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Well I don't believe we are in a computer simulation per say but I think there are certain properties that certainly make it seem like we are. For example, I b

Well I don't believe we are in a computer simulation per say but I think there are certain properties that certainly make it seem like we are. For example, I believe that conciousness can transcend to anything. We could just be some collective consciousness. When we are born we have no memory of our previous life. When we die we have no memory of our current one. So this suggest to me that it is entirely possible that we are continually living in different bodies, different animals, different entities that collectively make up reality. For instance, I learned that even animals take drugs to get high when they are stressed. That they feel affection and love just like humans. This tells me that our conciousness is overrated. It also suggests to me that it could entirely be possible that we live in some giant cess pool of conciousness, some network of consciousness that is constantly reproducing and dying like cells. so if our concousness lives through different bodies over time, then it is entirely possible that the current reality we live is also a transient state of being. it scares me how I came to know this and I'm not even on drugs or have done drugs in a long time.

element11 12y ago
I really like this comment. There is a deepness in our lives that everyone can feel, a love that transcends everything. Such a thing can't be simulated.
- BuckRogers 12y ago
  Care to explain? This sounds like wishful thinking. When love is merely a chemical reaction and all of your emotions are, why can't this be simulated in some way?
vikiomega9 12y ago
Or that the biological imperative that we share is common across all animals. The fact that drugs were found by said animal implies trial and error. But then again, what constitutes a drug? In a world where drugs that induce sensation of the level of say cocaine were absent, some other milder drug would apply as a suitable substitute to relieving stress. But really, I can't fathom how you connect collective consciousness to having no memory of a previous life or the one that follows. Apologies if I'm gravely mistaken.
- curiously 12y ago
  collective consciousness I like to think of it as the internet. everyone starts with a clean html web page. they get filled up with stuff. everyone has a different webpage. then they get taken down. or they spawn new ones when two web pages combine. then the new ones get filled stuff. further down this road, we have access to whatever was written about us, we of course have no recollection or unable to see or understand what our predecessors have felt other than reading about it, but the bigger picture is that our internet has gotten bigger, our offsprings will inherit even a larger version of it and so on. the individual experience has no memory because it can't, but it inherits the greater consciousness, the greater collection of wisdom and knowledges of generations and generations before it. whether this means we transcend through multiple lives like hindus or buddhists will argue or whether you go to hell or meet 72 virgins, is useless. our collective consciousness is a result of myriad of simulations conducted by ourselves and on this planet, in this universe, we do not live in some Matrix 2.0, our species as a whole has been able to evolve and reach our state through our entire human existence, our very lives are simulations that provide input to the collective, good ones, bad ones, towards a state where we are so efficient, so intelligent, so enlightened that further improvement is impossible OR series of events create catastrophic extinction of our biological representation and new ones emerge on this planet or another where the whole process will begin again. man I'm so scared by all this shit.
me_myself_and_I 12y ago
I pretty much reached this same conclusion :S I'm constantly tormented how I'm not conscious about 7 billion people's mind but I am of mine. Why it happened till now? Can it be happening infinitely? Like if you play a video, then you pause it for billions of years, then play it again. If we were able to watch the video cutting the part where it was paused, it would look like it was never paused in the first place. Maybe life is like that. I'll die, in a couple of billions of years, or other universes what I perceive as my consciousness will wake up (independently of the body form). If I was told to close my eyes, and I'll get some drugs to fall asleep, then during that time someone is going to make a 100% exact copy of myself, where would my current consciousness wake up? In which bed, if me and my copy are in the same room? How someone could convince my copy, he is not the original one? (if, for example, there is no video of the procedure). Would that prove there is no real consciousness as we perceive it and we are merely a byproduct of the laws of the universe? Why did I become conscious in the first place? What if my homosapien body had never born? Can it be that there is just one single consciousness but every creature experiences it on their own way? (like an OS being installed in different hardware. After some time they would look different, just like we all have different personalities and experiences, etc). There is an hypothesis that says there is just one single electron in the universe, but all the matter is a kind of representation of it in time. That would explain why a positron and electron would annihilate each other. I'm not an expert whatsoever on physics. I'm just curious of my own existence :)
- curiously 12y ago
  can you feel consciousness like I feel mine? I think you can, and I also think you don't. No one consciousness is same, it's like fingerprints, it's totally unique but the same components are there, just different patterns, different states, but ultimately the same. Looking at all the people on earth, do we as a whole represent some ulterior ocean of consciousness that has passed the test of time and evolution as the dominant species on this planet, and our offsprings may continue to improve and build our ocean of conciousness so that one day it may be rid of filth and waste, nothing but pristine, clean, transparent body of water? Could it be that our consciousness, our mind, can exist beyond our own species? Even our own planet and beyond? That we are all one in this race and struggle, that the pluses and minuses, at the end of the day all balance out and we are left with nothing permeable but something that is ephemeral? What if everyone earth stopped what they are doing and just did nothing, just began letting go of our daily activities and stresses, just let go of our firm grasp of what our version of reality is, what would we see? What would everyone eventually see what it is that we are fighting for, what is it about our existence that requires so much searching, when in fact our ancestors have already stopped doing some time ago, eventually being kick started again time to time in a period of spiritual famine? I only have questions, just like our scientific modeling of our reality and universe raises unanswerable questions. Is it wrong to marry the view of what actually is, has been to what needs to be according to a civilization that begun relatively short time ago? Is it fair or even wise to search for answers with precision that will fail with the same level of accuracy for those that practice this method? I just can't believe I'm uttering these things without drugs. I think even then I wasn't able to reach this level of depth.
