that night i was admitted to a mental hospital in November, 1992, i had the most frightening thought before i was sectioned and hauled off in a van: i was the only real person there, the other people in the room, all not real. solipsism was to me extremely disturbing. the idea had never occurred to me before that night. i didn't want to believe in it.
i am not solipsistic but i find it hard to believe as i once did that everyone is a real person. so it becomes a guessing game. what percentage of people are real? when i meet someone am i dealing with a real person? do real people have a presence?
if you think about it, how likely is it that all lifeforms that possess consciousness are capable of being human? surely not 100%. could there really be billions of people that could be configured as human? yet it appears there are.
what is unquestionable is that this reality possesses high intelligence. intelligence that could run a simulation?
and why are we here? i don't remember asking to be born on Earth. what is the purpose of the simulation? simply to meet other people?
i used to think of people that aren't real as "illusions". now in popular culture they are called NPC's.
if you seriously entertain the idea that the world of Earth is a simulation, populated by fewer than 100% real people, the concept of risk changes. you might like to visit somewhere abroad. it looks so good in the brochure. what if complete countries have 0% real people? with no one real to do anything there, aren't you straining the compute needed for you to visit this place? consider that real people generate programs for doing things, processes that can be shared with other people. if driving a car works for me, it can work for someone else. it is a risk to do something that no one real has done before then surely? what if you get in the plane to go off to that place in the brochure with a 0% real population and the simulation just freezes or worse because the place simply does not exist yet? more commonly, what is it like to go from somewhere where say 50% of people are real to somewhere where only 1% are? i think i have got what that feels like going somewhere where nobody seems real.
to put it bluntly, assuming as i once did as a child that the world is 100% populated by billions of real people now seems naive.
CLEARCHARGE
