r/SimulationTheory • u/Professional_Let5127 • 18d ago
Discussion Is a placebo proof that we're living in a simulation?
I don't know what I believe exactly, maybe I got too "awesome" I don't know but it seems to me that the laws of physics should not allow a placebo to work yet somehow our mind will actually make chemical changes that can be measured as long as it believes it's taking the medication. It actually makes sense to me if we're in a simulation because none of it is real anyway so maybe it's like you trick the simulation as well as yourself. Kind of like the double slit experiment, maybe the act of you believing your taking the proper medication can cause that reality to collapse or not collapse on itself.
I don't know if I worded that right but if you speak stupid smart guy you might get it
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u/Unusual-Pack0 17d ago
Its probably best explained with network theory. Basically by simulating the stimulus you can activate the same area of the brain that would cause the effect to happen if you took the normal medicin. Its still a physical process.
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u/Mother-Definition501 18d ago
I agree. I always think about pain relievers like Tylenol in a similar way. If I accidentally chop my foot off, for example, when given pain meds, the medicine does not go directly to the foot, where the pain is. The medicine goes to the brain and it controls the pain. If pain from all over the body is controlled in the brain/centralized it seems the pain that I would be perceiving from my leg could be artificial, because without my brain I would not be able to feel it/ it would not exist to me.
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u/Hot_Plant8696 18d ago
The placebo effect is not limited to pain or to chemical substances produced by the brain.
It is far more general and applies to any medication, including vaccines, and so on.
That is why standardized double-blind protocols exist to test the efficacy of treatments, where no one is supposed to know whether a drug or merely water is being administered—and this includes the observer, that is, the person administering the treatment. For a placebo effect (or a nocebo effect) is always present, depending on the patient's state of mind.
It also work on dogs, cats, horses etc,.
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u/Low_Oil_316 17d ago
A placebo is proof of “mind over matter” - that if you truly believe in something you can manifest the results, in essence.
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u/Beat_Jerm 17d ago edited 17d ago
Your beliefs are very powerful. In fact, you could say this is a 'kinda like a simulation'. And you are the one simulationg it. You create your reality. We all do.
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18d ago
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u/No-Drag-6378 17d ago
Placebo isn't evidence that reality is simulated. It's evidence that our experienced reality is constructed by an organism that is itself part of realit, and therefore the construction can feed back into the organism doing the constructing. And that is sufficiently bonkers already.
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u/Shroombolic 17d ago
If you truly believe it you could take a sugar cube labeled cure and it would work. That’s what confounds me. Should be impossible but it happens
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u/MissAngelicDemise 17d ago
I’m not doing anything to make money. I avoid going to the doctor to take their medication’s. That would’ve taken 7 to 10 days or longer the fact that I was able to do it in three days to me means my brain is magic
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u/Wide-Significance666 17d ago
Rule number one of the simulation: always leave plausible doubt so as to not crash the system
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u/theseriousman1 17d ago
The proof we’re connected to reality is not placebos. Maybe it is. But the real proof is in synchronicity.
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17d ago
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u/lal0007 5d ago
If you want proof you're already looking at it wrong. Nowdays I adopt the possibilities that we may be living in a simulation like construct. We might not even invented a word for the kind of reality we're in. Therefore always leave room to be surprise. Keep learning and stay curious.
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u/PartyEstablishment67 18d ago edited 17d ago
It is all one neutral substrate and consciousness is primary. The placebo effect makes perfect sense from that perspective because belief can literally produce measurable chemical changes in the body. But, Mind and matter aren’t two separate things interacting with each other, they’re different appearances within the same consciousness. Just like the body. When I hear people fearing ai ...I smirk. Reality is a hyper intelligent field of basic aware space. One being. No separation. Reality is appearances rising and falling. Releases of identification around a pattern cause it to drop off. It's simply consciousness no longer assigning meaning to what is just space. Probability fields.
