Are we living in a virtual reality?
Do we live in a virtual reality?
Based on an idea by Cheryl Jensen, a series of articles presented the fundamental characteristics of Simulism and some of the implications that can be drawn from them. These articles have been edited and compiled into a digital publication available at:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1466039
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The contrast is striking. The change from light to shadow as you walk along this forest river keeps your senses alert, so you don’t get used to it. Only the murmur of flowing water near the path provides a background sound that could numb your vigilance if it were not for the chirping of birds and the buzzing of insects.
Then all this would be virtual: an illusion! If so, would that be good news or bad?
An old mossy stump offers you an unexpectedly comfortable chair by the water. You think back to your gaming days in Second Life. What if you weren’t what you think you are? What if you were just an avatar in a great game, manipulated by a real player?
If you think about it, this would be good news… You could have multiple lives! All you’d have to do is transfer your ego-consciousness into the player’s self-consciousness! Many cultures believe in reincarnation, sometimes subject to the judgment of the previous life, like the evaluation of your performance at the end of one game before starting the next. Your new avatar would inherit gifts or after-effects linked to your past performance: your karma! You’ve discovered some very disturbing testimonies; children have memories they couldn’t possibly have created in the present; sometimes this information has been objectively verified…
Simulism could make sense of such facts. But it is an extremely radical model… subject to great reservations. Is it relevant to propose such a revolution that destroys our image of reality and of ourselves? Does this model justify the revolution that it implies?
1: A MODEL OF REALITY
A pertinent model is a construction based on logic that allows us to understand a maximum of observations with a minimum of postulates. Its relevance is a matter of common sense, broadened to include the results of our discoveries and not just the perceptions of our physical senses. Our senses show us that the Sun revolves around the Earth, but our knowledge has created a more relevant heliocentric model, because it explains far more observations with fewer postulates. Your senses tell you that you’re sitting on a solid stump, whereas the discoveries of science lead you to seriously consider that it’s just an illusion of a stump…, calculated and then represented in a kind of virtual Great Game!
Is this image of the world, radically different from the consensus of our perceptions, worth exploiting? It would appear so! A century and a half of astounding discoveries in physics and psychology become comprehensible through Simulism! The absurd world described by modern physics becomes logical and prodigiously interesting to exploit within the framework of this model! Simulism offers a fertile framework for understanding psychological discoveries such as near-death experiences, clairvoyance, hypnosis….
2: MODERN PHYSICS AND SIMULISM
Why is the speed of light a limit that nothing can exceed? Virtual reality, based on a calculated computer world, requires an internal clock to give the machine the rhythm it needs to coordinate its calculations! The limit imposed by the speed of light in our world becomes the limit imposed by the internal clock of the computer simulating the virtual world. A discovery that doesn’t really make sense in the classical context acquires new meaning in Simulism.
Why is the world discontinuous and quantized? Why is the microworld only constructed from integer multiples of fundamental values? Why is it that energy is only exchanged in packets, never continuously? How is it that a microworld particle suddenly jumps from one place to another without passing through the space that separates them? The computer reality described by Simulism makes sense of these strange discoveries. Indeed, computer scientists very quickly adopted a fundamental numerical language based on just two integers: 0 and 1. This choice enables algorithms to be solved elegantly, avoiding calculation loops that would prevent the program from finding a solution. In this way, the discontinuity of the world reflects a kind of pixelation of a virtual world. A particle is represented by pixels and can therefore only be represented by an integer, since there are no fractions of pixels! In motion, it will jump discontinuously from one pixel to another! Simulism logically leads to results that seemed absurd until now.
Matter doesn’t exist as such, with a nature of its own. How is it that exploring the intimate nature of matter only reveals condensed forms of energy? Our common sense tells us that matter and energy have completely different natures, whereas physics assures us that this is not the case! It teaches us that each particle that forms matter is merely a localized vibration in an energy field that fills all space! “Whatever the nature of matter, it’s not made of matter”, ironizes a physicist! But an energy field is fundamentally information that structures space, that attributes properties to it, and that only expresses itself under very specific conditions! The fundamental nature of energy and of our material reality becomes a computer reality! Perfectly compatible with Simulism!
Why is matter dual: wave-like and particle-like at the same time, when these two natures are incompatible! It’s impossible to imagine the same material entity in the form of a wave that vibrates continuously and occupies a potentially immense space, and at the same time, in the form of a tiny particle of matter that tends to remain motionless in an extremely restricted space! This problem can be solved if the world we live in is virtual, and uses the mathematics of waves to calculate the state of the objects that populate it, then displays the results in discrete form like the pixels on our computer screens. The wave/particle dualism reflects the calculated formula/display dualism. Once again, Simulism gives meaning to what has none in our perceived world.
Why can’t we accurately calculate the values of an object’s characteristics when it’s unobserved? How can we explain the fact that, as long as they remain unobserved, the characteristics of objects in the microworld, which contribute to their appearing real to us, are not perennial but vary between numerous possibilities, obeying the laws of probability? How is it that a particle seems to choose one of the probable values only after an observation or interaction, only to lose it again when it is no longer observed or interacting! The same particle can express different fundamental characteristics if it is observed again after passing through a period during which it was not interacting!
Once again, Simulism gives meaning to this observation. A virtual world is never displayed in its entirety; only a tiny part of the virtual world is calculated and then displayed according to the player’s choices. The screen shows only a very small part of the virtual world available through the game. Understandably, object characteristics can vary as long as they only exist in the form of formulas or databases, and are constantly recalculated as the game progresses. The characteristics of objects only take on precise values when the game forces them to be displayed in concrete, pixelated form. Physics describes a fundamental reality in which objects have no defined characteristics until they interact. Simulism describes a software reality that continually recalculates the characteristics of virtual objects until an interaction triggers their display with defined characteristics. What is profoundly bizarre becomes comprehensible.
Why can’t we distinguish between objects in the microworld? We can no more tell the difference between one particle and another of the same kind, than we can tell the difference between one symbol and another of the same kind. Two protons or two electrons do not have the individuality necessary to differentiate one from the other, just as a given symbol cannot be differentiated from the same concept used elsewhere. A digital dollar or a digital euro will be the same anywhere in the world; it’s not real money, but a representation of value: symbols.
Simulism allows us to understand this phenomenon, since it uses formulas and abstract numbers to define objects as long as they are not to be displayed; it does not describe real objects. In a virtual world, the fundamental nature of objects is mathematical and computational. It’s only when objects are displayed that they acquire individual characteristics that can be used to differentiate them from one another; a bit like when you materialize a sum of money you withdraw from a bank in the form of value papers that you can differentiate from one another by their wear and tear or by drawing different marks on them.
3: MULTIVERSE OR PROGRAMMING?
Physics is discovering that the universe is biocompatible thanks to the extremely precise adjustment of some thirty universal constants, such as the mass of a proton, the electrical charge of an electron, the value of the universal constant of gravitation… How can we explain what cannot be a coincidence? Physics offers two solutions.
The first postulates a Multiverse made up of an infinite number of different universes in which chance alone has defined the values of the universal constants since the beginning. In the vast majority of universes, chance will have done things badly. The random collection of universal constants governing the properties of these universes would not allow them to evolve long enough for life and intelligence to emerge spontaneously. According to this hypothesis, you would find yourself in the only universe that combines, by chance, the right physical values to allow the evolution of a universe rich in potentialities; all the others being quickly collapsed or impoverished before having had time to see life appear. It’s the same logic that gives a monkey the ability to write the Bible! All you have to do is teach it to type randomly on a typewriter it doesn’t understand… and then wait long enough for chance to do it right!
The other possibility postulates that we live in a universe created in such a way that the values of the constants have been finely tuned to trigger the emergence of life… The choice lies between an infinity of universes on the one hand, and a created universe on the other. The choice lies between the denial of a creator, on the one hand, and the involvement of a Programmer, on the other. The simplest postulate is quickly found: Simulism, with the construction of a virtual universe adjusted to create information through the emergence of increasingly complex, and therefore interesting, structures, is easier to imagine than an infinite number of uninteresting universes… What’s more, Simulism easily explains the origin of the universe, which Multiverse theory is incapable of understanding. All you have to do is activate the program!
The model proposed by Simulism seems to hold up well, much better than the Materialism our senses suggest. It becomes legitimate and interesting to explore the implications that the model entails. What would be the consequences of this model for our involvement in a Great Game?
So You’d be playing the Great Game of Life through your successive avatars, immersed so deeply in the process that You’d forget your true identity, which lies in another reality than the one in which your avatar lives. By merging into your alter ego, you would perceive a world that would have all the characteristics of reality for you. Your emotions, your local memory and the algorithms of your avatar’s artificial intelligence would persuade him – and You – of his free will, while You would manipulate him through what he would imagine to be his unconscious, without being able to really define its contours or nature. You, on the other hand, would experience his adventure in an infinitely richer way, since You would be his unconscious, his soul, but in full awareness! Only the rules of the game would be your limits.
4: SIMULISM AND PSYCHOLOGY
Over the last few decades, resuscitation techniques have become so effective that brains considered clinically dead now remember after resuscitation what they were unable to perceive because they were at rest: clinically dead!
There are countless “near-death” experiences incompatible with the postulate that describes the brain as the sole source of consciousness. Nearly a fifth of those resuscitated from cardiac arrest followed by brain death recount what seemed to them to be a kind of passage between two realities: our own and another… supernatural. A place where lost loved ones welcome and guide them, before convincing them to return to their bodies. A place bathed in the immense, unconditional love they felt before they were resurrected! And that they agreed to leave with immense regret. And which they are delighted to return to at the end of their adventure in this physical reality.
If we were the avatars of a Great Game, the testimonies of resurrectees who have had experiences that are impossible to explain in the context of a real, material world, would have to be re-evaluated in this new perspective.
Countless testimonies from resurrected people – often referred to as “experiencers” – are compatible with each other; they describe a very strange world, but comparable from one experiencer to another, whatever their culture of origin. While their brains were inactive, many recall experiences that are impossible to understand within the materialist framework. Experiencers recount their memories, sometimes later verified, which describe a consciousness freed from the body, capable of perceiving information impossible to obtain had they remained in a state of normal consciousness. It’s as if their consciousness had detached itself from their inert body and survived in a more global, more fundamental reality than the material reality we perceive with our biological senses. Often, their consciousness was able to perceive information outside their bodies, in other rooms, for example…
Their consciousness seems to have benefited momentarily from a limited but significant extension towards a kind of higher Consciousness arising from their unconscious. We can imagine a consciousness localized in the brain and dependent on its biological functioning, a state of consciousness that could be called “mind”, and which would share information with a more fundamental Consciousness that would not be directly subject to the activity of biological neurons. A concept that would be close to what Dr. Charbonnier calls “extra-neuronal intuitive Consciousness”. A consciousness which, paradoxically, is not directly accessible, but which lies beyond the mind, at the source of information and feelings we may have, and whose origin, for want of a better term, becomes intuition: the feeling that we have received information without understanding its origin, most often attributed to an unconscious that retains all its mystery!
Whatever the predominant culture in which experiencers live, they describe similar sensations; often a journey through a kind of dark void towards an intense light, accompanied by deceased loved ones and surrounded by a feeling of unforgettable unconditional love! Survivors report a profound change in their philosophy of life. On awakening, they return to their usual world with the conviction that they are not just mortal bodies, but that their true identity transcends their physical and mental selves. They now see themselves as immaterial souls momentarily associated with a material body and brain.
They are no longer convinced that the brain is the only source of consciousness. They are no longer convinced that when the brain dies, they will disappear with it. On the contrary! The brain is no longer felt to be the sole creator of consciousness, but becomes a kind of neural filter. A kind of filter directed by the activity of material neurons, a filter that decodes a tiny part of a Consciousness far more vast than the mind alone. Consciousness that would be the true identity of the experiencer. This decoding would be the source of the sense of self that animates the mind: the Ego. The momentary cessation of this filter following cardiac arrest would enable the mind to perceive a larger part of a much more vast Consciousness: the Self.
Consciousness becomes a field of information that fills the entire universe, transcends space and time, and survives the loss of the material brain and its associated mind. The momentary disruption of the mind’s neural activity following cardiac arrest causes the biological filters to malfunction, limiting the information received to that which defines a particular individual: a mortal I, as opposed to the non- mortal Self.
This Consciousness would be at the origin of experiences incomprehensible in the materialistic paradigm, such as the acquisition of information outside the perceptions of the senses: telepathy, premonition, clairvoyance… These acquisitions of unusual information would be explained by a decrease in the activity of the filters of the mind, so that the limits of the individual expand. Imminent death is only that of the mind filtering Consciousness. It is not total, since the mind recovers part of the memory of the event.
Simulism is compatible with these experiences, since it postulates that what we take to be a material world is merely an illusion based on a computer world. The brain only creates the mind, in much the same way as a computer can be the source of artificial intelligence. Avatar brains are capable of artificial intelligence.
Computer scientists have succeeded in creating artificial intelligence software by copying the architecture and functioning of the hardware brain. But this software does not create a structure comparable to our intuitive extra-neuronal Consciousness – our soul, of course. Artificial intelligence software only creates the equivalent of the material mind, which disappears when the brain dies, just as artificial intelligence disappears when the computer shuts down. Software, like Consciousness, can survive outside the broken computer.
During a near-death experience, most of these impromptu visits from what must be called an afterlife, describe very similar experiences, even in the complete absence of prior references to the experience. Experiencers describe a reality that could be the one in which avatar software finds itself: Player Consciousness, between two games. Simulism is a model in which it seems easier to make sense of these phenomena than Materialism.
If we were the avatars of a Great Game, we might evaluate differently events considered paranormal, such as synchronicities or clairvoyance. A computer world giving rise to what we perceive as a material world would be compatible with experiences totally incomprehensible if the world were only material. A momentary access to Consciousness, beyond the mind, could inform beyond the limits of the material mind. Modern physics, notably quantum entanglement, shows that the world does not have the properties we attribute to reality; modern physics transcends the limits imposed by space and time on the world perceived by our senses. A Consciousness that benefited from the properties discovered by modern physics would have the necessary qualities to explain telepathy, clairvoyance…
Certain observations, such as synchronicities, could be the result of processes equivalent to the jokers available in certain games. There are the rules of the game: the natural laws we have discovered through science. And the economy of the rule!… Synchronicities would be tools used by the Player to guide his avatar. The use of Tarots or Yi-Jing could be re-evaluated in this perspective… The Player would use these tools to guide his avatar through provoked synchronicities!
The comfort of the stump that shelters you, the monotonous music of the nearby river and the deep sense of security of the place, plunge you into a welcome meditative state, eyes closed.
What if our world is just an illusion? What does this mean? What new insights can we draw from it?.. What a program!
5: ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHIES AND SIMULISM
This image of the world is not exactly new. Eastern philosophies have been asserting for millennia that the perceived world is an illusion. Taoists and Hindus consider that the universe is not really made up of separate objects as we perceive it; they conceive it as a single entity, an organic whole made up of streams of subtle energies that interact and create the illusion of matter and the separation of objects. The immaterial energies of the Taoists’ Yin and Yang cooperate to create the multitude of perceived material forms… but impermanent and illusory! Subtle energies interact and differentiate by personalizing and individualizing themselves in a very graphic way in Hinduism, in the form of a multitude of gods in our image, who create us and then influence us… Could Simulism help you to synthesize what Eastern philosophies propose and what science is discovering today?
The Simulist Programmer becomes the Brahma of Hinduism. In Simulism and Hinduism, the creator is found in an unimaginable Elsewhere. His reality is completely separate from ours, totally incommensurable, ineffable… But he creates the Great Game and us with it, in a reality we perceive and try to understand.
These two worlds are at least as different from each other as Plato’s intuition suggests in the myth of the cave. There’s no way to imagine a world of light and three-dimensional objects when you’re chained and see only two-dimensional shadows cast on the cavern wall. Science can only try to imagine, with the help of mathematics, certain characteristics of the external world that is at the origin of the shadows we perceive. It discovers structures and recurring behaviours, but is unable to deduce anything about the nature of the world of light and the objects within it. Logic allows us to understand mathematics, but not the physical nature of the fundamental world that gives rise to what we perceive with our senses. Even the creators of quantum mechanics are shocked. They understand their formulas, of course. But it’s impossible for them to imagine the physical reality they translate, so different are they from our perceptions.
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. … Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”
-Richard Feynman, « The Character of Physical Law » (chapter 6, pg. 129)
Eastern philosophies also state that it is impossible for us to understand the nature of the fundamental reality that creates the illusion in which we live. Hinduism tries to illustrate the creation of the world with symbols and images. It tells us that Brahma begins by creating Shiva, the god of dance, pictured by a young man elegantly posed on one bent leg, the other raised and clearly initiating a graceful dance step. A pair of arms whose hands bear symbols evokes energy, while another pair of arms accompanies the god’s dance. Apart from the profusion of arms, a god in our own image, as almost all religions offer!
Why dance? Movement occurs in space, and dance gives rhythm to time. This is how Shiva creates space and time. Science suggests the same thing. In the beginning, an explosion of energy and the concomitant creation of space and time – that’s what the Big Bang model tells us! So far, the images and symbols of Hinduism are compatible with the discourse of physics.
