Professor Brian Greene was recently featured in a Huffington Post video piece titled “Are We Living In a Simulation?”  It is a most interesting piece, and well worth watching. The idea of whether we are living in a simulation has been explored before, using the ‘brain in a jar’ thought experiment that I wrote about in my last post. While it may seem a far fetched notion to the ‘average’ person on the street, it is taken seriously by many respected thinkers and scientists the world over; its ramifications are extraordinary, and are detailed in the piece.

The brain in the jar thought experiment, whose logical possibility derives from our modern scientific understanding of biology and brain science, allows us to identifying a methodology to create, within biology’s working central nervous system, any number of ‘illusory’ realities, which that biology would be unable to discern from any ‘actual’ reality. This methodology requires the use of some sort of  supercomputer to generate stimulus, and an input system to ‘upload’ that stimulus into the central nervous system, in such a way, so as to allow the brain to ‘do its job’ and manufacture, or ‘simulate’, that reality. Professor Greene has noted, in his presentation, that it could be that our experience of reality might one day be encapsulated within the hardware and software of such a supercomputer itself, where the experience of our biology itself would be part of the programming and not part of the physical nature of ‘reality’. He can suggest this, today, given the advances in computing and machine learning that points to the possibility of such a machine coming into existence. We don’t, however, need to wait for or imagine such a machine being developed at some future moment, such a machine already exists, it is encapsulated within the biology we call the human body, of which the central nervous system is an integrated part.

A central job of human, and all, biology, is to generate signals from our interactions with reality, using the organism’s bio-sensory system, and to then transmit, or ‘uploaded’, them to the organism’s central processing unit (the brain), where those signals are decoded, interpreted and re-created into a working ‘image’ of reality. This is, after all, the basis of why we can envision the brain in the jar experiment in the first place. As detailed in my book TotIs, from the moment signals are generated to the moment an image is formed, THE ENTIRE PROCESS is an interpretation; the signals themselves are NOT the reality they are interpreting. An interpretation of a thing is not the same as the thing itself. The process and the image formed is, for all intents and purposes, a simulation. This simulation creates, for the organism, an experience of reality, which is absolute, meaning, once again, that there is NO part of the experience that is actual reality. However, It doesn’t matter how many degrees of separation we can envision between the simulation and the ‘reality’ within which that simulation is created, there must be, existent, a source reality. For this reason we can say, as biology, that “reality is not an illusion, but the biologically created interpretation of reality is.” This ‘source’ reality is what I’ve termed totIs reality. The ‘reality’ that is experienced through the bio-sensory process, by the ‘brain in the jar’,  or in a ‘supercomputer simulation’, is an interpretation; and though it is essentially an illusion, it is believed by the organism to be equivalent to totIs reality, that it is ‘actually’ real, when it isn’t. This ‘simulation’ is what I call antIs reality.

But, once again, we needn’t envision a scenario beyond the one we, ourselves, are actually in. Our biology creates for us, the ‘observer’ of reality, a simulation of that reality using bio-sensory signals and our biological super-computer (if one wishes to call it that). This is a fact, and IT accounts for the actual character and quality of the reality we experience, not the other way around. This is why there exists an impenetrable chasm between antIs reality and totIs reality, inherent within any and all of these ‘simulation’ scenarios. AntIs reality is a reality that is wholly dependent on totIs reality. The attributes of antIs reality, as experienced by the organism, are, for all intents and purposes, a complete, one hundred percent, interpretation, and as such, can be considered as an illusion. TotIs reality, being source reality, is the prime, and only, reality upon which all in the universe exists; its attributes are absolute. No matter how ‘real’ any attributes of antIs reality may appear to the organism via its experience, totIs reality is not compelled to comport with such a reality. Red/blue, hard/soft, hot/cold, sweet/sour, are attributes of antIs reality that have no meaning in totIs reality. Even so we continue to believe that they exist within a framework of ‘actual’ reality that is ‘universal’; we believe that they exist within a ‘real’ space and time, whose actual attributes exist as we experience them. But since antIs reality is a one hundred percent simulation, whatever the attributes of space and time may be in totIs reality, if they exist at all, they will not be the same as our experience of them in antIs reality. Before/after, near/far, are also simulations, along with all of our other experiences of antIs reality, created for and experienced by us through the ‘supercomputer’ of our biology.

The nature of the attribute of time as experienced by an observer is what the physics of Relativity Theory  identifies as the ‘hyper-surface of the present’ in a light cone diagram of an ‘observer’ in spacetime. This is nothing more than the ‘now’ moment of that observer, the ‘present’ through which they experience the flow of time. According to Relativity Theory, from an observers viewpoint  such ‘now’ moments are relative, mutable, and exist in infinite numbers throughout space-time, depending on the speed, direction, and varied gravitational fields that various observers find themselves in, relative to one another. In TotIs, it is shown how this ‘now’ moment, as experienced by an observer, is not a ‘now’ at all, but is rather part and parcel of the bio-sensory process of stimulus creation, propagation, interpretation and re-creation. Everything about the bio-sensory loop conspires to keep an observer from ever partaking of an actual ‘now’ moment. It is, purely, a simulation, and as such, a creation of the organism. But the most profound question, regarding such ‘simulated’ reality,  for us as ‘observers’, is the question of ‘consciousness’; for an observer is a biological conscious being.

Observation is not an attribute of nature, it is an act by an observer in relation to their environment. The only observers we know of, in our universe, are biological organisms. The question of consciousness is a question of existence. “Where does consciousness actually exist, where is its actual locus?” Consciousness ONLY exists, the only locus where we can ‘find’ it, is at the nexus of a ‘now’ moment in space-time. It ‘was’ before and it ‘will be’ later, but consciousness IS, it can only exist, in a ‘now’ moment.  This ‘now’ moment is the invisible, yet utile, empty center of the hub around which the wheel of bio-sensory interpretation revolves, and through which time appears to flow, to observers. The conscious ‘observer’ and their experienced ‘antIs’ universe are the product of a simulated antIs reality, wholly dependent on totIs reality, and underpinned by our biologically manufactured ‘now’ moment. The ‘observer’ and the antIs universe disappear when the ‘now’ disappears, but the totIs universe IS, requiring no ‘now’ nor flow of time.

Albert Einstein was one of the first scientists to question the validity of our experience of a universe where time has an arrow, a direction. By questioning that foundational attribute of our experienced reality he questioned reality itself. The question of whether we ‘live’ in a simulation or not has been answered, we do, it is the simulated antIs reality, created from biology’s interaction with totIs reality. Our simulated antIs reality, which the organism mistakes as ‘true’, and equal to, totIs, reality, is both the ‘source’ of the ‘illusion’ Einstein alerted us to, as well as the reason for its ‘persistence’.