The Simulation Is For The Mice

I really, really, like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, because Zach clearly gets the joke. Like this comic: It’s great not only because it got an initial laugh. It also has some additional embedded assumptions that are just wild, y’all. The black swan fallacy. The argument above only works if all sims are porn. They’re not, so this proves nothing. People don’t actually like it when they get everything handed to them, either in narrative or in real life. On the other hand, there’s also lots of people don’t have enough handed to them. And this is the big one that gets me to laugh at ourselves as a species: It assumes the simulation is being run for the benefit of those inside it. Most discussions — at least at the pop-sci level — of the simulation hypothesis don’t emphasize that part well enough. {1} If the universe is a simulation {2}, then the odds are good that it is not for our benefit. It might be, but there is little indication that is the case. And as Douglas Adams pointed out…