Tfw your brain is probably already in a vat and you'll never get to see what reality is like

>tfw your brain is probably already in a vat and you'll never get to see what reality is like

I wish more people understood the reality of this situation.

The more and more realistic VR's and Simulations become, the higher and higher the relative chance of us actually inhabiting such a thing increases.

There's no way for sure that we know of to determine whether or not you / your brain / your consciousness is actually being "strapped into" a highly advanced form of Virtual Reality.

Imagine if a child was born and immediately subjected to wearing an Oculus Rift-type VR system, whilst hooked up to an advanced nourishment and hydration upkeep system intravenously as to prevent malnourishment and thirst. The VR system would prevent him from removing himself from the system, it would prevent him from discovering the outside world, it would entice him with (perceived) pleasures, entertainment, obligations, duties, and so on. Perhaps virtually eating a steak triggered the VR system to deliver the wearer an IV dose of dopamine to cause feelings of pleasure, and other such methods of simulating reward systems.

If the child was raised "in" such a way, he would truly have no concept of the outside world. You could spin any reality you wanted for them, and they would have no choice but to accept it.

How do you know this isn't happening to you? How do you know you're not in a giant tube, suspended in liquids, being intravenously nourished, hydrated, stimulated, pleasured, stressed, and more? How do you REALLY know you're not?

> You do not know that

>You could spin any reality you wanted for them, and they would have no choice but to accept it.
For literally what purpose

According to your "theory", reality is a biolab full of bubbling vats.
Pretty boring, actchally.

natural selection probably keeps the probability low, you might keep a simulation going for years and years for your amusement for no net returns however few beings will do this when they must divert all resources to their unending war against the Zargons, if it is a simulation the being will end the simulation once it has the information it needs

Maintaining a sustainable existence of the human species.

Is that webm legit? Wouldn't think the mouse would have the required neural wiring to make the wheels spin or understand the input from the digital camera they have.

can someone explain this brain in a vat thing to me? i get the general idea, that we could really just be brains in a vat and thus our perceived reality is not real. but why, exactly, does it have to be a brain in a vat? can't it really be anything and the conclusion is still the same? i mean we could be pieces of computer code, we could be figments of imagination, and the end result is the same, why does it have to be a brain in a vat

We could go with The Matrix, whereupon humans are enslaved for their biologically produced electricity which is harvested for use as energy (by robots :V)

We could have driven our planet to the brink of devastation via nuclear war and/or industrial pollution, and were enslaved by the visiting extraterrestrial neighbors for our own good while the planet was repaired / recovering. We could possibly be forced to simulate developing green energy and fuel before we are allowed back into the real world.

Or even hostile aliens are possibly enslaving us via simulation and subliminally enticing us to have sex so they can suck our dicks and drain us of our precious jizzum.

Who knows? But the truth is that in all likelihood, we ARE most likely not experiencing true reality as it actually IS. We are limited to the EXTREME by the very narrow band of visible light frequencies our eyes can perceive, the very narrow band of audible sound frequencies that we can hear, the slim slice of smells we can detect olfactorily, and so on.

Don't ever act so pompous! :0

How do you know that 1 year in this reality is 1 year in their reality? If we're in a simulated reality, the scale of time can be programmatically altered. Ten billion Earth years could easily be 15 seconds in Base Reality years.

If they are practically infinitely complex, why aren't we?

We're not that complex. If our brains were a little smaller we'd be like chimpanzees, not really sapient beings that can opine over things like this on an electronic Laotian stir fry competition discussion forum.

Also it follows that if we were statistically likely to end up as beings at this level of evolution and civilization, a little after they undergo the industrial revolution and start increasing populations mind, that populations weren't very high beyond a rapidly approaching point.

This seems to fit. Sapient beings randomly emerge from naturally evolved life then figure out how to manipulate the world around them only to self-destruct at some point in their desire to sate their naturally evolved urges.

>Wouldn't think the mouse would have the required neural wiring to make the wheels spin or understand the input from the digital camera they have.
It doesn't need to understand anything. It's pretty simple:
>Take some rat neurons and keep them alive in a jar
>Hook up basic stimuli for input and register basic motor output
>Program the machine to move when the motor output is registered
The mechanics of wheel spinning isn't part of what the mouse neurons influence. The neurons just fire off the basic "GO" message and it goes.

I'm ok with this. I'd prefer this over the alternative which is being stuck in raw, hard reality.
If the simulation's good enough that you can't know, then why does it matter? Once you realize just how hard some things are to simulate you really start to appreciate the 'real world.'

prove that maintaining such a simulation would actually be sustainable

Thought they were using a whole mouse brain. Pretty sure that for a whole brain, it's not just a simple "GO," but actually a complex series of firings.

> Pretty sure that for a whole brain, it's not just a simple "GO,"
It depends on what you're trying to account for here.
Yes, there are more complicated processes involved that control exactly how muscles move.
But no, that doesn't have anything to do with something a rat or a person for that matter is aware of when they make the decision to move. You don't think about all the muscles in your body and how to move them when you walk, do you? These are lower level details that are irrelevant to the point of what this rat experiment was conducted for.

How do you know the universe didn't span into existence last Thursday?

The mouse brain is still interpreting weird signals from a digital camera that it's not accustomed to. It takes a while for humans to develop the neural machinery to be able to interpret the signals from our retinas. I can't imagine a mouse can just start interpreting completely foreign signals and use them to make decisions like stopping and turning.

They're not weird signals. It's just an electrical impulse. The machine sensors detect something, the electrical impulse is fired onto the neurons, and the neurons fire their own electrical output which goes back to the machine and makes it move in very simple ways.

