Episode 2337 CWSA 12/29/23 Why do We Keep Confusing Political Opinions With Mental Illness?

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Back to episode — Episode 2337 CWSA 12/29/23 Why do We Keep Confusing Political Opinions With Mental Illness?

Context —

ke empty space. If you were to travel into space and try to grab something in space and see what's in there it would be empty. You have this so-called dark matter might be nothing might be something but it might be nothing. So there'd be a lot of nothing and that tracks. How about the fact that whenever we can determine it our reality seems to map to math formulas? Why is it that there are physic…

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ld be reproduced by word patterns is pretty obvious evidence that you're a simulation. Pretty obvious right?

If you're saying to yourself I don't see it Scott that's because you have a line of code that's preventing you from seeing the obvious. I know you don't like that.

How about this? Do you believe that most of the characters you encounter are real players or are they NPCs? Do you see a lot of people in your life who don't appear to be based on logic and they don't appear to have a history and they can't tell stories? There are people if you go up to them and say can you tell me a good story about anything like that was cool or interesting when you were a child and some of them can't like an NPC. So our real world has people who for all intents and purposes look like they're mindless and they will act like that their entire lives and you'll wonder what's going on. That's what you'd expect if we a simulation. You'd expect some of the characters might be players and some of them might be NPCs.

How about this? If you were building a simulated environment would you tell these simulated characters that they had free will or would you tell them that everything they do is just cause and effect and it's based on their programming? Well I think you would tell them they have free will. And what would be the evidence against it? Free will. All of science 100% of science really tells you you don't have free will. There's no part of science that's credible that tells you have free will. So what does a, if you were made as a simulation and it was really really obvious that free will didn't exist but it was really important that the characters in it thought it existed what would be your observation? Your observation would be it's obvious there's no free will but everybody around you is convinced it's true. That's what I see. I see the people around me believe they have free will when to me it's really obvious they don't. Like really obvious.

All right how about this? Here's my favorite one. I saved it for last. What

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Wisdom from this episode

"So our real world has people who for all intents and purposes look like they're mindless and they will act like that their entire lives and you'll wonder what's going on. That's what you'd expect if we're in a simulation. You'd expect some of the characters might be players and some of them might be NPCs."

Real life contains people who seem utterly mindless their whole lives, which is precisely what a simulation containing both conscious players and NPCs would look like.

"If you were building a simulated environment would you tell these simulated characters that they had free will or would you tell them that everything they do is just cause and effect and it's based on their programming? Well I think you would tell them they have free will. Your observation would be it's obvious there's no free will but everybody around you is convinced it's true."

A simulation would convince its characters they possess free will even though science shows none exists; the result is a world where the absence of free will is obvious to some yet everyone else is certain they have it.