In 1998, purported extraterrestrial contactee Jerry Wills claimed a tall blonde humanoid named Zo taught him how to access Aramu Muru and enter "another universe." Wills further claimed that Zo illustrated to him how our universe is an experimental simulation within his species' universe. They built it to understand their own reality, which is itself nested inside a larger universe.
The next year, in 1999, the blockbuster science fiction film The Matrix came out and forever emblazoned into our collective subconscious the idea that our existence is a simulation created by a more advanced race of beings. Incidentally, the film also made long black trench coats, black sunglasses, and my last name all the rage, but I digress...
A few years after the release of The Matrix, philosopher Nick Bostrom published the Simulation Argument, a concise paper entitled "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" It presented a trilemma, a mathematical breakdown of why at least one of three provocative scenarios must be true.
- " the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a 'posthuman' stage;
- any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
- we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation."The "posthuman civilization" to which Bostrom refers defines a period of time after which humans have merged with technology. This is sometimes referred to as post-Singularity, with the 'Singularity' describing futurist Ray Kurzweil's designation of a society in which humans are post-biological, living synergistically with artificial intelligence.
The Simulation Argument presupposes the development of this posthuman civilization, at which point, Bostrom states, advanced humans or AI might develop simulations of the past in the same way that current scientists create test environments; some of the simulations would likely be for entertainment reasons, as well, in the same way humans currently create video games and movies.
In recent years, a number of high-profile figures have come out to state their belief that we are living in a simulation. Chief among them is tech magnate Elon Musk, who has stated that the video game No Man's Sky confirmed his belief that someday simulations would approximate reality so comprehensively that they would be indistinguishable from reality. Apparently, he was sitting in a hot tub with friends when he finally converted.
Musk is the CEO and brains behind Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and OpenAI. In recent years, he has expressed bold plans for his companies that he believes will advance the human race: with Tesla, he wants to spearhead a transportation infrastructure that doesn't rely on burning hydrocarbons; with SpaceX, he wants to assist in humanity's gradual extraplanetary migration to Mars; and with Neuralink and OpenAI, he wants to facilitate humanity's merger with advanced computer technology.
When he was asked about whether humans are living inside a computer simulation, Musk made headlines last year by saying he thinks the chances are one in billions that we aren't.
"The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following: 40 years ago we had Pong - two rectangles and a dot," Musk stated. "That's where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year. And soon we'll have virtual reality, we'll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable."Here Musk is referring to the exponential growth of technology, the lynchpin of the Singularity theory. If in 40 years we've gone from the two-dimensional pong to the cusp of augmented and virtual reality, imagine where we'll be in another forty, or a hundred, or 400. Provided the human race survives, one may assume we will achieve the ability to produce simulations with sentient beings. Already, the Department of Defense has created the Sentient World Simulation, a real-time "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information, such as major events, opinion polls, demographic statistics, economic reports, and shifts in trends," according to a working paper on the system.
In recent years, other scientists have conducted research and even experimentation in attempts to show actual evidence of the Simulation. Heads turned last year when theoretical physicist S. James Gate announced he had found strange computer code in his String Theory research. Bound inside the equations we use to describe our universe, he says, is peculiar self-dual linear binary error-correcting block code.
A team of German physicists has also set out to show that the numerical constraints we see in our universe are consistent with the kinds of limitations we would see in a simulated universe. These physicists have invoked a non-perturbative approach known as lattice quantum chromodynamics to try to discover whether there is an underlying grid to the space/time continuum.
So far their efforts have recreated a minuscule region of the known universe, a sliver of a corner that is but a few femtometers across. But this corner simulates the hypothetical lattice of the universal grid, and their search for a corresponding physical restraint turned up a theoretical upper limit on high-energy particles known as the Greisen - Zatsepin - Kuzmin, or GZK cut off. In other words, there are aspects of our universe that look and behave as a simulation might.
