We Are Still Not Living in a Simulation

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

The recent partial collapse of the Metaverse, when Facebook parent company Meta lost 26% of its market value (or $232,000,000,000) in a single day, as well as the proliferation of new images this triggered of the ongoing transformation of Mark Zuckerberg’s flesh-and-blood body into a dead-eyed simulacrum of the sort only billions of dollars can buy, appearing ever more as if made out of the same materials as Stretch Armstrong (Karo corn syrup, latex), seemed a good occasion to revisit, perhaps more compellingly than on my previous attempts, the so-called “simulation argument”: the idea that what we think is reality is in fact a “computer simulation”.

The other occasion is the publication of philosopher Dave Chalmers’s new book Reality+, whose title sounds like something you might also buy stock in, especially if you are banking on a future of increased technological mediation between human experience and the world, in which our very idea of what is to count as reality will be correspondingly less dependent on the old criterion that served us reasonably well for at least some centuries (even if it has by no means been the default view of human cultures in most places and time): that to be real is to be out there in the external world independently of our experience.

More here.