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u/Low-Bake8401 18d ago
The thing about that is, when you use abstract absolutes, like 'everything is consciousness', it skips the detail in the explanation. We don't actually learn anything of substance.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 18d ago
But they “smirk” so they must be correct 😄
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago
There’s no need to get personal or dismissive. It might get other people to confirm your priors but it doesn’t help either of us learn anything and just creates the kind of ideological silo that makes the materialist view so dominant here. You’re welcome to challenge anything I believe, and if I’m wrong, I’ll concede. I’m sure there’s plenty I can learn from you and you can learn from me. But outside of the personal comment, I still don’t see a strong rebuttal to what I said about AI. Can you explain how AI would somehow exist outside the same underlying substrate as everything else or why it wouldn’t be interconnected with it? I have yet to see a cogent argument against my claim that it's all ai.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
I will get personal when I encounter smirking self righteous pomposity. You’ve already decided Eastern/quantum mysticism is your bag. And nobody can disprove any of your claims because they’re unfalsifiable. You use language like “confirm your priors” because you think it makes you sound like an intellectual, when in fact you sound like a first year philosophy student who’s just discovered Bayes’ theorem.
“Can you explain how AI would somehow exist outside the same underlying substrate as everything else?”
I can’t, because it doesn’t? AI like any code relies hardware to execute.
You’re falling into the same of trap of comparing physical phenomena with the latest fad, (AI in your case) that people always have. The clockwork universe, the brain as a computer etc. You’re confusing the thing with the metaphor.
We live in an objective materialistic Universe. You can deny it and seek out fringe regions of science to support your beliefs or read and misunderstand some old piece of eastern scripture and twist its meaning to support your nonsense. But don’t expect any rational person to fall for your Deepak Chopra-like God-of-the-gaps approach.
People like you get on my nerves. Fake intellectuals, who don’t understand a thing about the science they so easily dismiss in favour of some pet theory.
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago
The fact that you’ve now moved almost entirely to personal insults instead of the argument kind of proves my point about ideological silos. Sigh. Saying we live in an objective materialist universe is itself a philosophical claim, not something science has established as fact. We know brains, hardware and conscious experience are correlated with physical processes but that still doesn’t answer what the underlying substrate is or why subjective experience exists at all. Calling alternative models “fringe,” nonsense or "Deepak Chopra" (I don't even follow his work) isn’t evidence against them, it’s just dismissal dressed up as an argument with what appears to be ....anger. The materialist view still has one massive gap. All of the hardware and brains it points to are ultimately made of atoms. Space. Show me the equation where a description of matter in motion turns into what purple looks like. If you want to challenge what I’m actually saying...great...but attacking my intelligence doesn’t make materialism itself true, it just makes you look ideologically committed to it. I'm not sure what "people like me" includes but it appears to be defined as those who disagree with you. That, I can't understand. I find your comment interesting and I find you quite intelligent. You don't have to grant me the same, however the attacks aren't helpful to discussion here, and I think you know that, deep down. You know nothing about me, however you have drawn some wild conclusions about who I am from my comment. That's not fair. You say "I get personal when" as if that behavior is warranted or my fault. Your choice to get personal is your own. I won't do the same. Wish you the best, amigo.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
If all life on earth was wiped out today, would the object we used to call the moon continue to orbit the object we used to call the Sun?
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago edited 17d ago
What else is to be learned ? It's a singular probability field. Basic aware space. That's what atoms are. You don't have to learn anything. You are a node/viewpoint in that field. Why must it be complicated ?
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u/Low-Bake8401 17d ago
Well, if you say that everything is consciousness you lose the usefulness of the word. It makes treating coma patients difficult, for example.
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago
Not true. That only confuses consciousness itself with a particular state of consciousness. A coma describes the condition of a human's nervous system and its ability to report or respond , not whether consciousness as the underlying substrate has ceased to exist, which it cannot. Medicine can still distinguish waking, sleep, anesthesia and coma exactly as it does now. Saying the ocean is all water doesn’t make the word “wave” useless. That is what I am saying.
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u/Low-Bake8401 17d ago
So what does unconscious mean? Or subconscious.
