Just been devouring the book „Psychedelic Ape“ by Alex Boese and it has been doing my head in.
It ́s all about Parallel universes, are we living in a simulation, was Jesus a mushroom and did the Dinosaurs die in an atomic war, just to name a few topics.
It is one of these books that when you have finished a few chapters you lay in bed and can’t sleep because your mind is still on overdrive with thoughts bouncing around rethinking the history of mankind.
Are we living inside a black hole...? According to the calculations of Schwarzschild our entire visible universe and the rest that can be deducted mathematically would fit inside the event horizon of a universe sized black hole.
I do like the one where the book speculates that we maybe living in a simulation. How do I know that I am me and not a sim with a lifetime of memory implanted on a silicone chip, just switched on five minutes ago?
„cogito,ergo sum“ Said Descartes, I think therefore I am, more or less... But how can I be certain that I am actually thinking and not a running program on some kids home PC?
Yes, but what ́s real? Is that what I do, think and experience coming from me, or is it the product of some AI, or even worse, a string of one ́s and zero ́s?
Will our universe end not in a big crunch or a universe ever expanding until the laws of thermodynamics leave only blackness and elementary particles, but when mummy comes in and unplugs the computer because junior has to go to bed?
Honestly, I don't think you are going to get the conversation you seek, or yearn for here on EF. To explore that question, you must let go if what you think and enter withinity; either through a lifetime of practice, or by force.
No. You're not. You just think you are. Your really name is Dwayne Dibley and you are trapped in a VR game.
Seriously, the existence of an objective reality is something you either accept or reject. It can't be proven. Or maybe, in a different universe, it can!
Do you ever wonder about the amount of stuff we've seen in not much more than a human lifetime? First flight, nuclear weapons, space travel, moon landings, two world wars (so far), the internet, more music genres than you can count, AI, space tourism, real UFOs. Doesn't it sound like a lot of drama in a short period of time? Next I reckon we get alien contact who wipe us out in a dramatic finale by redirecting a big meteor, roll credits.
I saw a comment that all this drama is like a kid getting bored with the game and triggering the send in Godzilla option in the Sims.
I've never heard of the book, I'll have to check it out, Terrence and Dennis McKenna posited an idea called 'The Stoned Ape' that our ancient ancestors triggered the acceleration of their cognitive capacity from stumbling across psychedelic mushrooms.
That is also mentioned in the book and it weighs the pros and cons so that it is possible to imagine early christians getting stoned to "see" their god. After all taking psychedelica was pretty much mainstream.
It can't be simulation all the way down. At some point, some form of intelligence must have naturally emerged in order to create the first simulation.
Also, a few years ago, a group of scientists disproved the simulation theory by stating that such a simulation (to run the universe) would require a computer larger than the universe itself and one capable of infinitely-expanding power in order to power the simulation. This was found to be impossible, even with quantum computing. (I'll see if I can find that article again and will post a link if I can.)
It is a fun theory to contemplate, though. Here is the original paper on the Simulation Argument that was written by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford. I believe he is often credited as being the first to suggest the theory.
"This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) 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. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed..."
There is however one thing that seems to have been ignored. The text postulates that any computer or program would have to compute all possible outcomes for all possible simulated minds and that that is impossible.
But what if there is only one mind?
Only the need for one simulation?
What if you are a simulation for the benefit of my simulation, or that for me your simulation does not exist, or mine for you. Or for a few upgrades more why not imagine a simulation where the sim simply switches from reality to reality? Kind of like multiple virtual computers running on a Win Server 2022 OS.
That's actually one of the things that never settled well with me about the simulation theory -- its parallels with religion / creation theory. I guess I also see it primarily as a reflection of our knowledge of the existence of computers (i.e. before computers existed, we wouldn't have been wondering if the universe is a simulation).
The concept of "god" being a programmer or there only existing one mind is similar to panpsychism and the belief that the universe itself is conscious (which again parallels with religion), but there is no evidence for that. And in fact, the universe is believed to be random at the quantum level (e.g. Heisenberg uncertainty principle), which seems to contradict the existence of any sort of 'intelligent design.' Although, if there is any truth to the many world's theorem, then the existence of the multiverse could support a deterministic universe in that every possible outcome is realized.
Thinking in terms of "What if you are a simulation for the benefit of my simulation" reminds me of solipsism -- the belief that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is uncertain. I think that's basically an illusion generated by the feedback loops of our nervous systems which render us incapable of experiencing (qualia) anything outside of ourselves.
Anyways... If the universe is a simulation and "god" is a programmer, I think our antivirus software could really use an upgrade.
At the moment I am haggling with Spinoza ́s god, which means that if you have to have a god, then this god will be the sum of all laws of nature. If this god then has a consciousness or not would be a good topic of debate.
I suppose you could draw parallels to the internet, in its self no sign of consciousness (yet) but figure in the minds of individuals who use the internet then you could argue that the internet could already be very well conscious indeed.
I think that there were careful experiments to try and figure this out, but they showed that the internet is racist as well as misogynist and thought that Hitler did not do anything wrong.
Meaning that if the internet were a person it would need therapy.
Funny. That's how some scientists responded to the Big Bang Theory. "But it's creationism!".
There is no objective reality. There is no reality outside my own head. However, I don't seem to have complete control over it, so I'll pretend it's objective and other people really do exist, so I don't feel uncomfortable.
A sci fi short story springs to mind where reality is a being's dream, and that being starts to wake up. The being's conscious mind, however ,can't simulate that level of complexity.