Simulation Quotes

“Simulation Tobias kisses my neck.

I try to think. I have to face the fear. I have to take control of the situation and find a way to make it less frightening.

I look Simulation Tobias in the eye and say sternly, “I am not going to sleep with you in a hallucination. Okay?”

Then I grab him by his shoulders and turn us around, pushing him against the
bedpost. I feel something other than fear—a prickle in my stomach, a bubble of laughter. I press against him and kiss him, my hands wrapping around his arms. He feels strong. He feels…good.

And he’s gone.

I laugh into my hand until my face gets hot. I must be the only initiate with this fear.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“His eyes search the crowd until they find my face. My heartbeat lives in my throat; lives in my cheeks.
"I still don't understand," he says softly, "how she knew that it would work.”
― Veronica Roth, Insurgent

“Using fake feelings and relying on a trick box of artificial gadgets in order to create a simulation of desire, will not unravel the knotty puzzle to reinvent oneself. ( “Twilight of desire “ )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“If we are blinded by the razzle-dazzle of the limelight and can't even bring a little depth into our story, we must recognize that self-estrangement has besieged our minds, and reality has become a simulation. ("Was it all worthwhile?")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world. (Note: This quote is fake and does not appear in Simulacra and Simulation. I tried to delete it, but the system doesn't allow that because this quote has "too many fans" lol.)”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.)”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

“Something as superfluous as "play" is also an essential feature of our consciousness. If you ask children why they like to play, they will say, "Because it's fun." But that invites the next question: What is fun? Actually, when children play, they are often trying to reenact complex human interactions in simplified form. Human society is extremely sophisticated, much too involved for the developing brains of young children, so children run simplified simulations of adult society, playing games such as doctor, cops and robber, and school. Each game is a model that allows children to experiment with a small segment of adult behavior and then run simulations into the future. (Similarly, when adults engage in play, such as a game of poker, the brain constantly creates a model of what cards the various players possess, and then projects that model into the future, using previous data about people's personality, ability to bluff, etc. The key to games like chess, cards, and gambling is the ability to simulate the future. Animals, which live largely in the present, are not as good at games as humans are, especially if they involve planning. Infant mammals do engage in a form of play, but this is more for exercise, testing one another, practicing future battles, and establishing the coming social pecking order rather than simulating the future.)”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

“It might not be immediately obvious to some readers why the ability to perform 10^85 computational operations is a big deal. So it's useful to put it in context. [I]t may take about 10^31-10^44 operations to simulate all neuronal operations that have occurred in the history of life on Earth. Alternatively, let us suppose that the computers are used to run human whole brain emulations that live rich and happy lives while interacting with one another in virtual environments. A typical estimate of the computational requirements for running one emulation is 10^18 operations per second. To run an emulation for 100 subjective years would then require some 10^27 operations. This would be mean that at least 10^58 human lives could be created in emulation even with quite conservative assumptions about the efficiency of computronium. In other words, assuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives. If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth's oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“How do we know that even the realest of realities
wouldn't be subjective, in the final analysis? Nobody can prove his existence, can he?”
― Daniel F. Galouye, Simulacron 3

“A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.”
― George Gurdjieff

“Doomsday, when it came, wouldn't be a physical phenomenon; it would be an
all-inclusive erasure of simulectronic circuits.”
― Daniel F. Galouye, Simulacron 3