If you send electrical impulses generated by a digital camera into the visual cortex of a human brain, it's not going to create a coherent image. Don't think it would for a mouse's visual cortex either.

It's not creating any images at all. It's just stimulating the motor cortex with electricity and picking up the output. It's a reflex, not an act of higher cognition.

Always thought it would be more complicated. How I thought it would be: retinas send signal to visual cortex, which generates new signal and sends to prefrontal cortex (for decision making), which finally sends another signal to the motor cortex to move.

What do you think is more likely? Any one of the situations I've proposed, or the entire universe and all "proof" of its existence spawning into existence last Thursday?

>hurr last thursdayism

there's no point in arguing with the "how u know ur not an orangutang dreaming teh universe" crowd. not that your virtual reality musings make any more sense than that.

Because I remember last wednesday

nice blogpost reddit

>t. Someone too stupid to understand the simulation arguement.

I really want to see how that thing was designed and coded from bottom to top.

Maybe all these smart computer scientists know more than me but I just don't see how simulating a complex world like this will ever be possible. Processing power advancements seem to be slowing down as you can't make transistors infinity small. Also just imagine how much power this simulation would require to run.

Even if it was possible why would such an advanced civilazation need to simulate us? They are probably smart and wealthy enough to solve any problem. This all seems like a theoretical philosophical exercise to me rather than a practical question.

It's just people who can't accept that's all there is to it all. There's no sense, meaning or purpose, there no infinite alternative universes, multiverses, no simulations, no nothing. Reality is just this, there's no deeper hidden true reality. I put all these people in the same category with people who rave about god.

>I just don't see how simulating a complex world like this will ever be possible
You don't have to get every little detail right. In fact, you would probably leave out a massive amount of irrelevant details, which would make the simulation a lot less costly than you're imagining. Nothing about the simulation argument requires perfect fidelity. We're pretty sloppy when it comes to perceiving the world anyway. Everything we know about perception tells us we're running on a ton of misdirection and fill in the blanks self-narration about how things "must have been" instead of taking in a literal copy of the outside world like we tend to believe we're doing when we look around.
>Even if it was possible why would such an advanced civilazation need to simulate us? They are probably smart and wealthy enough to solve any problem.
They wouldn't need to. They would just happen to decide to. And if there are as many advanced civilizations as you might expect given the size of our universe, the number of planets comparable to our own, and the rate of our own progress given the time we've had so far, then even if doing this is a relatively unpopular pastime you would still end up with lots of cases of advanced civilizations doing this because a small percentage of a massive starting population of candidate civilizations who might do this is still a large number.
Also, people spend less time on basic needs and more time on unnecessary but interesting pursuits the more successful they are so I don't know what you mean by them not doing this because they're successful. If anything, you'd expect the opposite, that being much more successful than we are they'd spend even more time trying out ideas that have little to no immediate relationship to survival basics. Just look at all the inane things we spend our time on now that a lot of physical labor needs have been industrialized / automated.

Simulation doesn't give you meaning or purpose either. Not sure how you're making that connection.
>Reality is just this, there's no deeper hidden true reality.
Simulation aside, scientific history has been nothing but discovering new layers of reality. That happens all the time. We don't have access to "true reality" through our sensory organs alone. Those organs just give us the tiniest little opening to begin learning more about all the myriad aspect of the universe they don't register.

Kek, you couldnt account for latency of such a system. As far as we know, the brain expects a certain level of stimulation and detail to remain sane.
I doubt a super-computer could handle the input an average human brain handles for very long, if at all. Even if you somehow figured out what the absolute minimum amount of detail your simulation can have before the person goes insane, and you use a baby or something, you couldn't massively connect them or anything because of latentcy, they would be complicated, using a ton of energy, wholly impractical on large scale.

So just stop worrying about it. Evan if somehow you had captors, they are nice friendly people who haven't killed you, so that's nice right?

>I doubt a super-computer could handle the input an average human brain handles for very long, if at all.
The human brain has extremely low power consumption though, like around 100 W. That's not very different from the power consumption of an ordinary PC and much less than the power consumption of a supercomputer. So if our brains are machines that can operate with that little power, then advanced civilizations can probably build comparable machines that can also do that amount of work with that little power.

>scientific history has been nothing but discovering new layers of reality
name one

happy birthday Veeky Forums

Physics, electromagnetism, heliocentrism, atoms, subatomic particles, special relativity

how are these new layers? that's just the universe and how it work.

>that's just the universe and how it work.
No shit it's the universe and how it works. How else would discovering a new layer to reality ever work than that? Nobody said anyone is creating a new layer to reality that wasn't there a day earlier. It's discovering something that was always there but you didn't know about prior to discovery.

You are the kind of people who comes to seminars and have to jump into the front row screaming "Aktchually that defenition...!" and annoy everyone with semantics.

>scientific history has been nothing but finding, collecting and analyzing information adding knowledge for all humanity and uncovering new layers of reality.

There, is your autism satisfied?

how is that comparable to a fucking simulation you ape

I explicitly said "simulation aside," so I'm not sure why you're trying to make this about simulation now. My point was independent of simulation, which is that "reality is just this" is not a very reasonable belief to hold. Whatever reality is, we probably have plenty of new discoveries to make in the future that will completely change what we think it is and how we think it works.

>break out of the matrix
>nfw reality is a docker container

Training.

>we live in a simulation
>my is controlled by bluetooth
>no security, easily hacked

Please let me free so I can enter a decently secure simulation

its a bad bad pussy in the jopa of the jungle

As long as they didn't put any of the real world's social security or credit card numbers inside the simulation I don't think security matters.

I bet all mind passwords are stored in plain text in a "passwords" file

You don't need mind passwords, in-program minds aren't PCI compliance issues.