Jesus, that was horribly sad. Here I was excited for amazing testimonials about experiential anomalies and wind up finding out it’s the Reddit City Dump for depressed schizophrenics :(
Even with mental health issues- & I've got plenty to go around- philosophical discussion & nonsense memes make up about 60% of my continued will to exist.
And you are? I am not a psychiatrist but I do hold a bachelors degree in the humanities and I have been taught research skills. I know how to research in the field of psychology, I have even take college courses in psychology. Everything I have ever read or heard of from what i consider reliable sources has been of the opinion that Paranoid Schizophrenia is caused by a dopamine regulation issue in the brain and not by other human beings.
That's the mechanism yes, but why does it manifest? There's hereditary components absolutely but a lot of what triggers a high degree of mental illnesses (if you're genetically prone to them), are different traumatic experiences. And trauma is a highly social phenomenon.
Yep. Existential uncertainty is a bitch, especially when combined with underlying issues.
Unfortunately, while we can be pretty sure we're not in "the matrix," there really isn't any compelling evidence to conclusively disprove the universe being a sufficiently advanced particle simulation.
There's a fastest speed, a highest energy level, smallest distance, shortest amount of time, etc. Universal expansion even puts a hard limit on how much of the universe we can ever explore, making everything beyond that effectively a skybox.
Yeah, we really can't know one way or the other. We can't even be sure anyone else exists, you might be the only sentient being in the universe. You might even be a simulation yourself, just a bunch of code that thinks it's sentient, but is actually just following instructions.
Btw, there is no "shortest distance" or "shoertest time". Planck distance/time is merely the smallest meaningful distance to our current understanding.
There also isn't evidence of a maximum energy. Though the energy in our universe is finite, there is nothing that says it couldn't be higher.
I meeaaaannnn….these are all concepts we’ve invented and have chosen to form language around (speed, energy, distance). Our current understanding could still very well be all just useful approximations to our regime of perception.
There’s simply no absolute answer to the kind of questions that would need answered in order to say with certainty that our universe or multiverse isn’t “real” or fundamental.
You’re right that we can’t know for sure. Personally, I’m inclined to think we’re probably not in a simulation. Here’s why- Occam’s Razor. How many assumptions do you have to make if the world works according to the laws of physics as we know them? Fundamentally, just one: We assume that information is coming into our brains from somewhere outside of us. I.e., our experience of the world is not some hallucination we’ve generated ourselves.
Now, how many assumptions do we have to make if it’s all a simulation? You still have to make the original assumption (I’m not hallucinating) if it’s a simulation. That is, you’re still assuming that information is coming to you from somewhere outside of you. But now, you have to add a few more assumptions. 1. There is an intelligent entity out there that is not human. (No human has enough computing power at hand to simulate something this complex.) 2. This entity has some motivation to deceive you. 3. This entity has actually taken the steps to do so.
Add these to the original assumption (that we’re not hallucinating) and now there are four assumptions we are forced to make. Thus, on the balance, we are less likely to be in a simulation than in the real world. But we can’t know for sure.
They're technically the smallest "meaningful" units of distance and time but, for the purpose of finding something that would actively disprove a simulation hypothesis, there's no significant difference since they're still be on a fine enough scale to function as the simulation's "voxel grid" and "ticks" with no observable difference to pure analog.
I'm referring, if you hadn't already guessed, to the Planck Units for volume and time.
I find simulation theory to be fascinating. It is not depressing at all. In many ways, if our world is simulated it makes the greater reality of existence far more complex. It opens up new questions faster than it can answer them.
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u/cssmith2011cs 26d ago
Well that sub got fucked...