Originally posted by ErgoTheConfusion
One of the ones that will be available to us eventually is to immerse a person in a game where they forget they are playing a game. I don't mean virtual reality where your senses can't tell the difference... I mean you "wake up" as Guybrush Threepwood in an 8 bit 2D Monkey Island and you TRULY believe you are Guybrush, that the world as you see is real and the only one, and have to figure out how to get out.
Reading this part kind of blew my mind.
It would make perfect sense if we really were in a simulation. Imagine sitting in another dimension, and we agree to play a full lifetime here on a simulated planet to learn valuable lessons and become more 'experienced' and 'evolved'.
But there's a catch... once the simulation starts we forget everything and don't know anything other than the simulation we are in, so we believe that all this is real, as we have temporarily forgotten everything else. It's the only way that a learning experience like this could work. If we knew it was fake, we wouldn't really come out on the other side with genuine insight and experiences, because we would be saying "well it doesn't really matter, we're just virtual beings anyways". We would have to have our original awareness erased so we would take this experience seriously for the time being.
The 'game' starts from the moment of birth, and that's when the memory is wiped clean. When we die, the game ends, and the real 'you' in another dimension regains the original awareness, gets up from his/her chair and says "God damn, I need a cigarette after that one!"
And then a few hours later we move onto a new virtual 'life' (reincarnation)
[Insert obligatory Bill Hicks quote here]
This is all just speculation and rambling, but it's so interesting to think about. It makes so much sense after reading some of the posts in this thread.
edit on 11-7-2012 by Xaphan because: (no reason given)
