Imagine you’re walking along and someone near you says what the dude in panel one says, then disappears. Pretty sure you’d have doubts about your own reality.
Right, but why would everyone want to logout? If you don’t remember how you login you’re probably a npc. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to signal the computer that you want to “exit”.
I feel like having the capacity to question your own nature of existence sort of proves the existence to begin with. So if the fear is genuine, they too are genuine. Whether they are in a simulation is still debatable
Maybe its not about a game at all and dude has just acquired the ability to suspend his consciousness and the other people want to also be able to just stop existing for a while…
Source: I bought the DLC to gain the actual knowledge of reality a few years ago, and it’s the biggest mindfuck a DLC has ever been. Well worth it. If there was a dev I would have said it was their masterpiece.
Interpretation a) they are not real. They are part of the game/simulation and are not real, therefore they can’t log out.
Interpretation b) they don’t have the correct command. Sometimes computer are very nitpicky on what they understand and how you have to formulate a command. But one person seems to say exactly the same as the one who logged out, so either the computer is very nitpicky on the specific timing of words, or the command is user specific.
Interpretation c) they are not allowed to do that. Like in they don’t have permission to execute the logout command, like you don’t have permission to shutdown the computer infopoint in a mall. Or think of it like the matrix, where someone doesn’t want to let you out.
Interpretation d) subconsciously they don’t want to. Imagine the command is not what you say but what you really want, so they can’t log out, because subconsciously they do not want to.
Personally I tend to interpretation a) because there is this theory that in an endless or nearly universe, it is basically given, that some species will invent a computer that is capable of simulating an universe, which in turn will have a simulation going, because the same rules apply. Now if you follow this train of thought, you will arrive at the conclusion that for every universe, if there are multiple, there is a basically endless number is simulated ones, which makes the chances that you are not part of a simulation practically zero. Yeah, so that’s that.
there is this theory that in an endless or nearly universe, it is basically given, that some species will invent a computer that is capable of simulating an universe, which in turn will have a simulation going, because the same rules apply
My main gripe with simulation theory is that this claim just seems… false.
First off, it’s not possible to create a simulation of equal complexity to the host universe, so each iteration would necessarily have to be smaller, and I would contend significantly so.
Even the wildest theoretical computers can’t even simulate Earth, much less the universe.
There are a couple tricks one could use like having some parts of the simulation skip steps in less important areas, simulating different parts at different times in the host world and only syncing them back together when necessary, which would end up being invisible to those inside, as well as the simulation not running in real time, where it might be running slower or inconsistently in the host world, while inside the people see it as stable and not slow.
Not that I’m claiming it’s true; it’s simply an interesting thing to think about and ways around processing speed issues. If humanity ever makes a simulation of even a small universe, I imagine some of these tricks that are smoothed over in that universe would be used, since it can look messy from the outside but look normal on the inside.
You’re, of course, right about simulation speed not necessarily having to match host universe speed, but an issue you can run into is that your universe experiences heat death before anything interesting happens in the simulation.
I’m extremely skeptical of in-universe physics hacks not being observable. What does it mean for an area to be less important when we can look up at the sky and observe tiny little photons from the beginning of time (almost)?
I mean more that things people in a simulation can’t observe with great detail yet won’t be simulated with great detail until they can see that kind of detail, and by then, I assume technological advancements in the host world would have improved hardware to run on that allows that kind of detail to be simulated in a reasonable amount of time. Plus there’s also the ability of the host world to edit the simulation so that things that weren’t simulated in great detail when observed by people in the simulation before retroactively was changed, so that people inside always were able to see things in great detail in their memory, history, and other forms of knowledge from their points of view, but from the outside, things inside were changed minimally to make them consistent with any retroactive simulation conflicts. Not in a dystopian way, mind you, just in ways like “this very star was actually always a few light years away from its current position in the sky”, like small technical details that are smoothed over in the internal history as seen by the simulation inhabitants to match up with other parts of the simulation.
A common argument for simulation relies on infinitely nested simulations to conclude that the probability of being in the real universe is virtually zero.
What I’m pointing out is that the infinite simulations premise is nonsense.
Chances are that we’re not in a simulation, but you’re right that for our universe to be simulated, the host universe would need fundamentally different physics.
Even then, I feel like you’re underestimating the scale of the universe. Dwarf Fortress is laughably simple compared to a real universe. It’s a toy. You’d need something more than a couple extra dimensions for our universe to be at all comparable to that.
In our world that is the case but even in video games of today we have world building to make things more interesting like how you can shoot fireballs out of your hands while in real life you can’t the blokes simulating us probably just thought a word where you can’t have a simulation replicate itself as more interesting than their world really because we only have this plane of existence it’s hard to say what other universes would look like and thus simulation theory is more of a shower thought analyzing a question that has a sample size of 1
Yeah, this theory is not airtight even without me cutting corners in the explanation to keep it brief.
