Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
It wouldn't change anything because this is the reality we have. I wouldn't suddenly become immoral because there are still consequences and even if some people or even everyone but me is not real, they will still react as though they have emotions. If I hurt my wife, she would still cry. If I did something bad enough, she might divorce me. Take half my stuff. Lose some access to my kids. Those are all real consequences even if the people are simulated.
Maybe I'd be less concerned for people not immediately around me because any good simulation wouldn't actually sim everything out of range, so there wouldn't e.g. be Palestinians starving to death if no one "real" was there.
I suppose it would re-open the question of existence beyond death, but I don't think I would ultimately come to a different conclusion—there is no reason to think this experience would continue past my own death, and if I were memory-wiped and re-inserted it wouldn't really be the same me anyway, right?
If it were matrix-style there is a reality out there to experience if I can leave the simulation, I'd have some hard thinking to do about whether that would be likely to be a better existence than the one I'm having here.
Great point! I never find this line of questioning interesting for this reason. It doesn’t change anything