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Jamie you made me think of something --- have you heard the theory that we are NOW living in a computer generated "game" created by a high intelligence --- I was listening to hmmmm I can't remember, it might have been Gaia ... anyway, I was like WHAT? You can't be serious --- I looked into it and some highly intelligent people think that's the case. Oh MY! Right? Alls I know is that right now -- second life is tons of fun and the shopping is less expensive than in the "real" life. hahahahhahahah
A girl's GOTTA shop, right?
wink
Hi, Ms. Olivia. Yes, a shopping girl has got to shop.
Regarding the simulation theory that you mention above, see the following 4:45 min:sec video, which is part of a speech that science-fiction author and nonfiction essayist Philip K. Dick gave at the second Festival International de la Science-Fiction de Metz, France in September 1977. I couldn't find the full video of this speech.
* "Philip K Dick Speech Excerpts", Revlin ( archive.org/details/@revlin ), June 3, 2011,
https://archive.org/details/PhilipKDickSpeechExcerpts . Mirror: "Philip K. Dick Discloses Real Matrix in 1977 ?!.flv", sammysmithazt, Apr. 10, 2012,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTgxF2F9cIc . Mirror: "Philip K Dick exposes the matrix in 1977!", David Saoirse ( youtube.com/user/chaosismyonlyname ), Oct. 21, 2012,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owYMqhoZkn0 .
The full text of the speech was published as the nonfiction article "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others", pp. 147-165 of the following work:
* Philip K. Dick, edited and "Introduction" by Lawrence Sutin, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995), ISBN 0679426442, LCCN 94027812,
https://bit.ly/2LcYK8l ,
https://webcitation.org/71hvTWRtL ,
http://www.freezepage.com/1534397720HOBKOBFKWE .
Some of what Dick writes about in the above is correct, such as the pantheism of God (more exactingly, panentheism); and the existence of parallel universes. As the world's leading quantum physicist and inventor of the quantum computer (being the first person to mathematically formulate how such a device operates) Prof. David Deutsch has pointed out, there has actually only ever been one interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and that is the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI): all other supposed "interpretations" of Quantum Mechanics are simply attempts to avoid the MWI. The parallel universes of Quantum Mechanics really do exist.
And the below is an excellent lecture by neuroscientist Dr. Sam Harris, one of the main leaders of the New Atheist movement, at a June 2016 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference.
* "Can we build AI without losing control over it? | Sam Harris", TED ( youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector ), Oct. 19, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nt3edWLgIg ,
https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_ca ... ol_over_it .
As Dr. Harris points out, unless there is something literally magical about the operations of our brains, then it is a purely physical process that can be replicated via advanced-enough technology. Harris further points out that given any rate of progress, it is inevitable that superintelligent godlike machines will one day be constructed. So Harris believes in the existence of gods, it's just that he knows--as do I--that they exist in the future; and the not-so-distant future, at that. Therefore we come to the ironic insight that materialistic atheism, consistently applied, unavoidably results in theism. Consistent atheism turns out to be theism.
* * * * *
Regarding the Dickian simulation theory, it could well be the case that we are in a computer simulation being run by a highly-advanced society. However, there would be no possible tests that we could perform that would reveal that to us unless said society wished to disclose their existence. This Dickian hypothesis is actually a variation on the Gnostic heresy.
I like playing around with such concepts, but regarding my actual beliefs, I do not believe that is the case. I would think that a superhuman society would create a far more pleasant simulation. If they were malicious--and for various reasons that I've gone over elsewhere, I don't believe they could be--they would certainly be capable of creating a reality far more horrific than this one, bad as this world can be at various times and places.
Rather, the world appears to be more or less what I would expect it to be like if humans are naturally-evolved apes. In a certain very real sense, humans *are* trapped in a computer simulation: that of their mental programs operating on the wet-computer of the human brain. Humans are trapped in the matrix of bad ideas. Almost all of the main societal problems are due to false and destructive ideas.
* * * * *
Now here comes one of the strangest creations ever published, by one of the strangest people who ever lived. Edgar Allan Poe considered his following nonfiction book to be his magnum opus--and he was quite correct in considering it so.
* Edgar A. Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem (New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1848),
https://archive.org/details/eurekaprosepoem00poeerich ,
https://archive.org/download/eurekapros ... erich.djvu ,
https://webcitation.org/6AdUPRmzN .
(The best format to get the above book is DJVU, although it is also available in PDF at the first link. DJVU files can be viewed with the free and open-source, cross-platform program DjView:
http://djvu.sourceforge.net/djview4.html .)
In his above book, Poe gives an excellent description of essentially the entire Tiplerian Omega Point cosmology, from its Big Bang beginning to its Big Crunch end. Poe describes the universe starting at a "primordial Partictle" (i.e., an atom in the ancient Greek sense of indivisible unity), then expanding and evolving, and then collapsing into Godhead and unity in a state of infinite complexity. I wonder if Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was influenced by Poe, since Poe was very popular in France.
Throughout the book, Poe is at pains in attempting to describe the 3-sphere topology of the universe, but doesn't posses the technical mathematical terminology. On p. 29, he describes creation from nothing. On p. 100, he solves Olbers's Paradox. On pp. 102-103, he describes the parallel universes of Quantum Mechanics, i.e., the multiverse. On p. 117, he even gives an accurate summation of Special Relativity, that "Space and Duration are one." That is, space and time are actually different aspects of the same thing, i.e., spacetime. And that is just a few of the surprising gems to be found throughout this work. Poe isn't completely correct in everything he presents here, though he gets far, far more correct than wrong, and all his major conclusions are correct.
Poe knew that he would be laughed-at and derided in presenting this information--that he would be thought of as quite mad. Yet Poe also had not the slightest doubt that he would get the last laugh in the end. And Poe was right. How did Poe know? In publishing this work, Poe presented to mankind a deep riddle, a preposterous enigma. The commonly-credited inventor of the detective genre wrote a real-life nonfiction mystery for mankind to unriddle.
Interestingly, in one of my entheogenic psychonautical voyages well-before I had ever heard of any variant of the Omega Point cosmology, I experienced myself as a living, superintelligent 3-sphere that was collapsing to a single point, and that this point could never actually be reached but that this process would continue forever. Indeed, that I was part of a superhuman society whose goal was to reach this point, even though they knew that they never actually could reach it, just getting closer and closer to it--like some existential itch that can never be scratched. At the time, I didn't even have the mathematical terminology to describe this 3-sphere topology, or even know of its existence, yet I experienced what it was like to *be* a living, self-aware 3-sphere. This would have been circa 1999.
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