I imagine you can fix the holes with some thinking and speculation, but then again, does it really matter if you are just a “NPC” I mean for everyone else you are, but to yourself it’s only you who can answer that.
I can’t look into your head and you can’t look into mine (metaphorically speaking) so we can only give each other the benefit of doubt.
I suppose our universe is a simulation it’s probably possible that the devs could see exactly what we are thinking but considering evolution it’s possible living things in general weren’t intended our universe could probably be a simple dirt simulator and some bug in the engine made it possible for a specific explosion in a specific place accidentally made these special dirts to combine and create these slime contraptions that started to make themselves more and more complex and now they are combined into rigid structures that are exploiting the light and material ripple functions to interact with one another and the devs are just watching this bug and seeing how complicated it gets
Note: reading my comment back this sounds like a gag from hitch hikers guide to the galaxy
Yeah my guess is, that it’s either not meant to be funny but more like though provoking or existential horror inducing.
In the other hand it can be funny as in “I’m laughing at everything that stresses me to cope with things I can’t control”
I don’t understand
Imagine you’re walking along and someone near you says what the dude in panel one says, then disappears. Pretty sure you’d have doubts about your own reality.
Plus, finally a chance to exit the crapsack timeline we’re living in? Pretty tempting.
What do you think why he spends his time here? His reality is worse!
Same reason for all disaster tourism.
Not necessarily. I play a lot of video games that suck worse than this reality. Dead Cells is still pretty fun, but I sure don’t want to live there.
Ok, you got a point.
Imagine people wanting to come to our reality for fun. Our reality is like GTA but without cheat codes
Who knows, maybe the NPC’s are just that good at conversation and they suck ass everywhere else.
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But maybe, MAYBE, there’s other simulations better than this one.
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Don’t exit, sorry to be unfunny. Escape reality instead via book, games, and what not.
Right? People saying “lmao they know they’re NPC’s” but all I see is people desperate to escape this shitty life.
Right, but why would everyone want to logout? If you don’t remember how you login you’re probably a npc. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to signal the computer that you want to “exit”.
It’s a joke about existentialism. They don’t know if they’re NPCs, or just users who somehow forgot. And if they’re NPCs, they don’t want to be.
If I’m an NPC… COMPUTER - LOG OUT! LOG OUT!! 😨
I mean, there are easier ways if you just want to logout to a void
Easier than uttering a phrase?
Believe me, they’re not easier, and they don’t fail cleanly.
exit(1);NPCs perspective when you exit a video game.
Shoutout to Epic NPC Man
EEEEEPIIIIIC NPC MAAAAAAANNNN
Morning great day for fishin ain’t it huhuh
The people in panel 2,3,4 fear they might not be real and just NPCs.
I feel like having the capacity to question your own nature of existence sort of proves the existence to begin with. So if the fear is genuine, they too are genuine. Whether they are in a simulation is still debatable
I think, therefore I am.
I think I think, therefore I think I am…
I think I think therefore I am therefore I think therefore I am… I think?
Maybe its not about a game at all and dude has just acquired the ability to suspend his consciousness and the other people want to also be able to just stop existing for a while…
But how do you unsuspend when your entire conscious is not doing anything?
Just wiggle your mouse or hit your space bar of course.
An external timer maybe? Like an alarm clock for your existence…
So basically sleep
People who believe in God believe themselves to be NPCs.
Correct.
Source: I bought the DLC to gain the actual knowledge of reality a few years ago, and it’s the biggest mindfuck a DLC has ever been. Well worth it. If there was a dev I would have said it was their masterpiece.
He got to escape this wretched reality.
We live in a simulation
Same. Why don’t the other people just log out too? Are they that addicted to this silly game? I like logging out at night to relax a bit.
Interpretation a) they are not real. They are part of the game/simulation and are not real, therefore they can’t log out.
Interpretation b) they don’t have the correct command. Sometimes computer are very nitpicky on what they understand and how you have to formulate a command. But one person seems to say exactly the same as the one who logged out, so either the computer is very nitpicky on the specific timing of words, or the command is user specific.
Interpretation c) they are not allowed to do that. Like in they don’t have permission to execute the logout command, like you don’t have permission to shutdown the computer infopoint in a mall. Or think of it like the matrix, where someone doesn’t want to let you out.
Interpretation d) subconsciously they don’t want to. Imagine the command is not what you say but what you really want, so they can’t log out, because subconsciously they do not want to.
Personally I tend to interpretation a) because there is this theory that in an endless or nearly universe, it is basically given, that some species will invent a computer that is capable of simulating an universe, which in turn will have a simulation going, because the same rules apply. Now if you follow this train of thought, you will arrive at the conclusion that for every universe, if there are multiple, there is a basically endless number is simulated ones, which makes the chances that you are not part of a simulation practically zero. Yeah, so that’s that.
My main gripe with simulation theory is that this claim just seems… false.
First off, it’s not possible to create a simulation of equal complexity to the host universe, so each iteration would necessarily have to be smaller, and I would contend significantly so.
