understand. I will always be trapped in the fantasies of my imagination, and either way I am at the mercy of my captors and any freedom I have will be an illusion, so if the only difference is that I 'know' out here is 'real' and in there is not, then why does my choice even matter? As I see it it's a choice between the lotus eater machine I now know the truth of, and the lotus eater machine I know nothing about. Give me the one I can make myself a God in.

Edit: God damn it, just as I was hitting post it occurred to me that anyone capable of accurately simulating reality would indeed have to understand brain chemistry, making it a nigh infinitely better world to live in.

Now I can live in a world where I know for a fact there are zero consequences for my actions?

One of the stipulations of going back in is that you forget it's a simulation, but, minor detail.

As any schizophrenic will tell you your perception of reality has and always will be an illusion, hostage to brain chemistry we don't understand.

Despite possibly being more sympathetic to "postmodernism" than anyone else on this forum, I've never been able to get on board with this sort of thing. Assuming we're not already in a simulation, I think we have pretty direct access to reality most of the time. Truck comes barreling towards you on the highway, do you think "ah but I'm trapped in a prison built out of my own perceptions so really there's no way to know what to do in this situation"? No of course not, you get out of the way. Looks like you rely on your senses to give you accurate information about reality after all.

Truck comes barreling towards you on the highway, do you think "ah but I'm trapped in a prison built out of my own perceptions so really there's no way to know what to do in this situation"? No of course not, you get out of the way. Looks like you rely on your senses to give you accurate information about reality after all.

And if you were actually inside the simulation and aware of it, would your response be different? Or would you jump out of the way, even though you know the truck isn't actually real?

It doesn't matter if we are in the hypothetical simulation or reality, or if we are already in a simulation right now imagining another simulation - no matter what, we have to act as if reality is real, because it's all we get.

And we do have pretty direct access to what we perceive as reality most of the time. Right up until we don't. Some synapses fire wrong and our version of reality branches from everyone else's, but for us reality hasn't changed. Any discrepancies we notice are easily explained away, and a lot of the time those explanations aren't excuses, they are genuinely believed, because to the psychotic they are real. And when the delusion is broken, do the psychotic feel relief at having reality corrected? Generally no, they are sad because their reality has been broken. People with schizophrenia who recover and return to their normal lives don't forget though, they just don't think about it. Because that's the only option available - act as if it's real anyway or fill a shopping trolley with garbage, put on five or six coats and start screaming at pigeons.