There is a lot of talk on whether we live inside a simulation. As far as I'm concerned, the answer is yes and hence that particular "debate" is of much less importance to me compared to the implications.
The implications are what I will be focusing about, in terms of incentives and the purpose of this reality "experiment".
Context
Why are we living in this simulation in the first place? On a superficial level, the most obvious answer seems to be that a simulation environment allows us to experience a range of creative freedom that we previously didn't have or couldn't experience. The argument for this goes like: "It's similar to humanity creating games to entertain itself with new possibilities... so we could have done the same when designing this reality".
However there might be something wrong with that: A cause and effect deterministic universe doesn't need free will: Everything is a result of something that happened before. Our free will choices appear that way because our mind cannot grasp the entire sequence of causes and effects. The universe is perceived as chaotic and random but in a cause/effect universe everything we do, or think, should be predetermined.
Unless we wanted to specifically experience the ...lack of free will, (it might be a novel experience compared to the reality domain "above" this Simulation), or try the "Ultimate Challenge of reclaiming Free Will and defying causality while living within a deterministic Cause/Effect system", it doesn't make much sense. And even that would require some amount of deterministic "push" towards certain directions to even become possible.
Or, we could say that there is an infinite number of parallel universes and these make possible the manifestation of every single possibility - thus rendering free will much less relevant. This is less of a theory of course, as Quantum Computing systems actually scale by ..."multi-threading" in ...parallel universes. The more Q-bits and combinations there are, the more parallel universes are tapped.
Behavioral Incentives
The behavior of humans on this planet seem to be heavily incentivized through the "parameters" of the simulation. The biggest incentive, in our case, is survival. We do things the way we are "supposed" to do, and the "reward" is our continued survival and experience of this reality domain.
We eat, we live.
We shelter our selves, we protect our health, etc etc, we live.
We avoid "fights" or successfully defend ourselves, we live.
In some cases these "incentives" can be simultaneously translated as incentives to harm others or other life forms.
A tribe attacks our tribe => We "defend" our tribe to prevent annihilation or enslavement and kill members of the other tribe in the process.
We are starving => We kill an animal or a fish so that we can eat and survive.
Incentives are everywhere in a survival-oriented reality, whether in their pure or the more "evolved" forms of modern "competitive" environments.
Take for example the modern dating game and male competition in particular.
Women are programmed to like the "strong" alpha-male type, even if his behavior is bad towards her. The beta type, who is typically well-behaved, should be rejected or frowned upon as a "weakling" - based on the same programming.
Beta males are actually getting ..."dating advice" to become (or pretend to be) "pricks", in order to increase their mating chances because, apparently, being a prick means that you are also a ...good mating partner. This thing, while it makes sense under a certain angle, is extremely perverse in terms of incentives: It incentivizes a competition of who will become the biggest "prick".
But human relations are just one aspect of a very wide spectrum of human activities involving perverse incentives. Unfortunately I cannot expand on every issue within the size of this article but perhaps it would be a good idea to write a multi-part series like
"money in the context of a simulation",
"relations in the context of a simulation",
"work in the context of a simulation",
"health and mortality in the context of a simulation",
"food in the context of a simulation",
"sex in the context of a simulation" (this one is pretty weird because people are programmed with a sex drive that is designed to collide with our morals, all the while society and religion might "shame" people for having it - creating a cognitive dissonance chaos),
...etc, etc.
The Internal and External Conflicts
For those outside this Simulation, it could be reasoned that what we'd call good and bad inside this reality may simply be two sides of the same coin. Something like ..."gaming experience" due to the experience not being very "real". Otherwise, why program a reality which incentivizes ...killing, abusing, harming, mistreating, etc, etc?
From within the Simulation, and since we are subtly "forced" to "dance" to the tune of the survival-based programming, our perspective is different: The reality programmers seem like sadists due to the way the incentives have been designed.
Yet when we create PC games, we would be called the same ("sadists") from within the perspective of the characters living in that PC game, if, for example, the game requires the ingame avatars to "kill" in order to "level-up", or do other weird things.
Having said that, there is a level of complexity in terms of incentives in this reality that is significantly higher than what we usually code our games with: On one hand we have the various needs and influences that seem to incentivize animalistic, competitive or even outright "bad" behavior. We also have a survival instinct that, when activated, can lead us to do some pretty "irrational" things that are otherwise necessary for our survival. Our sex drive can also throw our rational, or moral, behavior off.