Shiva is followed by other Brahma avatars: Purusha and Prakriti. The former is a masculine energy that creates the information needed to give birth to perceived reality. Prakriti is a feminine energy that constructs a material form on the basis of Purusha’s informal creations… These symbols describe the energy and information that give rise to matter, to objects that appear different to us, even though they are made up of the same fundamental nature: information.
This image of the creation of the universe is also compatible with science, which describes the creation of matter from energy that condenses and takes on a localized form. Physicists describe an energy field that fills the entire universe, whose local excitations appear to us as separate, localized material objects. Simulism also describes two stages of creation. A software program that informs the implicit world, and a display of the result of the calculations that makes it explicit in the form of the perceived universe.
One should imagine the creator: Brahman, in another realm, outside the central dial on which his avatar Shiva Nataraja: the lord of the dance is pictured. The dance initiates space and time. Then Purusha, the hindu equivalent of Yang and Prakriti – Yin, can begin, the former to imagine our realm, the latter, to give birth to it. Purusha creates but do not Manifest his creations, when Prakriti transforms the information-energy in Manifested reality that our organs can perceive.
6: BIG BANG AND SIMULISM
Your torpor deepens; you enter a kind of lucid dream that unrolls on your mental screen the history of the universe as described by modern physics.
At the same time as you’re sitting on a comfortable stump by a river, your mind is imagining itself in absolute darkness – an oppressive void because there’s nothing there yet. You become a kind of pure Consciousness, without a body, in the middle of nowhere! Space and time don’t yet exist!
And suddenly, out of the black void, an incredibly white light of pure energy bursts forth; it’s an overwhelming sensation. Out of nothingness, everything explodes. You interpret this creation as the start of the Program. The Programmer has just activated the Great Game and you’re witnessing the Big Bang; you’re watching the program unfold from the side of the displayed results.
Energy explodes; time and space are born; they evolve. Energy is an active form of information that structures space and time. These are fundamental characteristics of the software that brings the Great Game to life; time and space create the stage on which everything else will appear and evolve. There’s nothing familiar about this vision.
After a little effort, you can make out tiny specks vibrating randomly. They remind you of the dust particles visible in the sun’s rays as they pass through a dark room. But here it’s the dust that dimly obscures the light, not the other way round, as in a dark room, where the dust becomes luminous. The grains swirl at different speeds, sometimes bouncing off one another. Slowly, some of the dust seems to aggregate…
Your observations suggest a strange idea; you notice a bizarre behavior of these tiny grains… they seem to clump together once they interact! As if they were trying to be together! Yes, they do interact, and gradually begin to form larger and larger dust clusters. The universe seems to be slowly granulizing.
Your attention is caught by a process that repeats and spreads: the nature of the particles that aggregate seems to favour their evolution towards complexity. Chance is not the only master; there are rules that favor the creation of new, richer, more elaborate structures. The very nature of the entities that emerge after each interaction leads them automatically to the emergence of a new organization, even richer than the one that gave birth to it. This fundamental characteristic of the process appears to you in the form of structures and colors that emerge spontaneously, reproducing themselves for a time, before a new characteristic, often more complex than the previous one, emerges and reproduces itself.
Amazed by what you observe, you have the impression of participating in the birth of an immense organic construction. You soon realize that this complexification is not only quantitative, but also arises from the forms and types of interactions that emerge from what was initially a very simple collection of tiny dust particles. Now they’re evolving into complicated, kaleidoscopically repeating patterns. Differentiated families of entities emerge and continue to interact with one another; interactions being the fundamental trigger that allows the shapes and colors of the participating entities to express their potential for complexification and evolution. There’s a kind of fundamental drive that influences what, at first glance, appears to be nothing more than chance.
The program runs; the information interacts according to the rules defined in the software: the laws of nature. The software – Purusha for the Hindus – expresses itself and creates the information that defines objects. It selects and activates the formulas and the software that describes their interactions: the laws of nature. The results of the calculations are displayed, changing their nature. Objects become perceptible. For Hindus, they are materialized by Prakriti. For physics, the wave form of quantum matter: its informational nature, becomes material, composed of particles of quantum matter. For Simulism, the results of mathematical calculations carried out in mathematical software are translated into displayed pixels.
You sense that something important is happening… It’s the increase in complexity of the universe.
7: FROM THE BIG BANG TO LIFE AND INTELLIGENCE
You imagine a surprisingly efficient and subtle programmer who chooses the rules and values of primordial variables with the aim of enjoying the evolution of his creation. You close your eyes and visualize on your mental screen a large energy bubble that explodes and grows very quickly. It cools and begins to crystallize atoms, very simple ones. But their intimate nature seems to have been chosen to give rise to interactions… The vacuum, full of energy and information, vibrates and continually creates and destroys particles, some of which interact and acquire a stability: a materiality that allows them to evolve in space and time. New, increasingly complex structures gradually emerge. Primitive atoms come together; the energy of motion is diluted in the expanding space, allowing gravity to assemble ever-larger masses until they ignite into stars.
Interactions continue and become more complex; stars create more complex atoms. They live for a while, then explode, releasing them into the rapidly expanding universe. The dust clouds of primitive stars interact; new stars appear, far more complex than their ancestors. They form planetary systems rich in distinctive features…
A beautiful blue planet soon takes up all the space on your mental screen. You see life appearing at the bottom of oceans where tectonic forces, energies and molecules interact… From physics and chemistry emerges biology! Once again, a complexification, an emergence that seems to create new structures, new properties that are difficult, if not impossible, to predict from the properties of the parent entities. Molecules acquire the ability to reproduce with varying degrees of efficiency; interactions between them and their environment give rise to a natural selection process that favours the most efficient structures, i.e. those that last the longest and/or reproduce most efficiently. You are accompanying the fundamental emergence inscribed in the nature of the universe, which pushes it to become more complex, to create new structures, to enrich itself, to accumulate increasingly rich information. This complexification is subject to the severe selection of the most efficient entities; they sometimes replace all the others, reproduce and create new structures, all related.
The planet is enriched by a biosphere in which life and matter interact to perpetuate and enrich the whole. Some of the planet’s physical characteristics depend on the activity of living organisms, and vice versa; the characteristics of living organisms are linked to the available resources of matter and energy. Ecology enables us to understand the whole, which evolves as an organic entity: the Biosphere. Naturally selected ecological regulatory mechanisms stabilize the whole and enable it to overcome accidents. Certain families of entities are clearly recognizable, but they are all highly interdependent. A subtle and fundamental balance links them all in a logic of interactions that create novelty and stability.
Science describes a planet increasingly rich in life. Inert matter is structured into living organisms, which start out very simple, but become increasingly complex and sophisticated species. Atoms and molecules are continually recycled, thanks to a stream of energy from the Sun that transforms and animates living processes. Everything is recycled, except energy, which is diluted, and information, which accumulates.
This story is not linear; it goes through planetary catastrophes, periods during which many species disappear. But the complexification of living organisms, the emergence of increasingly sophisticated species, is reflected in a more rapid recovery in the number of different species after each planetary crisis. There is a continual emergence of new properties, of richer and better adapted information to sustain life.
A new idea surprises you. How would you describe the impulse that drives objects in the universe to interact? The attraction that creates emergence! This fundamental property of the universe is at the origin of association, of coming together to explore emergence, the creation of new structures, of new and often unexpected properties.
An attraction that creates emergence! This attractive impulse makes you think of love! Could this be the source of the powerful feeling of unconditional love felt by the experimenters: the resuscitated cardiac arrest victims who are becoming more and more numerous as resuscitation techniques progress?
Their consciousness would have remembered a brief sojourn in a universe closer to the simulation software, after having momentarily left that of the results display. This adventure would have brought them closer to the source of creative emergences observed throughout the history of the universe. The software would be built around an impulse towards rapprochement, constructive interaction… If this were the case, one might think that the programmer’s objective would be to discover the creative power of new information in the software he has created! The creative emergence of information would be the objective of the Great Game! And love would be the tool to bring about emergence-creating interactions!
Your mind and muscles are numb. You get up to resume your walk. An intuition suggests that the mind could be a kind of interface between the world of software and the world of displaying results.
You’ve made up your mind! You’re going to look for tools to help you communicate more consciously with your unconscious; to help you bring the “I” closer to the “Self”. And through it, to try to promote the transfer of information between the avatar you think you are, and the Player: your true identity.
The meadow is in full bloom in the mild June sunshine. From the path, struggling to thread its way through the tall grass, you can see two big ears! Then the doe raises her head a little above the flowers she’s been grazing on. She’s just seen you, but doesn’t seem frightened. You look away to send her a comforting message. As you do so, your gaze catches a splendid cluster of tiny white flowers; you recognize it as yarrow. And you suddenly remember the day your life changed, 45 years ago!
As an experienced scientist, you had decided to follow the protocol to the letter, prioritizing open-mindedness; criticism would come later, when analyzing the results. So, to carry out the experiment in the orthodox manner, you began by harvesting yarrow stems and drying them. Then you cut them into ten-centimetre pieces and chose the 5o most homogeneous stems for the experiment. You were convinced that it would fail, because it didn’t meet the criteria of the scientific method at all; it seemed to you to be closer to alchemy than to science. But your bias in favor of observation and experimentation over theory had forced you, in a way, to verify your feelings by carrying out the experiment. And above all, you were very impressed by the results obtained by Carl Jung, who had already carried out the experiment in the 1920s.
THE SHOCK
You remember standing in your office, totally stunned, motionless for long minutes… just long enough to come to your senses. Clearly, you felt that there was a before and an after: your life was leaving one world and entering a totally different one! Your certainties evaporated; you found yourself facing a totally unexpected abyss. There was no way of avoiding the total change in the image of the world that had comfortably guided you up to that point! It was no longer possible to continue on this path, it no longer existed!
You remember that moment when you felt overwhelmed by contradictory feelings. On the one hand, a kind of astonishment at the loss of your long-held bearings; the feeling of having lived until that day in a world that had suddenly turned out to be illusory, even though you had built your understanding of reality on it; even though you had learned to adapt your behavior to this reality that had suddenly become outdated. On the other hand, a joyful curiosity about the immensity of this new reality to be explored. And that’s what you’ve been doing ever since… trying to understand this new world as much as possible. You had to abandon your certainties about the nature and functioning of the world to plunge into the unknown, in search of a new model: a new paradigm.
And in the decades since, you’ve benefited from what you appreciate as a grace: the discovery of a channel of communication with something much greater than yourself, with your soul perhaps!
You enjoy the peace and quiet and meditate along the path that crosses the meadow and heads towards the forest.
THE PHYSICIST AND THE PSYCHIATRIST
You’re starting from the beginning. At the outset, a great curiosity to understand the world through the scientific process. You didn’t need to learn it; it was part of your inner nature. This closeness to science didn’t start with theoretical reasoning, but with the experimental approach: observation takes precedence over reasoning; experience sanctions theory. This priority given to observation and experience seemed to you essential to avoid what some have called scientism: a dogmatic attitude that sterilizes the imagination and enriches our knowledge.
Your questioning led you to the work of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, who collaborated for 28 years in an attempt to understand the foundations of reality in the wake of the quantum revolution for one, and the discovery of the depths of the psyche for the other. Both had experienced the collapse of their image of the world and were trying to build a new one, adapted to the revelations of physics and psychology. Both had accumulated solid observations that forced them to admit a profound link between the physical world and the world of the psyche. Both were totally committed to science, but had discovered that it had strayed into a dead end since Descartes had excluded the psyche from physics. The two researchers used their experiments and observations to try and create a new model of reality that would combine the physical world with the world of the psyche; a picture of the world that would correct Descartes’ error, which had been at the root of their separation for 4 centuries.
Jung had accumulated impressive discoveries about the psyche, while Pauli had been awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the creation of the quantum model of matter. Both had been forced to accept that the separation of the two worlds was unjustified and did not allow them to understand their observations and discoveries. They sought to imagine a source of reality in which matter and psyche were one, before creating the reality we perceive in which matter and psyche are separate. Perhaps a Platonic world composed of two parts, a psychoid foundation – neither material nor psychological, but both at once – which would give rise to the other, in which matter and psyche are separate: the one we perceive directly with our senses.
Plato’s intuition would have suggested to him the metaphor of the cave, in which chained prisoners, their backs to the opening, do not directly perceive the events unfolding in the world beyond the cave entrance, but their projection, their shadow on the wall facing them. The prisoners understand these shadows as the only reality, since they perceive only them. For Jung and Pauli, we only perceive a projection of a fundamental reality that we take to be the only reality. The material world in which we find ourselves is a projection of another world in which there is as yet no separation between matter and psyche!
Sadly, Pauli died before the duo had time to describe an elaborate model. But they did have time to publish their ideas on synchronicity: that event which reveals a profound link between physics and psyche, and on the origin of the artificial separation of the physical and psychological worlds (“Synchronicity: A Principle of Acausal Connection”; “The Kepler Case” 1952).
SCIENCE AND PARADIGM
The discovery of their work had intrigued you to the point of attempting to reproduce certain facets of it experimentally. Dream analysis was one, but the one that suddenly came to mind when you discovered yarrow was far more unsettling; it suggested not only that synchronicity was a major discovery, but that it was possible to induce synchronicity at will! An experience that would create a meaningful link between a physical event and a psychological event unrelated by any discernible cause; a kind of magic. A link like the one Jung experienced when listening to a patient describe her dream in which an ancient Egyptian priest gave her a golden scarab and a real golden scarab arrived at the same time at the window behind his back. A synchronicity that triggered a salutary shock and enabled his patient to unblock her psyche and evolve in a beneficial way.
Of course, it’s impossible to attribute a causal link between Jung’s patient’s dream and the beetle’s timely arrival against the window of the psychiatrist’s office! But we can’t help finding a link between these two events! A link without a cause; an acausal but significant link. Jung and Pauli’s research convinced them of the reality of the phenomenon. So much so that they decided to develop a new concept to try and understand their observations: synchronicity.
A synchronicity is a highly improbable association between a mental state and an event in the physical world. An association that creates meaning for a particular psyche. An association that creates a powerful emotion in a given person that does not affect other witnesses in the same way. What an outsider would call chance or coincidence takes on a more magical quality for those who experience synchronicity! The world seems to be giving them the word to convey an important message! It’s impossible to find a causal link between the two events, yet their association cannot be attributed to chance alone, so meaningful is it to the person experiencing it.
DUALISM IS SECONDARY
The concept is revolutionary; it questions the separation between the world of spirit and that of matter that Descartes constructed four centuries ago, and which has proved singularly effective in the creation of scientific knowledge! Well aware of their heretical nature, Jung dared not publish his ideas for some thirty years. It wasn’t until a physicist as renowned as Pauli urged him to do so that he was persuaded to pass on his discoveries.
Synchronicity had seemed closer to alchemy than to science in the link it creates between a psyche and a physical event. But the discovery that two such creative and rigorous personalities as Jung and Pauli had experimented with this mysterious phenomenon intrigued you enough to give it a try! And here you are, in your office with your fifty yarrow stems, following a very complicated multi-millennial ceremony in an attempt to reproduce their discovery: the possibility of provoking synchronicity!
A THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD RITUAL
It was a question of interrogating a Chinese oracle, a collection of texts at least three millennia old and the heir to ancestral customs dating back at least to the Neolithic! Jung had interrogated the oracle after Richard Wilhelm, a Jesuit friend of his, had translated it into German. And he was so impressed by the result that he convinced you to do the same.
You’ve forgotten the question you asked the oracle 45 years earlier. But you can’t forget the result!
The scientific method is based on the reproducibility of the results obtained. So you decided to ask the oracle the same question twice, deciding that if there was anything serious behind this Chinese protocol, you should find the same answer twice, or two similar answers. But that didn’t happen! You remember the oracle’s response after you asked the question for the second time:
“It’s not me who’s looking for the young fool,
It’s the young fool who’s after me.
To the first oracle, I inform.
If he asks two or three times, it’s importunity.
If he is importunate, I do not inform.”
Yi-Jing; hexagram 4: « The Folly of Youth.
And from that moment on, your life changed! You couldn’t go on with the image of the world inherited from four centuries of separation between psyche and physics! You remember Jung’s statement that convinced you to numb your critical mind for a moment and try to verify his discovery:
“Anyone who, like me, has experienced the joy of experimenting with the divinatory power of the Yi-Jing {…} cannot fail to see in the long run that we are touching an Archimedean point from which our Western attitude of mind can be lifted off its hinges (…) Wilhelm has moreover transmitted to us a living germ of the Chinese mind, capable of essentially modifying our image of the world.”
You’re delighted to have succeeded in overcoming the many deep-seated reservations that your image of the world, based essentially on your perceptions and experiences in science, had erected. Your curiosity suddenly found itself faced with immense prospects: a new paradigm to explore!
There must be a reality in which matter and psyche are united; perhaps a fundamental reality from which ours is formed, one that places matter and psyche in two separate sets. And since then, you’ve benefited from this mysterious channel linking matter and psyche to guide your life choices. By exploring it, you benefit from a much richer and more global vision of situations than that provided by your senses and rational analysis alone. Over the past four decades, you’ve acquired a deep conviction in the reality of the phenomenon. A conviction which has its corollary: the conviction that our image of the world must be adapted to this discovery.