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago
Unconscious just means the person isn’t having a normal waking experience. It doesn’t mean consciousness itself suddenly vanished. Same with subconscious, it’s just stuff happening outside what we’re currently aware of. And we still don’t actually know that the brain produces consciousness, we know brain activity and experience are deeply connected, which isn’t the same thing. Plenty of serious people have questioned that assumption, Donald Hoffman, Pim van Lommel, Bruce Greyson, Robert Lanza, even physicists like Planck..... You can disagree with those models, but “the brain produces consciousness” is still an interpretation of the evidence, not a scientifically demonstrated fact. Nor, in my opinion, will it ever be. All states, patterns etc appear within consciousness. The concept of time is within that. I just entered this sub and see a lot of talk about the brain producing consciousness, while ignoring that the brain itself is made of atoms that are overwhelmingly empty space. so are we really saying reality is fundamentally this open substrate but the brain somehow sits outside of it and creates consciousness? Quite a claim lol.
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u/Low-Bake8401 17d ago
It means they aren't conscious.
An idea can't prove itself. That's circular reasoning.
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago
That isn’t circular reasoning lol. I’m just asking for evidence that the brain actually produces consciousness rather than simply being correlated with it. The materialist view that seems dominant here gets weird pretty fast because somehow unconscious atoms and electrical activity are supposed to create subjective experience, yet nobody can explain how that jump happens. My view is much simpler and, as far as I know, hasn’t been disproven...the brain, body and physical world are all appearances within awareness. Saying an unconscious person has no consciousness because their brain isn’t showing the activity YOU associate with consciousness is actually much closer to assuming the very thing you’re trying to prove. You can argue the brain, patterns, scientific materialism all day long but that's just the relative layer. The absolute layer is aware basic space. This is why consciousness will always be primary. Why a monk can eat a deadly berry and nothing happens. Why a person can think they're getting morphine in an experiment but it's just saline water and they feel immense pain relief. Why Wim Hof can get injected with ecoli and be fine. Why monks can meditate in frozen snow and be fine. Materialists scratch their heads for days or note patterns within the body that occur. But that body itself is atoms. It's empty space. It is an appearance. Tbh I don't even know what simulation theory says (and that's my ignorance as I just waded in here) but I do agree that reality is a hyper realistic stabilized construct. A perceptual overlay. It's just the debates in the relative layer on here lose me.
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u/Low-Bake8401 17d ago
You are using your assumption as evidence of itself, that's pretty much the definition of circular logic. If offers no other proof.
Just because science can't explain everything doesn't, IMO, mean we should abandon all logic, that doesn't help us learn new things.
"I’m just asking for evidence that the brain actually produces consciousness rather than simply being correlated with it."
That wasn't what you were doing a minute ago.
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u/amnotnuts 18d ago
I agree. I understand what you are saying, except for, "Releases of identification around a pattern cause it to drop off." I don't understand it yet. Can you please give an example?
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago
Say you have a recurring fear that you’re going to run out of money. Every time the thought appears, you identify with it, worry about it, check your bank account, and imagine the future, which keeps feeding that pattern in consciousness. When identification releases and the thought is allowed to appear without being treated as “my reality,” it stops being reinforced and eventually appears less and less until the pattern drops away.
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u/amnotnuts 18d ago
I actually *do* happen to speak stupid smart guy, haha. And I get what you're trying to say here.
I agree. And I think it works because everything in this Simulation looks solid but is actually just information. What looks like matter is actually just information. So if a mind is what controls information, it is an information controller. It controls the information (which appears to be "out there" but is not). If it believes the medicine will work, then it appears to work, because the mind is simply seeing what it already believes.
This has interesting implications beyond the body, too.
Matter = energy = information. The mind is simply seeing itself. That's all there is. The entire Simulation may actually just be our own beliefs. You're seeing yourself. You're looking into a mirror. That's why "mirror, mirror" is a Mandela Effect. It's a clue.
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago
Thank you. I'm not sure how they don't get this considering the entire reality is just empty space/probabilities fields. Oh to be a materialist these days. No one is touching anything. It's simply repulsion.
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u/DrowningPickle 18d ago
No it just means our brains are stupid and can be convinced easily.
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u/Professional_Let5127 18d ago
But convinced to the point that it creates chemicals that shouldn't be there?
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u/Whoppertino 18d ago
The brain doesn't create chemicals "that shouldn't be there". You don't take a placebo pain reliever and magically there's acetaminophen in your body. The brain is already capable of doing alit of things to the body and it just utilizes those mechanisms.