With news that there are two anonymous tech billionaires working on a secret project to break us out of the Matrix, it's hard to know whether we should laugh or scream in horror. Simulation talk is great epistemological fun and metaphysical amusement of the highest order, but it may speak to an underlying anxiety regarding the merging of our reality with machines, or an underlying existential loneliness. It's even been posited as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven't we met aliens? Well, because we live inside a world they built.
Our earth is marooned in a cosmic void so vast it would take our current Deep Space I propulsion system an astonishing 81,000 years to reach the nearest star โ in a galaxy of hundreds of billions, which is, itself, just one of hundreds of billions. The thought that it's all 1s and 0s rendered by a futuristic microprocessor is philosophically sexy but, perhaps, sociologically lazy.
That there is anxiety about reality being manufactured in a society obsessed with simulated pleasure and mediated experience isn't altogether surprising. It's the ultimate, though perhaps accidental, expression of resistance to a culture steeped in consumerism and artificial growth.
Reader Comments
In my perception, there are many layers of dimension. If we exist on a 3D surface then any escape to a 2D platform would be limited to the entirety of the range of our creations - be they books, movies or games. Eventually in infinity these experiences would become as monotonous as acting in the same library of films over and over and over again.
In contrast, built into our own experience of our dimension is 'computer' code called Nature that takes us beyond such limitations. Nature is an integrated system of cleansing, filtration, recycling and renewal; the very flora and fauna of the stage have purpose. Layer upon layer of diversity of matter enables increased substance.
As above, so below.
Just because someone is a rich disgusting pig is no reason to assume they are intelligent or know what they are talking about.
What he probably does know, but isn't saying because he's filling an objective, which probably has a lot to do with his so-called success, is that the mind is not a part of the body, it isn't a biological function, it's a quantum connection and he knows it.
In other words, you're body is in an experiment for your own being. So in a sense you are right about becoming. What this guy and others are marketing is a very long term objective to convince people that since they are essentially incorporeal, they can transfer their consciousness into an inanimate object. Typically silicon or quartz based. AKA, synthetic life. An Android Body.
What none of these people tell you is that the body and mind are part of a comprehensive biological receiver. It's designed to fulfill objectives for an incorporeal mind which is, evidently, connected to this receiver by means of some form of quantum tunnel. The objective of the NWO rich is to market a story so that once they obtain the ability to interdict this stream of life, of the mind, that they can then interdict this flow and by selling this storyline to the masses they will swarm to sign up for what they think will be some kind of eternal life.
That's not what will happen though. As you may have observed by using a computer, the soul of a machine isn't the soul of humanity.
Listen up, this isn't Star Stinker and the Hollow Men Deck of Stacked Cards. Got it? There's a storyline being sold to you, then your children, and finally to those stupid enough to think that whatever this insane nutcase thinks is real leads them into doing. Which is likely to become a virtual trip to hell. See Walt Disney on this one: The Black Hole 1979. They have been marketing this idiocy for while OK?
[Link]
Good God , talk about arrogant stupid humans: What; we know so much huh? Convinced this is a hologram huh? Yet again tell me what a magnet is because we know so dang much huh? Look people....do your homework or wish you had. Gullible isn't just stupid, in this case it's dangerous.
The term Matrix was derived out of Matrix Mechanics as part of the theoretical work by Pascual Jordan, Max Born, and Werner Heisenberg. It' s part of the first theory of quantum physics. Like that's completely trustworthy huh? We are talking here about dyed in the wool swastika wearing, hobnailed boot wearing, Adolf Hitler saluting Nazi's here. OK? Yet again, it's mathematics so there couldn't possibly be any untoward programming going on right? After all it's just all math .....cough...cough...well OK then. Don't say they didn't warn you.
[Link]
Pascual Jordan
[Link]
I don't think you get out of the Garden of Evil, by making it bigger.
Similarly (or identically if you prefer), if you possess a small and frail human, but very greedy, grabbing, magnifying ego (a ton of bullshit) you don't make it better by encouraging it to grow into a very large, greedy, grabbing, magnifying ego (an entire 'universe' of bullshit).
The problem of duality persists. Truth remains unknown and undiscovered.
ned,
out
The problem (challenge) does exist as IT is divine. Non-Duel beings also exist.
