What you said about simulations is true only insofar as the “players” in fact control the simulation. In human life, we don’t.
A good simulation provides resistance to the user’s or player’s will; otherwise, it simulates nothing. If a player’s will is that his plane never crashes regardless of what stunts he tries to pull off in the simulated plane, he is in fact learning little to nothing and not being trained or acquiring anything remotely like actual experience, which is the purpose of training and training in a simulator.
Again, it’s tempting to cheat in strategic video games (I like Sid Meier’s Civilization series); however, to do so would just mean easy victory after easy victory; whereas, the best part of the game is struggling in the rubrics (rules) of the game to achieve your goals against resistance and factors beyond your absolute control. The game is engaging and entertaining by approximating aspects of reality, aspects of which the game designers are constantly trying to incorporate in a playable way. That is the difference between a simulation and simple make-belief. It would be like playing chess where you also played as your opponent and meant to win against your “opponent”: easy, as ‘he’ (i.e. you) doesn’t even want to win against ‘you’. But chess wouldn’t be chess if you furthermore changed all the rules on your whim; it would only scarcely resemble chess because you happen to be throwing around chess pieces and have a chess board in the area.
This is more like a chess game in which the pieces are human and when captured, physically die. The game itself is not reality, but the consequences are.
Now this, I think, is an attempt to have our cake and eat it too.
The whole universe is ostensibly something like a hologram. If, therefore, someone “dies” in it, then that whole process and experience is also holographic. The “consequences” are just part and parcel of the simulation. That is the problem with these theories: Ultimately what is “real” and the concept of the real evaporates because, *per force * (given our nature) sensibles just are the basis of reality for us because they are the basis of our knowledge. Naturally, and ordinarily, our knowledge is grounded in sensible reality from which we abstract our concepts and thus acquire or build up knowledge. This was the whole strength in empiricism and why it is culturally and intellectual so congenial to scientific pursuits. In an intellectual system where you pull the ground out from reality (for humans at least) then you can never, as it were, reach first base, let alone get some runs in.
Let us return to the battlefield and map (of the battlefield) analogy.
Now it is obvious that if the map does not actually reflect or represent the actual battlefield, then the soldiers or forces on the battlefield who are taking their orders or instructions from the HQ are in a perilous situation, as their orders are based on something different than the reality on the ground: they are ordered to such-and-such coordinates because the map says it is a hill and, therefore, a strategic position to hold; whereas, in reality, it is actually an open and exposed plain that cannot be advantageously defended and not suitable for earthen works for defense, let us say. Now if it is actually impossible to “know” the battlefield itself, how can we construct a map of it? And what good is a map of some random thing that may or may not be based on something real or actual? Of what practical use is it? It would be hopelessly enigmatic and precarious for use at best.
Now supposing that the world we experience is just a hologram or simulation of reality, granted let us say it remains notwithstanding perfectly intelligible and rational as a simulation, like a good training simulation for pilots. Notwithstanding, the whole things remains fakery and we can never possibly confirm the real-ness of the simulated reality and, again, the whole concept of “the real” is an impossibility for us, because we can never actually know or experience what is actually “real”.
So in reality these theories accomplish nothing more than a linguistic and conceptual shift, with no apparent benefit. “The real” becomes what is most unknown, indeed actually unknowable, and what we call real is merely a conventional way of speaking, as it is impossible to “square” something with a “reality” that we have never actually experienced and, therefore, have no knowledge of. Now clearly this is absurd especially for practical purposes and, either way, people will still use experience acquired in this world as the basis for what is or isn’t real, authentic, actual or true.