Udo 12y ago
> For example, I believe that conciousness can transcend to anything. That's a religious argument unconnected to the question of whether our universe is simulated or not. > When we are born we have no memory of our previous life. This presumes there is such a thing as previous lives to begin with, something for which no scientific evidence exists. Barring that, the problem becomes the same as the question "why does a computer program I just wrote have no memory of its previous existence?". > So this suggest to me that it is entirely possible that we are continually living in different bodies Step back a moment from this logical jump and try to imagine how someone without your spiritual background might parse this conclusion. It comes from out of nowhere, some might even say it's the opposite of what one would expect to follow an observation like "When we die we have no memory of our current one.". > That they feel affection and love just like humans. This tells me that our conciousness is overrated. These observations about animals are not new, in fact most pet owners are likely to see this as a trivial truism. > so if our concousness lives through different bodies over time Another non sequitur. This observation doesn't follow from your chain of arguments, it follows from a premise you started out with. > then it is entirely possible that the current reality we live is also a transient state of being Everything is transient, our existence is as ephemeral as the configuration of our environment - this fact does not in itself mean anything. It sounds like you're reserving a special place for humans or intelligent life in general, but in actual fact the universe doesn't care about the existence of life one way or the other. The presumption that consciousness is a basic physical force constitutes a fundamental category error, it runs counter to everything we know about physics. In any case, this has no bearing on whether the universe is simulated or not: the basic building blocks of reality do not make special exceptions for brains. There is absolutely no expected difference between a mind running within a computer-like system and a mind running on the "real" universe, whatever that may be.
- curiously 12y ago
  I really don't think a logical, academic review of what I think the reality is of much use when in fact the very subject of what we are discussing is so strange and hard to fathom in our heads but I'll play. to me, if we were to believe that our our idea of ourselves is actually not unique, that we are just a very large variation of the basic properties of consciousness (something we can't really quite put a finger on), then it can be said that we are in a simulation, for the same reason, you dream, you daydream. Our brain frequently runs simulations during these period of rest and animals do as well. Why is it that we can be so convinced of our dreams as if it were real? Why is it that they by themselves have no real beginning or an end, sort of like our own existence? What if your life is just an episode of a dream? Who's running the simulations? Why is it not just one continuous flowing state? Why does it need to be disparate and seemingly discontinuous? My view is that this is actually the most efficient state a simulation can reach. If it was one giant cesspool of initial variables in one bubble it would be pretty obvious for the inhabitants of the simulation to figure out the walls quickly and before long question what's outside of it. The same reason that we can realize we are dreaming and experience lucid dreaming. But, we can't for the love of god find this wall in our own reality because our brain through years of evolution by previous consciousness, have been designed to find safety in numbers, fight or flight reflexes, gather or horde scarce goods. Only when our innate animal like instincts are squelched can we experience reality in it's rawest and purest form, something buddhist tibetian monks often frequent, a higher form of understanding where they are able to feel the whole range of human experiences without actually doing them because they realize that it's actually our own consciousness that trap us into realities that we create for ourselves. Knowing that we can and create simulations of our own through dreaming, out of will, help of substances or even meditation, it shows that at the outer level our reality can be fluid and can take many different shapes or forms. In the end, our own intelligence, our ability to find patterns out of chaos, traps us into thinking that something that doesn't follow a rigid set of rules or lack of data automatically mean that they don't exist, when in fact, such narrow mindedness can only come from the choice to view reality and oneself with the same set of practices used in laboratory or whatever environment where such mentality has been useful. I will say that even the latter situation is actually a simulation of it's own, but much much worse kind, it's created and rigorously maintained by other consciousnesses aimed at supressing all other views. Quantumn theory suggests that we live in our own simulation create by us, religious texts also suggests the same thing, you shape your own reality but at the end of the day, it's lacking the same solid walls as the one you create, it must be that the most efficient simulation is also one where every possible permutation is achievable, that our collective human race is literally a race towards achieving some enlightened status as a whole, that through experiencing life in the myriad of lives, that our collective consciousness will improve and become efficient, that it outlives all things biological, it continues beyond even our own planet, maybe we are truly one with the universe and everything it represents, we are simply the creation, not of an external super intelligent aliens, not future versions of us running Matrix 2.0 for shits and giggles but because it simply is the way it is designed, the same way we discover math in our own reality, and how it reveals answers, it must be that we are the simulation, not the simulatees or simulators.
seba_dos1 12y ago
If you don't have memory or any other way to link your actual "live" with previous ones, how does the situation where "conciousness" travels between bodies and does not actually differ? What identifies a consciousness A that was in the body X and traveled now to the body Y? How is it different from consciousness B that used to be in the body P and now lives in the body Q? How can you actually link them like that if there's no difference between them, so swapping those two consciousnesses between bodies Y and Q won't make any difference?

