#simulating

[mentalisttraceur]

I am probably at my closest to the believers in a God when I consider that my entire experience stream, this entire world, might be playing out in a mind vastly bigger than all of us combined - a mind with enough capacity to simulate all of our experiences.

Perhaps all at once, but it doesn't have to be at once - so long as that mind can remember or reinvent the pieces as it imagines our experiences, it could think us in whatever order, over any time scale, and we'd still experience it as simultaneous.

[tristaml]

H p76

[datarep]

The House Always Wins: Simulating 5,000,000 Games of Baccarat a.k.a. Punto Banco

[mentalisttraceur]

Sometimes it feels almost inevitable that there would be minds so large and complex that they have entire minds like ours play out in their thoughts as easily as we might conjure a moment of someone else's imagined experience.

Almost inevitable that we would be more likely to be inside such a mind, rather than the first minds on the "ground floor" of reality.

The only thing holding this at bay in my mind is the idea that surely there is no way for such grand minds to come into being spontaneously, without being built up to, first by long arduous natural selection, and then by more and more design as the minds get good enough to start deliberately striving to make artificial minds.

And so perhaps the odds across all possible universes are higher of getting to us from nothing in a ground floor reality, than the odds of getting all the way to minds big and strong enough to simulate so many of lifetimes like ours that it tips the odds in favor of us being simulated.

[mentalisttraceur]

I used to think this cultural appropriation thing was unsound bullshit based in confused immature slapping together of superficial social justice values like respect for other cultures.

Then one day I was simulating some possible experiences that I would have if I was a Native American, and I caught a glimpse of what it would be like to live in this world, to know the history that got us here, to be surrounded by the people in better conditions whose people persecuted the shit out of my people in some pretty awful ways, to know that my people's culture is literally dying out due to various factors related to that, and then finally to see those other people playing with superficial scraps of my culture, to see them making up and believing shit which just wasn't true, to see them adopting just the bits they like, and to realize that their version might be the one that lives on while my actual version winks out and is forgotten forever.

It's easier to picture this scenario if you have any idea or practice or truth that you actually care about people not getting wrong, because then you can imagine that instead of some bullshit ~culture~ that you don't really care about. Because it's easy for some people to see "culture" as just that - as a bunch of bullshit superficial stuff that doesn't really matter. So find something that matters to you, something that it really digs under your skin to have twisted. Use that.

If you can put yourself in those shoes, that's somewhere between unpleasant and existential-crisis-level horrifying.

And so one day I did that, and I felt it, and then I knew that was worth naming. Suddenly the term and rhetoric of "cultural appropriation" didn't seem like vacuous bullshit anymore - it seemed like exactly what someone might've come up with if they were trying to name that situation or experience. Suddenly it was only natural that if you started with that idea, it would get as popular as it did, that some of the seemingly vacuous bullshit would be un-nuanced application or bad presentation, and that some of the vacuous bullshit would be the result of nuance decay.

[mentalisttraceur]

Playing around with the idea of keeping a couple women friends in my life who I'm not in a relationship with and never intend to be, but I'll keep tricking my mind with outcome-sticky thinking into feeling jealousy about someone else "getting" them, whenever that jealousy would be useful for motivation.

Of course, ideally I would either motivate myself in other ways or could simulate my way to feeling jealousy, but reality can be a powerful motivator and it costs me no effort for reality to play out.

A flaw is that I intend to achieve a maximally fulfilled life, and probably will get reasonably close to that - I'm not sure if jealousy will happen readily-enough by then. This might also be a moot point because to have achieved that life, I would probably have had to master my motivation to the point of not needing this.

[mentalisttraceur]

Simulating

There is a big difference between just imagining, and imagining to the point that you have a realistic, automatic reaction. I call the latter "simulating". Imagination that does not achieve simulation is hollow, flat - you drive it but it does not drive you. When I talk of rehearsing cognition or scenarios in the mind, I mean simulating.

Simulation is one of the biggest reasons why imagination is valuable. Probably the biggest. Sure, imagination can enable mildly recreational daydreaming, and it can aid mental skills such as spatial reasoning, memory, or problem solving. But simulation is basically cheating. It is a hack for speedrunning almost any growth which comes down to knowing or controlling your own mind, and for having all sorts of experiences without their usual "real life" requirements.

It is also a liability. It can grow into compulsive maladaptive daydreaming. It can slowly consume you, as you get better at wireheading yourself with your thoughts. You can develop a powerful reflex of fantasizing at the slightest provocation. It can be hard to even maintain perspective of just how much you could be outside of your head instead.