Read an Excerpt
Seven
Selecting the Nexus, or How to Break Out of the Simulation for $0
Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a forum of scien-tists in 2016 where he argued that the universe is “very likely” a simulation.(15) In this forum, which is available to watch on YouTube, (16) scientists from every arena broke down the idea of simulation. While some say that it is absolutely likely, others say that it is even silly to be asking the question of whether we are in a simulation.
If someone wants to disprove or prove that we live in a simulation, they have to do it in one of two ways: 1. look for evidence (such as glitches) that we are living in a simulation or 2. find the limitation or “wall” of our simulation—kind of like Jim Carrey did in his classic film The Truman Show. Famed physicist René Descartes had a very good understanding of simulation in a time when the word didn’t exist. He proposed the evil demon theory; it was the precursor to the famous brain-in-vat theory credited to Hilary Putnam, which is the idea that he could be existing somewhere as a brain in a jar being fed information from some unknown intelligence.(17)
Eventually Descartes reasoned that God is fair and wouldn’t allow humans to be tricked. He eventually moved past this and believed that he couldn’t possibly be thinking the thoughts he was thinking and exist elsewhere. In other words, the fact that a person could think proved, to Des-cartes, that the person existed somewhere.(18)
As the Guardian article states, quoting Terrile again (and remember, this is a NASA scientist working at one of the most prestigious labs on Earth):
“Quite frankly, if we are not living in a simulation, it is an extraordinarily unlikely circumstance,” [Terrile] added. So who has created this simulation? “Our future selves,” said Terrile.(19)
Like the decades of cherry-picking pieces of quantum physics to fit their view, there is already an emerging trend for people in the -spiritual/New Thought/manifesting circles to label everything a simulation. This is a trend that must be stemmed, or, at the very least, slowed down until we have further evidence.
We need to be talking about this, because I think it holds the directions to the key to the locked door of the truth of our reality and how it really operates, but I don’t believe it is the key itself. The key to understanding why incredible tools like scripting can have legitimate, observable impacts on our reality is closer to being discovered than many realize.
PERCEPTION < REALITY
Scripting allows us to interact with someone—ourselves—and alter the reality of our world. Ever since I discovered the correct way to script, I have been searching for what it uses to operate or how it works. As discoveries in science and technology are made, I am always fascinated to see if they can help explain how seemingly otherworldly tools like scripting operate.
Donald Hoffman, a professor and cognitive scientist from the University of California, Irvine, presented a TED talk in 2015 laying out what he and his many research students had discovered.(20) Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory, and the brain, and I believe his discoveries may hold the “key to the key” that unlocks the door to understanding manifesting. In his twenty-minute talk, he takes the audience on an incredible journey that leads to one pretty astounding conclusion: evolution does not favor reality. Put another way: as we have evolved, our evolution has not made our perception of reality anywhere close to a priority. In fact, evidence suggests that the reality and nature of our world is something evolution (biologically speaking) saw as nonessential.
In the world of science, this is both a risky and game-changing statement. Hoffman begins his explanation by asking a simple question: If he sees a red tomato one meter away and then closes his eyes and sees a gray field, does that mean that in his reality the tomato is still there? It sounds like a silly question, but the answer is that he would think reality is that a tomato is only a meter away even when his eyes are closed, but could his perception of reality be wrong?
Humanity once believed that Earth was flat because that was how it looked. Copernicus and Galileo helped us to realize that we were, in fact, wrong. Hoffman reminds us that this discovery made Galileo question how else we might be misinterpreting; Galileo wrote, “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated.”
Let’s take the sense of vision as an example. Vision is an incredibly complex process involving “billions of neurons and trillions of synapses.”
We think of [vision] as like a camera. It just takes a picture of objective reality as it is. Now, there is a part of vision that’s like a camera: the eye has a lens that focuses an image on the back of the eye where there are 130 million photoreceptors, so the eye is like a 130—megapixel cam-era. But that doesn’t explain the billions of neurons and tril-lions of synapses that are engaged in vision. What are these neurons up to?
Well, neuroscientists tell us that they are creating, in real time, all the shapes, objects, colors, and motions that we see. It feels like we’re just taking a snapshot of this room the way it is, but in fact, we’re constructing everything that we see. We don’t construct the whole world at once. We construct what we need in the moment.(21)
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