[Zolda]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

What you're saying sounds more nihilistic to me. Even if someone's life is a fabrication, it's an arbitrary detail. If they can feel happiness, despair and love, then that makes them as real as anybody else. Only they can decide the worth of their life.

Which part of what I said was nihilistic? Is it this part?:
"Well, his world and all its inhabitants do not exist in the first place. There's no meaning in things that don't exist."

If yes, then I think you misunderstood something. You said "their lives", but can you call their lives lives if even their deaths can be easily toyed with and manipulated? Like I said in the same post: Repetition/quantity debases something. Repeated death debases death, thus debases life itself. Death is what makes life worth living. Our lives is worth living, precisely because each of us only have one life. When it ends, it ends. No Goddess of Creation, no wish-granting entities, no buts, no ifs, it just ends. End of story, literally.

That's the fundamental, irreconcilable difference between reality and simulation:
In reality, you have something called absorbing barrier. It's a point of no return, kinda like a flyswatter, that when you touch it, you stuck there forever. Forever. One of the known absorbing barrier is death. In reality, death is permanent. Unless you're a prophet, no one will ever return from death. In reality, time flows only in one direction: To the future. You can't turn back time to save someone from death or recover something from destruction. Time already lost can't be regained. You can never change the past. In reality, there are things that are impossible to change. After all, we all know the definition of reality: Something that can't be changed, whether you believe it or not, no matter how hard you try. I've elaborated this point in my first post in this thread.

In simulation, there's no such thing as absorbing barrier. If you die in an iteration, you simply retry in another iteration. Everything can be changed if you don't like it. Time can be turned backward (or even forward). Everything can be returned to previous states. Everything can be undone. Nothing is lost. No life is lost. Looks cool, right? Right? No, sir! If you can't lose a life in a simulation, then it means that you don't have it in the first place. You can't lose what you don't have. A reality where everything can be changed is a very, very sad place. Mesnick nailed it in one of his previous posts in this thread: If everything is possible, then nothing matters.

One way to ethically solve this simulation problem is by leaving the simulation alone. Never tamper with it, let alone toy with it. Once it's running, just leave it as it is and never touch it again. Let it run forever. This is the premise of the film The Thirteenth Floor (1999). But that's the perfect opposite of the premise of Geats, right? That's why I concluded that the story of Geats is nihilistic.