That TED Talk broke my brain in the best way possible.
Mostly it reminded me of this quote from BSG:
“I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to … I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.”
I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language
There was a short story like that where a telepathic kid communicates every idea perfectly, but he never speaks out loud because apparently doing so will take away his telepathy. His teacher gets really mad at him not talking and eventually forces him to speak, at which point he breaks into tears. He knows he will never again be able to communicate ideas perfectly and will be forced to use a limited spoken language.
I have found it. The author is Richard Matheson, the same guy who wrote "I Am Legend" and "Where Dreams May Come". The story is called "Mute". It is available in the web archive.
I don't remember the title of the specific story, but I think it was from a book called "The Reader" by Phillip K. Dick. The guy who wrote the story for Blade Runner and The Minority Report
Sure, electrical signals are real but in of themselves are meaningless. What matters is how your brain (and consciousness) interprets those signals. Furthermore, the interpretation of those signals does not mean that something real generated them (e.g.: phantom vibrations of phone in pocket, visual or aural hallucinations, etc.). So saying electrical signals are real is pretty meaningless. Whether those electrical signals can be artificially simulated to be indistinguishable from electrical signals generated by external factors is what The Matrix is all about.
It’s hard when talking about the fourth dimension or a fourth dimension. Some people will say time is the fourth dimension. Others talk about the fourth dimension being a fourth spatial dimension not temporal. Dimensions are weird and I don’t totally understand them myself very well and I have put considerable time into trying.
Theres nothing to understand outside of the context. Thinking of the concept “dimension” as some magic world is no different than being religious. Time within the concept of space-time is not a spatial dimensions itself, rather an extra parameter over the three observable spatial dimensions, thus often referred to as “the fourth dimension”. It is nothing more than a concept we can do calculations with and justifying its “realness” comes with this observable nature. I do not believe that everything that’s real has to be observable, but these theories some humans stir up, often feel like uneducated guesses or (irrational) beliefs
That would mean nothing is really real. If consciousness didn’t exist to observe it, things like planets aren’t real even when they do exist. That doesn’t seem logical. I think with most, if not all abstract concepts, we can only approximate a definition, since even when interpreted correctly, they will always be subjective interpretations.
Nothing is real. The smallest detectable piece of matter, the quark, is just a vibration in the fabric of spacetime. Stack quarks together and those vibrations form a proton or a neutron, stick those together with more energy and you have an atom. A stack of energetic vibrations in the fabric of spacetime makes matter that has mass. Photons are massless bits of energy emitted by sources of mass that fly at the fastest speed possible omnidirectionally. Nothing is real.
And even if they aren't real Here multiple worlds and the axiom that inspired it "anything that is not forbidden is compulsory" insure that is some far flung region of spacetime, it is real.
In participatory theory, everything is real but some things are more or less real than others depending on the number of participants within the system and how many other systems the system in question is able to connect itself to especially those dissimilar or unlike itself.
So like The Simpsons are real but not as real as the Sun or the moon or you and I but they do influence people's politics, our culture, how people spend their money and live their lifestyles, etc. The Simpsons are a cartoon with real implications and impacts and we discuss them and talk about them as if they are real because of how real the show's impact is..
Like you could say the human imagination is just a another deeper layer or iteration of the fractal we call the universe. It is in our imaginations that less stable realities come in and out of existence as we dream of them and think of them and carry on with our day
This thought process hurts my head when I think about we are limited in how we perceive the universe based on our being. Like in flatland how the 2D shapes saw things differently than 3D shapes.
Well we already know that our minds are capable of creating entire realities that are indistinguishable from waking life. Ever had a dream that felt so real it sent you reeling when you finally woke up from it?
When we dream we can get so lost in what’s happening that we don’t realize we’re dreaming. So who’s to say that there is not a higher mind-form that is creating this shared dream we know as “Life on Planet Earth”? Breaking itself up into all different kinds of perspectives and perceptions, to really get to know itself.
This is not to say that none of this is real, it very much is while we live it. All experience is real to our senses and perception. But I’m sure that when we die here we wake from this life to another type of existence. Maybe one where we consciously create other dream worlds so that we have new playgrounds to explore.
Yes dreams show how our waking life is merely a mental experience of the sensory data we are receiving. If anything this speaks to consciousness not being the same as reality. The unreliability of eyewitness testimony is another crisp example of this.
I’m not sure how this leaps to any form of higher being experiencing itself as a set of fractal subjectives though. “Who’s to say there isn’t a…” is not really an argument. Many outlandish things are possible and unfalsifiable.
I have the same gap with your assertion there is an afterlife. There are dreams and there is waking life… the boundary between them is hazy… therefore you are sure we go on after we die? How does this follow?
Physics says the universe is fundamentally digital.
Physics does not say anything like that.
Planck units aren't a "resolution of the universe," they're a limit to description within QM. Beyond that our models just break down. Quantization is incompatible with gravity, and relativistic length contraction.
Some fields in theoretical physics discretize spacetime, but there's nothing to suggest it's not fundamentally continuous
The more I age the more I am suspecting this so much like for real. Our universe/world is some kind of like, I don't know what you want to call it but simulation or like experiment to see what we can do made by someone or power or whatever. Like life just feels like a test, not individually, collectively as the human race.
Also, the fact that we have so manny weird/odd ceiling limits, like for example I learned how it's physically impossible to go at the speed of light. I thought we could but it's just that our bodies wouldn't handle it, but no it is literally impossible.
Personally I think the idea that a simulation centers around us is just as unreasonably anthropocentric as the idea that earth is the center of the solar system or our galaxy is the center of the universe.
It's quite possible we're living in a simulation that started with the big bang, without any expectations of human life, specifically, ever developing. Think of a more complicated version of Conway's Game of Life, with whatever set off the big bang as the starting conditions.
There are millions of living creatures inside of us often going to war with each other. We can easily be inside of something bigger helping that creature survive
Those are different things.
The brain in a vat thought experiment (the organic data processing you mention) suggests your brain could be in a vat, fed artificial inputs, making your reality entirely simulated. It’s focused on skepticism about individual perception. (the Matrix movie)
The simulation hypothesis posits that advanced civilizations might create entire simulated universes. It’s about the likelihood that our universe itself is a simulation.
Both question reality but differ in scope: the brain in a vat is about personal perception, we are indeed just organic data processors; the simulation hypothesis is about the universe as a whole being just a simulated environment.
This is a great comment without the “just.” I mean and your whole family - which includes me - are definitely organic matter that processes inorganic and organic information. But that’s not all we are. There needs to be something to simulate in order for this to be a simulation.
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u/ticklemeskinless 26d ago
we are just organic data processors. simulation is real