LIFTING THE VEIL
Your experiences have taught you that we have a mysterious ability to acquire meaningful, verifiable information using a tool that connects us to something much greater than ourselves. By questioning the Yi-Jing, you feel as if you’re taking off above the plane of our perceived, material reality, acquiring a kind of vision that accesses a higher dimension, beyond space and time as we perceive them. You have the impression of exploring the matrix of phenomena. By questioning the Yi-Jing, you have the impression of lifting the veil separating the reality in which your physical body lives, to catch a glimpse of the workings that construct this reality. You have the impression of accessing the sources of the physical world in which your mind lives, and which it has hitherto taken to be the only reality. You have the impression of observing the origin of reality from a point of view that transcends the world you’ve taken as the only reality until now. You feel as if you’ve entered the world of the gods as an observer, powerless but endowed with clairvoyance. And able to use it to steer your course through the world in which your physical body and mind live. You feel as if you’ve discovered a channel of communication between your body and mind on the one hand, and your soul on the other.
Your potential in the physical world is sublimated by your involvement in the transcendent reality that encompasses the psyche and which seems to be the one you perceive through the old Chinese oracle. As if it were possible to access the sources of our world, before matter and spirit were separated! As if it became possible to access the information that creates the physical world and the psyche. As if it were now possible to steer your life with the benefit of more and richer data than you can obtain through your physical senses
THE UNIVERSE IS ORGANIC
Modern physics is discovering a fundamental link between objects we perceive as separate. Quantum physics describes an organic, interactive universe, in which interactions are more important – more real, as it were – than the objects that interact. A universe in which objects don’t really have individual, real and permanent characteristics, but characteristics that depend on the interactions they have with the rest of the universe. These discoveries legitimize an interaction between yourself and the old oracle, since both are part of the same organic universe.
Questioning the Yi-Jing has taught you that questions that involve an underlying link between you and the world are answered in such a way that they continue to move and amaze you, just as they did when you first asked them. You’ve acquired the conviction that you’re intimately part of an organic whole in which you can choose to steer your life in such a way as to contribute to the harmony of the whole. A bit like a cell in a complex organism seeking information to participate in the harmonious life of the whole organism. The entity that dialogues with the oracle is at a much higher level than the individual. Questions asked within the framework of the individual alone are not answered. Your experience has taught you to avoid questions centered on the individual; the answers obtained are either incomprehensible in these situations, or revealing by redirecting them to a broader perspective than that of the individual alone. Indirect confirmation that you belong to something much bigger than you imagined.
Handling yarrow stems is a matter of physics, of matter. Gathering information that leads you to discover an ancient Chinese oracle is a matter of chance. The intense emotion experienced when you discover the relevance of the link between the question you asked and the reading of the old text, by way of chance, is a matter of the psyche and forces you to recognize that it is possible to provoke a synchronicity: an event without a direct, recognizable cause that encompasses a material and a personal psychological facet.
Who asked the question? Your mind! Perhaps influenced by your unconscious, but it’s impossible to know.
Who made the draw? Your hand!
Who guided your hand? Not you as you know yourself, but an entity far greater than you. An entity capable of manipulating matter without your knowledge in incomprehensible but highly effective ways. An entity that knows the Yi-Jing and your physiology to the point of steering your behavior towards the appropriate response from a huge set of possible responses! It’s clear: you’re much more than what you think you are, based on your perceptions and experiences! Your hands, their behavior, the yarrow stems, the old Chinese oracle… are all part of the same organic whole, structured and acting according to an underlying order that’s totally beyond you. But you are not subject to this order, you are part of it. And synchronicity is the proof.
You have the choice to behave as you wish as an individual. You also have the choice to behave in a way that takes into account your belonging to the organic whole. Synchronicity allows you to obtain information that goes beyond your limits of space and time, and enables you to adapt to circumstances in a much richer way than if you were limited to information from your mind alone, which is based on your physical perceptions and reasoning.
QUANTUM PHYSICS AND SIMULISM
Your walk has taken you to the edge of the forest. You’re delighted to discover the fresh, fragrant atmosphere.
The discovery of synchronicity has gradually led you to the model of Simulism, more relevant to take into account than Materialism.
Simulism postulates that we live in a virtual world, a mathematical reality that calculates the results of formulas and displays them in what we perceive as reality. Modern physics and Simulism both postulate that there is a fundamental reality in which matter does not exist as such, but which gives rise to matter as we perceive it, as a result of interactions. Simulism implies the coexistence of two realities: that of the simulation software, whose essence is information, and that of the results of the calculations, which are displayed in another reality, the one we perceive as material. Initially, matter and psyche are nothing more than formulas, sharing a common nature: equations. Then, interactions between virtual objects in the Great Game trigger calculations and the display of their results. Objects change their nature, become material and separate from the psyche.
The software, the information processing, lacks the materiality of the objects displayed. This difference is perhaps reflected in the difference between psyche and matter. The psyche is more about processing information, while objects are more about displaying results, which for us becomes matter. Before calculation, nothing separates matter from psyche: both are computational in nature. Perhaps this is the fundamental psychoid reality imagined by Jung and Pauli, long before the development of computing suggested they explore this possibility. We would benefit from a psyche, a Consciousness that would be of a different nature to that of material objects, and which would far exceed the limits of the mind, whose functioning is based on material neurons. Consciousness would enable us to access the world of software, using Yi-Jing as a tool. In this way, Consciousness would be a bridge linking us to a reality that transcends time and space. It would be responsible for psychic faculties impossible to understand through matter and mind alone. Clairvoyance, premonitions, near-death experiences, out-of-body journeys, synchronicities… would be driven by Consciousness and not by the mind. This Consciousness thus acquires the characteristics attributed to the soul.
The mind, enclosed in material reality, would be able to share information accessible only to Consciousness, to the soul, paradoxically through the subconscious and then the unconscious, in a form attributed to intuition or creativity. Consciousness thus acquires a perspective infinitely broader than that of self-awareness! A perspective compatible with that which we would tend to attribute to a soul outside the limits imposed by space and time! A perspective that will never be achieved by artificial intelligence, which is entirely tied to the material world.
If we really are protagonists in a Great Game, questioning the Yi-Jing would be the equivalent of putting down a Joker to extend the limits of the game’s rules. Consciousness would link us to that of the Player whose avatar we would be. Consciousness that we can access in certain circumstances to benefit from information that is impossible to access in material reality, which remains within the limits of space and time. So, by experimenting with Yi-Jing, by dropping in a Joker to momentarily broaden the rules of the Game, you’ve discovered your soul!
A beautiful little town! You’re familiar with Annecy’s medieval streets, and you never tire of wandering through them. But today it’s not just a stroll, you need to find an original target for your visit, one that’s as rare and unexpected as possible! Arcades, old houses and ashlar portals are all too familiar, and should be left out of the choice you have to make.
Your small group of interested friends has given you a mission. You’ve learned that Soviet and American intelligence agencies have developed espionage protocols based on a hitherto considered paranormal faculty: remote vision, a kind of clairvoyance! A U.S. report presents research conducted by physicists at one of the country’s most prestigious universities over two decades, in secret. The millions of dollars spent in secret were not wasted. Researchers were able to acquire information on Soviet weapons development remotely, from their offices at the university, without any access to objective information! Only the subjective faculties of a few particularly sensitive individuals were exploited to perform what they described as a kind of remote viewing. The test subjects learned to trust their intuition and then to exploit it systematically until they obtained results that were sufficiently precise and detailed to be useful and, above all, to be verified. Satellite images confirmed the seers’ descriptions! At first, research focused on gifted subjects, but later protocols were developed to allow anyone to explore this intuition. Your small group of researchers has decided to replicate this experiment; they’ve asked you to choose a target that you’ll try to transmit to them by what we’ll have to call telepathy, until a better concept comes along.
At first sight, it may seem astonishing that scientists should have the idea of exploring such controversial avenues as clairvoyance. But modern physics is proposing a paradigm shift; Materialism cannot make sense of the major discoveries of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics. New perspectives are opening up on new paradigms in which what was impossible, even absurd, becomes possible, if not comprehensible. It’s as if you’re witnessing a kind of re-enchantment of the world! What seemed like magic or charlatanism, such as clairvoyance or telepathy, seems to be moving closer to models derived from science and its rigorous method of investigation.
AN ORIGINAL QUEST
You’re looking for a target that can’t be guessed at by deduction or coincidence. A target which, if described by your friends, is sufficiently unexpected that you can be reasonably convinced of the reality of remote viewing. American researchers are discovering that we can acquire information inaccessible to our senses, through what they have named intuition, for want of a better word. Intuition is a kind of unconscious faculty for acquiring information, far beyond the conscious mind. Our mind, our consciousness, works on the basis of signals sent by our biological senses and our memories, tirelessly constructing the most appropriate interpretations of the world to help us adapt. This is why your friends’ minds will naturally tend to visualize a target typical of the region from which you’ve been commissioned to send them an image. If you want to be reasonably convinced of the transmission of information by intuition, you need to find a target that is incongruous, improbable, beyond coincidence.
You leave the medieval arcades and walk away from the lake along the river that runs through the town. The houses become simpler; the town begins to resemble other small Savoyard towns. You arrive at the Parc de l’île Saint-Joseph. Too well known! Turn left onto Rue de la Gare. Like many others, it doesn’t really have much personality. Then turn right, into an alley lined with old buildings whose first floors are adorned with enticing displays of all kinds of shops and crafts. The alley leads to a well-defined parking area between the street and two buildings. Two large Italian poplars line the almost-full parking lot; two dozen cars and vans unexpected in the city center. Here’s your target! A parking lot, instead of the lake, the busy river banks or other ancient arcades! You stop for a moment at the foot of a poplar tree and slowly scan your surroundings, taking in their particularities. You make no effort to convey anything, just feel the present. You decide to sit still for a while, watching your surroundings attentively… After a few minutes, you set off for home.
You rejoin your group of friends, very curious to find out what their impressions are. You have contradictory feelings. Your reason suggests that clairvoyance is an illusion. But you’re intrigued by the results of experiments in which you’ve discovered the seriousness of the method, the status of the researchers and the academic context in which they were carried out. Your open-mindedness encourages you to favour objective facts over preconceived ideas, which is why you’ve decided to give this exploit a chance.
You take a seat in the living room, among your friends who are trying to relax and clear their minds.
MIND AND INTUITION
Researchers have found that intuition is constantly overwhelmed by the rational mind: your ego, constantly arguing in your head. When you’re awake, the rational mind is in charge! The information eventually transmitted by intuition is much more subtle than the results of logical reasoning or the mental images constructed from information obtained through our physical senses or memories. To have a chance of perceiving an intuition, we must try to calm the mind.
Intuition seems to respond to an intention that focuses the mind on it. To have a chance of being effective, the intention must be clear and focused. At the same time, the mind must be calmed to allow the faint signals of intuition to pass through. And the mind must be focused to perceive them.
A few minutes pass, and then you decide to go round the table. Three of your friends decide not to intervene, for lack of a sufficiently clear signal. Two participants propose fairly obvious targets. You’ve passed them without stopping, precisely because they were too obvious. So what can you conclude? You can’t be reasonably convinced of the experiment’s success.
But then a participant smiles: “I saw a cow! No way!”
You feel a shiver run through your body! Stunned, you don’t intervene immediately; you assimilate the information.
“Incredible! There was a cow on the target! Not a real cow, of course, but an image of a cow! I stopped for a few minutes in a small parking lot in the middle of town. Among the parked cars was a delivery van, all white, with a huge “Laughing Cow” portrait on its sides! You know… the logo of the processed cheese sold in round tins. This can’t be a coincidence! I think the experiment was a success; clairvoyance does exist, even if the signal is weak and difficult to perceive! One out of six, bravo!”
You remember when you looked at the processed cheese logo and felt admiration for the artist who designed it so skilfully without a model! He has imagined and reproduced an extravagant cow’s head wearing earrings made from the same cans of processed cheese, and looking at you with a mischievous and very friendly contagious smile. And now your friend has perceived a cow in a meadow! A perception precise enough for him to mention it, but so impossible in the middle of Annecy that he didn’t believe it! And yet you were confronted with an image of a cow! Your friend didn’t directly perceive what you saw, he didn’t see through your eyes, but he seems to have received symbolic information that he interpreted by referring to his memories. It wasn’t the “Laughing Cow” that his mind received, but a cow in a meadow. His mind has probably interpreted a symbolic but very disturbing intuition. His mind acted as a sort of translator. He received a symbol and translated it into an image by referring to his memories: a cow in a meadow.
PLATO WAS RIGHT
Thus, an objective experiment seems to confirm the relevance of the results of modern physics, which describes a universe organized into an organic whole made up of energies and information, very different from the one we perceive. In this new universe, we could be fundamentally in relationship with all its parts; we should be able to communicate beyond the limits of space and time that restrict us in the world of separate, material objects we perceive with our biological senses. Our image of the world needs to be revised. What our common sense teaches us, the image of the world that our senses and memories have developed, is very well suited to ensuring our survival in the best possible conditions, but does not correspond to physical reality as discovered by science. We live in an illusion, a very useful one indeed, but an illusion nonetheless. Science and philosophy paint a very different fundamental reality from the one we perceive. A reality much closer to the one that has been described for millennia by certain philosophies; Plato’s myth of the cave, for example.
The fundamental world is not made up of separate material objects, but of interactive currents of energy. The world we perceive as made up of separate material objects would be an illusion, the result of a kind of projection of a fundamental reality onto the screen of our minds. So Plato was right when he illustrated his intuition with the myth of the cave. Like the prisoners he describes with their backs to the entrance of the cave, perceiving only shadows of reality, our vision of the world would be no more than projected shadows, reflections of the fundamental reality that lies elsewhere, beyond the cave.
MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS
This experiment suggests that the brain is not the only creator of consciousness. Its biological activity would build our mind, the sense of a personal self limited by our body, fed by our perceptions and memories. But consciousness would be broader than the mind. It would have access to a vast body of information from which our intuition could feed our mind! Through it, we would have access to information beyond our physical senses. A picture of the world compatible with these results would be better illustrated by a world composed of interactive energies than by an inert material world. Our brain would be both a receiver of consciousness and a creator of mind, rather than the creator of all consciousness.
Could this be a consequence of the wave/particle duality discovered by physics? Energy/matter duality? Could consciousness be extra-neuronal, energetic in nature, and the mind the result of the activity of material neurons?…
These unexpected and revolutionary discoveries open up exciting new perspectives! With your friends, you analyze what has happened, having agreed on the validity of your findings: a reasoned conviction of the relevance of the concept of expanded consciousness beyond the mind, accessible via what you decide to call intuition.
What is intuition? What role does it play? What relationship could it have with your free will if it’s entirely unconscious? All sorts of questions emerge and enrich your reflections. Many phenomena considered paranormal in the materialistic world picture, become comprehensible in the new perspective suggested by modern physics.
If your intuition belongs to you, if you see it as an integrated part of your personality, then you are much more than the body you perceive; your fundamental nature is no longer limited to your physical body! The unconscious but real perceptions you receive link you to the whole universe, far beyond your physical limits! Suddenly, you feel an intimate part of this immense Whole that renders your bodily limits insignificant. You exist beyond time and space through your intuition, which you may be able to link in some way to your soul! Amazing perspective!
Could Simulism help you make sense of your discoveries?
AVATAR AND CONSCIOUSNESS
The image of the world constructed from Simulism is more easily compatible with the results of modern physics than the one proposed by Materialism. But you can go even further. A virtual world, a Great Game, would be animated by Players, of course. And the Players would have to be able to interact with their avatars. Perhaps what you call intuition is a way in which the Player whose avatar you are influences your behavior! Your own personality is, in part, built on feelings, sensations… intuitions! All of which contribute to your behavior! The activity of your mind, fed by your perceptions, memories and intimate nature, is influenced by your intuition, manipulated by the Player whose avatar you are. If we lived in a virtual world manipulated by Players, intuition would play an indispensable role. It would be the channel for transferring information that would link us to the Game, a link that would integrate us into the Great Game and, in particular, to the Players.
You reassure yourself by thinking that your mind, your conscious self, should remain in control of its decisions! You remain convinced that you are the true master of your behavior! But let’s not forget that free will is a complex and controversial subject!…
Thousands of shoes wade in a black mud. A tide of umbrellas undulates; very close, they touch each other and the movements of some are transmitted in light chaotic waves which animate this immense black surface. Nobody would have imagined so many curious people gathered on this thin inhospitable moor, usually crossed by some sheep and their shepherds. Mostly grass. A few trees and bushes sparsely furnish these small hills far from everything.
Tens of thousands of Portuguese hope, for some, to live the miracle announced by “the beautiful lady”, for others, to laugh at the credulity of these believers ridiculed since the revolution of 1910, socialist and ferociously anti-clerical. The rumor that started in May has taken on a surprising magnitude: three young uneducated children, the oldest barely 10 years old, claim to have been miraculously visited by a large lady suspended in the air, above a small oak tree, on the 13th of every month since the spring. The local political authorities and even the village priest have done everything to denounce a deception, in vain. The children surprisingly resist all the intimidations, sometimes very violent, to force them to confess a deception.
