Anonymous asked: Is material reality just a simulation? If so, is the multiverse an infinite regression of simulations? Simulations within simulations?
Not as I see it. Material reality isn’t a simulation. It’s far worse than that. It’s merely a thought-construct, a theoretical model to explain the fact that the sensory information that I receive appears to bear some correlation to the sensory information that you receive.
Imagine for a moment that we are both examining a paper cup. Receptors in my eyes are sensitive to certain wavelengths of light, which then pass electrical signals to my brain. These signals are passed through various neural pathways, pre-consciously filtered and processed through various routines (object is not a threat, object is not moving, etc.) before being passed through my conscious software and I receive an internal experience labeled with various properties, such as “white”, “cylindrical” “cup”. These properties, of course, are not inherent, but are instead concept clusters that allow me to sort, order, and make sense of the world around me.
When you look at the cup, the information flows through a similar route, but at every step of the process there is variation. The composition of your receptors (more rods, less cones, astigmatism, blue eyes, etc.) is different than mine. Your “hardwiring” is different than mine. And the concept clusters that you have synthesized over your lifespan from your sensory experiences are bound to be radically different than mine.
And yet, bizarrely, we can send vibrations through the air via our breathing tubes that will stimulate the fine membranes within each others ears such that we receive a different sort of information, one that through early childhood encoding we have learned to interpret as highly dense concept clusters and signifiers, or language. Through the use of this informational “shorthand”, I can give you some sense that I am experiencing what I have labeled as a “cup”. You might agree, having encoded the same linguistic label on the set of experiences that accompany a visual impression that is “white”, “cylindrical”, etc.
But there is no certainty that we are experiencing the same thing at all. Worse still, we are not even experiencing the “cup”. It, and everything else we have ever perceived has been a projection inside our skulls, data flowing from a webcam to a computer monitor. And yet we mistake the pixels for A Thing, forgetting due to the killer graphics that everything we have ever seen has been a simulation.
I think that we are all nodes in the multiverse, islands separated by an uncrossable sea.