“From my own experience I know that the cruelest thing is to make a person doubt his own reality...”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“The balance of terror is the terror of balance.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Naturally, von Neumann’s picture of the player as a completely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudoscience will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings.
Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way. This is because no man is either all fool or all knave. The average man is quite reasonably intelligent concerning subjects which come to his direct attention and quite reasonably altruistic in matters of public benefit or private suffering which are brought before his own eyes. In a small country community which has been running long enough to have developed somewhat uniform levels of intelligence and behavior, there is a very respectable standard of care for theunfortunate, of administration of roads and other public facilities, of tolerance for those who have offended once or twice against society. After all, these people are there, and the rest of the community must continue to live with them. On the other hand, in such a community, it does not do for a man to have the habit of overreaching his neighbors. There are ways of making him feel the weight of public opinion. After a while, he will find it so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, so restricting and oppressing that he will have to leave the community in self-defense.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Inside the vault housing Shalmaneser: cool. Waiting for the launch window, which is a decorative way of saying when the GT guide is good and ready to start, this fact has already decided several of the crowd one hundred nine strong (some of whom are tourists some of whom are genuine potential recruits lured by the handouts and TV plugs of the GT Corp. some of whom have seen themselves here so often in the personae of Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere that they couldn’t tell you why they bothered to make the visit in reality and some of whom are GT’s own plantees primed to speak up at the right moments and give the impression of Things Happening) that they aren’t going to be interested in what they’re shown. Cold! In May! Under the Manhattan Fuller Dome! And clad in Nydofoam sneakers, MasQ-Lines, Forlon&Morler skirtlets and dresslets; strung about with Japind Holocams with Biltin g’teed Norisk LazeeLaser monochrome lamps, instreplay SeeyanEar recorders; pocket-heavy with Japind Jettiguns, SeKure Stunnems, Karatands to be slipped on as easily as your grandmother drew on her glove.
Uneasy, watching their accidental companions on this guided tour.
Well-fed.
Shifty-eyed, slipping tranks into their chomp-chomp jaws.
Damned good-looking.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“Donald was stunned. They must be making a sensaysh out of it, to sacrifice so much time from even their ten-minute condensed-news cycle!
His Mark II confidence evaporated. Euphoric from his recent eptification, he had thought he was a new person, immeasurably better equipped to affect the world. But the implications of that expensive plug stabbed deep into his mind. If State were willing to go to these lengths to maintain his cover identity, that meant he was only the visible tip of a scheme involving perhaps thousands of people. State just didn’t issue fiats to a powerful corporation like English Language Relay Satellite Service without good reason.
Meaningless phrases drifted up, dissociated, and presented themselves to his awareness, all seeming to have relevance to his situation and yet not cohering.
My name is Legion.
I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.
The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.
Say can you look into the seeds of time?
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Struggling to make sense of these fragments, he finally arrived at what his subconscious might be trying to convey.
The prize, these days, is not in finding a beautiful mistress. It’s in having presentable prodgies. Helen the unattainable is in the womb, and every mother dreams of bearing her. Now her whereabouts is known. She lives in Yatakang and I’ve been sent in search of her, ordered to bring her back or say her beauty is a lie—if necessary to make it a lie, with vitriol. Odysseus the cunning lurked inside the belly of the horse and the Trojans breached the wall and took it in while Laocoön and his sons were killed by snakes. A snake is cramped around my forehead and if it squeezes any tighter it will crack my skull.
When the purser next passed, he said, “Get me something for a headache, will you?”
He knew that was the right medicine to ask for, yet it also seemed he should have asked for a cure for bellyache, because everything was confused: the men in the belly of the wooden horse waiting to be born and wreak destruction, and the pain of parturition, and Athena was born of the head of Zeus, and Time ate his children, as though he were not only in the wooden horse of the express but was it about to deliver the city to its enemy and its enemy to the city, a spiralling wild-rose branch of pain with every thorn a spiky image pricking him into other times and other places.
Ahead, the walls. Approaching them, the helpless stupid Odysseus of the twenty-first century, who must also be Odin blind in one eye so as not to let his right hand know what his left was doing. Odinzeus, wielder of thunderbolts, how could he aim correctly without parallax? “No individual has the whole picture, or even enough of it to make trustworthy judgments on his own initiative.” Shalmaneser, master of infinite knowledge, lead me through the valley of the shadow of death and I shall fear no evil …
The purser brought a white capsule and he gulped it down.
But the headache was only a symptom, and could be fixed.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“In short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest attention seekers insist, for better or worse, on the superlative degree of comparison only, leaving you, dear reader, in a binary abyss alternating between the virtual and the real. ”
― Lil Diamond Smith, Secrets and Lies of Digital Beings: Silicon Valley edition

“It is better to be surprised by a simulation, rather than blindsided by reality”
― Stuart Candy

