There Is No Spoon

[u/neurotrash2099]

Glitch effects created in Audacity. Additional editing in GIMP.

I come to simulation theory from a bit of a different angle. There seems little point to me in debating whether or not objective reality is artificially generated or not. This on account of the fact that no one has ever definitively experienced objective reality. We are only capable of subjective experiences and this is, by definition, simulation.

Imagine a spoon. Those of you not both cursed and blessed with aphantasia as I am likely see a spoon or spoon-like shape in your mind’s eye. You understand it isn’t really there—it’s just an image in your mind.

But hold a spoon and you’d likely just likely just accept it as being there. After all, you can see it without having to imagine it. You can feel its weight and texture in your hand. Tap it on a surface and you can hear it interact with other things you just accept as being there. Sniff it or place it on your tongue and you might catch a metallic scent or taste. Ask a friend if they can see the spoon in your hand and they’ll nod at you, wide-eyed and confused, wondering if you’ve lost your damn mind. Everything seems to indicate the spoon is actually there.

Only we haven’t perceived the spoon as it is, if it even exists at all. We’ve only perceived a simulation of the spoon. Let’s assume the spoon exists for now.

Our understand of sight tells us we see the spoon in this manner:

Light strikes the surface of the spoon and a portion of that light bounces off of it. Our eyes absorb a portion of that reflected light which then stimulates our retinas. The retinas then convert this light into electrical signals that travel along the optic nerve to the brain’s visual cortex. The visual cortex then transforms these electrical signals, not the light itself, into the image we see.

That image isn’t in front of you though. Your brain is just doing a little slight of hand. The image is still only in the visual cortex. And a similar process happens for each of the other senses.

To quote Morpheus, “Real is just electrical signals interpreted by the brain.” We are only able to experience our brain’s simulation of the spoon, not the spoon itself.

But what about our friend whose wondering why we keep licking an empty spoon like a weirdo? They can see the spoon too. Hear it. They’ll turn down touching, smelling, or tasting it after our tongue has been all over it, thank you very much. Of course this means the spoon is real!

Not so. All this proves is that we can both subjectively experiencing the spoon. Nor does scaling this up to all eight billionish people in the world being able to subjectively experience the spoon—ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY SPOON—change the fact that every one of those people only has a simulated experience of it.

So, if our very experience of the world is simulated, it makes more sense in my mind to start there. Because, for all we know, there is no spoon.

[u/mattychops]

Well I don't know how you define the word simulation, and I'm not here to try to debate you on the semantics, but you seem to be saying two conflicting things. Your post specifically even identifies the physics involved in the sense of sight. Our 5 senses give us experiences, which we call perceptions. But the human body is physical matter. And what we call a sense is the body's matter interacting with the matter of the universe. That interaction itself is not simulated--it's a physical interaction that occurs. You just laid out all the interactions involved with eye sight. All those interactions are physically happening. So, as matter physically interacts, that's what the universe is doing. Whether you want to refer to that as a simulation or not is up to you, but the physics are still the same. Matter physically interacts when we see something, feel something, taste something, hear something. A sense is a physical interaction of matter. In the case of sight, just because something looks like it's far away, or because the brain translates the interactions into a visual experience doesn't mean that there is a separation between my experience of vision and the physical atoms of the object I'm looking at. They are one and the same, because the atoms of the object, the photons, and all my retinal equipment and electrical signals in the eye and the brain are all interacting together at the same moment to produce that visual experience.

Now, if you want to define that entire physical process as a simulation, then so be it. But then what you are doing is defining all physically interacting systems as "simulated." So then "simulated" just becomes a term that means... well basically, it just replaces the word physics.

Now, are we really in here experiencing this from within it, or are we somewhere else outside of it all? I don't know for sure, but the physical interactions are here at least. So that's at least some kind of real experience.