On the 13th of every month since June, more and more spectators attend the Visitation. Strangely enough, they see and hear nothing but three kids talking to the void, kneeling in front of a tree. The children seem to see and hear someone who is invisible and inaudible to everyone else! It is hard to believe that such young and simple children are able to manipulate so many adults, sometimes very critical, with efficiency.
It’s hard to explain the phenomenon! It is clearly not an objective event accessible to all, since only the three children witness it: it exists only in their psyche. But it is not entirely subjective either, since there are three of them living the same event, as if it were an objective phenomenon! A collective hallucination? Would one of the children perceive a subjective phenomenon with enough power to unconsciously persuade the other two until they also perceive it? Difficult to accept.
But the children asked the beautiful lady to help them prove that they were not lying, that they were experiencing a real event. And the lady promised, three months earlier, a miracle for this October 13, around noon. A supernatural event announced long before it happened! Never seen before! Hence the immense crowd of believers, curious people, skeptics… who waited under the rain which did not cease to wet the moor since last night.
It is past noon; skeptics begin to snicker; the credulous begin to get angry… Suddenly, Lucia, the oldest of the children, asks abruptly to close the umbrellas. Surprisingly, she is largely obeyed; the black canvas surface gradually disappears and reveals a huge crowd composed of all kinds of participants, of all ages and conditions. Local peasants, but also journalists coming from Lisbon, a hundred kilometers away. Notables, doctors, academics… All meet under a rain, fine from now on. And, suddenly, the rain stops; the sky remains covered nevertheless. The kneeling children look above the tree, then Lucia speaks softly, perhaps to the white lady.
And the very improbable supernatural event hoped for is triggered! The sun breaks through the dark clouds and becomes visible, but strangely enough, it does not blind anyone. The spectators describe a very shiny silver disk, but pleasant to look at. Some witnesses compare it to a big snowball that turns on itself; others describe a light as beautiful as the light interference that occurs in pearls… Then stupor, sometimes fright, seizes the spectators. The Sun starts to move. It turns on itself at full speed. It projects great colored gleams which illuminate the landscape and the spectators with the pure colors of the rainbow. Colored beams sweep the crowd and illuminate it in yellow, green, then in blue… The Sun is moving and moving, here and there, stops, starts again… All heads are turned towards the sky. The weather is no longer gray; the crowd is illuminated by a strange day.
Suddenly, cries; spectators throw themselves on their knees. They will say later that they thought they were living their last moments. Mothers try to protect their children by wrapping their arms around them; husbands embrace their wives… The sun is falling on them; it is getting bigger and closer to the crowd!
Then everything stops; the Sun resumes its place. The show lasted about ten minutes but the miraculous event promised since 3 months is not finished. Very quickly, the moor dries inexplicably; the clothes too, as if the sky had become a great source of imperceptible but very effective infra-red!
2. HOW TO UNDERSTAND THIS EVENT?
There is no doubt: something supernatural was experienced by tens of thousands of witnesses. And this event was very clearly predicted by three little shepherds of 7, 9 and 10 years old, uneducated and deeply convinced of their vision and of their role as messengers. Convinced to the point of resisting the political authority that promised them an atrocious death in boiling oil if they did not go back on their testimony!
How to interpret what happened on October 13, in the Cova da Iria?
Is the phenomenon only subjective, perceived only by the mental of the witnesses without reference to an object that exists physically in the sky? Clearly the Sun did not move for the whole Earth but only for the witnesses gathered on the moor! If there was a physical object in Fatima, it was not the Sun. Nevertheless, it is impossible to imagine an immense collective hallucination. There was indeed an objective phenomenon; the most probable is that an object was mistaken for the Sun. Witnesses saw the phenomenon when they were not expecting it and were about 30 km away from Fatima. We deduce that an objective luminous phenomenon was perceived on a surface of a thousand km2 by tens of thousands of individuals.
But there remains a subjective facet since only the children perceived the white lady who revealed her identity to the children that day, as “the Lady of the Rosary”. Thus the phenomenon was able to induce a visual and auditory perception in the minds of 3 children, without influencing the minds of the crowd of witnesses. But it also created an objective event visible on a very large surface, whatever the preconceived convictions of the witnesses: credulous or critical. An objective phenomenon, therefore, but also with a facet that includes a manipulation of the mind of the three children. A very unusual and incomprehensible association.
Was the phenomenon triggered by an objective, locatable event? Can we imagine that the crowd was deceived and took for the Sun an objective and therefore real phenomenon?
The numerous testimonies are similar: an object taken for the Sun appeared from dense clouds. Very luminous, it did not burn the eyes; it was pleasant to look at. It started to turn very quickly on itself. It emitted powerful beams of light that changed color and illuminated the crowd and the landscape with pure colors like a rainbow. It moved across the sky without following a predictable path. It increased in diameter as if it was falling on the crowd. Then it returned to the sky. The moor and the clothes dried surprisingly well and fast.
An analysis of the testimonies given by people far from the epicenter of the phenomenon allows us to clarify the observation. Witnesses in Alburitel, about 10 km east of Fatima, others in Minde, about 10 km south of Fatima, and still others in Leira, about 20 km northwest of Fatima, described luminous phenomena in the direction of the Cova da Iria, at the same time that the phenomenon was being experienced by the crowd of onlookers gathered on the moors. It can be concluded that the objective phenomenon was very localized and at low altitude, since it was perceived above Fatima by witnesses who were all around the site. If the phenomenon had been very high in the sky it would have been perceived over a much larger area and in the same direction by all the observers around Fatima. The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west for everyone! Here, the phenomenon was perceived in the west direction from Alburitel, towards the north from Minde and towards the southeast from Leira. It is therefore a well localized phenomenon and at low altitude. What could it be?
The phenomenon is reminiscent of similar events reported by numerous witnesses throughout history but more documented since the middle of the twentieth century and the waves of strange aerial phenomena, often perceived as disks, flying saucers since 1947. Mostly sudden events, luminous phenomena in the sky described with images that vary mainly according to the period and local cultures.
The phenomenon of Fatima recalls both the observations of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) and the apparitions of strange characters often related to myths linked to local cultures. Objective phenomena? Subjective? Often both at the same time, like in Fatima! This is what you learn from your long researches and the analyses that you have carried out since you decided to build important databases to gather and categorize the testimonies. Gradually, you have expanded your research to the beginning of history.
3. HOW TO INTERPRET AN UNUSUAL EVENT?
Our brain instinctively tries to build a relevant image of reality by gathering the perceptions that reach it. From there, it tries to predict the near future in order to adapt to it as quickly and as well as possible. And if the perceptions do not refer to anything known, it proposes an image as close as possible to those it already knows. This is how, in biblical times, witnesses interpreted unidentified aerial phenomena in the form of chariots of fire descending from the sky, glowing wheels… Later, Roman legionaries described a shield of fire flying in the sky between two armies ready to fight; others compared the phenomenon to an object made of molten metal and its shape to that of a large jar… In China it was a large ball with reflections reminiscent of the iridescence of a pearl that was reported. In Nuremberg in 1561 or Basel in 1566, black spheres as well as “suns” and “moons” impressed many witnesses…
Sometimes people are seen in strange devices. Messages are transmitted without support, by telepathy it seems, as in Zimbabwe on September 16, 1994, to the children of a school, for example… Entities more or less similar to humans are met; they make think sometimes of mythical characters: elves, angels, demons …. Mythical characters sometimes seen in the absence of strange machines… These mysterious phenomena trigger behaviors sometimes very impressive in their witnesses. As in Fatima, they do not leave indifferent. How to understand these phenomena?
The children of Fatima have evolved in the interpretation of their perceptions. At first they saw an angel suspended in the air, then a large white lady who ended up presenting herself as the Lady of the Rosary… very clearly interpretable as the Virgin Mary. The context is religious and is a miracle. Why?
The children receive secret messages that the Lady asks them to pass on to the religious authorities, which they do. Two of them are quickly revealed and concern Russia, which is summoned to convert. Clearly a manipulation. The subjective part of the phenomenon is a manipulation! And its objective aspect clearly participates in increasing its impact.
The phenomenon escapes the understanding of many researchers. It accumulates effects understandable by logic, rational, and others, perfectly absurd. Your databases are becoming very rich but the phenomenon remains mysterious. Far from clearing a path towards a clarification of the phenomenon, the accumulation of testimonies leads to a multiplication of hypotheses. Sometimes mysterious flying machines suggest an extraterrestrial origin by their behavior which defies the laws of physics as we understand it. Material objects but which seem to be free of the constraints that the laws of physics should impose on them. No visible wings nor audible means of propulsion.
Some testimonies cannot be linked to material objects! Flying objects change shape… They suddenly appear from nowhere… They become blurred and transparent before disappearing… Sometimes the phenomenon seems to be part of a mythology which can unconsciously influence the witnesses, to the point of being of more interest to the psychiatrist than to the physicist. But the psychiatrist does not understand the phenomenon either, while being convinced of its reality for those who have experienced it.
The more you study the phenomenon, the more incomprehensible it becomes. When you think about it, you wonder if it is not a kind of generalized manipulation, as with Fatima! Some testimonies make you think of visits from elsewhere. No nation is capable of manufacturing flying machines as described by the witnesses. However, the number of testimonies, their distribution on the planet and the behavior of the objects do not seem compatible with an exploration of our planet by civilizations from elsewhere.
Some observations are too closely linked to local mythologies to be foreign. Some are close to religious interpretations, such as that of Fatima. Thus, in order to try to understand the phenomenon, very different hypotheses are put together, such as an extra-terrestrial origin: explorers coming from other planets… or extra-dimensional: explorers coming from other dimensions than the 4 we know; manipulators coming from our own future; or manipulators who intervene from a completely different reality than ours. A fundamental reality that would create the one we perceive. The reality that seems totally concrete to us would in fact be virtual and created from a fundamental reality impossible to imagine. We would be part of a Great Virtual Game from which Players would manipulate our world, virtual for them but which seems perfectly real to us.
4. FROM ONE DISK TO ANOTHER
You are suddenly overwhelmed by a recent memory.
You have stumbled upon the transcription of a sublime poem engraved on a stele in Egypt, on the heights of Amarna: the city of the Sun, imagined and created by the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten 33 centuries ago. The poet confounds himself in thanks for the grace generously distributed on the Earth and all its inhabitants by the only god he recognizes: Aton: the solar “disk”.
Here is a young man propelled, still a teenager, on the throne of the most powerful country of the time. He is enthroned as intercessor between his people and hundreds of gods more or less venerated in the different provinces of the immense country. And all of a sudden he decides to start one of the most ruthless revolutions that our history has known. He orders the destruction of all the cults to the many gods worshipped for more than a millennium and imposes a single god: Aton: the solar disk!
It is this reference to a luminous disk that triggered the recall of your memory. As in Fatima, perhaps a luminous object has taken the place of the Sun to manipulate the mind of the young man. This is not about Re, the Sun god worshipped since the origin of Egyptian culture. It is about the solar “disk”: Aton. And it is this reference to a disc that makes you think of Fatima.
The abrupt conversion of the young pharaoh led the country to transform itself at an impossible speed. His absolute determination reminds you of that of the three children of Fatima who braved all attempts, sometimes inhuman, to make them reconsider their testimony.
Akhenaten revolutionized all facets of Egyptian culture: religion, architecture, arts, politics… To the point of abandoning the capital, Thebes, and its hundred-year-old temples, to build a new city in the middle of the desert, in only three years, with palaces, temples without roofs to welcome the rays of the only god, from now on. The art is just as upset as the religion. The hieratic representations, agreed upon for centuries, are transformed and express a sensuality, a naturalism extremely touching, as much as the poetry engraved on the stele which triggered your association of ideas. What if Akhenaten had been manipulated by a luminous disc that he would have taken for the Sun! An event that could have been accompanied by a transmission of messages, as in Fatima! Is the extraordinary determination of the children of Fatima not similar to that of Akhenaten?
Some Egyptologists wonder if this historical revolution could be the result of a mysterious event that would have triggered the mystical madness of the young man. It is necessary to imagine an exceptional event in order to try to understand the relentlessness going up to the suicidal blindness of the young pharaoh. Obsessed by his conversion, he let the country and his vassals decline so that at his death he left a country in ruins, impoverished, and his vassals gone, invaded by their enemies that the kings of Egypt had undertaken to keep at bay. But he did nothing else but continue his worship of the solar disk… until the ruin of his country.
That this revolution cannot be understood as the natural evolution of a civilization but wanted only by Akhenaten, is confirmed by the very fast sinking of the new cult after his death. Very quickly after the death of the pharaoh, his young son Toutankamon returns to Thebes; the old cults are re-established and the capital of the solar disk is destroyed, razed and forgotten until its discovery in the last century.
Could it be that the young Akhenaten lived through an episode similar to the one that changed the lives of three children in Fatima? Could it be that he had an extraordinary experience, objective and subjective at the same time, like in Fatima? An event so powerful that it had a profound influence on the young man, even to the point of destroying the cultural and religious foundations of the past ten centuries?
“Everything happens as if the UAPs were the product of a technology that integrates both
physical and psychic phenomena while deeply affecting the cultural variables of the
society by manipulating the somatic and psychological characteristics
of the witnesses.” (J. Vallée, E. W. Davis; 2003)
The possibility of manipulation is supported by the testimonies. Very often witnesses report phenomena that seem objective to them but at the same time present a subjective influence, sometimes interpreted as telepathy. These events upset those who have experienced them, sometimes to the point of influencing their beliefs and the local culture.
5. PLAYERS AT THE CONTROLS?
Could Simulism shed new light on these experiences linked to the observation of characters or machines that are impossible to integrate into an image of the world compatible with our usual experience?
If the universe that we believe to be real were rather a large playground, we would live in a virtual reality in which Players would control all or part of the variables of a Great Game. Perhaps you are only the avatar of a Player who lives through you and manipulates you through your unconscious, your impulses, your dreams… The Players would have access to the mind of their avatars and, by doing so, would trigger appropriate perceptions during subjective phenomena such as those that involved the Fatima children.
As in an actual video game, the Players could act on the characteristics of the Great Game: landscape, number and personality of the characters… and on the course of events perceived by the avatars as real. The luminous phenomenon of Fatima, the flying objects perceived simultaneously by pilots, observers on land or sea and radars, have the characteristics of objective events, perceived in the same way by several witnesses and measuring devices. But their behavior seems impossible to us when they move as if gravity or mass did not exist for them, or when they appear or disappear suddenly, coming from nowhere or going towards nothingness!
These Players would be the source of manipulation as in any game, of course. It is impossible for us to imagine the reality in which the Players find themselves; there is no reason to believe that it is anything like ours. But if our experience of the evolution of our virtual games could be useful in trying to imagine the reality of the manipulators who influence us, we could imagine that the Players would be so involved in the Game that they would perceive themselves as “real” characters living in a world that would seem perfectly real to them, too, although it would be virtual…
Simulism opens new perspectives to give meaning to a multitude of unusual but surprisingly numerous observations. In particular those which are sometimes interpreted as due to devices of extraterrestrial origin. It is difficult to imagine why such visits would be distributed over very long historical periods and all over the planet. It is unlikely that we would do so if we had a planet to explore. Perhaps some of the phenomena are extraterrestrial in origin, but it seems more appropriate to attribute most of them to manipulations of Players involved in a Great Game rather than to visitors from other planets.
The Fatima episode would be a manipulation involving a mythology linked to religion; a very powerful approach to manipulate consciousness. A luminous disc would have taken the place of the Sun hidden behind thick clouds to subjugate a large crowd. The objective episode would have been accompanied by a subjective manipulation: the psyche of three children would have been used to communicate messages tinged with religiosity. A formidable manipulation! Thus, throughout history, manipulators would have influenced our minds by playing on our myths, our religions and the life experience of their avatars…
THE WEIRDNESS OF ENTANGLEMENT.
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Suppose you find an old broken doll. You take it apart to recover its hands. You put each one in a bag; you mix them up and become unable to tell which hand is in which bag. Then you send one of your two bags to a friend on the other side of the world.
Your friend receives the bag, opens it and discovers a left hand. When she phones the information, you are immediately sure that your bag contains the right hand; nothing strange… but what if we do the same experiment with a quantum object?
For us a hand is either left or right. It is impossible to imagine an indeterminate hand that is neither left nor right but potentially both at the same time! However, this is what quantum physics has discovered.
When they were first described, quantum objects were limited to the domain of the atom: a nuclear particle like protons, neutrons, electrons… for example. For a long time, physicists wondered if the strange results they found were limited to very small objects like these. Today they know that this is not the case. They discover the weirdness of quantum behavior even when they study large objects like molecules composed of thousands of atoms, provided they are protected from interactions with their environment. It is now known that the behavior – quantum or classical – of objects does not depend directly on their size but on the probability of interaction with other objects, and it is the latter that depends on their size. Thus the world seems to be governed by the same natural laws whatever the size of the object studied. But these laws are quite strange!