Even the wildest theoretical computers can’t even simulate Earth, much less the universe.
If you’re dealing with a bunch of Jerrys you can step the complexity down to 5% with no noticeable effect.
I assume you’re referencing that children’s cartoon with the drunk scientist
I wouldn’t recommend it for children, but if you fit absurdism into a box and call it for kids because you don’t like it, then yeah.
I’m a bit lost can someone fill me in on what cartoon y’all are talking about
Rick and Morty
Touchy
There are a couple tricks one could use like having some parts of the simulation skip steps in less important areas, simulating different parts at different times in the host world and only syncing them back together when necessary, which would end up being invisible to those inside, as well as the simulation not running in real time, where it might be running slower or inconsistently in the host world, while inside the people see it as stable and not slow.
Not that I’m claiming it’s true; it’s simply an interesting thing to think about and ways around processing speed issues. If humanity ever makes a simulation of even a small universe, I imagine some of these tricks that are smoothed over in that universe would be used, since it can look messy from the outside but look normal on the inside.
You’re, of course, right about simulation speed not necessarily having to match host universe speed, but an issue you can run into is that your universe experiences heat death before anything interesting happens in the simulation.
I’m extremely skeptical of in-universe physics hacks not being observable. What does it mean for an area to be less important when we can look up at the sky and observe tiny little photons from the beginning of time (almost)?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232062849_Constraints_on_the_Universe_as_a_Numerical_Simulation
I mean more that things people in a simulation can’t observe with great detail yet won’t be simulated with great detail until they can see that kind of detail, and by then, I assume technological advancements in the host world would have improved hardware to run on that allows that kind of detail to be simulated in a reasonable amount of time. Plus there’s also the ability of the host world to edit the simulation so that things that weren’t simulated in great detail when observed by people in the simulation before retroactively was changed, so that people inside always were able to see things in great detail in their memory, history, and other forms of knowledge from their points of view, but from the outside, things inside were changed minimally to make them consistent with any retroactive simulation conflicts. Not in a dystopian way, mind you, just in ways like “this very star was actually always a few light years away from its current position in the sky”, like small technical details that are smoothed over in the internal history as seen by the simulation inhabitants to match up with other parts of the simulation.
It just means that our universe is extremely simplified compared to our host universe.
A common argument for simulation relies on infinitely nested simulations to conclude that the probability of being in the real universe is virtually zero.
What I’m pointing out is that the infinite simulations premise is nonsense.
Chances are whatever dimension is hosting our Universe server, is probably 4th or 5th dimensional.
Sorta how we can make a detailed 2D simulation like Dwarf Fortress. Our 3D universe might as well be somebody’s Super Nintendo.
Chances are that we’re not in a simulation, but you’re right that for our universe to be simulated, the host universe would need fundamentally different physics.
Even then, I feel like you’re underestimating the scale of the universe. Dwarf Fortress is laughably simple compared to a real universe. It’s a toy. You’d need something more than a couple extra dimensions for our universe to be at all comparable to that.
To be completely honest, dwarf fortress is way more complex then tic-tac-toe.
Compared to a universe, they’re equally complex.
Tic tac toe is on the order of 10^2 bytes.
The Dwarf Fortress install is 10^8.
The number of particles in our universe? 10^80
In our world that is the case but even in video games of today we have world building to make things more interesting like how you can shoot fireballs out of your hands while in real life you can’t the blokes simulating us probably just thought a word where you can’t have a simulation replicate itself as more interesting than their world really because we only have this plane of existence it’s hard to say what other universes would look like and thus simulation theory is more of a shower thought analyzing a question that has a sample size of 1
There are people who seriously believe that we’re in a simulation.
Yeah, this theory is not airtight even without me cutting corners in the explanation to keep it brief.
I imagine you can fix the holes with some thinking and speculation, but then again, does it really matter if you are just a “NPC” I mean for everyone else you are, but to yourself it’s only you who can answer that. I can’t look into your head and you can’t look into mine (metaphorically speaking) so we can only give each other the benefit of doubt.
I suppose our universe is a simulation it’s probably possible that the devs could see exactly what we are thinking but considering evolution it’s possible living things in general weren’t intended our universe could probably be a simple dirt simulator and some bug in the engine made it possible for a specific explosion in a specific place accidentally made these special dirts to combine and create these slime contraptions that started to make themselves more and more complex and now they are combined into rigid structures that are exploiting the light and material ripple functions to interact with one another and the devs are just watching this bug and seeing how complicated it gets Note: reading my comment back this sounds like a gag from hitch hikers guide to the galaxy
None of those interpretations are even remotely funny
I personally found the comic funny with a few of them. In either case, this is comicstrips not funnycomicstrips.
Yeah my guess is, that it’s either not meant to be funny but more like though provoking or existential horror inducing. In the other hand it can be funny as in “I’m laughing at everything that stresses me to cope with things I can’t control”