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As for "TEH SIMULATION" theory, any inner experience is a simulation. Your body is the simulator, bringing you (somehow!) an *experience* as you physically move through the world. The world may as well be a DVD, and your body is the player. Base reality is a simulation.

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For example, PAIN does not exist in base reality. Without an observer, in the cold, dead world of scientific materialism, there is no pain, only things smashing indifferently into other things. Create a "being" in this reality, and you have a robot that might at best say "Ouch" or perform a pain response when smashed by something but does not *feel* pain. To make it feel something, you have to add a simulator: wire something physical into something... else(?). You have to choose that certain things will be mapped to certain experiences, and other things won't. Purple light will look purple, infrared light will not be seen. This is a simulation, even if you create it in base reality. We live in a simulation, and it is most likely right here in base reality.

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The Drake equation: checking his numbers is a distraction. Our attention goes right to his numbers, checking his estimate of the probability of this kind of planet or that kind of star, when we should check his *entire framework*, his choice of what probabilities to include, what questions to ask. If you want to control the answer, control the question. When you pick a question, you are picking the answer. If you didn't know the answer in advance, then you're more sincere than you might have been, but that doesn't make you right. His choice of probabilities to include comes from his framing of how the universe is. This is why rigorous mathematicians prove esoteric things like "the solution exists" before they buy into any solution. Math (and all rational analysis) lives inside a bubble of non-math: does this equation MEAN anything, and is it fit for our PURPOSE? You don't answer those questions with math or science. This is what scientific materialists CANNOT look at. It breaks their brains. Because they are a religion (of trying not to be a religion).

In other words, I agree with you! :D

For most/all of these arguments, you could easily construct its opposite. Let's dream up a bunch of forces that work against life, quantify them all as probabilities, string them together, and get a crazy-low probability that life could happen (isn't this equivalent to the finely-tuned universe hypothesis?). I guess that would mean this must be a simulation, LOL! It's a bit like the broken window fallacy, looking only at the glazier's income from repairing the window, ignoring the deficit of the broken window... or the lost time spent having a broken window and getting it repaired, which you can never get back.

Perhaps we could call this whole category "One-sided ledger fallacies."

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