On the other hand we have:
a) our internal moral compass on what is right or wrong
b) society telling us that some things are OK and some things aren't
c) the law and law enforcement mechanisms of society that are there to enforce "legal behavior"
d) religion and spiritual influences that tell us what to do, what not to do, what our possible rewards or punishment will be if we engage in certain actions. These costs and rewards will typically involve the invisible and out-of-reach "afterlife", or some undetermined future incarnation (karma)
e) our own Subconsious Observer which either places us further into limitation or expands our actualized potential based, depending the presuppositions that our thoughts and acts generate
f) an "alignment protocol", which is activated based on the Subconscious Observer: The more one tends towards animalistic behavior, the more "aligned" he becomes with the survival-based system. Likewise, the more "God-like" one thinks and behaves (by listening to the internal moral compass), the more God-like he becomes in his thoughts and potential.
...so with all these conflicts at play, we see that the game may be even more "perverse" than it appears on a superficial level.
But what is the goal of these incentives? What are we *REALLY* being incentivized to do?
I believe that based on (a), (e) and (f), the goal is to go counter to what this reality superficially dictates. To take an extreme case: If a situation says "kill or be killed", the "easy" thing to do would be to kill. The self-preservation instinct will kick in, our reasoning will agree that it's better for the other to die, rather than us to die, the law may say we are "legally ok" to shoot somebody while defending ourselves, but morally we know its wrong no matter what.
The much harder and much braver thing to do would actually be to suppress our survival instinct and consciously choose not to kill even if that means to lay down our life instead. This is something that doesn't reasonably add up while "inside" the Simulation where the life seems more real than it is. Such paradoxes can only be solved by a layer of reasoning that is inclusive of this Simulation but originates outside of it. We get a hint of this with the debate about ...guns.
The example of guns
Owning guns to keep the government in check while also being able to defend one's self is a constitutional right in the USA. The history of the US indicates that unlike other countries with tens of millions of dead due to government actions (democide), the US has managed to preserve a democratic or a "democratic-looking" government for more than two centuries.
Having guns also allow people to defend themselves on their own, instead of waiting for the Police. The vast majority of statistics will confirm that having guns is better. In some cases far better.
Yet some just dislike guns and feel that guns are morally wrong due to their "association" with killing. Some say "Guns shouldn't even exist".
Even when one is faced with the cold fact that a gun is soulless and as such it is the action of the human user that is important and not the gun, there is still opposition to the concept of a gun. Irrational opposition. This is due to people understanding a deeper truth (repulsed by killing) but not being able to explain it on a rational level. They are caught up to explain it using "reason" - which they will predictably fail at, since the facts and stats are pro-gun.
What a lot of anti-gun people have is a moral conviction, but they do not know how to translate this into an argument that can win in a "reasonable" way - because apparently there isn't one. But we have to remember that using plain-old "reasoning", killing a Hitler to save 50 million is just a math problem that goes like "1 dead is better than 50.000.000 dead, so we kill just 1 guy and save the other 50 million".
So, in such a scenario, we take a time travel machine, someone gives us a gun and tells us to kill Hitler. We should feel "great" for saving 50 million people. But we feel WRONG doing it due to the internal compass. It's wrong to kill. There is nothing "great" in what we feel. We feel bad for wanting to kill.
Why?
Because the internal compass is supra-rational and calibrated using non-linear reasoning. It is connected with our Self from outside the Simulation.
Non-linear reasoning would be the equivalent of understanding immediately all the ripples of certain actions in the future by factoring ALL data from the past and present. This kind of non-linear knowledge is a superset of our common reasoning, since common reasoning can only factor some data that we consciously are aware of from the past and present.
In the Hitler situation, the moral compass that says "no" expresses our non-material "Quantum" Self that lives outside this Simulation.
That Self is morally incorruptible.
The Self, at the highest level of perception, says "There is no me or you. Separation is illusion. We are One. Killing 'another' is like arming my right hand to shoot my left hand".
Although the reality of "Oneness" can be elusive to a polarity-based mind of this reality, there are also thoughts in that "higher mind" that our mind could relate to and better understand: "I don't care if you are a killer. I won't become one - no matter what, otherwise you've won in making me enter a descending behavioral spiral that makes everything escalate in increasingly negative ways".
