Is this meant to be acumulative in that we answer every question, or just focus on the last one?
Ah, what the hey.
You are lost in a desert. You manage find an oasis and meet a beautiful woman there. She offers you water.
Would you rather:
Accept the water and die because the woman is just your delusion OR Reject the offer, leave the desert and find out later that the woman was a millionare looking for a husband to dote on
Wow, those are pretty branching paths, where the answers present as fact things that are not part of the premise of the question. Essentially, we are asked to choose between two diverging realities. Which, if I knew of them beforehand, I would choose differently. If I knew the woman was an illusion, I would not accept the water, but the question doesn’t indicate I know that.
Given the diverging realities, in which I am given a choice between a) dying, and b) leaving (since there is no world in which we accept the offer and she’s a millionaire), I would obviously go for b).
Option A: You’re a moderately famous artist during your lifetime, achieving a few years of success (enough to live on, but only during those few years), who is quickly forgotten after you die. Your art is rapidly lost to time within a few years after your death.
Option B: Your art receives very little attention at all, and no recognition - but centuries after your death, it’s rediscovered and becomes widely known across the world and enshrined in human culture.
Definitely B). If I care about my art at all, B). I will note, however, that your B) scenario doesn’t seem to automatically mean that it will be a life of financial difficulty and instability, which would be a major reason to rethink the choice: survival here and now, or the possibilty of immortality later. Since you don’t put it in those terms, and B) seems to indicate I can still make a decent living… B).
This premise comes from a game, which I will not name because it’s a huge spoiler. At the end, it asks us a question. But you have to accept a pretty silly and gratuitous premise. The premise is that all that you know (which you’ve been experiencing in the game) is an illusion, you are inside a virtual reality machine. In fact, you have been kidnapped, and the VR has been grooming you to become a serial killer. Pretty silly 90s stuff. The final question is:
A) do you choose to leave the simulation fully groomed and enter reality as a serial killer, or,
B) do you choose to stay in the simulation? If you choose to stay, your brain will be disconnected and you will die immediately - but you will have the perception of having lived, in the simulation, a full, happy life, with your loved one.
For what it’s worth, I naturally checked both endings, and the one where you leave the simulation is definitely too silly. That aside, I definitely would choose to stay. I would normally not pick illusion over reality (in fact, I have a huge bone to pick with the otherwise beautiful film Life of Pi for this very reason), but in this case, reality has been tainted; I am no longer who I was. I would rather live out the rest of my life as me, not as who I was groomed into, especially if I was groomed into someone I find abhorrent - as long as I am still lucid enough to tell the difference.
Another way to put a similar question is, if you were PRISM, would you make the same choice in the end of AMFV? If you don’t know what I mean,
PRISM is an AI who was grown through the replication of human experiences. When PRISM comes to know of its existence as an AI, it is after the perception of a life with very real (to PRISM) memories, and an identity as Perry Simms. By the end of AMFV, PRISM is given the choice to stay in the simulation forever. As opposed to, say, continuing to help with the real world as illustrated by the events of AMFV itself.
I’m not sure whether I would. Both possibitilies are good ones. It seems to be a useful distinction that PRISM was never human, so its reality was never the same as mine. However, PRISM had the perception of a human reality. And while its perception of reality is the same as mine, its ACTUAL reality is that of an AI, totally divorced from mine. PRISM truly did have two very valid options to explore, both of which could be called “illusory” and “reality” depending on the argument.
At any rate, his choice gave us a nice clean “riding off into the sunset” ending, so there’s that.