CLASSICAL BEHAVIOR AND QUANTUM BEHAVIOR: WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP?
The behavior of a quantum object seems strange to us because it obeys the laws of waves and not those of point objects occupying a well defined place in space. The objects that we normally perceive – billiard balls, for example – behave like solids. When they are stationary, they occupy a well-defined space; when they are moving, their speed and trajectory are easily estimated. Mathematics allows us to know when they will be at a given place. But these calculations do not apply to a quantum object. Immobile, its localization will obey probabilities of presence which undulate like a wave capable of filling a space much larger than its size! We would have a high probability of finding the object at a given location and a very low probability of finding it elsewhere, but never a certainty; we would never be sure to find it at a well-defined location. If it moves, it would be impossible to measure its speed and its location with precision. Only probabilities could be estimated and these probabilities are also expressed according to the mathematics of waves: they undulate along space and time.
Here is a pebble. It seems real to you! But what convinces you that it is real?
First of all, it has a shape, a color, a weight, a texture… a whole series of characteristics which, together, give it an individuality, an objective reality. You can recognize this stone among others, as soon as you have analyzed and memorized its own characteristics. And you know, without having to experience it, that if you put this stone somewhere, you should find it again, as it is today, at any time. Its existence and characteristics are its own and stable in time and space. It is a real rock; it exists by itself in the same space as you. It is not a hallucination that exists only in your head.
But physics tells us that the real nature of this rock is fundamentally strange, very different from what we perceive. Physics tells us that this rock expresses its own characteristics only because it is continually interacting with a myriad of other objects and energy fields. Physics teaches us that, if we had the possibility to protect this stone from any interaction, it would appear to us in a completely different nature: a kind of vibrating energy extended through time and space and not in a defined and localized form, gathering a series of defined characteristics as color, texture… Physics teaches us that when the pebble enters into interaction with another object or energy field, its quantum wave nature, probabilistic, is instantly transformed to acquire all those precise characteristics we are used to and which make us think it is material, therefore real.
But it is not impossible that the pebble is not quite the same as the one we observed and described before isolating it from any interaction! Indeed, by recovering its quantum wave nature, our pebble, protected from all interaction, has lost its precise characteristics to recover characteristics only defined by probabilities around given values. Thus, during a new interaction, after a passage in the wave quantum world, it could express new characteristics, different from the previous ones, but which remain in conformity with the probabilities that physics can calculate. Is the new rock the same as the one you described before it regained its quantum wave nature? Yes and no!
Yes, because it is the same object. No, because its characteristics may not have the same values as before the passage of the pebble through the quantum wave world, free from any interaction! No, if an interaction was at the origin of new values of the characteristics that we observe. We would perceive it as another pebble than the one we had observed before its journey free of interactions. A very similar but not identical rock. A momentary passage in the wave and probabilistic quantum world destroys the foundation on which our convictions rest: that there is an objective world populated by objects independent of our presence and endowed with defined characteristics.
We thus discover that the interactions are fundamental to create the reality that we perceive since it is from them that depend the values of the characteristics of the objects we perceive. Those which persuade us that there is a world outside us and of which we are part. Physics discovers that it is not so simple, the world does not really have the characteristics that we attribute to reality!
« Whatever the nature of matter, it is not made of matter! » H. P. Dürr: physicist.
If a quantum object enters into interaction, it instantly transforms and behaves in a way that is compatible with common sense and the mathematics of solid objects. It is as if it instantly looses its wave nature to adopt that of a particle. The larger the object, the more difficult it will be to protect it from contact with other objects or energy fields. This is why the objects that we perceive with our senses and which are immense compared to the size of the particles that compose them, always behave like solid objects and not like waves. This is why we never observe these strange quantum behaviors; our common sense perceives the universe as if it were only made of particles, and not of waves. But this is only part of the reality!
THE STRANGENESS OF QUANTUM HANDS
Suppose you could now treat the bags and the doll’s hands they contain as quantum objects and keep them completely free of any interaction: no other object with which they could react, no energy field that could change their properties. You send one of them to your friend as before. Does the bag have a left hand or a right hand? Well, quantum weirdness tells you that you can’t ask this question: it doesn’t make sense in the quantum world! Indeed, we have seen that a quantum object has no defined properties if it does not interact with its environment. You cannot think of a left hand or a right hand: both are in your two bags, in a mixture, an indeterminate state, a superposition absolutely impossible to understand but which physicists have discovered and described for a century now!
Imagine that your friend receives the bag you sent her, opens it and finds a left hand inside. As she interacted with the quantum object: the superimposed hand, it instantly collapsed into one of two possibilities: in this case, a left hand. As before, you instantly deduce that the bag kept at home contains a right hand. The superposition of specificities has collapsed into discrete specificities. The indeterminate states of the bags and hands became determinate the instant one of the bags was opened. How is this possible?
One possibility would be to assume that there are parameters you know nothing about that determine whether the hand is left or right in a way you cannot discover today. In other words, the experiments that you are able to perform with current technology only allow you to find a superposition of left AND right hands, but in reality, both hands are left OR right depending on the value of parameters that are beyond your control. In fact, this assumption has been proven wrong since 1982! We find ourselves with this quantum superposition, this indeterminacy impossible to understand with common sense but only through a mathematical model: quantum mechanics.
WAVE OR PARTICLE ? WAVE AND PARTICLE !
Quantum physicists have discovered that every object has two natures: a wave nature and a particle nature. According to the way we look at it, a quantum object behaves in a way described by the mathematics of waves or in a way described by those of a particle like a billiard ball. Here again, common sense cannot admit that an object can behave like a wave and thus occupy an enormous volume, and also behave like a particle confined to a very precise place, according to the way we look at it! This is the difference between the volume occupied by the pebble you have just thrown into a pond and that of the waves that move away from the point of impact. Common sense cannot accept that an object can remain motionless like a particle or be constantly vibrating like a wave, depending on how you look at it! Once again, it is impossible to understand this with common sense; only mathematics and experimentation are able to apprehend this strangeness. Impossible but true and discovered again and again for a century.
WHAT COULD BE THE BASIS OF ENTANGLEMENT?
If we take into account the dual nature of matter, we can formulate a new hypothesis to explain entanglement. It postulates that there are two realities. A fundamental reality that we cannot perceive with our senses but only through physical experiments; an underlying fundamental reality that obeys the mathematics of waves and that, as soon as an object enters into interaction, gives rise to a derived reality: the world that we perceive and that behaves as if it were made of particles.
In the fundamental domain, that of a reality that obeys the mathematics of waves, there are only superpositions; a world of energies, so to speak, where interference is the law, where the wave nature of each quantum object allows it to occupy an enormous volume without being able to be precisely localized in the universe, nor in time. A fundamental world where the characteristics of objects such as their size, their location, their speed… are not defined but whose values can only be estimated by probabilities. These values fluctuate like the ups and downs of waves, and are not fixed, stable and discrete like those of the objects we perceive in our world. The hands in the bags will not be defined as left or right until they have been observed or measured. It is only if the quantum object interacts with its environment that it acquires the objective specificities we are used to in our world: a well-defined size, speed… A quantum doll’s hand will be both left AND right as long as it remains isolated from any interaction.
In other words, in the fundamental quantum world interactions have more reality than interacting quantum objects, since an interaction is the trigger that defines the properties of quantum objects. An interaction reduces the superposition to a single value among the many possible outcomes that are calculated by applying wave mathematics. In other words, an interaction gives an object the characteristics that make it appear real to us.
The image that we have of the world: a universe that shelters real objects made of real matter and endowed with specific properties independent of the way we look at them, is obsolete; we must find another way to understand our universe! In other words, our world seems to us to be populated by objects that each have their own characteristics, stable and independent because we only perceive very complex objects that constantly interact with their environment. But their fundamental nature is nothing like the one we perceive! It is interactions that determine the acquisition of defined properties and that give objects the objective reality that we attribute to them.
A REALITY INDEPENDENT OF SPACE AND TIME.
Since 1982 we know that the entanglement between the left and right hands, if they are kept isolated from their environment, is not related to space. Interacting with one hand instantly causes the collapse of the superposition of the other, no matter how far apart they are, even if this separation is so great that no information about the specification of the first hand could be transmitted to the second in order to obey the laws of logic. The specification of the first quantum object instantly triggers the specification of the other one which is then no longer in superposition. And this is because they are entangled.
So how to understand this destabilizing weirdness? How is it possible that the world we perceive is so different from the quantum world that determines it!
Is it possible that we perceive the world in a way totally different from its true nature? Is it possible that we only perceive illusions? Philosophers and scientists think so. They point out that it is normal that we do not perceive reality as it is, but that we perceive images adapted to our physical characteristics. Evolution made us perceive reality to survive… not to become wise! Reality could be very different from the images that our brain presents to our vigilance.
EVOLUTION AND PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD.
If we are alive today, it is because our ancestors survived long enough to transmit their characteristics through heredity. In other words, we have inherited the behaviors that give us the means to react in the fastest and most adapted way to our environment and its dangers. We did not receive the genes of a person who wondered about the specifics of the predator he or she perceived behind a bush instead of running away! We are the descendants of people who perceived an anomaly and ran away first, without trying to better understand its nature!
Because it can be easier and quicker, we perceive objects in our environment, not in all their complexity, but in the form of abstract symbols that are easier to interpret to trigger an appropriate and quick reaction. Our perceptions are analyzed and translated by our brain before being presented to consciousness, much like a file is calculated in a computer and then displayed as an icon that draws a file on a screen. Our brain will present a translated object to consciousness in an easily recognizable form and not in a form that represents its true nature and possible complexity.
Our consciousness perceives objects transcribed in the form of symbols, a bit like a computer displays icons on a computer screen: our alertness can thus more easily understand their nature and properties without wasting time analyzing properties that are not important for our survival. You click on an icon to send a file on the internet without worrying about how your computer and the internet do the work! You perceive an object in your environment without caring about its fundamental nature but only about the properties that are interesting for you.
We understand better why quantum physics describes a world so different from the one we perceive. We understand better why Eastern philosophies describe a world composed of energies, not objects; a deeply interconnected world, very similar to the one that quantum physics has been discovering for a century. How have they been able to develop this intuition since thousands of years? A fascinating mystery whose solution could open up new ways of understanding the nature of consciousness!
A NEW PARADIGM: SIMULISM
Modern physics places us today in a situation that reminds us of the time of Galileo. We perceive a moving Sun that travels from East to West every day! Galileo must have understood that this perception gives us a false image of reality: it is the Earth that revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. We must make the same kind of effort today to understand how and why our perceptions do not give us an image of reality as it is, but rather symbolic representations more adequate to ensure our survival.
Simulism is a model that helps to understand the profound strangeness of our universe, discovered more than a century ago, and that profoundly challenges the image we have of it. Simulism is a model that helps us to understand why the image of the world discovered by modern physics is so foreign to us. It explains why modern physics overturns the common sense of our experience of the world, itself based on the nature of our perceptions, themselves biased by the influence of our evolution.
The fundamental reality that we do not perceive directly but that physics allows us to discover, seems to be of a wave nature, probabilistic, and gives rise to the reality that we perceive: a reality made of distinct and defined objects. The discoveries of physics suggest that the nature of objects is purely computational; physics represents them in the form of interactive equations whereas we perceive them as separate objects.
A simulated object is computational in nature. It is represented in a computer in the form of data and interactive equations, which are themselves represented by electrical impulses in the computer’s circuits. A computer simulation program runs in a computer in the form of electrical impulses and then displays on a screen the result of the calculation of the equations at each moment, in the form of distinct pixels. On our computer screens, the pixels form a luminous image of specific shape and color. It is no longer a bunch of invisible electrical impulses: the nature of the simulated objects has changed! What used to be electrical in nature has become light.
A NEW DUALISM: SOFTWARE AND DISPLAY SCREEN.
Cartesian dualism separates mind from matter. Simulism separates the software information from the displayed information. In our computers the equivalent of Descartes’ mind circulates in the form of electrical impulses; the equivalent of Descartes’ matter is displayed in the form of luminous pixels on screens.
Simulism suggests that the simulation software manipulates equations and then displays the results of the calculations in a distinct and defined form. The program operates in a reality that we cannot even imagine. Our perceptions are limited to the results of the calculations performed in this ineffable reality: virtual abstract symbols that seem to us to be made of particles, whereas their existence reflects underlying processes of a very different nature than the one we perceive. What we perceive as real objects made of matter are in reality symbols that can be displayed in a form that we interpret as material.
Just as a computer simulation program runs in a computer and then displays the result of the equations in distinct pixels, the simulation software expresses what we interpret as the laws of nature. It operates in a reality that we cannot even imagine.
Physics discovers that we live in a universe whose fundamental nature is information. The Simulism model postulates that we live in a virtual universe based on information. Simulism suggests that objects exist only in the form of equations, information that obey the mathematics of waves, until an interaction triggers the calculation of the result of the interacting equations, and then their expression in a form that obeys the mathematics of particles. We only perceive the results of the calculations that underlie the simulation. We only perceive the display of the results of the simulation. We understand better the importance of the interactions that define the specificities of the interacting objects. Indeed, it is the interaction that gives a logical reason to display a result. As long as there is no interaction, a simulation program will continue to calculate the evolution of objects without having to display them. The wave/particle dualism becomes logical.
Space and time are therefore only numbers manipulated according to a program and do not have the concrete reality that we attribute to them. Two intricate objects react instantaneously to interactions according to the rules determined by the software and not those that apply in the world we perceive with our senses. And in the case of intricate quantum objects, this software describes how they superimpose themselves as quantum waves until an interaction with one of them determines the properties of both, instantly. When your friend opens her bag, the interaction with it causes the collapse of its fundamental wave nature and allows her to perceive a real object in its particle nature.
According to the criteria we attribute to reality: materiality and objectivity, the fundamental world is unreal, fluctuating, blurred, spooky in a way… until we observe it. Interaction that triggers the attribution of defined characteristics to the objects we perceive. Interaction that creates reality in a way. But it doesn’t really exist; only information exists, in the end! Simulism allows to imagine, to give sense to this destabilizing discovery.
To be continued.
*This is an idea of Cheryl Jensen, webmaster of AskHiggins and TheKindnessParadigm.
Thanks to Cheryl also for her corrections and her comments which were very helpful.
Sources, references and quotes can be found in: PUBLICATIONS: “SIMULISM: Do we live in a virtual Universe?”
1: BORAGE AND NASTURTIUM
You have it on the tip of your tongue, the name of this plant with its deep yellow corollas and round leaves like those of a tiny water lily. But you can’t remember its name! You know that it is counterproductive to make efforts to find a memory. You don’t really have any control over your memory and you don’t know how to make it obey you. You know that you have to let go to have a chance to satisfy your quest. You have no active power to direct the recall of a memory. You don’t know what it was remembered for, where it is, in what form, or how to find it!
You remember having used this flower in some salads, with another flower of a complementary color, a deep blue: the borage.
Suddenly the name comes back to you: it’s… No, it’s not a nemesia but a name close to it,… which also starts with a n, maybe. You try to think of something else to let the instinctive mechanisms that you do not master activate and allow you to satisfy your search.
You have discovered the mystery that underlies your consciousness: namely the subconscious; just below what is you: your consciousness. Sometimes you feel as if you are only the reflection of mechanisms that escape you completely; as if you were only the surface of a deep ocean. A surface under which you can only imagine powerful currents, the shapes and colors of mechanisms that structure what will arrive on the surface and that will be you.
Still no way to remember this name that obsesses you! Why did you remember so easily the borage and not its yellow companion in your salads? You have no idea! You know from experience that an association can help you remember. But here, not even the one involving lettuce and borage works. You remember that this plant whose name escapes you is highly appreciated by aphids, so much so that it is sometimes planted to trap them. Its flower has a pleasant peppery taste in the mouth. Its color is reminiscent of the marigold, another species that is edible in salads. You see it clearly on the mental screen of your imagination, but without its name.
Still nothing. You decide to abandon your search.
It is very frustrating! You know how much you identify with your consciousness and how much your memory contributes to your personality. If you had amnesia you would not be who you are anymore! Perhaps you would even have forgotten your name! You wouldn’t even know who you are anymore! However, you have no power over the memory mechanism or the recall of a memory. Science has been trying for a long time to locate it and to understand its mechanisms; without really knowing any significant progress. Emotions seem to preside over the choice of information worth remembering as well as the recall of memories. But again, you don’t really have the power to direct the necessary emotions that would eventually allow you to remember the name of that flower. The power you can have over your memory seems to be limited to the repetitions, voluntary or not, that promote memorization. But how are these processes managed by your brain? This remains very mysterious.
How much control do you really have over who you are and in particular over your memories and their implication in your personality?
Your subconscious mind seems to be doing what it needs to do for your consciousness to access what it is trying to do. You seem only to be able to state an intention, without having any idea of the processes that are going on in your intimacy to satisfy them. Your consciousness wants to remember the name of this edible flower, but it is a lower level of your consciousness: your subconscious mind, which is doing the remembering. And at this level, it seems unable to satisfy you and you don’t even know the reason! Frustrating!
