Could the reality we experience every day—complete with the tactile sensations of a coffee cup in our hands, the brilliance of a rising sun, and the complex interplay of societal structures—be nothing but an elaborate simulation?
Hi Cristi from keto to cyber to AI … cool. I will read the whole essay carefully I guess what's really interesting is that o-1 wrote it and you just did some editing.
Are you familiar with Donald Hoffmann and his "case against reality" ?
I personally feel that simulation or not does not really matter if you think you dont have free will (Saposky) .. which as I'm getting older I tend to believe more, I am a program running in my brain (Josha Bach) so wether this program was "written" by evolution or advanced programmers does not really matters, does it?
Thanks for the input Philippe. I'm not familiar with it, but I've heard of it. On the free will part, I know it's really controversial, and in my personally opinion, I do not believe the universe is completely deterministic, nor human life. I think we have a certain degree of free will. I don't think the existence free will is a binary (yes/no), but it's more nuanced. I guess I adopted this perspective from a recent book on Crispr/Cas9 (if I recall correctly). I want to get into Bach's work at some point, alongside David Deutsch's work, but one step at a time :)
Response to Cristi Vlad's "Could reality itself be a sophisticated simulation?"
Interesting discussion - if mostly irrelevant, since whether we are or not we can't do anything about it at this juncture. :-) We're still mostly chimpanzees and chimpanzees are not going to outwit the sort of civilization which can do such things as creating simulated universes. Captain Kirk's outwitting of machine intelligence by behaving in a typically chimpanzee irrational emotional manner never made any sense.
It's also more or less equivalent to various "occult" theories originating from or modified from various Gnostic concepts, except those have no "technological" component.
A more interesting but relevant concept is: What if we are being manipulated in a similar manner by a specific post-human or alien species?
When K. Eric Drexler wrote "Engines of Creation", the primary text which hypothesized "ubiquitous nanotechnology", he discussed the probability of being able to embed nanotech "robots" inside human living cells, which would have the ability to monitor and correct any negative conditions, thus correcting illness before it starts and extending life span.
I have speculated that an advanced species could implant such nanotech in humans which would have the capability of monitoring and manipulating human sensory capability and neural function such that they could exist and humans would be unable to be aware of their presence - including the presence of such "robots" inside human cells. Thus, a human peering through an electron microscope would not even be capable of seeing the presence of such "robots" or deducing their presence by cellular events.
Further, human neural function could be manipulated to any degree on a global scale, thus manipulating the entire population.
Indeed, it would even be possible to implant such technology in every form of existent on the planet, from single cell organisms to every life form and even inanimate objects such as rocks. Recall that some Native Americans believe some rocks are actually living. Nanotech could make that a reality.
Science fiction has dealt with this topic in a variety of forms. Eric Frank Russell wrote a book about energy beings living in the sky on a visual frequency that humans could not perceive. I think the original "Outer Limits" TV show had an episode where some people encountered an alien life form which looked like rocks in the South-Western desert.
Primarily, though, my speculation was based on my experience interacting with the late independent journalist John A. Keel, who wrote several books on the UFO and abductee
phenomena. He suggested something similar - that all those phenomena and much more might be originating from life forms from "another dimension" - of the electromagnetic spectrum - which interacted directly with the human brain.
This is not just speculation. A professor of psychology named Michael Persinger, operating out of Laurentian University in Canada, speculated that the UFO phenomena might be caused by seismic events which cause perturbations in the earth's electromagnetic field which could in turn cause mental disturbances in humans, including hallucinations.
He did more than speculate. He created an apparatus that could induce hallucinations in humans using focused high-intensity magnetic fields. Someone sitting in the chair could experience visions of their dead grandmother, alien abduction or even visions of God, depending on their belief system.
I have speculated that the UFO phenomena is a case of an advanced technological species which originated on this earth prior to the rise of the human species. We know there were several proto-human species before humans. Given the time scales involved, it is quite possible that such a species achieved intelligence, then civilization, thousands of years before humans. There are plenty of human legends about such an advanced civilization which are assumed to be myths because archaeologists have found no physical evidence of such.
However, if such a civilization did exist, they would likely have discovered nanotechnology at some point in their technological evolution. This, as Drexler pointed out in his book, could accelerate scientific and technological progress to the point where hundreds or thousands of years of advancement could be achieved in as little as one year. This could have caused that civilization to leap ahead to the point where they no longer needed a physical civilization of the sort we have now.
All this could have occurred before or in an overlap with the evolution of humans. The overlap could be as little as a few hundred or thousand of years. With the speed of technological development enabled by ubiquitus nanotech, this is a blip in the earth's timeline.
That civilization could then have observed the rise of humans and implanted such a nanotech "control mechanism" as I suggested above in humans. This would give these entities the ability to monitor and if necessary control the evolution of humans, thus giving them insights into their own evolution, among other interests, while at the same time going about their own business without the interference of humans except as they might desire otherwise. So many of the so-called UFO sightings could be hallucinations caused by the nanotech monitoring system while what actually happened is entirely different.
I have also speculated that the so-called "UFOs" are not "alien spaceships" but the actual entities themselves. After all, if you have ubiquitous nanotech, why would you wander around in a fragile biological body inside a space ship when you could BE the "space ship"? In other words, "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" and all such "space opera" never made any sense to me once I became aware of the possibility of post-human nanotech entities.
If nothing else, this theory could make for some very cool science fiction novels and movies.
Reality is a false construct from the perspective that matter is a created and temporary state, thus it is fake to our souls, but of course very real to the combined construct we think of as ourselves. Scientists intuitively recognise that all isn't as appears however are on the wrong tangent.
