“Enhancing the Placebo”

I find the placebo effect to be utterly fascinating. It’s almost certainly responsible for the successes of shamans, faith-based healers, and homeopathy. And, on the other side of the coin, the documented successful witch doctors’ curses. But it’s literally all in your head. Which means that everyone who has ever been affected by any of the above-mentioned things has always had the power to heal — or harm — themselves, without any outside assistance at all. And presumably, so does every other human on the planet.

There’s so much that this implies, from the evolutionary reasons for religion, to questions about whether we’re really as insignificant in the grand scheme of things as we seem to be, to metaphysical questions of all sorts that can never be scientifically answered. For instance, is this ability limited to our physical bodies, or might healing simply be one manifestation of something a lot more extensive, as many people have claimed through the centuries? The Secret was widely dismissed as mystical bunk when it was released a few years ago, but some people who heard its message found that it simply described what they’d already experienced. (I’ve had a few such experiences myself, things that my rational, scientific side find difficult to assign to chance alone, even with the help of my mathematical and statistical side.)

The more I learn about the world, and the more I experience, the more I have to admit that mere physical processes simply don’t explain it all. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to back up that view, if you’re willing to see it. Never enough to prove anything… which is itself suggestive… but enough to put doubts into any truly logical mind.

My take on it? The entire universe is fake. Some kind of simulation, a la The Matrix and many science fiction works before it. These little inconsistencies are clues that whoever is responsible for it have deliberately left in the program, presumably so that we would have some chance of noticing them. There’s never any conclusive proof because the program is deliberately designed to prevent that from ever happening. I can only speculate why, but think about it… if we could prove that it was all fake, that would change our collective behavior in myriad ways, many of which the majority of us probably wouldn’t want.

Who could be responsible for such a thing? Who would design and build a simulation like this, which presumably could be perfect, but leave so many clues that at least a few people in every generation are bound to notice and wonder about? It’s impossible to say, of course, but assuming that they aren’t simply mistakes on the part of the designers, think about this: if some person or group was responsible for designing a computer simulation that would have billions of inhabitants during its run, why would they deliberately leave any clues to its artificial nature at all? A malevolent force like the machines in The Matrix certainly wouldn’t, why give their captives any reason to believe they could ever escape? A benevolent force wouldn’t either, because it would be cruel to give the poor sods within any glimpse of something they could never have. And an indifferent force would see no reason to do so. But if that person or group was going to subject themselves to it…

‘Nuf said.

6 Comments

  1. Fascinating! One possibility, if our existence is all some kind of simulation, is that the designers are neither malevolent nor benevolent, but instead are scientists trying to using this simulation to increase their own knowledge, maybe to answer a fundamental question of existence itself. Random inconsistencies could be due to the fact that, no matter how advanced these designers are, they still aren’t perfect. There occurred some scenario that they didn’t expect, or there was some sort of outside interaction they hadn’t planned for. You could expect even more errors if they didn’t directly create this simulation, but instead had a very powerful machine they created create the simulation, as they wouldn’t necessarily be able to adequately debug the simulation before running it. Taken that all this is a simulation, one would hope that the creators would be watching somehow, either from afar, or perhaps closer disguised as forms we just don’t give much thought to, like cats or rats. We should hope that the designers are the only ones with a vested interest in the simulation, or they’ve defended it enough from other such beings that we don’t have to worry about the simulation being spontaneously aborted by another group. Oh, it would suck to have this all go away just because someone wanted to build something like a galactic superhighway through here. ;D

  2. c-square: if it’s a simulation, it looks like the entire universe is being simulated, not just this planet. So no worries about a galactic superhighway… unless the race responsible is posing as lab mice to keep an eye on us, that is. 😉

    Any race that’s capable of simulating our whole universe is very decidedly ahead of us in the technology department. I’m assuming that they’d have come up with a lot better design capabilities as well (since technology pretty much demands it), such that any “random inconsistencies” wouldn’t be noticeable to the inhabitants of the simulation. Unless, of course, they’re meant to be noticed. But of course, this is entirely speculation… there’s an excellent chance that anyone within such a simulation is constitutionally incapable of understanding the world outside it, even if he (we) could perceive it. What little evidence I’ve seen seems to point to the scenario I suggested, though it requires a lot of interpretation and could very well be wrong on many points, both major and minor.

    Ploni: never read that one, but from the context, I assume that it posits something similar to The Matrix as well. Or, if you’re referring to c-square’s comment, something similar to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 😉

  3. True enough. I want you to know that I didn’t mean to make light of what you where saying. It’s just it seemed to fit so perfectly with Douglas Adams’ writings, I had to point it out.

  4. Somewhat like the matrix in spirit I guess, like a lot of PKD’s SF. I think you’d like it, I can’t really tell you more, as it would be spoilers. 🙂 (Due to the way the story is structured, it’d be easy to spoil.)

  5. c-square: No worries, I know it sounds ridiculous. And I know that there have been a lot of SF stories along those lines, even several (other than The Matrix and its sequels) that made it to A-list Hollywood movies. I hadn’t specifically noticed the similarity to THGTTG, but it’s certainly there.

    Ploni: I don’t think I’ve ever read a PKD book yet. I will some day, I’m sure, but I don’t have a lot of time for casual reading anymore, and I’ve already got a long lineup of books to get through in the little such time I do have.

Comments are closed.