element11 12y ago

I really like this comment. There is a deepness in our lives that everyone can feel, a love that transcends everything. Such a thing can't be simulated.

BuckRogers 12y ago
Care to explain? This sounds like wishful thinking. When love is merely a chemical reaction and all of your emotions are, why can't this be simulated in some way?

vikiomega9 12y ago

Or that the biological imperative that we share is common across all animals. The fact that drugs were found by said animal implies trial and error. But then again, what constitutes a drug? In a world where drugs that induce sensation of the level of say cocaine were absent, some other milder drug would apply as a suitable substitute to relieving stress. But really, I can't fathom how you connect collective consciousness to having no memory of a previous life or the one that follows. Apologies if I'm gravely mistaken.

curiously 12y ago
collective consciousness I like to think of it as the internet. everyone starts with a clean html web page. they get filled up with stuff. everyone has a different webpage. then they get taken down. or they spawn new ones when two web pages combine. then the new ones get filled stuff. further down this road, we have access to whatever was written about us, we of course have no recollection or unable to see or understand what our predecessors have felt other than reading about it, but the bigger picture is that our internet has gotten bigger, our offsprings will inherit even a larger version of it and so on. the individual experience has no memory because it can't, but it inherits the greater consciousness, the greater collection of wisdom and knowledges of generations and generations before it. whether this means we transcend through multiple lives like hindus or buddhists will argue or whether you go to hell or meet 72 virgins, is useless. our collective consciousness is a result of myriad of simulations conducted by ourselves and on this planet, in this universe, we do not live in some Matrix 2.0, our species as a whole has been able to evolve and reach our state through our entire human existence, our very lives are simulations that provide input to the collective, good ones, bad ones, towards a state where we are so efficient, so intelligent, so enlightened that further improvement is impossible OR series of events create catastrophic extinction of our biological representation and new ones emerge on this planet or another where the whole process will begin again. man I'm so scared by all this shit.

