Statistics and you!

[standalonehuman]

Hitori Togusa 3/30 near Recolle

Let me ask a question that is the reverse of one that, I believe Dave was asking before. Who has access to this site but has not seen any strange memories? A lot of people have mentioned the phenomenon of memories that have been recalled, but don't seem to fit with the rest of your life, or what you remember. I still love the term 'hallucinomemories.' But it can't be all of us, statistically. A related but different question, every time we talk about this, I have to bring up that I'm not an expert in memory. So do we have anybody on this site who is? Psychologists, researchers, somebody who worked in a memory lab during grad school? I'll take anything.

Comments

[standalonehuman]

Hitori Togusa I'd be with you on that, if it weren't for the paintings.
Hitori Togusa Looked up the work of a feudal era woodblock painter, now all of a sudden his works depict samurai and ladies riding chocobos, not horses.
Hitori Togusa Artist friend of mine has taken the change a little personally.

[blooming_resonance]

Well, I suppose "VR Simulation" isn't still out, is it?

I feel like there's been quite a few movies about it. Maybe a company finally took it all to heart and we're all sitting in weird computer pod-chairs. Changes to entire species don't just happen. Let alone fruit gaining enough of a brain to be able to control muscles to dance.

How we got here is anyone's guess, of course, but sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.

[standalonehuman]

Hitori Togusa I've been tiptoeing around the edge of this rabbit hole, but, you know what? Let's just dive in. Thought experiment. Say this is a virtual reality simulation.
Hitori Togusa How could we tell from inside the simulation?
Hitori Togusa Other than that stupid black cat trick. Man, I hated that movie.

[blooming_resonance]

Horses being spontaneously replaced with an avian species, and the whole rest of the world assuming that's been the norm the whole time isn't a good enough clue? It's so perfect, it was almost like someone just did "find and replace" in a text program.

And now these fruit. Fruit does not have the biological capacity to smile and dance around, but now suddenly it does. There's no good scientific explanation for it based on what I know. But if it was programmed to do it, maybe it could? Like a video game.

[standalonehuman]

Hitori Togusa Okay. This is very close to something I was saying not long ago. I think you're frighteningly right on the idea of the find/replace.
Hitori Togusa Horses got replaced with birds. But they're not flying birds, they're still birds that fill all the fundamental roles of horses from the perspective of us humans.
Hitori Togusa Draft animals, used for racing, transportation, or even in combat, seem to eat a similar diet.
Hitori Togusa The fruit, despite the smiling, still fills all the ecological roles that the previous fruits and fruit trees did. Animals still eat them, we still eat them, they still germinate and reproduce in the same ways as fruit trees.

Hitori Togusa Form has changed. Function has not. As strange as these changes are, they actually have not affected the world that much.

Hitori Togusa But then we get to ask "so how do you reprogram reality?"

[blooming_resonance]

Right, it's not like all horses got replaced by small animals or something, which couldn't do things like pull a cart or carry someone. I think that may have changed society too much. Or we'd be relying on something like elephants and horses would just have become a non-entity and something totally different would have replaced them.

Just as an example.

If it was a computer simulation, it'd be just reprogramming the simulation, then. Maybe you have a computer controlling the reactions - what is that, the AI? - of the people who are not part of the experiment, and they're just hollow approximations of people we once knew, based on how they're programmed.

But then we are... hmm... ourselves. Just seeing how we react.

[standalonehuman]

Hitori Togusa Not the train of thought I was expecting from someone whose parents work in a psychological field.
Hitori Togusa Have you followed in their footsteps, or are you working in a different field?
Hitori Togusa I ask because we've got a few programmers around, people who have been trying to look at Retrospec from the technical side. But even attacking the problem through the tech, how would we be able to tell if we're inside a simulation?

[blooming_resonance]

It still feels and sounds more like a VR or sci-fi movie than anything actually happening. I suppose I could've said someone was using some kind of chemical or electrical stimulation to change all of our perceptions of reality, but that would be extremely hard to do to a random group of people who weren't already all gathered together.

Besides, it wouldn't account for the changes to actual physical beings. You can make someone hallucinate the vision of a giant bird instead of a horse, but changing tactile stimulation feedback would be an entirely different matter. It would still be in the shape of a horse under your fingers, even if everything else was changed. Same goes for the fruit.

It's easier to assume that it works like a computer than anything else, if that's what you were wondering. So I don't have the slightest clue how it would begin to work, but I at least know what Artificial Intelligence is and how it works in some video games. I may be older than half the users on this place, but I don't live in a cave.

Telling we're in a simulation might be related to the tactile feedback idea, maybe. Except I rode a chocobo once. It felt, moved, and was shaped like a giant bird. So I guess it's just the impossibility of replacing a four legged animal with a two legged one that indicates it's some sort of absurd alternate reality.