(August 4, 2015 at 1:07 am)robvalue Wrote:(August 3, 2015 at 3:04 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: What difference does it make if they really exist or not?
I mean that seriously.
It's the difference between real life and a computer game. I know the "people" in video games aren't real, as far as I can possibly tell, so I'm happy to do whatever I please to them for my own amusement.
It's an interesting question though, what if I knew for certain that no one else was actually experiencing anything at all? Would it change my behaviour, and if so, how? I think it would change my behaviour, although the details are rather sketchy. For example, secondary/long term concerns such as "the environment" would no longer matter very much to me. Also, I'd feel a great sense of relief that I can't hurt anyone except myself.
As for dealing with people and animals directly, it may well be the case that my behaviour doesn't change a whole lot simply because of the positive/negative responses I get from my actions; and if they are still going to "lock me up" for acting crazy, it's a real deterrent to me even if I decided I wanted to start acting that way. In a computer game, the "deterrents" are easily worked around.
But this isn't why it troubles me, or at least I don't think it is. I'm not exactly sure why it does trouble me... It isn't something constantly on my mind, it's something that I just come back to now and again. I've accepted it's a fruitless endeavour to try and answer it. We seem programmed to get the fuck on with it and not consider this too often.
You know your life is very different from the computer games that you play (that you know are computer games), because you will get locked up for playing the 'reality game' in certain ways. You do not get a reset button or an option to play a different game. You are stuck with the one 'game' for life.
I wrote about something similar in another thread:
#174
It will help if you read the post at the link above before proceeding in reading this post.
If I 'knew' that my life was a computer simulation instead of being 'real,' I personally would do EXACTLY the same things I do now, because all of the consequences for me would be the same as they are now.
Do you want to see the 'simulation of your wife' crying? Would that make you happy? If not, then you, too, might want to do exactly the same things, regardless of whether your life is 'really' a computer simulation or not.
I really do not see any reason to behave differently. The ONLY things that make different behaviors reasonable would involve differences in what is observable. If everything is observably the same, then the same actions make sense, regardless of any unobservable differences.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