me_myself_and_I 12y ago

I pretty much reached this same conclusion :S I'm constantly tormented how I'm not conscious about 7 billion people's mind but I am of mine. Why it happened till now? Can it be happening infinitely? Like if you play a video, then you pause it for billions of years, then play it again. If we were able to watch the video cutting the part where it was paused, it would look like it was never paused in the first place. Maybe life is like that. I'll die, in a couple of billions of years, or other universes what I perceive as my consciousness will wake up (independently of the body form). If I was told to close my eyes, and I'll get some drugs to fall asleep, then during that time someone is going to make a 100% exact copy of myself, where would my current consciousness wake up? In which bed, if me and my copy are in the same room? How someone could convince my copy, he is not the original one? (if, for example, there is no video of the procedure). Would that prove there is no real consciousness as we perceive it and we are merely a byproduct of the laws of the universe? Why did I become conscious in the first place? What if my homosapien body had never born? Can it be that there is just one single consciousness but every creature experiences it on their own way? (like an OS being installed in different hardware. After some time they would look different, just like we all have different personalities and experiences, etc). There is an hypothesis that says there is just one single electron in the universe, but all the matter is a kind of representation of it in time. That would explain why a positron and electron would annihilate each other. I'm not an expert whatsoever on physics. I'm just curious of my own existence :)

curiously 12y ago
can you feel consciousness like I feel mine? I think you can, and I also think you don't. No one consciousness is same, it's like fingerprints, it's totally unique but the same components are there, just different patterns, different states, but ultimately the same. Looking at all the people on earth, do we as a whole represent some ulterior ocean of consciousness that has passed the test of time and evolution as the dominant species on this planet, and our offsprings may continue to improve and build our ocean of conciousness so that one day it may be rid of filth and waste, nothing but pristine, clean, transparent body of water? Could it be that our consciousness, our mind, can exist beyond our own species? Even our own planet and beyond? That we are all one in this race and struggle, that the pluses and minuses, at the end of the day all balance out and we are left with nothing permeable but something that is ephemeral? What if everyone earth stopped what they are doing and just did nothing, just began letting go of our daily activities and stresses, just let go of our firm grasp of what our version of reality is, what would we see? What would everyone eventually see what it is that we are fighting for, what is it about our existence that requires so much searching, when in fact our ancestors have already stopped doing some time ago, eventually being kick started again time to time in a period of spiritual famine? I only have questions, just like our scientific modeling of our reality and universe raises unanswerable questions. Is it wrong to marry the view of what actually is, has been to what needs to be according to a civilization that begun relatively short time ago? Is it fair or even wise to search for answers with precision that will fail with the same level of accuracy for those that practice this method? I just can't believe I'm uttering these things without drugs. I think even then I wasn't able to reach this level of depth.

Udo 12y ago

> For example, I believe that conciousness can transcend to anything. That's a religious argument unconnected to the question of whether our universe is simulated or not. > When we are born we have no memory of our previous life. This presumes there is such a thing as previous lives to begin with, something for which no scientific evidence exists. Barring that, the problem becomes the same as the question "why does a computer program I just wrote have no memory of its previous existence?". > So this suggest to me that it is entirely possible that we are continually living in different bodies Step back a moment from this logical jump and try to imagine how someone without your spiritual background might parse this conclusion. It comes from out of nowhere, some might even say it's the opposite of what one would expect to follow an observation like "When we die we have no memory of our current one.". > That they feel affection and love just like humans. This tells me that our conciousness is overrated. These observations about animals are not new, in fact most pet owners are likely to see this as a trivial truism. > so if our concousness lives through different bodies over time Another non sequitur. This observation doesn't follow from your chain of arguments, it follows from a premise you started out with. > then it is entirely possible that the current reality we live is also a transient state of being Everything is transient, our existence is as ephemeral as the configuration of our environment - this fact does not in itself mean anything. It sounds like you're reserving a special place for humans or intelligent life in general, but in actual fact the universe doesn't care about the existence of life one way or the other. The presumption that consciousness is a basic physical force constitutes a fundamental category error, it runs counter to everything we know about physics. In any case, this has no bearing on whether the universe is simulated or not: the basic building blocks of reality do not make special exceptions for brains. There is absolutely no expected difference between a mind running within a computer-like system and a mind running on the "real" universe, whatever that may be.

