Proof We're in a Simulation

4 points by bbarnett ↗ HN
I have proof we're all in a simulation.

Actual, real, factual proof.

Butter.

Think about it.

If your house is too cold, or warm, it's borked. It doesn't spread, or it's melted. It's designed to spread at the perfect temp zone for human living, yet it's the by product of milk and a natural process.

Likely the parent simulation has a delicious, similar spread, but it requires a heating bowl, or a cooling bowl to be able to use it at room temp. Butter is a pleasant design, a fantasy for those playing, controlling, and watching our simulated world.

It's proof! This is a simulation!!!

19 comments

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Is this some AI generated content on HN? The ramblings of a mad man? What are you getting at here?
What am I getting at?! Consider all the conditions required that a by product of a food animal's milk only works well at perfect room temp. You think that's a mistake? A happy coincidence?

No. It's proof that the entire universe was designed to ensure that butter spreads at the same temperature that humans find comfortable. Even the fact that human comfort == butter comfort is a big, hairy flag.

Mistake? I think that if it were otherwise we wouldn't have a thing called butter. The critical characteristic is why we have this thing. The way butter is, it is.
Exactly!

Butter is butter because if butter wasn't butter, the universe would not exist as it is! It's the cotter-pin of our reality, it's the centre that holds, it's the validation of an if-then statement, it's an automated test.

I bet if butter isn't perfect at room temp, the next version doesn't ship!

Not exactly. The world is exactly as it is because it is. Butter is no different from water. You're effective saying "land animals breathe air, sea creature breathe water. This means we're in a simulation."

Butter has propeties like everything else. Those properties across a range of temps has an appeal. Ice cream... Same thing. Ice cubes, same thing.

And so on.

What about the thousands of things that do not work at room temperature? Why butter? Why does food spoil if left at room temperature? Why would or simulation need fridges and freezers? Why do we have food safe temperatures we need to cook food if we are in a simulation? Why simulate so many negative experiences on man? I don't think butter proves anything and is such a weird offer of proof as to living in a simulation. Otherwise humans would have thick furs and skin and we would live in world where ice and cold surrounds us and we could have ice cream left out on or table and it would not melt.
> It's designed to spread at the perfect temp zone for human living, yet it's the by product of milk and a natural process.

That is because butter is fatty, and like lard, it will coagulate and spread smoothly at room temperature. It's not simulation theory, it's basic gastronomy.

The struggle with Hacker News is that people regularly ask dumber questions than this during more sober news hours, so it's impossible for any of us to know if you're being serious.

You're making my point!

This universe is designed that way. Designed so butter spreads.

That's not a mistake. It's baked in.

Or hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary optimization for the conditions of thriving on Earth decided that a water-soluble lipid stable at ordinary temperatures maximizes your chances for survival under the conditions Earth presents.

There are other fats that are liquids at freezing temperatures and solid as a brick at 1000c. It shouldn't really surprise you that animal fats are optimized for the average living conditions of a warm-blooded mammal. Any other mutation simply would have died off during evolution.

That's what the designers want you to think, man! Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes, let them distract and dissuade your thoughts on this.

Embrace the truth, don't shy away. Take that stick of butter and revel in its incredible happenstance, its wonderful mystery, and know that such universally derived splendour is not to be waved away.

Take that butter, spread it. Feel the joy in is flavour and taste. Know that this only happens, that your toast and bread only survives unscathed in a universe where butter temp and human temp are a conjoined state of blissful commonality.

Move that metric a little off, and your morning is torn asunder, your toast made into shreds of its former dignity, by the might of your hard, cold, angry butter.

It's not a mistake, it's planned. Quintillions likely watch us all walk around, spreading butter every morning.

I think I'm pretty comfortable leaving the butter where it's at right now, thank you.
By that logic we’re in a simulation because water freezes below our range of viable life and boils above it.

Congratulations on discovering the anthropic principle, then turning it into a horrifyingly myopic and solipsistic vision where the universe has been made to fit you rather than you having evolved to fit it.

If we were in a simulation and that simulation had an intelligent designer that was intending to improve on things, would your fingers be able to be inserted into both your asshole and your mouth? If the fecal-oral route exists you’re not in a simulation for humans, you’re in a simulation for bacteria, which in turn is a simulation for viruses, which in turn is a simulation for entropy, which then is ultimately just a non-pseudo RNG.

And yet, all that said and done, butter is butter.

You've not explained butter, instead you've merely described distractive choke-points in validation of my theory, placed there by designers of our simulation.

Why do you think we eat butter in the morning, at breakfast? It's because we're not awake enough to realise the wonder of butter, a joke by some developer in the real world.

Butter is breast milk that’s been shaken and allowed to congeal. You need to get to cheese and ghee before you’re anything like awake, dreamer.
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Alternatively, the popularity and disimination of butter throughout the culinary world is largely due to how easy it is to preserve and use in environments which are ideal for humans. If not for that, it might be a more niche product.
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What proves it for me is all the obvious memory optimization tricks.

I believe there is an array of fixed size attached to the local spacetime cell which keeps a list of weird/uncommon words. This is why we often see the same uncommon word multiple times in close proximity across otherwise-unrelated contexts.

Example: The other day I saw the word "rackset" on a piece of equipment at work. Later that day I saw the same word on a completely unrelated thing. That's not a word I've ever seen before. And now all of the sudden it's getting used in multiple places. It's so immersion-breaking.