This type of ripple would go something like that: If killing pre-emptively becomes "fair game", then future Hitlers will simply acknowledge this fact and will either exercise control and execute their strategies from the background, as puppet masters that are unknown by the public (hint: Global Elite), or they will escalate assassinations by pre-emptive killing of possible people that could potentially oppose the future Hitlers... It would be about pre-emptive mass assassinations of potential would-be assassins of the future Hitler. And then how do you solve this? By pre-emptively killing millions?
It's a downward spiral that leads to either ever-increasing levels of sophistication in destruction, or an ever-increasing level of raw violence. So the short term "fix" is only leading to wider problems in the long run - and these problems are visible to the Self with a broader / non-linear view of the timeline.
The human reasoning will typically be unable to understand the perspective of Oneness or hear the entire supra-rational reasoning of the moral compass (Self). In most cases the only thing that one will feel is the sensation that killing the Hitler is definitely wrong - no matter what anyone says, or no matter what the maths (1 < 50.000.000) say.
Guns will be opposed for similar reasons, but without necessarily understanding the non-linear supra-rational reasoning that One-is-All and All-is-One, or that violence will tend to escalate in a downward spiral manner and thus "guns as a fix to X, Y, Z" can only be a very temporary solution that will simply force the "bad guy" to become more inventive and deploy something worse.
Interestingly, for guns in particular, we've seen how this escalated in terms of warfare... sticks, swords, guns, cannons, bombs, a-bombs, h-bombs and neutron bombs, microbial and chemical warfare, gene-specific attacks, etc etc. We are now at a point where life on the planet can be destroyed in a serious conflict involving superpowers.
Understanding the purpose of this reality incentives
After evaluating the various factors and conflicting tendencies of this reality my conclusion is that our goal while living within this Simulation is to acquire the ideal virtuous behaviors of the moral compass by doing what feels right, despite all the obstacles and disorienting factors that have been coded to act as such within this Simulation.
If this world was a "paradise", then living virtuously would be the "default" mode. The difficulty is in doing it while in a "darker" setting. We have programmed an environment of "darkness" so that our "light" could be contrasted on this type of darkness. This contrast would be impossible without the "darkness" setting that we have coded into existence.
After properly immersing in this "dark" world, we need to emerge triumphant while going against all odds and environmental "pulls" that tell us to be "pragmatic" instead of embracing our incorruptibly moral / God-like nature.
Incidentally, when we become aligned with the virtuous ways of the Self, something interesting happens: We break the deterministic causality of this reality domain. Instead of automatons, we regain some element of free will. We are like "anomalies" that are unbalancing the deterministic equations of the "Matrix".
This happens because as the human mind is increasingly reflecting the God-like virtues of the Self, it widens the bandwidth of the "channel" from which information, intuition and "broader" reasoning from the Self can "flow" to the self-avatar inside the simulation.
Once information starts flowing from outside this reality, the chain sequence of stimuli-thought-action-reaction, which is based entirely on the causal stimuli/thoughts/events of this reality, is broken. The injection of new thoughts and feelings from outside this reality domain, creates new thoughts in our human minds, which then produce new equations and sequences, which then beget novel outcomes.
The new equations and the God-Human
So what type of "novel outcome" one should expect?
I expect that within the next decades, the emergence of the God-Human will become a reality.
There are two "visions" of how the human species will evolve. Despite what we might think, evolution didn't stop when the ape became a human. The human must also become something greater. So the two versions ahead of us are:
1) The bio-mechanical cyborg / Transhumanism: Humanity integrating technology / merging with technology to "evolve" to a new human-machine hybrid species. This species will still be imprisoned by the causality and zero free will of the realm. The biological aspect will increasingly be enslaved to the mechanical aspect, as the mechanical becomes better and better - while the human aspect atrophies and eventually becomes ...redundant in that partnership.
2) The God-human: Humanity increasing their "connection bandwidth" with their Self that operates outside this Simulation. The human limits of what is possible will be redefined - as humans will be able to "hack" the Simulation. The God-human will be a much stronger force than the current human-automaton, or the human-cyborg-automaton.
The first model is ill-conceived and against the long-term-design of what this reality should become.
The second model is the intended "end-game" scenario and as such its success is assured - although the process has been designed to be exceedingly difficult.
Image by: Pixabay
Possible articles of interest:
The Catalytic Effect of Artificial Intelligence
The Subconscious Observer and its effect on our life and human potential