curiously 12y ago
I really don't think a logical, academic review of what I think the reality is of much use when in fact the very subject of what we are discussing is so strange and hard to fathom in our heads but I'll play. to me, if we were to believe that our our idea of ourselves is actually not unique, that we are just a very large variation of the basic properties of consciousness (something we can't really quite put a finger on), then it can be said that we are in a simulation, for the same reason, you dream, you daydream. Our brain frequently runs simulations during these period of rest and animals do as well. Why is it that we can be so convinced of our dreams as if it were real? Why is it that they by themselves have no real beginning or an end, sort of like our own existence? What if your life is just an episode of a dream? Who's running the simulations? Why is it not just one continuous flowing state? Why does it need to be disparate and seemingly discontinuous? My view is that this is actually the most efficient state a simulation can reach. If it was one giant cesspool of initial variables in one bubble it would be pretty obvious for the inhabitants of the simulation to figure out the walls quickly and before long question what's outside of it. The same reason that we can realize we are dreaming and experience lucid dreaming. But, we can't for the love of god find this wall in our own reality because our brain through years of evolution by previous consciousness, have been designed to find safety in numbers, fight or flight reflexes, gather or horde scarce goods. Only when our innate animal like instincts are squelched can we experience reality in it's rawest and purest form, something buddhist tibetian monks often frequent, a higher form of understanding where they are able to feel the whole range of human experiences without actually doing them because they realize that it's actually our own consciousness that trap us into realities that we create for ourselves. Knowing that we can and create simulations of our own through dreaming, out of will, help of substances or even meditation, it shows that at the outer level our reality can be fluid and can take many different shapes or forms. In the end, our own intelligence, our ability to find patterns out of chaos, traps us into thinking that something that doesn't follow a rigid set of rules or lack of data automatically mean that they don't exist, when in fact, such narrow mindedness can only come from the choice to view reality and oneself with the same set of practices used in laboratory or whatever environment where such mentality has been useful. I will say that even the latter situation is actually a simulation of it's own, but much much worse kind, it's created and rigorously maintained by other consciousnesses aimed at supressing all other views. Quantumn theory suggests that we live in our own simulation create by us, religious texts also suggests the same thing, you shape your own reality but at the end of the day, it's lacking the same solid walls as the one you create, it must be that the most efficient simulation is also one where every possible permutation is achievable, that our collective human race is literally a race towards achieving some enlightened status as a whole, that through experiencing life in the myriad of lives, that our collective consciousness will improve and become efficient, that it outlives all things biological, it continues beyond even our own planet, maybe we are truly one with the universe and everything it represents, we are simply the creation, not of an external super intelligent aliens, not future versions of us running Matrix 2.0 for shits and giggles but because it simply is the way it is designed, the same way we discover math in our own reality, and how it reveals answers, it must be that we are the simulation, not the simulatees or simulators.

seba_dos1 12y ago

If you don't have memory or any other way to link your actual "live" with previous ones, how does the situation where "conciousness" travels between bodies and does not actually differ? What identifies a consciousness A that was in the body X and traveled now to the body Y? How is it different from consciousness B that used to be in the body P and now lives in the body Q? How can you actually link them like that if there's no difference between them, so swapping those two consciousnesses between bodies Y and Q won't make any difference?