Evolution has a time and place, same goes for the experience of humanity.
Both beautifully explained in tbe Bhagavad Gita. 'No where to go, No thing to do'
Cheers... let s do it!
Hey, he could even develop a vacuum-filter system to clean the air down here.
Note the ego is a term I use for the focus in specific definitions and not for the power or ability to attract and accept such ideas and believe them or make them real to their believer by reacting as true.
Every attempt to 'storm heaven', wrest power or steal the light operates a deeper and more subtle reinforcement of a matrix-mind of lack, fear and guilt - and all the progeny thereof - as unconscious dissociation under the 'mind-control' of asserted reality and at cost of awareness and participation in real relationship of any kind.
In other words the ego attempt makes a hollow tool to the purpose that the mind accepts as its salvation or survival in a fake or substitute 'life' of evasion and belief in the power of a personal control taken to be our self - and defended from insight that would reveal it a construct and not the living movement of being - that may be called the Field or Context with which all that is experienced is supported as your experience because who you truly are cannot be denied - even by self-denying beliefs by which to have the experience of your will denied and deprived, attacked and defended, split and masked over by narrative 'control'.
Ideas are valued for what they serve the purpose of. The a tempt to control reality experience by force is already a deceit - because there is no outside by which or from which to leverage - and so if you WANT such a personal sense of 'power OVER life', a sense of separation or disconnection has to be set up to leave you 'in charge' - but amidst a world of opposition and threat that puts Cause OUTSIDE the split-off sense of self. This is subjection to the fruit of one's own 'idol' or unwatched thinking - which could not be had in full awareness that symbol and image are being used to hold meanings of your own insistent determination so as to 'align in power' and look down at the effects the then validate your sense of self.
This insistence, persisted in, generates the fragmentation of negatively entangled dissociation FROM which we presume whatever sense of 'control' is left to assert or presume or pretend to have. How far into darkness for a false light of a fantasy wish given power?
Reality is not yours to control or possess for yourself apart and alone but is yours to give and receive in wholeness or freedom of being - regardless your freedom to believe yourself unfairly treated by Life, by others and by a past that made you of which you cannot remember and are predicated against re-opening such memory. Social reinforcement and mutually agreed definition operate the matrix of a defence against knowing via the investment in survival of and as the ego sense against fear of loss of 'self' of 'face' of 'control' or of the ability to escape and deny pain.
Alignment in a false sense of power and control made hell out of a 'Heaven' that needed no name because there was no real separation from its being - but its does so as the splitting of our own mind against itself in mutually reinforcing conflicts of fear-denials and guilted betrayal and unworthiness. Here is the search for 'becoming powerful' by which to lose awareness of the power being given to the fear of lack that lies beneath.
Escape into the realm of changing experience can seem challenging and at times gratifying - but no substitute for true fulfilment but will seem to fail you, abandon or betray the meaning you gave it - but thought it possessed in itself.
You as you have learned and believed yourself to be can ONLY give distorted or false witness to everything and everyone you see - while 'operating' the mind in the world of its own asserted beliefs and judgements. But you can pause from such a 'mind' and open the space or presence from which you SEE the nature of your thinking and its consequence - in act or as a current insight. Opening from a connected awareness and living in accord with the truth revealed is the releasing of the false for the acceptance of true that you do not make - and that is part of your knowing truth - for you need do nothing for truth to be itself.
That you do everything to maintain a sense of your own reality is witness to 'getting in your own way'. All is Given You by its very Nature. True receiving is the basis for giving true witness. Otherwise - in modern terms, garbage in/garbage out.
These appear to be opposing poles, but they actually suffer from the same blindness. They don't understand that they are in a process of spiritual development, and that consciousness of self (ego) is necessary for that process. How can you learn who you are unless you go through a process of becoming conscious of yourself as a separate being that has a spiritual impact? How can you learn who you are unless you go through a process of finding out that analysis of the physical components of the universe isn't adequate for understanding your relationship to it?
I appreciate your posts. And I like that you think for yourself.
Thank you.