Now the really weird question. What if you're not real and I am just observing you?
A fun question that spawned from my how would you know you were in a simulation or not.
Source: internetstructure.wordpress.com
This post presumes we decide we ARE in a simulation. See the lead in post before this one:
If reality were only a simulation how would WE the simulants be able to know for sure?
So from that post let's pretend the answer was...
Yes we are in a simulation
In out simulations that we make we often observe them from above and watch computerized worlds and people run around. Other times we inhabit a character and look out through their eyes.
The other characters, the world, and everything are built around us.
In our simulation who is the observer?
This post is going to be rather short. It is mostly a post on what I hope are thought provoking questions spawned by the other topic.
- Is someone observing us and we are all simulants?
- Am I the observer and all of you are simply NPCs?
- Is the observer hopping around through each of us like we are vehicles, and each of us may hold pieces of the observer?
- Should we presume the observer has the same limited senses we do?
- Perhaps we are the singularity and we are a simulation created to house the minds of multiple observers... (EDIT: This would indicate interesting things for those that believe in reincarnation)
Source: gamingimage.wordpress.com
BOOOM..... there went my head.
Think on that for awhile.
I have had some interesting visual/mental experiences which brought me to believe I was the only real mind, and even questioned my own existence. I was later introduced to the idea of Solipsism, which is simply the philosophy of the experience I had beheld.
Obviously if you can maintain the same, or a similiar, idea as such then I cannot be the only real mind. This leaves either none of us to be real or all of us to be real.
I think that we are all individual facets of a mass collective consciousness that has an awareness unlike anything we could ever comprehend in our human states of consciousness. So to say that ot is looking through our eyes, each, would be true as it is false. I think the experience is meant to be just that, an experience; this in turn is recorded in the meta-field that is pure energy: raw chaos.
This is all but a way for the universe to experience experience, creating every possible interaction through its infinite cyclic time point.
Just my ideas. :)
It's a deep rabbit hole.
You say it well:
@alchemage expresses it well:
So what can I say. Based on the premise of your previous post (long-time Conway's Game of Life fan here, [hated the video btw :p]), all is one and one is all: the "field" carries the information and its vibrations (panta rei) that makes up what seems to be the "objective" "reality" on some octaves (space/matter/mass) and, on other octaves, the "consciousness" (information/aether/light/energy flows). Like the shards of a mirror through a kaleidoscope and the eye segments of an insekt, all human consciousness is in constant turbulent resonance with the "main stream", which in turn "experiences" the same unfolding or progression through the iterations ("time"), merely a few octaves "higher" (or "lower", depending on your view).
When the matter wave decays (the "material body" "dies", through NDE, drugs (DMT/psylos), or actual exitus), the tune of the "soul" - that particular "timbre" - swings back into the great orchestra.
That is, sort of, how I look at it conceptually, but I'm not sure if it makes sense.
Yeah this is a deep pool we could explore for some time and get a lot of interesting ideas from it. I speculate and imagine and come up with many different ideas, some of them contradictory. Yet the exploration of the mind and imagination/intuition in itself is definitely rewarding.
As to the Conway video. Sorry about that I was writing quickly. I almost linked to a web based version of the game but I thought most people would not know what they were doing and odds are they would not take the time to find out. So I put a video in there that explained the concept at a basic level. I have zero doubt there are better videos on the subject out there.
No worries about the video, I understood the intention, good introduction; but when the audio pretended/suggested that the intelligently designed complex oscillators, generators and whole Turing complete computers shown emerge as if by themselves as easily as simple blinkers and gliders, I cringed a little.
Self-contradiction is not a problem per se: Kurt Gödel to the rescue!
a fun topic :-)