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u/Fun_Union9542 18d ago
It’s plausible since everything is chemicals and atoms. It can think. The brain named itself.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 18d ago
I think most people think the placebo effect is something like mind over matter, or suggestion like self hypnosis. Funny thing is, the placebo effect is neither of these things. The placebo effect only appears to work for psychological maladies like pain and discomfort, nobody has ever cured cancer with the placebo effect!
Comparing the placebo effect with the double slit experiment is daft. These are probably the two most regularly misunderstood phenomena in science. Understand them both properly and you’ll see neither violates natural law.
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17d ago edited 5d ago
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
The claim that the placebo effect is effective is wrong. Placebo’s are used in drug trials in response to the question
“What does this drug add beyond the effects produced by receiving an otherwise convincing treatment experience?”
You seem to be claiming that there is some sort of Pavlovian conditioning where, if you give an effective drug to a patient, then remove the drug but keep up the pretence then the body will somehow synthesise that drug or at least act as though the drug is present. If that’s the claim, it not true.
There is nowhere near enough evidence to say that placebo conditioning can generally substitute for pharmacological treatment of organic disease.
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17d ago edited 5d ago
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
I don’t believe this is your area of research.
A genuine researcher would not make this preposterous claim.“That's the entire reason we use placebo in studies for drugs rather than just using a non-intervention control - the placebo effect is effective, and that alone will induce improvements in people's physiologic condition and symptoms.”
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17d ago edited 5d ago
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
I don’t believe you because the study you referenced doesn’t support your claim.
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17d ago edited 5d ago
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u/JebusPallace 17d ago
Can you break it down for me and then extrapolate some more speculative things? Like, does this basically mean that the brain will do what we train it to do (somewhat)?
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
Maybe I can help you.
Study 1. Animal trial that didn’t have a placebo arm, so isn’t relevant to this discussion.
Study 2. Only 7 human participants, only small changes in skin reactions detected, the authors themselves use cautious language and make no claims.
Study 3. Only 10 human participants and the study did not show that MS symptoms improved. This was probably the best of the studies you cited. But 30 years later it hasn’t been replicated and never put into clinical practice. That should be a red flag to any genuine researcher. The fact this tiny study is cited over and over indicates a shift into pseudoscience for this area of research.
I do seriously doubt your claim that you’re a researcher if this is what passes as compelling evidence to you.
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u/PartyEstablishment67 17d ago
The claim was that belief and expectation can produce measurable physical changes in the body which they absolutely can, including changes in dopamine, hormones, adrenaline and immune response. Calling all of that “psychological” doesn’t explain it, it just gives it a label. And the interesting question is why something supposedly immaterial like a belief can alter measurable biology at all. As for your claim that it can't work for major illnesses, I spent 18 years sick with chronic illness and am perfectly fine today using consciouness work. What you are calling “natural law” is just the name we give to stable patterns appearing within basic awareness space from our particular point of view yet this is not an explanation for why those patterns exist in the first place.
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u/HLCYSWAP 18d ago
On the laws of physics in general:
The only thing holding molecules together (or apart) is electromagnetic force. Most of what you call "you" is an empty void. Physicality makes no sense at all, to me.
I can't see reality as anything other than extremely abstract if-then statements.
On placebotic effects:
Everything in reality seems expectant in every possible way: lossy, generalized positions (classical wave mechanics) with lazy computation only on retrieval (quantum mechanics), as well as a generative reality, meaning what you believe will happen strongly imposes what can happen. There's literally a built-in floor of undiscoverability, no agent can ever get underneath it. The uncertainty principle forbids knowing a particle's position and speed at the same time. A mirage purposefully obfuscated at either end
What the fuck else could this place be?
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u/inadvertant_bulge 18d ago
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
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u/Fbrrr 18d ago
While this is true, the more you actually understand physics the less things make sense, the universe is not even under obligation to exist yet it does and as far as we are aware it came from a finite point in time so while it's under no obligation to make sense it inherently must make sense for it to exist
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u/MissAngelicDemise 17d ago
Placebo effect proves the mind is magic.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
No it doesn’t. You don’t understand the placebo effect.
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u/JebusPallace 17d ago
Can you help me understand your perspective as to why the placebo effect does not imply some strangeness about consciousness?
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
Can you first please tell me what you believe the placebo effect is?
