The Great Simulation

The astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson has at times spoken something like “I fear that the universe is a great simulation” and others have immediately shot back in rebuttal that they cannot accept an unreal universe.  Of course, many remember Einstein saying “I fear the universe is far more bizarre than we can imagine”. But Tyson seems to get caught up in the web of requiring a super intelligence to have designed the “game”.

Anybody who has any experience at computer game modeling knows that the people designing the game are no more intelligent than most of the rest of us. Gaming programs are becoming more complex by virtue of standard routines which can be keyed in easily and then modified to say make the explosion shift directions or more smoke or more flame. And yet, in spite of probably billions of dollars spent, they still lack the credibility of a real video of an explosion.

People who have written about their Near Death Experience (NDE) indicate there is quick soothing confirmation to deny that you can do anything wrong, particularly emphasized by Dr Eben Alexander.  That may be because what you did in your life was designed, it didn’t just happen. Judgement day is likely based around our own judging of ourselves when we find out it is too late to make changes in what we did in the life that we can remember. Of course, if we can soon remember our past lives, we might be calmed by knowing the last life was not all that bad.

Many ancient civilizations such as Tibet and Peru apparently moved to high altitudes and tough living conditions to develop a peaceful society away from warmongers who simply didn’t want to live there. These civilizations developed or retained an advanced understanding of spiritual thought talking about astral and mental planes separate from the physical plane we think we live in. Perhaps because these folks could use meditation with more success, they developed a much further advanced spiritual understanding.  The Russian born lady Blavatsky tried to write in terms western civilizations could understand via the book “Secret Doctrine”.  The book is hard to read because it constantly uses terms that only eastern religious folks can remember.

Others in the Theosophical Society have written about Buddhism and even performed some amazing analysis in the book “Occult Chemistry” by Leadbeater and Besant. Again this effort has been largely ignored because it was too advanced for even modern times. And then there is the great prophet Edgar Cayce who mentions the “creative force” thousands of times in his 14,000 readings of several pages each. Apparently the Great Simulation toys with us by providing sparkles of insight every now and then.

We now have about 7 billion people on our earth and many of us know there are millions of other civilizations on distance planets and moons. Many of them are from the same ancient folks that we came from and look identical to us. Of course, there are others that do not look much like us, but their souls or entities may be identical or at least function in a similar fashion.

People with NDE are quick to point out that the astral and mental planes are not “places” but are different states of existence. What we typically think about states of existence is the concept of phases, as in solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma.  A drop of water in the ocean that evaporates into the atmosphere actually exists somewhere and so the analogy is not all that functional but perhaps useful.

People called mediums continue to tell us that the afterlife exists at a different level of vibration, perhaps far higher than any electromagnetic waves we have found to date. On the other hand, it may be a type of vibration we have not even thought about. For example, how does gravity know two bodies exist? People have been arguing about this speed of gravity influence for decades. Some suggest it may be millions of times faster than the speed of light. It would make sense that aliens who exist all over the earth, at times, likely use some other type of communication than electromagnetic waves.

Eastern religions talk about the seven cycles of the universe lasting 311,040,000,000 years and then there is a period of rest and then it gets reborn again.  Most engineers would say this as close to forever as one might want to get. But the fundamental intelligence is just asleep, not dead. Therefore to answer the quest for the foundation of the Great Simulation, this “Creative Force” may be the inhabitants of the mental plane, whatever that may be.  But it doesn’t need to be a separate higher intelligence, but merely the accumulation of our most advanced souls. Perhaps there is a hierarchy or society of mental plane occupants. Do we really need to know what it is or how it works?

There are a couple billion people on earth, mostly in China and India, who simply accept a “Way of Life” and don’t fall back onto a god or get caught up in the relentless argument of spiritual alternatives. There are aliens who advise us to think of the Creative Force, or just creation, as a separate concept from the idea of a god.  They advise us that god is a human, though greatly advanced from any of us on earth and perhaps the boss of the mental plane. One might think of the workers who created the Great Wall of China as the creative force and god the man with the whip. J

There are many examples of humans achieving knowledge without having been taught or learned from outside sources. Autistic folks and even folks with traumatic injuries have suddenly acquired musical or artistic capabilities. One named Daniel Tammet has written a couple books outlining how it is he can do these advanced calculations and linguistic capabilities and it is obvious from his description of the technique that he was not taught by anyone or anything we know about.

It seems almost certain that humans can acquire expertise from their spirit or soul if you like. It also seems likely that techniques for the acquisition would vary from one human to another.  So if someone writes a book showing how they did it,  there is no guarantee that approach will work with everyone, but likely it will work with some folks. It seems likely that many folks will claim that god is at the helm and nothing as simple as your own spirit is at play. But does it really matter what it is?  It only matters that we learn how to maximize the acquisition across the broad range of the 7 billion people.

Whether the Great Simulation is real or unreal can be addressed by our basic understanding of matter.  While we think we know a lot about protons, neutrons and electrons, there is much about matter that we do not know and may never know. For example, decades ago science taught that electrons went around the nucleus in orbits like planets around the sun.  Even at the time the theory was being taught, they already knew it was untrue. Science then took the leap via quantum mechanics theory and attempted to describe the orbits as a more like a probability.  You don’t get much more “unreal” than that.

We owe much of what we think we know of the universe from the study of electromagnetic spectral lines that issue from atoms because the electron is “changing orbit”…or “changing probability?”  Whatever the fundamental of the electron movement, it is exceptionally precise.  Spectral lines from each element are so precise that we can tell what the makeup of a star is from the spectral lines emitted from the star.

There is further order in the atom with how these orbits, or shells, are systematically filled as larger atoms are created from smaller ones.  Nobody knows why the atomic structure is the way it is.  It seems to be just the way the creative force works. It sounds like a “gamer programmer to me”.

The nucleus of the atom is of the order of 10^(-15) meters in diameter and the range that the electron occupies is of the order 10^(-8) meters. Therefore the majority of the volume of the atom is “nothingness”. That is pretty unreal, don’t you think? Not only is the space between star systems filled mostly with nothing, but even the atom itself is mostly nothing.  How unreal is that? Maybe the question is not “How can the universe be unreal?” but “Why is the universe unreal?”

The video game we tend to want to call “unreal” is actually made up of the same unreal pixels on a screen that makes up everything. It seems that the unreal nature of the Great Simulation is actually as real as anything we “really” know about.

 

Jim Branson, Retired Engineering Mgr.