RE: ¿Have you dreamed of this man?
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While I agree that the physical universe is not what we see, I understand that the reason for that is simply that we have evolved in an environment that has been provided certain stimuli that matter to terrestrial life, and hasn't been stimulated by things that don't, or haven't mattered to living things.
I pretty much disagree that there's a 'supercomputer', however, implying that the universe is simulated. While I suspect people are liars, I don't think the universe is, and reckon we can take it as it is. What that is doesn't natively appear to us because we are creatures of our environment, and not interstellar travelers, so haven't evolved to need to better understand and perceive physics beyond our native environment.
Thanks!
Yep, that's right. You basically can't imagine or clearly figure out what you didn't know or haven't experienced before. The stimuli to which we have been exposed and subjected in our environment and those experiences that we have learned and memorized in our minds are the only ones that give us that faculty.
Well, I know that Donald Hoffman is the main and most known popular spokesperson of The Simulation Hypothesis. However, as I suppose you have already seen. The video that I have chosen of him for this post, among the many that exist out there, has more to do with the psychological and social aspects of the human being. Which are the ones I really wanted to highlight in this article and really have nothing to do with his famous postulates on The Simulation Hypothesis.
And that's precisely the reason why I accompanied that initial video of Hoffman throughout the post with the other videos from the remarkable film by Nicolas Cage to establish more clearly the starting point of what I truly wanted people to think and reflect on the content of this post.
But yeah, that will require watching the full movie or at least «clicking» on the word "spoilers" above.
I suspect it's a bit more subtle than we can't imagine anything we haven't experienced. Fiction obviously exists, but I struggled with the concept of spacetime for years, because we don't experience spacetime as it is, but experience space, which we perceive as a continuous expanse, and time, which we perceive as a discrete instant serially replaced chronologically, very differently from one another, which makes the actual fabric of reality, spacetime, difficult to wrap one's head around. One thing that makes me feel I have come to grips with spacetime is when I realized that the arrow of time can only point forwards, because there is no negative space. Despite all the maths that don't have this stricture, the physical universe does, and this is a weakness of physics, that it is so dependent on maths, because descriptions of things are not the things, and physicists seem to not understand this, or at least to a degree.
Of course, science fiction is replete with time travel, but my understanding of spacetime precludes the arrow of time being reversed. We can imagine all sorts of things, but that doesn't make those things real or accurate descriptions. I figured out the irreversibility of time despite not experiencing any new events about spacetime, so we can imagine and figure out things we haven't experienced - but it's not easy. Maths are just one language in which we can describe things, and like any language, we can lie in maths.
Consciousness is almost completely indescribable, we know so little about it. It isn't any form of energy we understand and that smart folks have devised laws by which they operate. We are trying to establish from where it originates, because we find that single celled creatures demonstrate consciousness, and that shows it doesn't originate from brains, which has been assumed. I compare the consciousness of a creature with a brain to a person with a calculator which they use to perform calculation. Consciousnesses in organisms with brains clearly use them to perform tasks that make having brains evolutionarily advantageous - but not so much that every multicellular creature has evolved brains.
It is strange to try to understand what consciousness is and where it comes from because we are more our consciousnesses than we even are our bodies, and are so intimately familiar with being a consciousness that it seems ridiculous not to know such fundamental things about it. The truth is we can't measure consciousness in any way, and can only even detect it indirectly, through conscious actions taken by creatures that can will themselves to move.
When (if) we finally figure out where it comes from and what it is what we learn will dramatically impact our understanding of the most fundamental reality about ourselves. The thing is, we can imagine all sorts of sources for it, but it is extremely difficult to imagine an undescribed form of energy, other than the physically described EMF, weak, and strong nuclear forces. It seems very important to creatures that survive preferentially depending on their intellectual capacity to have some understanding of their source of intellectual capacity, that such understanding would better enable reproduction. However, there seems not to be any such improved understanding naturally potential to us, so that hasn't been a factor increasing reproductive success and causing evolutionary pressure to increase understanding.
Yet. Maybe it will when (if) we get a handle on it. It's hard to say when we don't yet have any understanding of it at all. But consciousness is only proof there are things very fundamental to us and the universe we live in we barely even know are there, much less know much about them. There are clearly many, many things like that in existence, that we aren't comprised of, that we have no idea even exist at all.
We can imagine a lot, and anyone that has read much science fiction or fantasy comes across imagining a variety of fictional energies or sources of them, such as midichlorians that produce the Force in the Star Wars universe, or magics in many others. We can easily scoff and dismiss magic, for example because we have no evidence of it, but when confronted with our almost complete nescience regarding consciousness despite the probative nature of what experiential evidence we have, it seems an arrogant act of hubris to be so certain magic isn't real, for example.
Like how we experience space and time much differently than it actually is as spacetime, yet we can wrap our heads around the reality to some degree, I suspect that when we discover handles on yet undiscovered forces and things in the universe we will be able to cope,and do so usefully. However, time will tell, alone.
Edit: here's something you may find interesting.
https://odysee.com/@Qwinten:b/Rupert-Sheldrake---On-Scientism,-Morphic-Resonance-And-The-Extended-Mind:2