Magic may well have been real. Healing crystals, shamanry, witchcraft, voodoo, things of this nature may have been real at one point and have since been patched out. These could have simply been glitches in the program.
We’ve all heard of glitches in games that can be exploited that eventually get patched. Could have been real.
Nothing matters and we’re all going to die. Nobody will remember or care about anything we did. Everything that will ever exist will eventually die a cold death due to entropy. So just have fun and be nice to each other until it’s over.
This applies whether it’s a simulation or not. The end result is the same.
The second Matrix movie basically had this idea in it. Those ghost twins were part of it, but they also straight up mention vampires and werewolves casually as the French dude explained how these all used to be systems setup by the machines to control the system, like a precursor to Agents.
I could imagine that “daemons” may have manifested as actual demons inside the Matrix.
There was this old cold fusion joke that went something like that. Where a programmer notices someone getting free energy. They proceed to fix the bug, recompile and reboot. Fixing the problem.
Days late but I’ve found it
“Yo, Mike!” “Yeah, Gabe?” “We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah.” “I thought you fixed that last century!” “No, no, not that. Someone’s found a security problem in the physics program. They’re getting energy out of nowhere.” “Blessit! Lemme look… <tappity clickity tappity> Hey, it’s there all right! OK, just a sec… <tappity clickity tap… save… compile> There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?” – Cold Fusion, 1989
Or, just phases in the game. Like, Civilization, only magic fades away when you enter the industrial age. Sure, you’ve got all this written media talking about the supernatural and magic, but there’s no enduring proof, and later generations just accept it as superstition, despite the global written anecdotal evidence.
Love it.
The ruling class has the cheat codes.
Never change, Lemmy.
That is actually the entire premise behind the book series Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer.
People find the data file for our simulation and modify it to do “magic”.
There’s a book series based on this general idea, it’s called Magic 2.0
This exact sentiment crosses my mind on occasion while I ponder the apparent infinity that is the universe.
I prefer to assume that we are simply the hallucinations of a brain floating through space. Which is more probable than everyone living in a simulation and a lot funnier to think about.
One of the best episodes of all time.
Until you name that “brain” Azatoth and everyone loses their minds.
Imagine we mix the two. If a single developer created the (computer) simulation we are living in, aren’t we a hallucination of his brain?
I wonder if it’s more or less likely that would be the work of a single developer, or a collaborative effort, like complex development projects require a large group for us. Would assuming a hyper-intelligent brain, or one with infinite time change the equation?
Now I imagine how having infinite power and resources in this universe would make a difference. Is this floating brain (let’s call him ‘god’, just as a placeholder) be more likely to create a physical structure (atoms and such) to run his simulation/hallucination/thought experiment, or just use abstract structures? And would it make a difference for the simulated/hallucinated people inside?
How did the brain get into space?
It formed there.
Statistically speaking it is more likely that a single brain formed randomly and is hallucinating the existence of our lives than our species forming as we are through billions of years of evolution and existing on Earth.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Mark Twain, or possibly Benjamin Disraeli
People who don’t believe in Math are doomed to be taken advantage of. ;)
I’m honestly charmed and impressed by how infuriatingly you applied that quote. Bravo!
I prefer to think we’re simply the hallucinations of a possible brain, with no way to distinguish every possible brain that could exist from ‘real’ brains that exist in reality.
Glitches usually don’t accidentally cause entire “features” to emerge.
arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities
Or—they were different concurrent simulations using overlapping memory locations.
People tend to misintrepret what the simulation hypothesis actually suggests. The idea isn’t that these simulated worlds would somehow be fictional or like video games. The point is that we take the known physics of the universe and run computer simulations of it. Things like magic would be just as impossible in these simulations as they are in the base reality. There’s no reason to expect that things would be any different even if we in-fact did live in a simulated world.
Your point doesn’t necessarily disagree with the OP point. OP is saying that the simulation was supposed to be realistic but had glitches that people interpreted as magic.
There are multiple simulation hypotheses, both are possible, as are others.