Even further away from your consciousness, you know from experience that a more mysterious structure is also involved in your personality: your unconscious. It is the one that seems to direct your moods and, therefore, influences your performance… It is the one that organizes your dreams and that could be responsible for your moods. It participates in your passions; it shapes your interests, triggers impulses, offers you intuitions and, sometimes, makes you a creator. Like a lamp suddenly illuminates the darkness, an idea invades you without you knowing how. And you have no way of controlling it. It is as if you were a puppet. But a puppet so proud that it believes it has power over itself while it is being manipulated!
2: THE INFLUENCER
You remember that show presented by a hypnotist who amazed you… You remember sitting near the stage in the big auditorium, worried about being chosen as a guinea pig by the artist who is passing between the rows. The NASTURTIUM! There it is, that name you were looking for a moment ago! It is undoubtedly your letting go that has allowed the memory to reach your consciousness. So it was not a matter of forgetting but of an inability to recall a memory that was stored somewhere; you don’t know where or how, but it was there.
This consciousness, which is fundamental to describe your identity, what is it really? Again, you experience your identity as a surface that you control, over which you have some power, but which floats above a deep ocean over which you have no real influence. On this surface your mind reasons, gathers memories and skills, organizes information, logically structures it to derive knowledge for application. Your mind creates new structures, new associations but from concepts already present. Where do the really new ideas, the creative ideas, the impulses and intuitions come from?
You are convinced that some of them are the fruit of the work of your subconscious mind when it manipulates information and concepts fed by your mind but automatically, without your consciousness having to intervene. It’s like the automatic process that drives all sorts of bodily mechanisms such as walking or digestion… Your consciousness issues an intention to go somewhere, but it is not the consciousness that controls the amazing coordination of your muscles to satisfy you. A series of organs are in charge of perceiving, calculating and triggering the contraction of certain muscles, necessarily coordinated with the relaxation of others, to allow you to think about other things and stay alert. Your subconscious mind can work without your knowledge, using information, concepts and capacities at its disposal to discover new ways of understanding phenomena, to take advantage of what you already know. But you have had the opportunity to experience insights out of nowhere. Really new ideas that go beyond what you have been able to provide to the subconscious mechanisms. Where can they come from?
Not really from your own free will! The best you can do to access truly new ideas is to let go and let it happen! It is when your alertness is fogged, as if slowed down, when you just feel without analysis, sometimes even after a night of sleep, that your personality fundamentally understands the subject that preoccupied it and finds a solution, that your imagination comes alive without your interference and creates something new… Humiliating! Instinctively, your self-image attributes creative genius and gifts to your conscience, when you dimly feel that it is not really responsible.
The show comes back to you. The hypnotist asks for volunteers to come on stage. You don’t want to be one of them and you are reassured to see that a dozen people come up. The performer orders them to stand in a line, facing the audience, and then asks them to join their feet together and do the same with the palms of their hands, their two index fingers facing each other and pointing up. They do so.
Freud – that’s the stage name of the hypnotist – captures the attention of the volunteers and begins his work as an influencer. He asks them to imagine that a screw goes through their index fingers and, as it turns, brings them closer together. You are amazed at the willingness of the guinea pigs; none of them smiles and all of them stare at their index fingers very seriously despite the absurdity of the situation. This quick submission to the artist’s injunctions is probably due to their decision to volunteer. You know you would have been more recalcitrant, but you nevertheless try to put yourself in the shoes of a volunteer to enjoy the show.
Freud walks along the line of volunteers and pretends to turn an imaginary screw that brings the outstretched index fingers together. You are close enough to discover that the trick works. Only four people stare at their index fingers, which remain separated… Freud gently lowers their arms; he will choose volunteers more receptive to his suggestions for the rest of the show. To those who have their index fingers joined, he suggests, or rather orders in an authoritarian voice, that their index fingers will not be able to come off without his permission, despite their efforts. A volunteer manages to take them off and Freud lowers his arms in turn.
The hypnotist comes back to the end of the line and approaches a young woman who cannot get her index fingers off. He puts one hand on her shoulder, places the other behind her head and, with a commanding word, convinces her that she feels very well, perfectly relaxed, then heavier and heavier… and finally that she falls asleep very comfortably. You are amazed by the result; she flinches, and only Freud’s reaction prevents her from hurting herself by falling. He supports her and slowly puts her down on the floor, accompanying his gestures with repeated injunctions to convince her that she is fine, comfortable and asleep. What she seems to do.
Freud repeats this protocol on six other volunteers, five of whom react like the first. He thanks the volunteers who are more resistant to his suggestions, asks them to return to their seats, and keeps only those most likely to participate in his show.
You know that you would be among the refractory ones. But how do you explain this astonishing suggestibility of many volunteers? Today, professional hypnotists work in the medical field and are able to induce deep trances during which those influenced undergo operations without any anesthesia! And these professionals teach you that they don’t really distinguish between those who can be influenced and those who can’t, but that it’s only a matter of time and method to be able to hypnotize anyone. You would be suggestible, just like the volunteers who amaze you on stage; it would just take you longer to do it! How to explain this facet of the human personality: the impression of being master of our will and this astonishing suggestibility to the will of another, this dissolution of our personality on demand!
What happens to a patient operated under hypnotic anesthesia? How come he doesn’t feel pain? He doesn’t really seem to be asleep. The anesthesiologist takes him through a virtual walk by the sea; suggests him to feel the sea breeze, the smell of seaweed, the sun on his bare skin… And the patient seems to live this other virtual reality so deeply that he does not feel anything of the actual reality: the one that cuts his flesh and triturates his entrails! Impossible but true! The patient is under the control of someone other than himself, like an unconscious puppet. How can this be? What would explain this very deep sensitivity to the influence of someone other than ourselves? What would explain that a brain becomes impervious to the nervous impulses that inform it about the environment in which it finds itself and replaces them with ideas from its imagination directed by another brain?
You don’t know, nobody knows! But we must accept that a mechanism exists within us that directs our vigilance, our consciousness, and that, mysteriously, an intruder is able to insert himself between the source of perceptions and our consciousness. An influencer outside of yourself is able to take the place of your inner self, of your deep self and commands your vigilance for you! He is able to create sensations that cancel and replace those that your body sends to your vigilance. The consciousness of the patient under hypnosis no longer directs its vigilance on the nervous impulses that transmit the pain but on those constructed by its imagination directed by another consciousness. This is a major discovery whose importance we prefer to ignore because it upsets our feelings and our certainties about our identity and the control we have over ourselves!
Freud resumes his show with the six people who now seem to be sleeping on stage. He suggests that they relive a very funny episode they saw in a movie. He repeats his suggestion at length, in a firm voice and asks them to laugh without shame, to let themselves go… and they do. You can hear them laughing on stage! Freud then suggests that they recall a very sad episode, again in a film… and here they are now sighing! No doubt about it: they live in a virtual reality that is very far from the real one. Their will seems to be so submissive to the influencer’s that they behave as if they had none. They have become puppets manipulated by another consciousness than their own!
The artist wakes them up by suggesting that they will feel great and that they will have no memories of the episode they just experienced. He chooses a young man among the six guinea pigs and puts him back to sleep abruptly but asks him to stay up this time. What he does, with his eyes closed. While convincing him that he feels very well, that he is perfectly relaxed… Freud orders the young man to forget the number 7. “The number 7 does not exist and has never existed!” The hypnotist repeats his command several times and adds that he will wake him up but that he will have completely forgotten what happened during his strange hypnotic sleep.
An injunction wakes up the young man. Freud asks him to count to 10. The young man does so… but goes directly from 6 to 8, without mentioning the 7! Freud asks him how much is 3 plus 4. The young man seems to be searching without finding an answer! And how much is 4 plus 5? The young man calmly gives the exact result. And Freud starts again: “And how much is 5 plus 2? “ No answer!
Freud puts the young man back to sleep and asks him to return to his normal state in which the number 7 exists. When he wakes up, he is stunned. Freud asked him to remember everything he had experienced before, during and after his experiment. He could not understand what had happened inside him that had made him unable to solve such simple calculations! The artist thanks him for his cooperation and releases him.
And you ask yourself the same question: how is it that we are susceptible to such incredible experiences? Although the young man seems to have returned to his normal waking state, although he seems to have fully regained control of his consciousness and his personality, he remains unconsciously subjected to the suggestion previously given when he was not in his normal state. He remains subjected, without realizing it, to the will of someone else than himself! Very impressive!
The hypnotist gathers the five remaining volunteers and very quickly subjugates them. They all seem to be asleep, with their eyes closed, in a completely artificial and improbable state. You realize that they certainly can’t refer to their past to know how to achieve such a feat: sleeping upright, literally! They have surely never done it and yet they all seem to sleep standing up without any problem, as if they had all experienced it before.
And now Freud speaks to them in a low voice; the audience cannot hear what he says. Then he asks them in a loud voice to wake up and forget what has just happened. The volunteers seem to come to their senses. Freud ignores them and explains to the audience how he imagines hypnosis. The volunteers stay on stage and just listen to him.
Suddenly Freud pauses in his speech, looks at the stage and remarks that it is particularly hot. He wonders where this heat can come from…
To your surprise, the volunteers on stage take off their shoes, all with their right foot. The two young women take off, one her pump, the other her sneaker; the three young men undo the laces of their right shoe, take them off and keep their shoe in their hand. Two of them seem surprised to discover a shoe in their hand. The other three guinea pigs do not seem disturbed. Freud asks one of them why he is doing this. The young man replies that he is too hot. “And why the right foot?” “Because it is the one who is hot,” replies the young man unperturbed! To you his answer is absurd. To him it seems perfectly logical and sensible. How can this be? You realize that you do not live in the same world as him; your reality is not that of the guinea pig for whom it makes sense to take off his right shoe! Even his cognitive performance is adapting to the post-hypnotic suggestion instilled by the influencer when he was whispering in their ear under hypnotic state. He certainly does not express his cognitive potential as he would have expressed it if he had not received a post-hypnotic suggestion! His critical and analytical mind would certainly have deduced that his gesture is absurd; he would not have given such an absurd answer as the one he has just confidently proposed.
Freud turns to a young woman who seems perplexed and asks her the same question. “I don’t know… I felt like an impulse,” she replies. There remains in her a critical spirit that analyzes the situation but does not understand it; she does not try to justify herself; her suggestibility, although astonishing, does not go so far as to influence her faculties of logical analysis to the point of finding an absurd justification for her gesture.
Freud turns to the audience and explains. He ordered his guinea pigs, when they were under the influence, to take off their right shoe as soon as they heard him say that it was hot. And this after they were awake, so in their normal state. And this is what they did; showing the power of the influencer even beyond the episode of hypnotic somnambulism. Freud illustrates the reality of post-hypnotic suggestions to show the enslavement, not only of the will of the guinea pigs to that of the influencer, but also sometimes of their cognitive functions, even after they have returned to their normal state of waking consciousness.
Beyond this very astonishing discovery, what strikes you is the absurd justification that the subject gives to explain his action! As if he had had complete control over his behavior and that he had decided it entirely by himself, for a reason that is logical and justified for him… And you know that this is not the case! How can you be sure from now on that you are the one who decided on your actions, without any external or foreign influence!
You realize that this faculty of our consciousness is maladaptive; it cannot be explained by evolution and natural selection since it affects the cognitive functions responsible for building the most accurate picture of the world so that we can survive and adapt to it for the better. Our evolutionary history does not explain that our ancestors were selected for this type of behavior, on the contrary. We imagine that we are the descendants of those who reacted better to reality as it was, rather than constructing absurd images of the world… and dangerous because of their maladjustment to realities.
A hypothesis is constructed…, illustrated by a mental image.
You see a body, with organs sensitive to their environment that inform a brain through conduits. But just under the brain the tube that carries all the information passes through a kind of three-way valve that can act like a faucet. There is a position that blocks the information coming from the body under the brain and opens a secondary and perpendicular entrance connected to another brain, further away. That of the influencer! What you are discovering can be explained if there is a kind of filter between, on the one hand, all the unconscious and automatic processes that allow you to be yourself in the world that is yours and, on the other hand, the awareness that you have to perceive your environment in the best possible way, the awareness that you have to be master of your individuality. A kind of filter that can be influenced by another consciousness than yours, without you being able to notice it!
Of course you know that we only see well what we look at, that we only hear well what we listen to… Our consciousness is so made that it concentrates on the perceived events that seem important to it and focuses on them, to the detriment of the rest. This habituation diminishes until it extinguishes the perceptions of persistent stimuli when they are not considered dangerous. When walking, you no longer perceive your weight through the soles of your feet but rather the visual and auditory landscape around you. And this involuntary and targeted loss of alertness is beneficial by letting your consciousness focus on what it considers important, especially for your survival and well-being.
That our vigilance is focused on a small part of the information received by the consciousness is understandable. We are the descendants of ancestors who knew how to focus on the information that was important for their survival and how to react with accuracy and speed to stay alive… and to ensure their descendants. But that this vigilance can be parasitized by an external consciousness is incomprehensible. This mechanism does not seem to favor the survival of the individuals who express it; on the contrary! They could put themselves in danger if they perceive a reality other than the one in which their survival is embedded.
What could be the advantage of this structure for our survival? You can’t find one!
Your mind is used to relying on your subconscious mind to handle all sorts of functions automatically, such as looking for a memory that you would like to have back… Like walking, running, juggling… Your mental alertness does not take care of the details, it only issues intentions that your subconscious mind takes care of through a remarkable and very complex work that escapes you completely.
But here is a foreign mind which replaces yours! Your subconscious obeys it as if it had received your intentions directly. It makes no distinction between the intentions of your body and those of a foreign body! Your subconscious is used to reacting to abstract intentions and translates them into concrete actions. Freud shows you that there is a mechanism capable of short-circuiting your intentions to impose those of a foreign mind on yours!
Perhaps the world you think you are in is not the one you imagine. Suddenly you see yourself as a component of a virtual world as described in Simulism. You become the avatar of a Player from a completely different reality that you cannot even imagine. The Player lives a Great Game through you and for that he must be able to perceive your reality and react. The avatar that you are must include a mechanism that allows the Player to manipulate his avatar in the Great Game of Simulation!
The three-way valve that Freud seems to have used to transmit his intentions would be part of the mechanism that would allow the Player to suggest his intentions to his puppet. This one would be endowed with a kind of local intelligence able to make it evolve in an environment that it could understand, in a way; an intelligence that would allow it to be autonomous too, but that would be enslaved to another intelligence, according to the Game… Simulism becomes a paradigm able to give sense to the strange discoveries of hypnosis and of our suggestibility.
1: IF WE WERE IN A SIMULATION COULD WE FIND BUGS IN THE PROGRAM?
Damn! All three parking spaces are occupied! Suddenly, the recommendation of the tourist guide you consulted comes to mind. The table of this small hotel in Piolenc : a small village in French Provence, is famous; the restaurant of the hotel is full; nowhere to park. Perhaps you should have had dinner there, but you preferred to visit the region you have chosen as a stopover on your way to the Mediterranean. It’s already late; your toddler is already asleep in his travel cot in the back seat. (NOTE)
You park your car behind the first of the three parking spaces and decide to ask the owner of the hotel where you will spend the night for advice. You leave your keys with your wife so that she can unlock the car in front of yours if necessary.
The owner of the hotel-restaurant accompanies you to your car and informs you that a possible free parking space might be very far away. He advises you to leave your car there and to give him your keys so that he can free the car you are blocking if necessary. He doesn’t know if it belongs to a hotel guest who will spend the night there or to a restaurant guest who will leave the parking lot this evening. He says that he will hang your keys on the board behind the reception counter so that you can pick them up the next day.
Your wife is out of the car with your sleeping child in her arms; you face your host who is waiting for your decision. Relieved to have found a solution that releases you of all responsibility, you ostensibly place your keys in your host’s outstretched hand.
Later, in your bed, something is bothering you… You remember that you did not lock your car doors before giving the keys to your host. Should you get dressed, find the keys on the board behind the front desk, lock the doors… You decide to stay in bed!
The next day, after a quick breakfast, you try to put your suitcases in the trunk of your car, still parked behind the one you blocked the day before. You are reassured: it was a guest of the hotel; you did not bother anyone. But your car is locked! You congratulate yourself for not getting out the day before; your host had the good idea to check and do it for you.
You go to look for your keys on the board described the day before by your host. No keys! You ask the receptionist in front of the board, behind the reception desk. He is not aware of your problem and suggests that you call the owner who manages another hotel in the village. He gives you his phone; it doesn’t happen at all as expected… You are very surprised by your host’s answer; he says that you kept your keys and specifies that this had upset him because he would have had to come and wake you up if he had to unlock the car in front of yours! You answer him that, if you are sure of one thing, it is that you do not have your keys because you gave them to him the day before!
Instinctively, without thinking about it, your left hand finds itself in the pocket of your pants which, usually, shelters your keys. Stunned, you discover them under your fingers! In a strange mental state, you hear yourself apologizing to your host and tell him that he was right… you did have your keys with you!
