Too many things have lined up to not go with this belief. This weekend a bunch of strange events occurred and none of it was even related to any major events in the world. We did a quick poll on our running joke, “Questions for Plato”, where we asked if the world we live in was a simulation or not. It ended up being a rough 50/50 split down the middle. We’re on the “yes it is a simulation” side of the equation now. It certainly sounds like witchcraft, but we’re not talking about the horoscope lies that everyone seems to believe these days (praying that they have “astrology on their side”). This is going to be much more high-level, a rare move on this side of the web, as most philosophy is just nerd porn.
Simulation: Living in a simulation implies that we don’t have free will. Instead we’ve been programmed to operate a certain way through life. If you believe that you have free will, try to do something that is horribly bad for you (in your opinion). It won’t work. Similarly, in what appears to be a contradiction, you could find errors within any particular simulation. Simulations are governed by rules so if you can find the tweaks that others are not aware of it means you’ll get ahead in this programmed game. Naturally, this means you have to be lucky enough to realize you’re in a simulation to game the system.
That’s more than enough of the insane high level stuff for now. Instead we’ll turn to the facts. The world operates based on a bunch of rules. If you jump out of a plane with no parachute onto cement, you are going to die. If you lift heavy weights your muscles grow in proportion to the stress it is able to handle (pre-determined by genetics). If you run fast, your heart rate goes up. We can go on and on about all the rules we have. The “naysayers” will then say “but we haven’t figured out how to solve XYZ yet”. This doesn’t work logically since the absence of a solution does not disprove the rule. In fact, all it means is that we haven’t figured out the “why” yet. The “why” is being figured out at lightning speed.
Figuring Out the Next Why: Look at anything from quants for stock markets to sports betting etc. There are no arguments anymore. Artificial intelligence and computing power are better predictors of human behavior than humans. Press releases of earnings come out and the algorithm will know if the stock is going up or down based on the release. It will also scrape conference calls and figure out if the stock will move up or down during the conference call. In fact, if you read interviews of successful quant funds they will publicly state that a lot of their signals do not make “logical sense”. Meaning? The machine simply learned that if XYZ is used the stock will go up or down, even if it has nothing to do with the fundamentals of the Company.
What is the point here, the point is that humans are incredibly predictable and we are simply learning how to perfect that science. Currently we use probabilities which are going to become more accurate… slowly but surely. We can already predict a person’s sexual orientation, their risk of developing a particular disease and more.
Thinking further, we see an extremely clear business model where older people are able to catfish as being attractive men/women in V-logs. We’ve gotten to a point where physical images are so fake that if you meet the Instagram star/model in person… they rarely look like their photos. Their general body/face/structure was simply the “best fit” for the current set of photoshop tools.
This “new business model” has already happened at a low scale with CGI images. Who would pay $1000 for a model photo shoot, when a $100 picture of a fake model is proven to be more attractive? *No one*. This is an area that has already been disrupted and if you’ve missed it, you haven’t been looking hard enough at those original “photos”.
Hopefully you’re at least partially convinced at this point, we’re now able to pinpoint how humans will react to information with increased accuracy (stock market example) and we’re able to pinpoint what exactly is the “most attractive”. Over time, specialization will take over these industries. One image will be used to sell shoes, another when attempting to sell high-end cars, another when selling software products etc. When we say “image” we’re referring to everything from the person selling it to the design of the website to the sales memo. We’d say it’s essentially guaranteed.
Put These Two Together: Since rules govern the entire world and on top of that we’re simply scaling up the ability to read how humans interact, it’s a matter of time before everyone is predictable. This also explains why successful people and unsuccessful people will rarely ever connect or get along. They don’t understand how the “wiring” works. More spiritual people will call this a “vibe” or a “feeling” when it’s simply how their hardware is running. Those in touch with their own hardware know what they are projecting out from month to month, sometimes its high energy amped up working on a grand idea (most common with successful people age 18-25) or it could be a relaxed mode as they contemplate a move (typical for people in their 30s). The “vibe” or “energy” (insert any other hipster explanation), is the heat emitted from the computer hardware that you have.
Clear Explanation of the World: If we are living in a simulation it actually makes a lot of the things we see make logical sense. The people who are “low consciousness” just don’t have the hardware to understand the data being thrown at them. Think of trying to run a high end software program on one of the very first personal computers. It wouldn’t make sense and the interpretation of the data would be wildly inaccurate and more importantly irrelevant. If you load up a file with the wrong program, the file has no value and just looks like a bunch of spaghetti thrown against the wall.
This would also explain the tendency to “find” people on your general wavelength. Everyone has a different wavelength and will interpret you a bit differently. But. Why is it that unlucky people always get head nods when they explain that they are unlucky. Also. Luckier people tend to always have things fall into their lap at the right time because they are emitting the right “wavelengths” to the world. This is much more likely to be by design.
This also explains why the same message can get interpreted entirely differently. If you want to have fun with this, make up a random quote and tie it to different people. The person who said it will determine their interpretation of the quote since individuals latch onto an anchor (which is always the person). Similarly, since sound and vision quality differ from computer program to computer program (person to person), the message will always be different. This also explains why music preference can be polarizing.
Thinking this through, if we’re in a simulation then we should see a non-linear improvement in predictability. This is undeniably the case today. Every ten years or so, the amount of things we know to be true changes exponentially and many of the world’s “mysteries” are solved. This will continue to occur.
Practical Use of This: Not much to say from a practical standpoint. Since the poll we sent out got 50/50 results, this means that half the people will laugh and say “what is this nonsense” while the other half will say “this makes some logical sense”. Any time you have polarizing events like this it isn’t worth it to have a discussion since it would be similar to discussing “politics”, hint, no one has ever sat down with a liberal/conservative and convinced them to switch over.
Concluding Remarks: Taking a step back, some of the smartest people in the world (Elon Musk being the most public example) believe that we are in a simulation. In addition, many brilliant mathematicians have also made this argument in the past. People with low IQs and low success are usually the ones to argue against it the most (this also pushes us towards belief in the simulation hypothesis). There is no way to prove that we’re in a simulation, so if we’re wrong that’s perfectly fine. That said, when we look at how the world operates it’s clear that we’re moving closer and closer to predicting all human behavior (only possible if we’re pre-programmed and events are not truly random).
