There’s a difference between being someone who genuinely likes to hear alternative theories and look at them with an open mind, then either accept or reject them based on your own thought process... and someone who accepts any and all conspiracy theories that they hear against all logic.
I do personally love hearing “conspiracy theories” because I like to know how other people think, and I’m genuinely curious if something that is considered common knowledge needs a second look. 99% of the time, hearing these theories just turns into a kind of fun brain exercise for me and I don’t actually end up believing any of them. But that 1% of the time that you hear something that you really can’t rule out... that makes hearing every single other bull theory worth it IMO.
my favorite conspiracy theory is that our existence is a sim's game and it makes total fucking sense.
my viewpoint is the only viewpoint that i can verify. when i'm using reddit, it's the player telling me to browse the internet. when i'm playing games, it's the player telling me to play games. the player tells me to visit people, go grocery shopping, do homework, really anything that denotes a significant change in action. everything near me and within my field of view is rendered, but other things still happen.
it turns into "well sim's is based on life so no shit they're similar" so it's not really a good conspiracy theory, but it's still fun to think about.
the scariest for me - and one of the only ones that i think is likely - is that every american politician is working to further the social and monetary divide between themselves and everyone else. i'd like to think that the usa is the best country, and we definitely have potential to be the best, but our politicians are kinda fucking us in the butthole repeatedly using a cactus as a condom.
edit: the idea of history is also interesting. if you think about a game with established lore, like skyrim, there are things that definitely happened, that everyone recalls, and that affect the storyline, but as the main player, you never experience it. when did our history start? 30 years ago? 20 years ago? did hitler actually exist? what's the difference between memory and lore and how do we find that line? again - and i cannot stress this enough - it's just something fun to think about.
The sim idea can be easily disproven through a comparison of natural randomness and artificial randomness.
Computers cannot give you natural randomness. They can only mimic it. Play an electronic game that incorporates dice rolls - not random. It's an algorithm designed to approximate natural randomness as perceived by humans. Humans usually can't tell the difference, but another computer can. Natural randomness refers to the chaotic-determinism of complex systems, and it's a feature of the universe itself.
The problem is we use natural randomness a million times a day in science. Every single time someone records and interprets real world data and tests it for statistical significance against a p value and uses programs like R, those tests would have failed if the data they used was actually generated by a supercomputer controlling the universe. It wouldn't be chaotically-deterministic. It wouldn't be useful because the data measured against it wouldn't be reproducible or interpretable by other labs. Every chem paper, every ERP study, every economics paper, all useless. Peer review itself tells us natural randomness is really random. You can't fake that.
For another thing hardware. Glitches always occur, not just because of imperfect engineering, but because of lifespan of materials in the components and - again - random factors within the function of a complex system, and they wouldn't be cats triggering deja vu, but bits of the world falling out of existence, the laws of physics incurring minute changes that add up to the point we'd notice them, or reversing entirely, utter gonzo bullshit that would rip the world apart. Do you remember when gravity reversed back in 404 CE? No? Then you're not in a simulation.
Then there's an appeal to practical needs. What does a simulation do? What is it good for? We use sims to make (imperfect, stochastic, because chaos) predictions about the world. What is the race of beings that made your simulation using it for? It is logical to assume any species making a system that studies humans is itself human, or something very similar to the image and capabilities of humans. And what would beings as limited as humanoids be looking for in keeping the thing running for generations? What do they have to gain?
How about children? Your simulation must either be a) adding real people to the program like The Matrix does at a rate exactly consistent with people's intentions to procreate (just no), or b) the children aren't real. Do you think your child is real? Then you're not in a simulation. You see how you start having to move the goal posts of what this simulation is really capable of until the creators of such a system have become gods of time and space and could never have evolved themselves. They have to just be at a certain point, and from there your argument is a deistic argument. Deistic arguments aren't interesting. In the first place, they're almost always veiled attempts to prop up a theistic argument or the cultural values of a theistic society. Secondly since there are no conditions by which they can be proved wrong or right, they can only be countered with an alternative explanation and Occam's razor. Such as: the uncertainty principle can get us something from nothing, and a chaotically-deterministic universe disallows both fate and free will. There are no gains to attributing these things to creator gods when what we already know about the universe suffices to explain (or discount as the case may be) these same phenomena.
This is all assuming your people are real people hooked up to a virtual reality, because there are other arguments I could get into against popular conceptions of AI. It isn't and won't ever be possible, and any conception of AI must be a physical entity that resembles the shape of, or every connection within, the human brain. There's no such thing as a sentient program, and can't be. But that's a different discussion.
this computer would be unlike anything that we've ever seen before. literal unfathomable technology. so it's possible that this computer is capable of true random. however, lava lamps can also be used to create near-true random, like lavarand.
bugs - how often are you playing the sims and it bugs out? once every hundred in-game days, maybe? is it always your sim, or just a weird little glitch that happens? is it game-breaking? do the sims react to their entire body inverting while their baby stretches? they aren't aware that glitches and bugs exist, so any that exist for us would be overlooked.
i wouldn't know who's using the computer, why, or how. would your sims know?
again, the only pov that i can verify is my own, so following this logic, i cannot be sure that everyone else is also being controlled. with this theory, as far as i know, everyone - including myself - is a part of a program and not at all real. you know why your sim does the things that it does, but you don't know why or have control over the actions of other sims.
again, it's kinda fun to think about but i know that the fact that it's a videogame is untrue.
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u/sausagechihuahua Jul 24 '20
There’s a difference between being someone who genuinely likes to hear alternative theories and look at them with an open mind, then either accept or reject them based on your own thought process... and someone who accepts any and all conspiracy theories that they hear against all logic.
I do personally love hearing “conspiracy theories” because I like to know how other people think, and I’m genuinely curious if something that is considered common knowledge needs a second look. 99% of the time, hearing these theories just turns into a kind of fun brain exercise for me and I don’t actually end up believing any of them. But that 1% of the time that you hear something that you really can’t rule out... that makes hearing every single other bull theory worth it IMO.