“My suggestion would be to go back with a portable generator and a few laptop computers containing the sum of modern political, aesthetic, scientific, medical, etc., progress. Give it to a few exceptionally liberal and well-positioned people with as wide a cultural distribution is possible (American picks might be Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine). Stress the part of the lesson about how using technological advances to efficiently kill large number of people and applying rational principles only to the established group doesn’t work out so well in the long run for anyone.”

It occurs to me, that 200 years ago…

Political thought (Locke, Adam Smith, Jefferson, Tom Paine, etc. etc.:

Aesthetics (from Ancient Greece though to the great Romantic and Landscape painters, sculpture, literature, poetry, plays, music etc. etc.);

Science (Newton, the Particle Theory of Light; Galilean Relativity, rigorous dimensional analysis; Cosmology — “Infinite in All Directions”; the exposition by Nicolas of Cusa, Cardinal in 1440 advancing the theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun; that the Sun was just another star in an infinite Universe, with other stars having planets — some of them inhabited by living intelligent beings much like ourselves; the Commonsense (Tarskian) Correspondence Truth principle; no incalcubly toxic chemical cocktails floating around everywhere, the Enlightenment triumphing; the beginnings of Critical Rationalism; the beginnings of the age of mass-production; optimism towards the future (absent Malthus and a few others); a reasonably clear and intelligible Common Law, with a comprehensive core of basic principles and deductive applicability; no Marxism; no reductionist materialism to speak of; the list goes on…)

Medical advances:

Well, yes, but we also have Big Pharma, the all-powerful medical cartels which block evidence-based medicine, and escalate a stupefying increase in costs, often accompanied by iatrogenic “medicine”… )

It’s not so clear that people would, in fact, be much better off.

Positivism and “The Impossibility of Knowledge” rules NOT-OK; crazily unscientific “Singularities” cosmologies, so that near-on every physicist has a different Cosmology now, with disastrous consequences for unstable people seeking ‘ultimate foundations’ in modern (pseudo-) sciences such as Darwinism, Special and General Relatvity (‘Born Refuted’ by Absolute Rotation and discarded by Einstein); “Quantum-Mechanical” absurdities (reifying a formalism, an approximation method — I ask you!!!), Neo-Classical Economics (Austrian School, Chicago School — see Wiki on top-flight philosophers of science Imre Lakatos and Spiro Latsis blowing both clear out of the water as incapable of novel pedictions, this untestable… the list goes on

Sure, we now have some wonderful _technologies_…

Time Travel is physically impossible anyway, because the same atoms cannot be in different space-time co-ordinates at the same time; and Absolute Time is available again with accurate predictive and retrodictive corrections for the time delays in light-signals…

And everywhere, Omnipotent Government is organizing ‘false-flag’ exercises like “9/11″, the “Strategy of Tension” in Italy, and the Madrid and London bombings — all provable as cruel hoaxes…

If they had known this would be their future, they might have given the laptops back (smiles)

Tony

I guess in order to work the movie assumes that the experiences of the people in the matrix are virtually identical to experiences they could have in the real world. Like suppose the people in the matrix experience living in vats of water with icky life-support tubes, exactly as in the real world. Then it seems obvious to call it a simulation.

But again, why call it a simulation? Words like “reality” and “simulation” are formed via interaction with certain sorts of phenomena. Yes, we can certainly refer to phenomena we haven’t experienced; but our ability to do is an extension from usage closer to home.

What does Wittgenstein say about solipsism?

He thinks it’s incoherent.

What does Wittgenstein say about solipsism?