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 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.