“You’ve got your answer then, haven’t you?'
Lydia nods. She has. She knew it all along. But sometimes it takes an artificially intelligent simulation of a long dead Beatle to put things in perspective.”
― Eddie Robson, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words

“The rocks are craggy/unmanageable
without sufficiently lacerating my Self ~ scarcely
solid ground, but more accurately a foothold. Yet in smoothness, the rocks are even less effective against the sweep of the tides than the sands of the shore. I sit here, not terribly concerned about the bruises and scrapes the jagged rocks lend in the moment, but concerned nevertheless by the waves that sweep back so effortlessly over the catchstones and eternally beyond reach—evading capture, leaving only a dissipating froth upon the black ridges to signal, at the very least, that 'it' happened: for whatever 'it' is worth.

There is a distinctive tenor to this declaration of presence, this collapsing flow—Something that reminds me of...?—the reverberations of which remain beyond the span of cognition. Reverberations: there exists a memory of a memory of a dream I had once, but
never an authentic rendering of the essential
Moment. Still I can hear it in dreams of memories of memories of dreams.

In dreams: a faint voice.

A persona, a belief system distinctly its
own, yet for now, the roar of the tides are a
whisper ears strain to grasp. Seemingly a clue to a memory locked within. Or it’s all imagination:
perhaps the sound of the ocean causes me to
assume I’m remembering something. Gives the
memory a sentience of its own and a vessel
allowing it to surge in and ebb out. Yes, I’ve heard such things mentioned before: the stimulus that reverse engineers the very memory it is presumed to trigger.

Still, it bothers me: this evasive, timeless
notion.”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

“A la hora en que cada uno tiene razon, todo esta perdido, todo se vuelve permitido y posible, es la hora tragica por excelencia y es la nuestra. Estamos en medio de personas de buena fe, que moriran por su causa aceptando inmolarse, sabemos que su causa es un malentendido en la mayoria de los casos, pero no sirve de nada informarselos, se rehusaran a creernos y especialmente teniendo en cuenta que en ello se contienen sus razones. El ideal es casi siempre un pañuelo de equívocos y si sustraemos el contrasentido, consagramos a la mayoria de los hombres al absurdo, no estando nunca la verdad a su medida. Ahora bien, nuestros medios, a cada vuelta de rueda, vuelven la verdad mas fuerte y nos sentimos cada vez mas desorientados en el universo, este universo que humanizamos sin cesar: esta paradoja no es menos trágica que la precedente y no se le ve una solución. Cuanto tiempo subsistiremos presas del desorden? Pues el desorden no sabria eternizarse, el espiritu humano no lo soporta sin estallar. Entonces la catastrofe parece preferible y el hombre vacila en precipitarse, con la esperanza de forzar la mano al futuro.”
― Albert Caraco, Kaos'un Kutsal Kitabı

“Η ειρωνεία του πράγματος είναι πως το γεγονός ότι είμαστε εικονικοί μας δίνει περισσότερες υποχρεώσεις προς τον πλησίον μας, προς τον πλανήτη. Και κυρίως, σε συλλογικό επίπεδο.
... Επειδή, το τεστ αυτό δεν απευθύνθηκε σ' εμάς ως άτομα. Η προσομοίωση αυτή αφορά τον ωκεανό.. δεκάρα δεν δίνει για το πώς κινείται κάθε υδάτινο μόριο. Η προσομοίωση αναμένει μιαν αντίδραση από ολόκληρο το ανθρώπινο είδος. Δεν θα υπάρξει υπέρτατος σωτήρας. Θα πρέπει να σωθούμε μόνοι μας.”
― Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly

“Life is a recurring simulation, the script of which has already been written many times before, with some slight variations.”
― Jack Freestone

“What? You mean the people don't know they are in a simulation?" asked Steve.
"That's right, " said Bob.
"There is a small blocking program that prevents them from taking the idea of their
world being a simulation seriously.”
― Peter Clifford Nichols, The Word of Bob: an AI Minecraft Villager

“Everything has value only when ranked against something else; everyone has value only when ranked against someone else. Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win—a situation where players are free to collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games. The real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many
and varied games.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

“The roads traveled more are often synonymous
to treadmill.”
― Rajesh Walecha

“Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simluation