What’s really going on? This is the question at the bottom of my movie project as many others.
Space X Pioneer and Tesla founder Elon Musk said “The chance we are not living in a computer simulation is “one in billions”. He is not alone and the “Matrix”-like idea has become a legitimate scientific hypothesis.
Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the museum’ Hayden Planetarium said: “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment” (Scientific American, Clara Moskowitz, April 7, 2016: Are we living in a computer simulation? ).
It seems that the simulation hypothesis is a simple explanation for the dark forest we are living in.
What if its another theory hiding just what’s really going on and making us fatalistic? What if there is a someone out there using such beliefs to oppress people?
At first sight the computer simulation theory makes a lot of sense because it suits not only our everyday life experience but could also explain supernatural encounters and religious experience.
Many people feel they are part of a larger drama, but don’t know the director or the screenplay of their lives. They encounter the same situation and similar characters again and again.
Moreover there are repeating patterns in life as in a “Game Of Thrones” where often a similar twist does happen.
Are we trapped in some sort of “Truman Show” or even the “Hunger Games” without even knowing it?
THE VERGE asks “if we are avatars being guided by creatures in another reality” (Richard McCormick, Jun2, 2016).
Yes it feels a lot like this because we can’t see the driving forces in the universe but there is a strong perception of some (divine) intervention in many situations.
Hauntings in the forests and Ufo-Encounters often appear like paradox stage-plays or some video-clip played again and again. This is like part of a computer game or simulation.
However there are some simple questions which are often avoided. What we can actually do by ourselves is creating some very convincing cyber space which looks very real.
But what is about physical objects? Could a solid object like a wall or a tree be nothing else as some sort of cyberspace-reality? Maybe in the future, but it couldn’t be easily imagined from our experience.
What’s happen is that the advocates of simulation theory are blurring the distinction between mind and matter. It’s true that living in an online world is changing perception and virtual realities become very real. But that doesn’t change base reality. Sometimes we need to be careful not mixing up things here. If we take a walk in the forest without any mobile devices we experience base reality again. And hopefully we’re still sometimes “offline”.
What makes simulation theory very interesting is that indeed visionary encounters and supernatural events could happen in some sort of realm of reality which resembles a computer game. The reports often sound like some sort of “cinematic” experience and we ask where is the projectionist. However this applies to a level of the other world, like the celtic otherworld, which is still close to base reality.
Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University writes about the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation created by posthumans, who want to simulate the world of their ancestors: “the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent” in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws”, Nick Bostrom, “Are you living in a computer simulation”, Published in Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 53, No, 211). This sounds like typical alien encounters and alien intervention from outer space and gives perhaps some bizarre events some meaning.
But is it more realistic or more credible as a highly developed extraterrestrial visitor who is guiding our civilization in a subtle way?
And, there is an account of visionary experience as long as mankind exists and these accounts tell a different story. On some level the other world is abstract and can’t be encompassed with our models of the universe.
We may be indeed part of a big game but it doesn’t work the way we usually think. Archetypical images for example are often simply disturbing and cannot be explained or interpreted.
It’s no surprise that simulation theory is basically an adaption of much older theories going back to ancient times. Seeing the world as a computer simulation is in a way like Plato’s allegory of the cave. Computers didn’t exist at this time. But the philosophers knew that what we see might be a simulation but in the end its much more then simple simulations.