Back at your car you are both relieved and amazed when your wife confirms that she saw you hand over your keys to your host! You are not hallucinating because you have a witness who has lived through the same past as yours. But how is it that the hotel owner’s past is not the same as yours and your wife’s? He didn’t hallucinate either, since your keys were in your possession and the car was locked as his past told him, and not on the dashboard as yours reminded you! Two different and incompatible pasts; no way to find a synthesis that would reunite them in a rational story! You feel a kind of decoupling. A part of you automatically acts to unlock the car, load it and leave this strange place. Another part tries to stay calm without trying to explain the inexplicable!
Since this experience you have tried to understand… without succeeding! How is it that the pants you found yourself in the morning of your departure did not correspond to the one you had left the night before? The first one had your keys in the left pocket while the other one didn’t; your wife had seen you hand them to your host! Like you, she knows that you would never have locked your car while blocking someone else’s: this behavior is totally out of character for you! She can’t confirm that you left your car unlocked, but she can confirm that you no longer had the keys!
Two incompatible pasts for one event! Your research tells you that others have had similar experiences. One author has even gathered them under one name: “the Mandela effect”. She found that many accounts claimed that the South African lawyer died in prison in the 1980s, while others let Mandela live, get out of prison and become the icon we know, only to die in 2013! You find that it is not just a few people but large minorities who have different memories! How is this possible?
If this had not happened to you personally, in the presence of a witness, you would not have been interested in this phenomenon and you would probably have associated it with the many conspiracy theories that pollute social networks. But here it is! No way to find a rational explanation… at least not in the world as we imagine it today. The proposed explanations involve “bugs” in the creation of memories. We would sometimes be led to wrongly associate erroneous memories. But how can we explain that some bugs are widespread in entire populations? If the controversial event were clearly established as not being the result of manipulations of a collective memory, voluntary or not, then your image of the world would have to be revised!
The analysis of the Mandela effect does not take you very far. The simplest explanation is the lack of memory, despite the large number of people and situations involved. But in your case it is not possible to accuse a defect of memory!
You know that what happened to you cannot be a memory defect. You and your host have concrete evidence of the coherence of your respective memories. You are right because a witness saw you throw away your keys; your host is right because the keys were in your pants and your car was locked!
If it is not possible to evoke a faulty memory to explain the Mandela effect, should we consider the existence of parallel worlds, sometimes with errors in the attribution of pasts between different characters? Could individuals find themselves in a given world but from two different past worlds? No way to know. Physicists are seriously considering the hypothesis of multiple worlds to explain certain characteristics discovered by quantum physics. But most theorists think that interference between these hypothetical multiple universes should be excluded.
Could Simulism be part of the solution? Could the Mandela effect be due to uncorrected bugs in the simulation program? Any program must be patiently corrected; errors are usually discovered throughout its operation and require endless corrections. This is not surprising. But it is the radical hypothesis that leads to this question that is very destabilizing!
At this point, we might as well ask the question in a more general framework. If, in spite of our conviction resulting from our perceptions, the universe was virtual rather than real, would it be possible for us to notice it, by discovering bugs for example? On reflection, you think that this is unlikely since the programmer can correct his work and restart the running of his program. A SIM: a virtual, simulated individual, would expect to discover bugs in his simulated world if he were used to computers. But a conscientious programmer would correct them so that they are no longer detectable. This track seems to lead nowhere a priori!
But a familiarity with computers would prompt the SIM to look for differences between a real world and a virtual world based on their fundamental differences. He would find at least two.
Your pants that morning were not the ones you had left the night before! One had no keys left in the left pocket while the other had them! This discovery seems to indicate that the characteristics of your pants are calculated in an interactive way which displays a pair of pants in conformity with the present in which you perceive them but which, in your case, is not in conformity with the one that your memory recalls! This observation is compatible with a calculated, simulated universe, and incompatible with a real and concrete universe! You have a witness who confirms that your memory accurately recalls a given event. But this same event has become incompatible with the present in which you find yourself!
NOTE: The event described is real in all its details.
A BUG IN THE PROGRAM?
2: THE LITTLE BLONDE AND THE BIG BAD
1979: Moonraker: a pure James Bond movie with memorable villains, energetic young women and a very special agent at his best.
The very bad giant with steel teeth: Jaws, tries to throw Bond into the void by biting the traction rope of the cable car that transports him. Bond miraculously escapes and Jaws finds himself entangled in the rubble of the cabin. A young blonde, Dolly, spontaneously helps him to disentangle himself… Jaws, charmed, develops a smile that reveals his impressive dentures glistening in the sun. Surprisingly, Dolly is under the charm of the big brute. She looks at him for a long time through her big glasses and smiles in her turn, discovering her dentures. First meeting and love at first sight understood by the spectator who smiles, too, by discovering the good idea of the scriptwriter. Reunited by the steel of their teeth, they live a love at first sight which binds them until the end of the film.
Jaws is relentless against Bond until the British agent informs him that his employer is deceiving him and wants to exterminate the entire Earth population, which he considers genetically deficient, to replace it with perfect humans. Jaws and Dolly, knowing they are imperfect, join forces with Bond to defeat the initiator of the nefarious project who dies, projected into space!
Watching this 1979 film again today is amazing: the memory of many viewers does not fit with the viewing of the film today. Dolly no longer has braces! How then can we explain the very unexpected bonding between the two characters that everything else separates? Dolly doesn’t have braces while many viewers of the 1980s remember smiling when they understood the origin of the very unlikely love at first sight between the big bad and the little blonde with the steely smile! Could it be a Mandela effect? This question has been much debated; meticulous investigations and research have brought to light several interesting pieces of information, without however closing the subject.
Some conspiracy theorists have analyzed DVDs and even old VHS from the 1980s to find possible evidence of image manipulation… without convincing. However, it seems that Dolly behaves as if she had braces. From the side, her upper lip looks too prominent, as if her teeth were braced. Towards the end of the film, when she learns with Jaws that the imperfect humans will be exterminated, she seems to hide her teeth whereas she was revealing them in broad smiles until then.
Is it possible that this is just a memory error on the part of the audience? If so, it would be difficult to understand the origin of the love at first sight between the bully and the frail young girl. How could the scriptwriters have missed such a good idea! Especially since the reading, today, of a history of the realization indicates that the idea had been suggested then abandoned! A researcher went so far as to question the actress who played Dolly. Blanche Ravalec answered that she did not have braces and that there had never been any question of them!
Does this end the debate? Not really!
Indeed, let’s suppose that we are part of a virtual reality. What seems real to us becomes a very realistic display of a simulation. As in a video game, this display is constantly renewed several times per unit of time to leave room for the results of successive calculations adapted to the evolution of the simulated situation.
An object seems to last in time. It is concrete, solid; it has an individuality described by its own characteristics… so we consider it real! But an object can seem just as real to us when we perceive its image on a screen. A movie gives us the illusion of an object that is stable in time while each image is displayed for only a fraction of a second!
A well thought-out simulation program will continuously reconstruct the appropriate environment for the main subject, avoiding anachronisms and misinterpretations that would reveal the illusion of reality. In the world that seems real and perennial, DVDs and VHS seem as they were when they were edited in 1979. But if our world is virtual, the old DVDs or VHS are not real objects that have remained as they were for decades, they become virtual objects that have been recalculated, recreated at the moment the simulation calls for it, with the properties they should have had if they had really remained real… provided there is no error in the scenario.
An error concerning Dolly’s braces would cause a new environment to be made compatible with the new situation. In other words, the DVD viewed today would not reproduce exactly the same images that its alter ego displayed in the 1980s! In a virtual reality, even Blanche Ravalec’s response and memory would be adapted to ensure the illusion of reality. The actress’ response today is not sufficient to eliminate a possible Mandela effect since it must be adapted to the present context with DVDs and VHS in which Dolly does not have braces.
Should we conclude that it will always be impossible to detect a Mandela effect? Not really!
A virtual reality program uses the near past to calculate the most perfect present possible. The simulation calculates and displays each particular situation according to the circumstances. It is impossible and useless to calculate the whole universe when only a small part of it is displayed at a given moment. It is impossible and useless to calculate all the past until the origin of the world since we only display the present. When an error is detected and must be corrected, it is difficult to imagine that this analysis can go back to the origins of the simulation without quickly overloading the calculation capacities. It is likely that the calculation of the present is based on only a few past generations and not on the whole history of the simulation. If this were the case, one could expect to find discrepancies for the distant past. One could expect to find bugs if one went back far enough in time, to a moment from which the programmer deemed it unnecessary to repeat all the calculations in order to adapt the simulation to the lived present. In practice, when a bug is discovered, the programmer would restart the simulation from a past situation and not from the origin of the program. If this were the case, incongruities could remain in the simulation of a distant past, if not in that of the near past.
It would also be very unlikely that the simulation program would correct the indirect effects of an error on all possible levels. If an error is discovered, the simulation would be recalculated step by step with the new parameters up to a certain point, compatible with the computational capabilities. A very indirect effect of the error would probably be re-displayed without recalculation, as it was originally, to avoid overloading the computer. In order to detect a real Mandela effect, which would not be simply a memory defect, the discrepancies would have to be searched for as far back as possible in time and on the most indirect supports possible.
In the case of Dolly it would be necessary to analyze documents written in the past that are not directly concerned with the character but rather with other main subjects and that would refer to Dolly only in a very indirect way. Yet such indirect information in favor of a genuine Mandela effect rather than a mere memory lapse has been discovered. Here are two of them:
From this, it is inferred that there are indeed contradictions about Dolly’s braces, but they are only discovered in very indirect contexts: a list of characters in the film with a very brief description of each, as well as a eulogy for a character other than Dolly. It seems difficult to attribute these two examples to memory failures. Rather, they suggest that further research into the reality of the Mandela effect would be relevant.
Not to mention that the Mandela effect could be deliberately introduced by a Player who is facetious or curious about the reactions of his virtual characters!
1: THE GOLDEN SCARAB
You sit in your armchair, behind the window of your psychiatrist’s office through which a clear summer light shines. In front of you, a patient that you know only too well. There is no way to make her let go; she remains irremediably locked in her sad vision of reality, rigid and dry, barricaded behind her mind, incapable of the least disturbing surprise; no enchantment possible in her overly rationalist vision of the world and her life in it. She clings to her mind and destroys emotions, feelings and influences of a possible deeper, unconscious personality; she is sure to know everything about herself: a body without a soul.
Fortunately, she agreed to tell you about her dreams despite her lack of interest in them. Today, comfortably seated in front of you, she tells you her latest dream. She sees herself living in ancient Egypt and receiving a golden scarab, a very common symbol of renewal in the Pharaonic era. You take note… and you hear a shock behind you, coming from the closed window. You turn around and discover a green rose chafer that has just hit the glass. In a second state you get up, open your window to recover the stunned beetle. You approach your patient and hear yourself say, “Here is your golden scarab!” The green rose chafer is indeed the closest European insect to a golden scarab with its glistening golden green elytra. (Note 1)
Your patient is stunned. Her purely rational world is collapsing! Later you will define her experience as “numinous,” an experience that weaves a powerful link between physical reality and another, spiritual, perhaps even divine, reality! Your patient can only let go and accept that reality is immeasurably richer than what she has been perceiving. Her world has been enchanted in some way. She is going to open up to the real life that goes beyond the limits of what her mind is capable of rationalizing. From a bag of meat and bones she becomes an emotional and spiritual being.
You yourself have experienced many synchronicities: this is how you will call these strange experiences that associate events that are purely coincidental but that cannot be fortuitous because they trigger deep feelings in you. What for someone else would be a simple coincidence takes on a meaning for you that can transform your life! A quote from Einstein comes to mind: “Chance is God walking around incognito”. Sometimes chance takes on meaning for you alone. You realize that you are part of a much larger reality than the one that is only matter. The world that appeared to you as a gigantic soulless machine comes to life in a way and becomes organic, capable of creating meaning! There is no longer any real separation between matter and spirit, between physical and psychic! As if matter and spirit were born in a single fundamental reality before being separated. One crystallizes in the world of matter which obeys the laws of physics, the other in that of the spirit which has nothing material.
A patient tells you a dream; a green rose chafer flies towards your window. There is absolutely no way to connect these two events by any rational cause… Moreover, they are simultaneous; if the dream had been told to you a week ago you probably would not have made the connection with the curious intention of the green rose chafer to visit you today. Suddenly the world is enchanted and events follow one another out of all material logic, as if by magic, as if an invisible intelligence manipulated your world to guide your thoughts and your behavior. Moreover, you reacted almost automatically, without using any critical filter, and you triggered a salutary reaction in your recalcitrant patient thanks to a physical event: the occurrence of a green rose chafer, and another, imaginary one: a dream, over which you, as an individual, have strictly no control!
You have nothing to do with the choice of your patient’s dream; you have nothing to do with the choice of the green rose chafer… But here are two events that are totally unrelated to each other and that trigger profound spiritual reactions in you and your patient. How can this be? What intelligence designed and implemented this protocol? What intelligence has the knowledge and the power to organize a dream in your patient, to build an imaginary reality that involves a symbol whose meaning she does not even know: it is you who will explain it to her! What power is capable of making a green rose chafer crash on your window, at the right moment, so that your patient and you can, or even have to, make a significant link between events that are not rationally connected?
Everything happens as if you and your patient were only the plaything of a manipulation whose origin is clearly transcendent to your reality. A manipulation which intervenes from a reality in which matter and psyche are phenomena of a similar nature insofar as they can be manipulated in the same way. Your patient, her consciousness, clearly has no way to control her dreams. You, as a therapist, have no way of controlling the behavior of an insect in order to instrumentalize it into a powerful tool of transformation. And yet the miracle happened…
Of course your mind is not influential; neither yours nor your patient’s was involved in the beginning of the phenomenon. Your subconscious mind, which processes the information for you before presenting it to the mind, cannot be involved either. If it is at the origin of your patient’s dream, it should be recognized that it has an astonishing perspicacity as well as magical powers capable of knowing the future in its smallest details, or the power to manipulate the behavior of an insect to make it come to crash at the right time in the right place! Everything leads us to imagine that either the unconscious goes far beyond the individual and propels him into a whole that could be the whole universe, or that the unconscious can be manipulated by a mysterious intelligence with magical powers!
An intelligence other than that of your mind and that of your patient must have intervened! It could be part of your identity, provided that your identity goes far beyond the one you are aware of. Or else you would be manipulated by an intelligence outside of you. As if you were part of a virtual simulation in which a Player manipulates you! The synchronicities would be the clues of the actions of mysterious Players… Perhaps you would be this Player, or rather his avatar in the Great Game! You could be the computerized form: the avatar, of a Player totally immersed in a Great Game which, through the immeasurable depths of your unconscious, would have the power to manipulate you and your world.
Simulism proposes an explanatory framework to the strangenesses discovered by modern physics, but also to synchronicities.
2: THE ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK
Melchizedek! Strange name for the group you are about to discover. A quick search tells you that Melchizedek was a kind of obscure priest-king from biblical times. Sometimes even considered a forerunner of Christ. A group that chooses such a name to represent itself probably cultivates elitism, a taste for secrecy and esotericism, which is nothing like you.
It is your research on UFOs that led you to what seems to you to be a sect. You were challenged by a tag in a subway corridor: “The lord is an extraterrestrial who returned in a flying saucer” signed: “Order of Melchizedek”. As a scientist yourself, you regret the indifference of your peers for the subject that interests you and worries you at the same time. You fear that the abandonment of research on UFOs in the hands of non-scientists will lead some to beliefs rather than knowledge. And you fear a radical fanaticism fueled by irrational beliefs and dangerous for a society. (Note 2)
Why are scientists so hostile to UFO research? You have been asking yourself this question for a long time. As a young trainee in an observatory for your astrophysics studies, you witnessed an incident that revolted you: the destruction of data potentially interesting for studying UFOs. They were destroyed because they did not correspond to those expected. The person responsible for the observation would have kept them if they could be attributed to artificial satellites. But the trajectory of the object was incompatible with that of an artificial satellite! It was easier to decide that the observations were surely false and then to destroy them, rather than to spend some time, with an open mind, to clarify the question. This approach is contrary to the philosophy of science which favors results over theories and proposes to change theories rather than ignore non-conforming results!
In the course of your scientific work, you have sometimes created a model, a hypothesis, to understand a phenomenon that is still poorly understood. You have imagined experiments whose results would allow you to confirm your hypothesis and to better understand the studied phenomenon. If the results obtained after conducting the experiment were not what you had expected, you would know that your hypothesis would have to be revised. You would not have ignored them because they were not what you expected, of course! UFOs being misunderstood, it is more comfortable not to be interested in them. All the more so since you risk being considered an uncritical eccentric if you accept to spend time trying to understand fortuitous observations that are impossible to reproduce. But, perhaps because you were young and inexperienced, you were shocked by the action of the person in charge at the observation! And this episode started your extensive research into the subject of UFOs, which you have pursued for decades with remarkable and astonishing results.