Hi Cristi from keto to cyber to AI … cool. I will read the whole essay carefully I guess what's really interesting is that o-1 wrote it and you just did some editing.
Are you familiar with Donald Hoffmann and his "case against reality" ?
I personally feel that simulation or not does not really matter if you think you dont have free will (Saposky) .. which as I'm getting older I tend to believe more, I am a program running in my brain (Josha Bach) so wether this program was "written" by evolution or advanced programmers does not really matters, does it?
Thanks for the input Philippe. I'm not familiar with it, but I've heard of it. On the free will part, I know it's really controversial, and in my personally opinion, I do not believe the universe is completely deterministic, nor human life. I think we have a certain degree of free will. I don't think the existence free will is a binary (yes/no), but it's more nuanced. I guess I adopted this perspective from a recent book on Crispr/Cas9 (if I recall correctly). I want to get into Bach's work at some point, alongside David Deutsch's work, but one step at a time :)
Response to Cristi Vlad's "Could reality itself be a sophisticated simulation?"
Interesting discussion - if mostly irrelevant, since whether we are or not we can't do anything about it at this juncture. :-) We're still mostly chimpanzees and chimpanzees are not going to outwit the sort of civilization which can do such things as creating simulated universes. Captain Kirk's outwitting of machine intelligence by behaving in a typically chimpanzee irrational emotional manner never made any sense.
It's also more or less equivalent to various "occult" theories originating from or modified from various Gnostic concepts, except those have no "technological" component.
A more interesting but relevant concept is: What if we are being manipulated in a similar manner by a specific post-human or alien species?
When K. Eric Drexler wrote "Engines of Creation", the primary text which hypothesized "ubiquitous nanotechnology", he discussed the probability of being able to embed nanotech "robots" inside human living cells, which would have the ability to monitor and correct any negative conditions, thus correcting illness before it starts and extending life span.
I have speculated that an advanced species could implant such nanotech in humans which would have the capability of monitoring and manipulating human sensory capability and neural function such that they could exist and humans would be unable to be aware of their presence - including the presence of such "robots" inside human cells. Thus, a human peering through an electron microscope would not even be capable of seeing the presence of such "robots" or deducing their presence by cellular events.
Further, human neural function could be manipulated to any degree on a global scale, thus manipulating the entire population.
Indeed, it would even be possible to implant such technology in every form of existent on the planet, from single cell organisms to every life form and even inanimate objects such as rocks. Recall that some Native Americans believe some rocks are actually living. Nanotech could make that a reality.
Science fiction has dealt with this topic in a variety of forms. Eric Frank Russell wrote a book about energy beings living in the sky on a visual frequency that humans could not perceive. I think the original "Outer Limits" TV show had an episode where some people encountered an alien life form which looked like rocks in the South-Western desert.
Primarily, though, my speculation was based on my experience interacting with the late independent journalist John A. Keel, who wrote several books on the UFO and abductee
phenomena. He suggested something similar - that all those phenomena and much more might be originating from life forms from "another dimension" - of the electromagnetic spectrum - which interacted directly with the human brain.
This is not just speculation. A professor of psychology named Michael Persinger, operating out of Laurentian University in Canada, speculated that the UFO phenomena might be caused by seismic events which cause perturbations in the earth's electromagnetic field which could in turn cause mental disturbances in humans, including hallucinations.
He did more than speculate. He created an apparatus that could induce hallucinations in humans using focused high-intensity magnetic fields. Someone sitting in the chair could experience visions of their dead grandmother, alien abduction or even visions of God, depending on their belief system.
See the Wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Persinger
I have speculated that the UFO phenomena is a case of an advanced technological species which originated on this earth prior to the rise of the human species. We know there were several proto-human species before humans. Given the time scales involved, it is quite possible that such a species achieved intelligence, then civilization, thousands of years before humans. There are plenty of human legends about such an advanced civilization which are assumed to be myths because archaeologists have found no physical evidence of such.
However, if such a civilization did exist, they would likely have discovered nanotechnology at some point in their technological evolution. This, as Drexler pointed out in his book, could accelerate scientific and technological progress to the point where hundreds or thousands of years of advancement could be achieved in as little as one year. This could have caused that civilization to leap ahead to the point where they no longer needed a physical civilization of the sort we have now.
All this could have occurred before or in an overlap with the evolution of humans. The overlap could be as little as a few hundred or thousand of years. With the speed of technological development enabled by ubiquitus nanotech, this is a blip in the earth's timeline.
That civilization could then have observed the rise of humans and implanted such a nanotech "control mechanism" as I suggested above in humans. This would give these entities the ability to monitor and if necessary control the evolution of humans, thus giving them insights into their own evolution, among other interests, while at the same time going about their own business without the interference of humans except as they might desire otherwise. So many of the so-called UFO sightings could be hallucinations caused by the nanotech monitoring system while what actually happened is entirely different.
I have also speculated that the so-called "UFOs" are not "alien spaceships" but the actual entities themselves. After all, if you have ubiquitous nanotech, why would you wander around in a fragile biological body inside a space ship when you could BE the "space ship"? In other words, "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" and all such "space opera" never made any sense to me once I became aware of the possibility of post-human nanotech entities.
If nothing else, this theory could make for some very cool science fiction novels and movies.
Reality is a false construct from the perspective that matter is a created and temporary state, thus it is fake to our souls, but of course very real to the combined construct we think of as ourselves. Scientists intuitively recognise that all isn't as appears however are on the wrong tangent.
Interesting point.