Now, we’re outside in “reality.” Or are we?īy definition, until we “break out,” we have no way to prove that our reality is simulated. Now we break out to a “higher level.” We wake up in a different reality, knowing that we were inside a simulation, but now we’re not. Until we break out, everything about our reality seems perfectly real to us. Let’s imagine it was true, that we live inside a sophisticated simulation and we have no way to prove that we are simulated, except perhaps by “breaking out” of our coded environment. The idea is attractive because it is almost possible to understand, to relate to things in our own world.īut its attraction is deceptive. Now that we’ve invented sophisticated computers and gaming systems, it’s not so hard to imagine how we could all just be programs running on an even more advanced CPU. Objective reality, the fact that stable matter actually exists and interacts with other matter in a consistent way, should be considered one of the true wonders of the universe (some people already do). There are two common ways in which this is done: 1) by speculating that the universe is a simulation (the Matrix model) or 2) by suggesting that nothing is real except their own experience (the Descartes model). I’ve read articles where people extrapolate their misunderstanding of the observer effect to deny the basic objective reality of the universe. Some philosophers misinterpret the observer effect because they don’t realize that “observation” simply means a quantum event is converted to a macro-event by interaction with the rest of the universe. Where in the brain is consciousness? When might something be “consciously observed?” Is a human soul required for consciousness ( The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka is an entertaining exploration of that question)? Physicists hewing to an overly-enthusiastic Copenhagen interpretation misinterpret what is meant by observation when they don’t realize we have no idea what “conscious observer” could possibly mean. Is consciousness a thing? Are there basic subatomic particles of consciousness that science hasn’t yet discovered? Or is consciousness an emergent property of the complex organization of conceptual matter? This continues the discussion of the nature of reality from my previous post about how the observer effect is frequently misinterpreted.