Your research taught you that witnesses of unexplained aerial phenomena, convinced of their good faith and very disappointed by the disinterest of scientists, had sometimes decided to get involved themselves to try to understand their observations. Some of them created groups of people interested in the subject to pursue a research that was shunned by the experts. You have discovered groups convinced by charismatic leaders claiming that they have the answers and that they are extraordinary! They often present themselves as “contactees” who have been initiated to profound truths and who have been charged by some sort of extraterrestrial gods travelling in flying saucers, to prepare open-minded individuals for the evolution of humanity towards better days. Hence the formation sometimes of sects, gurus and disciples rather than groups interested by an objective research.
You have spoken with people who are convinced that they have been the subject of research and manipulations by extraterrestrial entities; that they have been abducted. Whether it is real or imagined by the witnesses, a very competent psychiatrist (Note 3) has shown that they are intimately convinced of the reality of their experience. For them it was absolutely not a dream or a hallucination but a physical experience, an encounter with non-human entities in whose hands they served as guinea pigs. The testimonies obtained by the psychiatrist form a coherent whole. They are very similar even if the people involved do not know each other. Sometimes the witnesses do not really remember the whole of their experience. The beginning and the end are clear but they cannot explain what happened to them during the few hours between them. Under hypnotic induction they discover a much more complex event than they remember, and individuals who have had a common experience but do not remember it tell the same story under hypnotic trance, which makes their testimony particularly interesting.
All this intrigues you to the highest degree, while at the same time arousing your concern. A dangerous drift is not impossible and it is this concern that leads you to question the leaders of the Melchizedek order. They claim to be contacted by extraterrestrials to convert and save humanity. No scientific approach, but faith and submission to the leaders of the sect! An open door to authoritarianism!
You have been working on this sect for quite some time and you have just collected your notes. You take a break from your research because you have to go to an appointment quite far from where you are. You hail a cab which passes in front of you, on the boulevard. When you arrive at your destination, you ask the driver for a receipt for your expense report. You pocket it without checking it. Two days later you take the receipt out of your wallet to store it away and … you are stunned. The receipt is signed “Melchizedek”!
How is that possible? You are in Los Angeles. You check the phone book of this megalopolis of several million inhabitants. It has only one individual of that name. And it is him that “chance” has put on your path while you are researching the order of Melchizedek! It is impossible, of course, for the event to have been programmed! It is also impossible to believe in a simple coincidence! What could it be?!
A synchronicity! A mysterious connection between a physical event and a psychological link, without any causal explanation! Synchronicities are impossible to explain today within the framework of our image of the world but they deeply question the relevance of the image we have of reality. Your reflections lead you to imagine a fundamental structure of reality which would favor this kind of connection between a physical event and another, a psychological one.
What if the foundation of reality is information rather than matter? The profound oddities discovered by modern physics suggest that the world of material objects and the world of thoughts both have their origin in a more fundamental reality that gives them birth. And this fundamental reality would be composed of information. It would be information that would be at the origin of both objects and thoughts, as the creators of the concept of synchronicity thought.
If the synchronicity you just experienced emanates from this fundamental reality of information, it becomes easier to imagine an origin for the significant association between a cab driver and your search. An “event organizer” would have used the information “Melchizedek” to construct the synchronicity you experienced. The information behind your driver’s name would be associated with your concern about the cult. To his query on Melchizedek, his database would have returned the name of your driver and yours who are interested in the cult of the same name. If we lived in a virtual universe as Simulism suggests, one could imagine that a facetious Player decides to give you an important clue for your research: the world is a simulation played by entities that are totally foreign to us and that we have sometimes taken for geniuses or gods!
That your life can sometimes be manipulated by an obscure actor reminds you of other historical events reported by many witnesses. Your extensive research suggests that sightings of mysterious flying objects are sometimes thousands of years old! The oldest ones have been relegated to the realm of myth and legend but remain eerily similar to contemporary accounts. From time immemorial witnesses, sometimes very numerous, have reported having witnessed strange phenomena in the sky. The Bible evokes flying objects described as wheels… sometimes accompanied by extraordinary characters. Roman soldiers reported large flying shields above the battlefield… Witnesses use images adapted to their culture, to their time, to describe a phenomenon they do not understand. Could it be that their behavior was also manipulated? Simulism could give a significant coherence to these events. We would be driven unconsciously by the choices of Players in a Great Game through a virtual world of which we are part and which they control.
NOTES
1) The psychiatrist Carl G. Jung relates this episode in his biography: “My life. Memories, dreams and thoughts.” Recollections collected by Aniéla Jaffé.
2) This anecdote is freely adapted from a real event experienced by a scientist. It is published by Jacques Vallée. “Messengers of Deception: Ufo Contacts and Cults” Ed: Daily Grail (1979, 2008)
3) John E. Mach. “Abduction. Human Encounters with Aliens”; Ed: Simon and Schuster (2007)
Last night you didn’t spare your avatar in “Second Life”! Tonight you offer it a breakfast in bed to do it a favor before starting a new game.
You wonder if it can feel tiredness or greed other than by expressive attitudes imagined by the programmer. You can see that it is happy to discover two sugar breads and two croissants, but what is the real fact? Does it feel emotions?
In your reality, you know that your avatar is only a mathematical abstraction described by a few colored pixels on your screen, which are themselves the result of a myriad of electrical impulses slowed down or amplified through an unimaginable path of electronic micro-components. You know that this electronic reality becomes accessible to the programmer only from abstract instructions, a code close to a written language. You have experienced some of them in your profession, without really exploring their deepest nature. You didn’t need to learn machine code, which is closer to the structure of the only instructions capable of directing the flow of a program: the bits. The early days of computing were tough! Machines were much less complex than today. The programmer had to instruct them through a language that was all the more complicated for humans than it was interpretable by a machine. Few steps separated the programmer’s intentions from the electronic impulses that were the result. Today, a whole series of automatic translators are in charge of simplifying your task, but your memories bring you closer to the reality of the machine, which is so foreign to yours.
You give free rein to your avatar who enjoys itself and your thoughts drift towards your own reality. And if you were an avatar yourself, could you find out?
Surely not if the programmer didn’t want you to! You can’t imagine your avatar becoming aware of its nature and blaming you if the programmer didn’t strongly plan for it. But are you so sure?
Today, programmers know how to use artificial intelligence but are surprised by its effects. They are unable to follow the steps explored by the program to arrive at the results they discover! Yet they created this program! Your avatar may have a kind of artificial intelligence that can create something new: the unpredictable effects of a kind of creativity introduced into the program by its author, with curiosity and interest in discovering its effects.
Can you imagine yourself in the place of your avatar; how does it perceive its breakfast?
There is certainly an association between an instruction module that represents it in the computer memory and modules that describe a croissant and a sugar bread. The association can be more or less complex depending on the circumstances of the game and, in this case, they should activate a module that triggers a behavior of your avatar that you would interpret as joy: a cheerful smile and maybe some appropriate sounds. But would it really be able to taste its pastries and be satisfied with them? You discover that there is no way to know since you cannot “get into the head” of your avatar. No way to feel its possible emotions! Objectively, only the perception of the subjective effects expressed by your avatar is accessible to you. Just like in your own reality; you only feel your own emotions, not those of others! Maybe your emotions are no more real than those you attribute to your avatar. Maybe they are only the result of the action of a computer module in your avatar, or of a set of neurons in you, which would be part of a complex of modules directing behaviors.
If you were in the place of your avatar, you would constantly refer to your memory to associate your perceptions with the most appropriate behaviors that they should trigger. Your memory would be inherited (generated by the programmer) or enriched by your experience (results of the artificial intelligence modules). In this case you would perceive objects that an automatic search in your information library would make you associate with croissants and sugar breads. But what is it really?
In the end, if you were in the place of your avatar, the information stored in your memory, the associations that the program would make between them, the results of complex calculations that would determine the appropriate behavior… All of this would come down to interactions of computer bits: sets of “0” and “1”! Numbers! Fungible abstract symbols, since you couldn’t tell the difference between a 0 and another 0 or between a 1 and another 1. Numbers have no individuality! You can differentiate a set of 0’s from a set of 1’s, but within each set, it is impossible to differentiate the numbers, to individualize them. The only way to individualize a number is to compare it to another; to compare a 0 and a 1 for example. An association, an interaction is indispensable to allow individualization. In the world of numbers there is no intrinsic individual characteristic, independent of an interaction.
For your avatar the croissants and the breads are real; they have characteristics that define them: shape, color… It is impossible to confuse them. You know that in reality they are only the result of abstract calculations materialized by electronic impulses in a world underlying the one in which the results are displayed as images of croissants or breads for you. And in this fundamental world the croissants and the breads are not really real anymore since the equations and the numbers that define them are totally fungible, interchangeable. It is their association alone that seems to define the characteristics that lead your avatar to consider them as real. The croissant full of butter and the bread sweetened with sugar. But the variables x, y or z and numbers like 2 have no individual characteristics that would allow us to recognize them among a set of identical objects. A set of numbers “2” or letters “y” cannot be considered as a set of individualities since each member of the set is totally interchangeable with any other member. The semblance of reality, of individuality that your avatar might attribute to his pastries comes only from associations, from interactions between abstract and fungible objects, with no real intrinsic characteristics.
You are struck by the resemblance between the abstract and fungible world in which your avatar bathes and the one that modern science describes for you!
REAL OR VIRTUAL? HOW TO KNOW?
What would be a determining difference between an object that we would call “real” and the same object that we would call “virtual”?
A real object appears to us with intrinsic characteristics that are stable in time, perennial, as long as it does not undergo interaction with other objects or an energy that can modify them. A real object presents identical characteristics to different observers who perceive them in the same circumstances and with the same means. A stone remains identical to itself as long as erosion does not affect it. If you leave it alone in a drawer you, or someone else, are sure to find it as it is later, to recognize it; it is therefore real!
But the microworld changes the game! The discoveries of microworld physics profoundly disturb our concept of a real object. “Everything we consider as real does not have the characteristics we attribute to the real! “
ARE THE PARTICLES THAT CONSTITUTE MATTER, REAL?
You are an professional physicist in 1922. You decide to test the quantum model proposed by another physicist. This model postulates that one cannot imagine “real” characteristics of an object of the microworld if it is not observed; it postulates that it is the observation which defines the characteristics of the object! But you are convinced that the object is real, and therefore has characteristics defined before being observed. The Moon is there even if nobody looks at it! Why would it be different for a particle of the microworld?
You choose to study a particle sensitive to the magnetic field: a kind of microscopic magnet formed by a single particle of matter. The particle has a magnetic north and a south pole. The convention is to represent the magnetic field as an arrow that goes from the south pole to the north pole.
If your microscopic magnets are real, they should each have their own characteristic. The orientation of their magnetic field should be defined, whether you measure it or not! If you study a set of magnetized particles you expect to find particles whose magnetic field points in any direction. And if you pass them through a strong magnetic field, it should deflect the particles more or less depending on which direction their magnetic arrow points as they travel. At the exit of your magnet you would expect to find a large spot on the screen, a spot formed by the particles being more or less deflected depending on the orientation of their magnetic field as they pass through.
The quantum model is very strange. It postulates that the direction towards which the arrow points is undefined and that it is the measurement, its passage in a magnetic field which determines it, which triggers the direction towards which the arrow points. The model suggests that it has no “real” characteristics before the measurement; it is its passage through the magnetic field that you will install in front of its path that will determine one of only two possible characteristics. For example: arrow up or arrow down, if the magnetic field is vertical. If you decide to place your magnetic field horizontally, then the model postulates that your particle will still point in only one of two possible directions, but this time the arrow will point to the left or right and nowhere else.*
You make a first experiment whose result seriously disturbs you! The quantum model is confirmed. At the exit of your magnet you thought you would discover a large spot formed by a whole family of particles whose arrows are directed at random, towards any direction on 360°. And here you observe only 2 small spots. The field of the magnet that allowed you to make this measurement was vertical; you find only particles whose arrows point up or down, nowhere else!
You confirm the model by doing a second experiment, this time with the field of the measuring magnet placed horizontally. You find only particles whose arrows point to the right or left and nowhere else.
Very puzzled, you set up a more complicated experiment but one that should relieve your common sense. Perhaps your experiment only allows you to observe a part of the particles, those which, by chance, are sensitive to the direction of your magnetic field. You mount three magnets in series. The first one develops a vertical magnetic field, the second one is horizontal and the third one is vertical again. You place them so that the particles deflected upwards by the first one pass through the second. And you place the third one so that the particles deflected to the left at the exit of the second magnet pass through it.
The result is very clear and in perfect agreement with the quantum model. At the exit of the first magnet you have chosen particles whose arrows point upwards. At the exit of the second magnet you have chosen particles whose arrows point to the left and now at the exit of the third magnet you find particles whose arrows point downwards whereas you have eliminated them at the exit of the first magnet! You are forced to conclude that particles whose arrows were pointing upwards at the exit of the first magnet have been transformed by the second magnet into particles whose arrows are pointing, this time, to the left or right! Then those pointing to the left have been transformed into particles whose arrows point upwards or downwards.
This discovery is totally incompatible with the image you had of reality since you find arrows pointing downwards whereas you eliminated them at the exit of your first magnet! This characteristic, which you thought was “real” and therefore independent of observation, seems to be determined by your last measurement! You discover that you have the power to attribute, in a way, a real characteristic to particles, according to the choice you have made, according to the orientation you have chosen for your magnetic field!
You are forced to admit that the particle is not determined, is not “real” until it is observed. Its characteristics are not independent; they depend on your observation. This becomes understandable if the objects exist only in an abstract, mathematical form, until they have to be displayed as a result of a command from the simulation program. In a virtual game, the objects are the results of calculations based on mathematical equations. The display of objects during an observation is of a completely different nature since it is, on our screens, a symbolic assembly of pixels which do not have the nature of the abstract mathematical equations which define them. The two worlds are totally correlated but one is mathematical while the other is material.
Physicists have been amazed to discover that atoms and particles cannot be studied as if they were real and independent of the observer. They have no perennial characteristic that would allow us to individualize the different objects that we perceive in the microworld, in the same way as we do in the macroworld. It is impossible, for example, to give a number or a name to a particle because it has no individuality. The observation creates the measured characteristic; it is not defined before the observation. If the pebble from earlier, stored in the drawer of your night table, behaved like a quantum particle, one evening it could be white, then the next day, black, depending on its environment! It would be impossible for you to give it a “real”, permanent color, which would not be influenced by your interaction with the pebble. In the microworld it is the interaction that creates the characteristics that we attribute to reality. These characteristics are indefinable in a perennial way if there has been no interaction, no observation.
This discovery is more easily understood if the world is virtual rather than real since in a virtual world it is the interactions of the virtual objects that influence their properties at the moment they are displayed, after each computational step of the program. When they are not displayed they exist only in abstract mathematical form, easily recalculated according to the circumstances. Two loaves of bread do not have the same individuality as two croissants. But the numbers “2” in front of the loaves or the croissants do not carry this individuality; they are totally fungible, interchangeable. The particles that make up the world are as fungible as numbers. The next time they are displayed, the characteristics associated with them will depend on the new interactions they may have had with other objects or circumstances.
WHAT ABOUT THE MACROWORLD?
The oddities discovered in the study of the microworld do not seem to be limited to the infinitesimal, but can be found in objects of the macroworld, provided they are kept free from interactions with other objects. An object acquires the characteristics that make us say it is real only if it is measured, perceived in some way, or if its components are in conditions that allow them to interact with their environment or with themselves. These are the indispensable conditions for an object to express the characteristics that we attribute to reality, from a fundamental ineffable world impossible to qualify as real according to our criteria. A world that we can only approach through the abstract concepts of mathematics.
The pebble you saw earlier seems to have an individuality; its shape is recognizable and seems to participate to its reality. But Relativity has taught us that the shape of an object is not perennial; it depends on the relative speeds of the observer or of the object. Moreover, there is no way to know who is moving and who is stationary since there is no absolute spatial reference that would allow us to make this distinction. If we are dealing with two observers who are moving very fast in relation to each other, each one will perceive himself normally, whereas he will perceive the other observer all the more distorted as his speed of movement will be great. The same result concerns the mass of the observers. It is not perennial; it is a measure of the energy of the objects which varies, in particular, with the acceleration which they undergo. Our aspect, our mass cannot be considered as perennial, real characteristics, perceived in the same way for any observer! Again, these discoveries are better understood if the world is virtual rather than real.
Analysis of the matter that makes up the rock leads nowhere. “Whatever the nature of matter is, it is not made of matter”, says a physicist! Your stone is only a set of particles whose characteristics remain very strange and far from satisfying the criteria that we attribute to real objects. The intimate constituents of matter can be in several places at once, as long as you do not interact with them. They are made of energy in a very condensed form; a kind of assembly of very localized vibrations of an energy field that fills the whole universe… Not really what we expect to find for a real object, with its particular characteristics independent of observation!
But then, this energy is real! you will say. Yes, but it is not really matter as we know it. An energy field looks more like a set of information than a real object. An energy field can only be expressed through an interaction with an object which itself represents, in the last resort, another energy field. This is how the universe becomes much closer to “a great idea than a great machine” said a physicist. The universe thus looks like the result of information interacting in a programmed way; just what we expect from a simulated universe, thus based on interacting informations.
SIMULISM: A NEW PARADIGM 
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