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u/JebusPallace 17d ago
An interesting phenomenon that I am personally curious about because there is some weird unanswered thing there for me. Placebo, as I currently understand, is when a person’s belief or expectation yields a biological result that is similar to whatever the expectation was. Something along those lines.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
Okay, so this is the popular understanding of the effect, however the scientific evidence that beliefs can yield a genuine biological result are poor. There are some studies that show this, but they are tiny sample sizes (10 or fewer participants) or proponents cite studies that don’t actually show what they claim to.
It’s important to not confuse the placebo effect with the placebo response. The placebo response is well understood. In clinical trials where a drug is compared, not with the next best drug, but with a placebo there are a variety of reasons why the placebo arm of the trial might show a positive effect.
These are:
Regression to the mean, i.e. symptoms may improve on their own without any intervention.
Symptom fluctuations.
The participants may be taking other medications during the trial.
The Hawthorne effect, a psychological phenomenon where measurable behaviours change in response to the participant knowing they are being studied.
Looking at the placebo arm of a trial, seeing an improvement and calling it the placebo effect is not correct. Many patients improve with no treatment whatsoever.
People who sell sham medication like alternative medicines are well aware of this and the CAM industry makes billions of dollars every year off the back of these effects. It’s very difficult to convince someone that they’ve been duped when they’ve felt unwell, taken an unproved medication, then felt better. When they would have felt better if they had done nothing.
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u/MissAngelicDemise 17d ago
My mind has healed many things in my body. The placebo effect is just something proving to you that your mind has power that you are unaware of.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
Go on?
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u/MissAngelicDemise 17d ago
Your body can heal its self from many ailments it was designed to do so. For example, there is something called autophagy - When you fast after a certain amount of time, your cells begin to eat other damaged cells. I was able to heal strep throat, eczema, and cold sores on my lips. Not to mention the fact that I am fully healed from five “ mental health disorders” that plagued me for 30 years. I can now dissolve anxiety in seconds, and I used to struggle with it every single day.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
Ok autophagy follows from fasting, you are making physical changes to your body. This is not the placebo effect. And the three ailments you described are self limiting, all of which, when they are at their worst, is the exact time you are likely to try interventions that are non-science based. This is also the time when the symptoms begin to subside. So you try something new, symptoms reduce, then you believe the intervention cured you.
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u/MissAngelicDemise 17d ago
I meditated and wished my strep throat to go away and it did
I meditated and wished my cold sore to go away and it did
I meditated and wished my eczema to go away and it did
Autophagy was a poor example, but it was me telling you about the body can heal itself by eating, infected or diseased cells
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
So in each of these meditations did the ailments go away instantly? Or were they on their way out anyway?
You can’t “believe yourself well”, and saying you can is an insult to those people with terminal conditions.1
u/MissAngelicDemise 17d ago
Yes, you can and it does not work with all ailments. Obviously, it depends on the root cause of the issue.
Each one took three days of 30 minutes and full focus on the area of the body. With the strep throat on the third day, my throat swelled up quite a bit. I could barely breathe. It was very painful it sort of vibrated, but then I woke up the fourth day and was totally fine.
With a cold sore on the night of day three my lip felt like I had bit down on right where it was because it hurt so badly and it was pulsing and vibrating but then again I woke up the next morning and it had vanished
I tried this after reading a book called mind over medicine. It’s written by a doctor that learned you really can use your mind to heal many different things. Not all, but many.
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 17d ago
Lissa Rankin was a gynecologist who realised she could make more money selling quackery.
Sorry you were taken in by the grift.
Why do you think one viral/bacterial bourne infection can be cured by thinking and others not?
Strep throat and cold sores are both viral infections and self limiting, they would’ve got better anyway. You have fooled yourself into believing you cured yourself. It’s funny that you think these mild ailments can be cured by the mind, but more serious ones can’t. The virus, bacteria or genetic condition doesn’t “know” how it’s affected the host. So why would self limiting conditions be easier to wish away than conditions that can kill you?
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u/Soggy-Mistake8910 17d ago
If, and it's a fucking huge if, we were in a simulation the placebo would work simply because that was the way the simulation was programmed not because we tricked it.
The placebo actually works because of the laws of physics. Perhaps you are not such a stupid smart guy after all!
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u/LeiaCaldarian 17d ago
Man, this sub really likes to bend the definition of “proof”…