Paranormal & Fortean : Questions About the Nature of Reality

I have wanted to keep doing small posts about upcoming topics in between the H/A series and that I hope will provide a background for future discussions. Not feeling so great this evening but decided to go ahead and post this tonight, so it would be at the top of the page tomorrow if people passing through would like to comment on it if they have downtime on Sunday. I would also like to keep this as the only post here for the next three to four days unless there is information I can add that will add to this topic. If anyone would like to comment please do and don't worry if it is not here in a bit. I am going to be somewhat busier the next week and like to have the comments sent to my email first-but I will post almost any comment about anything as long as it is not a personal attack and would definitely appreciate any ideas on this subject.

I think the 'fabric' of our reality is very important to discuss in relation to philosophy, metaphysics and the paranormal. This post will talk about an idea that has been around for awhile and I will give a couple of links to check out if anyone wants to. This idea has been called the 'Matrix Theory' and the 'Simulation Argument'. It has been discussed by many thinkers and theorists and average people for some time. I do not really like the idea that much at all and it seems to be linked to many people involved with transhumanism. This is not to say anything bad about transhumanists or any people who talk about some post-human future. I very much however think we lose a lot of what makes us human in some of the ideas that are expressed and think that technology is wildly outpacing our ethics to deal with some of the ideas brought up in this and other 'cyber-human' fields.

The reason that I feel it is so important to talk about the simulation argument is that is 'solves' some problems with ease that are brought up by modern physics. I want to present a quaternity of problems that the simulation or matrix hypotheses solve. For a long time I have wondered where we, our thoughts, our ideas, our emotions, our world, even our blogs exist in the fabric of space-time. I wonder if you, dear reader have ever had any intuitions that things are not as they seem. I sure have, especially in the last four years. Sometimes the world, to me anyway, seems to take on an almost comic-book like aspect when I view some of the events that have happened in recent years. I have noticed many people talking about how 'synchronicities' have been occurring with much more frequency in their lives and that time seems to be speeding up-even if these people have never been exposed to such ideas. Yet, and thank high heavens for this, I still get many feelings of human kindness and human wonder. What I am trying to say-perhaps using too many words is that I hope and do not want to think that our lives are being lived in some hyper-dimensional central processing unit that is both projecting the 'screen' and the 'movie' of our reality. However I think I should present these four ideas for some background discussion.

The first idea I want to talk about that the simulation argument solves is one brought up in a previous post. This is the proven fact in science that non-locality exists in experiments performed in modern day quantum mechanics. Non-locality is simply the fact that two particles at the level of quantum mechanics always change their respective quantum states immediately when something happens to one of them. These states are ones such as charge, spin and orientation. Put simply, it basically means that once the particles have been in contact with each other they are always connected. This has been proven and so it means that if the particles are somehow communicating it is faster than the speed of light or they are connected in a higher dimension of space. The simulation argument solves this problem because if all of the interaction between the particles is simply taking place inside a computer-no matter how unimaginably vast and complex-there really is no 'space' between them and the interactions are just an algorithm that is being solved by the 'computer'.

The second problem that the simulation solves is that of the wave-particle duality problem in physics. Trying to figure a way to state this simply so there is no confusion. In modern physics when a scientist does an experiement, the way he does the experiment determines if a 'wave' or a 'particle' is detected. This is bizarre if you think about it, how can something be both a wave of interference patterns and a particle at the same time-and WHY should how the scientist performs his experiment have any say on what is detected by instruments measuring events at the sub-atomic realm. This has also been proven. If a beam of light or electrons is focussed onto a screen behind an apparatus with one slit the scientist always gets a solid beam of particle hits. However if two slits are used he always gets a wave or interference pattern-and this happens every time -no matter if the electron beam or light beam is slowed down to just where one particle unit should be coming from it at the time. It is like the particle 'knows' if it is being shot to a detector with one or two slits! The matrix or simulation argument solves this problem again-in that if our reality is all just a bunch of computations taking place step by step in a computer-the computer would 'know' how the eventual outcome should look, more about this in the next two items.

Time and space in a computer are not 'continuous'- operations are performed in a step by step fashion. Modern physics continues to puzzle by the fundamental fact that all of its mechanics take place in a step by step fashion, in other words as opposed to the sweeping hands of an old analog watch, where there is an in-between, countless quantum experiments show that when you get down to the smallest level of our reality. everything is taking place in a 'digitized' manner. Also, there is no explanantion of why nature should be divided into whole numbers with nothing in between. The simulation argument solves this again because if the fabric of our reality is simply operations taking place step by step in some hugely powerful CPU-you would not expect to find any in beweens-either as far as space or time is concerned. And in modern physics, this seems to be the case. There are levels of space and of time-think very small scales of space and very small units of time that science does seem to not need to concern itself with. Exactly what you would expect if our reality was being projected in a computer like fashion and if there was a maximum limit to this computers level of power. This is why you would have a limit to the speed of light, and the constants in nature also such as the gravitational constant.

Our last item of concern is something called the 'uncertainty principle' discovered by Werner Heisenberg in the last century. This is when a physicist measures either the position of a quantum particle or the momentum of it. Heisenberg showed that the more you try to know of one state either position or momentum-the less you can know about the other. Why should this be a fundamental law of nature that can be expressed mathematically? Remember that one feature of quantum mechanics is that quantum properties come in whole units only-NO IN-BETWEENS. There are very few things at our human level of reality that are only black and white with no grey areas. Again, it seems that there is some level and constraints to what we can know about our reality when you get down to the constants of nature and the smallest units that we CAN measure-these seem to be fundamental constraints and there is no way around them. This is exactly what you would expect if our extremely powerful 'reality projection machine' has limits to its computational power.

I have just touched on some of these ideas here and would like to leave this post up on top until Tuesday at least if not Wednesday. The only things I would add are if I can add another post to this with more theory or add into this post if I have made something unclear or a mistake. Once again I do not like this theory at all that much but thought it should be presented as it would explain a lot of problems that modern science comes across when dealing with reality at its most fundamental levels. Then hopefully after this we can continue our H/A series and other things. Peace and best wishes to anyone stopping by or passing through. Here are the links-
http://www.bottomlayer.com/

http://research.lifeboat.com/bostrom.htm