Yesterday evening I spent some time talking with my good friend Jasmine about my CAJ “The Simulation Theory”. She had never heard of it so I started to explain her the basic idea. I didn’t have to go on for very long about it. She immediately got the idea and drew the comparison to the movie “Matrix”.
The first thing that came to her mind was the idea of not being responsible for what she was doing. She told me that she didn’t believe in God per se. She believed in a higher power but that could also be a programmer of the future. Then she said something really interesting. She actually liked the idea that there might be a programmer who programmed us and our lives. I found that quite surprising as we talked about this in one of Henry’s classes and the majority of students were afraid of that thought. So I asked her about what precisely she was so happy about if there were to be a programmer. The funny thing is that she admitted that she would feel kind of relieved if there would be somebody out there who had programmed her life. She said that she wouldn’t have to worry about all of her decisions because the programmer would be responsible for taking them. She basically meant that she could pass on all of her responsibilities towards her life to the programmer. In a way, that seemed like a really big relief to her.
The first point of discussion brought us to a next thought on which we couldn’t really decide. We were wondering if the programmer would program really all aspects of our life. Like, if he would decide about anything that happened to us or if he would only provide a frame. We talked quite a while about the idea that maybe he would give all conscious beings in his simulation a general direction of their lives, exactly as we did in “The Sims”. We argued that he might have decided that some individuals should follow a career as mathematicians and others as professional singers. I think this idea was particularly interesting as it implied that our abilities might come from this decision. If let’s say person X was programmed to become a mathematician – doesn’t matter whether he became a teacher in a high school, university professor or scientist – the programmer might have included all the necessary abilities to become one in him. So, this would explain why some people are better in doing one thing than others. In a way, biology wouldn’t be the solution for different abilities within human beings.
Next, we started a discussion about why one should create a whole universe. In general, we found two solutions:
1. 1. the person might just be bored and to him, we are like a big reality show and he is watching what we are doing just for fun.
2. 2. he might want to let the simulation solve problems which the programmer or his universe is actually suffering from or he might want to see how another universe might have dealt with a particular problem.
Jasmine wasn’t too in favor of the second option so she went more or less with the first one. She argued that the programmer might just be bored and we would be like a big reality show to him. Whenever he felt like watching TV, he would switch on his computer and look what’s happening in his small simulated universe. I believe that this scenario could be absolutely true. That’s exactly what humans do. Instead of living their own lives, they follow the lives of others. We concluded that boredom would be a pretty good reason to create a simulated reality.
Whereas I didn’t have big problems with the second argument, Jasmin really had. She just couldn’t see the point in letting others solve your own problems. She said that going through a rough patch was what makes you stronger. So for her, simulating a universe just to see how these people would solve problems of another universe was just ridiculous. I tried to challenge her by saying that the programmer might have created a simulation where 10 years equal 1 day in the programmer’s life. So he would program the simulation a couple of days before a decision had to be made in his universe, for example war or no war. And he would have created two simulations, one would go for the war and the other one wouldn’t. In one day he could see how these two decisions might develop within ten years. I asked her if that wouldn’t be a promising way to make a great decision. Well, she didn’t think so. She said that it would always depend on the people using these simulations and what they wanted to achieve. I think she clearly has a point there. If these simulations would be used by careless and corrupt politicians (just an example but I think quite an accurate one), they wouldn’t help nobody. They would go for the option which would bring the most profit and not the one which might save a country or maybe the world.
All in all, I think we had a really nice discussion about the Simulation Theory and I liked the way we brought it to an end. Jasmine smiled and said that she never even has thought about the chance that we might not be real. However, she wouldn’t mind and with a laugh she grabbed her glass of wine and said: “Well, my programmer wants me to drink another glass of wine and have fun tonight!” I believe that sometimes it might actually be kind of nice to think that somebody else decided what we should do. If it helps to get my mind of studying and to stop being stressed for just one hour, then I totally go for the idea of a simulated universe.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen